The Bomber Story 2020

 Lots of crazy here.

When officers arrived at Perry’s home, police said she had two unloaded pistols sitting next to her on the porch. She told them those guns belonged to “Tony Warner,” police said, and she did not want them in the house any longer. Perry, then 62, was then transported for a psychological evaluation after speaking to mental health professionals on the phone.

Throckmorton told The Tennessean that Perry had fears about her safety, and thought Warner may harm her. The attorney was also at the scene that day, and told officers Warner “frequently talks about the military and bomb making,” the police report said. Warner “knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb,” Throckmorton said to responding officers.

https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-nashville-police-21f4f5b6b75216fcfe06c10e82606ae6

Authoritarian Power Sans Trump

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarianism-in

Learning About Gratitude

Suddenly altering one’s lifestyle to include verbal affirmation for others will not cure anxiety or depression or miraculously alter one’s mindset.

Rather, making a concerted effort to show gratitude for others in one’s life can help generate a feeling of support. It creates a sort of network of goodwill.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/the-science-of-gratitude/ar-BB1chgHw 

The Sacred Cow (Stole the Movie Title)

A friend was patiently explaining to me the reasons he believed meat eating, and therefore hunting, is wrong. He's a deep thinker with impeccable logic, but often hasn't delved too deeply into the issues he's feeling strongly about. 

But as for the ethic of meat eating ...

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Non paid support for this, go check it out:    https://www.sacredcow.info

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First, there is no option that is less damaging to animals. Industrial mono cropping gave us:

-pesticides

-fertilizer from oil

-oil used to transport seeds, prepare for seeding, seeding, weed control, insect control, harvest, transport, preparation from the raw product and refined to the food portion

-very low quality nutrition for humans

-massive quantity of animals killed in the process, from the oil extraction and transport to the other transportation stages to the plowing, insect control, weed control and harvest. Snakes and other small predators, mice, grasshoppers, crickets, slugs, snails, birds, etc; all are killed in the process

-irrigation adds salt to the soil, eventually it will be unfit to grow any plant; although, plant engineers are growing mono crops that are more salt resistant to delay the inevitable

-oil based fertilizers leave the ground unfit to grow anything but mono crops; the fertilizers kill the soil bacteria

-the fertilizer runoff has created a massive dead zone where the Mississippi dumps into the GoM

Summary: industrial mono-cropping is environmental disaster, kills more animals than animal farming and provides food that is of low quality for humans and drives poor health outcomes

CAFO animal husbandry utilizes the products from industrial mono-cropping to feed the animals. The waste from the confined operations is not manageable and becomes toxic. The amount of anti-biotics needed to help cattle tolerate corn based diets makes the cows sick and increases risk of anti biotic resistance. The famous methane cow farts you have heard about result from cattle being fed food that makes them sick whilst being injected with antibiotics to make it possible for them to survive the sickness from the food they are fed (fattening cows with corn is effective and cheap, but very costly in the larger picture)

Economists call these outcome "negative externalities". They are not the point of the system, but they are hand in hand with the system. 

The only approach that can generate the food that humans need without negative externalities described above is pastured meat animals. They fertilize the soil, and support the life cycle around herd animal grazing that is natural and sustainable. The carbon impact is not only low – it is inverse, because pastured animals are part of the creation of topsoil which sequesters large amounts of CO2.
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Best books on the topic: Guns Germs and Steel and The Vegetarian Myth

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All animals are made to die to feed either another animal, bacteria or a plant (often all 3). Plant to animal, animal to plant, that’s how life goes. Deer in particular are built to live about 8 years, after which their teeth become so poor they cannot eat enough to survive the winter. A deer will starve of old age, be hit by car or be eaten by a predator. Humans have taken away the predators that would keep the weak and ill out of the herd, and would keep populations stable – over population of deer is bad for deer and their immediate environment due to over browsing. In Maine, the winter kill is estimated to be 30%, and even with that the herd is growing enough that either sex permits are needed to keep the population regulated (lower deer populations help reduce the incidence of Lyme disease).

In studying the remains of cultures at the time they shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, those populations became shorter, had very poor teeth, lived shorter lives and showed more markers of starvation in their bones (including vitamin deficiency diseases).

Summary: humans are omnivores and apex predators. We are engineered to eat meat and meat is far more nutritious for humans than any vegetable products. A deer is essentially a nutrition refinery for a human – they eat high amounts of food you and I could never live on and turn it into complete, perfect human nutrition.

Until a few hundred years ago, humans at nose to tail; tongue, eye balls, genitals, internal organs, bones for marrow and soup, and the brains – and the skin and sinews and bones became tools and clothing. We were made to kill and eat large mammals and are at a peak of health when we do.

Why The Rich Pay For Everything

I'm always glad to see Tamny's stuff and this one is more readable than most, and just as helpful to be clear about the significance of human freedom to human well being.

I hope the good doctor found as much satisfaction as it seems like he should have ... some of the successful do not. 

 https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/12/29/remembering_the_great_lawrence_d_dorr_md_654733.html

Real "Tolerance" ....

 This article is full of MSM nonsense about Trump, but Haidt strikes a chord I agree with. It will never be the case that "all of us" will agree on the complex issues of government and human liberty. It would serve us better if we could view those with differing perspectives as "equally human" in spite their threat what we value. 

Haidt discovered that conservatives had some important insights to offer on human nature, the value of institutions, and the importance of moral capital. He felt conservatism offered an important counterbalance to the excesses of progressivism. He also came to appreciate the pedigree of conservatism, from the writings of people like Edmund Burke in the 18th century to Thomas Sowell in the 20th. (Haidt told me he considers himself to be a centrist, engaging with views from multiple sides in order to understand issues. But he’s a centrist who only ever votes for Democrats, because he thinks the Republican Party has been in a state of moral and philosophical decline for many years.)

Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/jonathan-haidt-pandemic-and-americas-polarization/612025/

Walter Williams on Individual Liberty

 He appeals to the authority of the founders too much, but his logic is always spot on. Hand salute, again, Dr. Williams, on the journey.

On the other side of the coin from limited government is individual liberty. The Founders understood private property as the bulwark of freedom for all Americans, rich and poor alike. But following a series of successful attacks on private property and free enterprise—beginning in the early 20th century and picking up steam during the New Deal, the Great Society, and then again recently—the government designed by our Founders and outlined in the Constitution has all but disappeared. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this when he said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

"Ironically, the free market system is threatened today not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has done so well in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind—disease, pestilence, gross hunger, and poverty—that other human problems seem to us unacceptable. So in the name of equalizing income, achieving sex and race balance, guaranteeing housing and medical care, protecting consumers, and conserving energy—just to name a few prominent causes of liberal government these days—individual liberty has become of secondary or tertiary concern."

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/future-prospects-for-economic-liberty/?utm_campaign=williams&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=101929147&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_7Xid2e4YvUwbiTjrmw2xXJfrmqurfhpWDcYSOULhZa6PD5GENDtXckseLMDURb4szR5W3KFI3lBpJpBJAg8BFOkBbVA&utm_source=housefile

As good to re-read as it was to read the first time ...

Two hundred years ago the American people were quite a bit more equal in terms of wealth, and life was marked by unrelenting drudgery. Those relatively brutal living conditions weren’t an effect of socialism, even though socialism would have eventuated the same outcome.

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Cooperative exchange is the highest form of human interaction.

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The shame of socialism is that the wildly talented are restrained from profitably improving the lives of the people around them, and perhaps continents away. Thinking about life two hundred years ago, distance was a severely limiting factor for the talented when it came to making things better for everyone. No doubt there were people with skills similar to those of the richest Americans today, and some became very well-to-do by early 19th century standards. But they didn’t become staggeringly rich simply because a lack of technology limited the ability of the ‘1 percenters’ of the early 19th to touch the U.S. (and the world) with their genius. Limited technology has socialistic qualities in the outcome sense for it restraining the brilliant from improving the lives of others while getting rich for doing just that.

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2018/11/11/surging-wealth-inequality-is-a-happy-sign-that-life-is-becoming-much-more-convenient/?fbclid=IwAR3BbDsvASk_GAtBhFiiO3KtAxq5wHf8sSXies80B4IBUvXsc-McUme928I&sh=2657557064ca

The scarcity mentality leads folks to believe that if one person is rich, the wealth must come at the expense of another person. What the wealthy do in a capitalist economy is create more wealth - more stored human time and energy - through cooperative exchange.

Bearing the Weight of Liberty

It appears we've become security state lap dogs with not appetite for bearing the weight of self government. The home of notsofree and the notreallybrave. Maybe the generation suffering from the current jelly spined responses to government over-reach will grow hungry again for the benefits of individual liberty.

In The Price of Panic, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards offer a contemporaneous answer to this question while at the same time exploring alternative ways to deal with the pandemic that are not violations of mere socialnorms, let alone the inalienable rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There have been violations of the free exercise of religion and the right to peacefully assemble, both enshrined in the First Amendment. The Second Amendment’s guarantee of right to keep and bear arms, which is fundamental to allowing a free people to defend themselves against both criminals and the government has also been restricted; this is particularly important when the government does not protect its people from criminals. The sanctity of private households, the Fourth Amendment, has been disregarded. Presently in most of California, you are not supposed to have any friends or family over to your house. Many governments have disregarded the right of due process and property, which as part of the Fifth Amendment are not to be ignored. The Twenty-First Amendment’s guarantee to drink liquids of one’s choice is in many places functionally returning to the Eighteenth Amendment. While some may quibble at “intoxicating liquors” as an inalienable right, the ability to drink such liquids is certainly part of the natural law tradition.

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/viral-panic/

Gingrich with the excellent summary of affairs

 An excellent summary of what this feels like to even a late the party Trump supporter. I'm in the middle ground. This seems all wrong, but what's a law abiding citizen to do about it? It looks like they will get away with it; and there's no reason to think what went wrong won't be duplicated next time. 

In 2016, I supported an outsider candidate, who was rough around the edges and in the Andrew Jackson school of controversial assaults on the old order. When my candidate won, it was blamed on the Russians. We now know (four years later) Hillary Clinton’s own team financed the total lie that fueled this attack.

Members of the FBI twice engaged in criminal acts to help it along — once in avoiding prosecution of someone who had deleted 33,000 emails and had a subordinate use a hammer to physically destroy hard drives, and a second time by lying to FISA judges to destroy Gen. Michael Flynn and spy on then-candidate Donald Trump and his team. The national liberal media aided and abetted every step of the way. All this was purely an attempt to cripple the new president and lead to the appointment of a special counsel — who ultimately produced nothing.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/21/why-i-will-not-accept-joe-biden-as-president/

About those vote spikes ...

 Seems like nothing will come of this.

Will anyone tackle the job of reinforcing the voting system so that we can be confident in the results? 

I'm does not appear to be in the best interest of politicians to have a manipulation free system ...

"In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.
This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern."

https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020

An Easy, Obvious Fix In the Tax Code

The solution is to take a cue from the tax code, which allows married couples filing jointly to earn more before a higher rate kicks in, accounting for the fact that both adults can be breadwinners. Congress removed marriage penalties for highly paid professionals long ago, and it is past time to give this basic consideration to working-class Americans.

Child care assistance — inherently pro-work, but with the largest marriage penalties due to the high cost of childcare — is the perfect candidate for reform. Moreover, state lawmakers have significant discretion over the program and can enact desperately needed reforms. First, increase the program-eligibility threshold of family income for working-class married couples to account for the reality that two adults will earn more than one adult. Then, phase out the benefit slowly to reduce the financial hit to recipients as they earn more or get married.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/16/a_simple_policy_fix_to_encourage_two-parent_homes.html

The Deaths of Despair

A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far.

The crisis fueled by the powerful painkiller fentanyl could have been far worse if it wasn't for the nearly 3,000 times Narcan was used from January to the beginning of November to save someone from the brink of death, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/overdose-deaths-outpace-covid-19-deaths-san-francisco-74823530

I suppose the drug dealers are not obeying the lock down. They should be ashamed. 

Back in the 90's I worked the Flight Deck of the USS ENTERPRISE

I had a memory of being assigned to ENTERPRISE, where I was a catapult and arresting gear officer. One day after we shot training command jets for 3 days (new pilots flying with instructors earning their carrier qualification the first time), my boss (the “Air Boss”), who knew the CO of the training squadron, got a ride for me in the back of a trainer jet - 5 shots and traps.

The catapult shots were 4g of acceleration – 0 to 120 in 4s. It feels like nothing could possibly stand up to that much pressure, the thought in my head was “nothing could survive this” even though I was surviving it. I learned it is best enjoyed when giving a rebel yell when the jet started down the track.
At the end of the cat shot, 60’ above the water, the transition was from crushing acceleration to none. It felt like the jet was hovering off of the bow of the ship, absolutely surreal, like the plane could just fall into the water. 

I had a moment at work like that Thursday morning - only not a physical experience, a purely mental one when the frantic work hit the finish line and I had nothing to do ...

There was a lot to love about my tour aboard Big E, and a lot to grieve as we lost 5 members of the team in that 3 years - and I watched helplessly as a Sailor lost his hand in a jet intake in a moment of carelessness on deck. 

I enjoyed the intensity, the team work, and my sense of responsibility to the youngsters on deck working long days in the cold and heat, with way too little sleep. I did my best to shepherd them, I pulled or directed many of them out of dangerous spots and was honored to have the opportunity. 

The Population Time Bomb

Can you hear the song? "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine ...."

"No fewer than 23 leading nations—including Japan, Spain, South Korea, and Italy—will see their population cut in half by 2100. China’s will drop by a stunning 48 percent, knocking it out of contention as the world’s economic super-power. This precipitous decline will not be caused by disease, famine, or any kind of natural disaster. The missing population will simply never have been born. Their would-be parents are simply forgetting to have them."

https://quillette.com/2020/12/11/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/

Liberty or Death

 I identify with this guy. Both sides have a better grip on some pieces of virtue than the other, and both sides have some "so wrong for so long" strongly held beliefs. Both sides are at their best when grounded in individual liberty and self government with rule of law. I'm pretty sure many of our citizenry either doesn't care about or doesn't understand the idea of individual liberty and self government.

"Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” ... "I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/jonathan-haidt-pandemic-and-americas-polarization/612025/

Take Them Down

But there’s plenty of evidence of misconduct — among the FBI investigators. A scathing report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice inspector general, documented some of it.

• Agents relied heavily on the known-to-be-discredited Steele dossier, full of made-up rumors, to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

• Agents lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get multiple warrants to monitor campaign adviser Carter Page — who they knew to be a CIA asset, not a Russian agent.

Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were fired, and Durham has delivered one conviction so far: FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty for falsifying a document sent to the FISA court.

https://nypost.com/2020/12/04/ag-barr-does-his-job-on-two-key-calls-annoying-democrats-and-trump/

The Man Has a Voice

The greatest obstacle to success is an excuse.

People bound for success run from excuses. People bound for failure look for them.

Modern political liberalism, particularly its racial orthodoxy, is the science of excuse-making, the training of black minds for failure. Wokeness is the Doctorate of Race Philosophy. Black Lives Matter is the online, social media university awarding PhDs in Race Philosophy. Jack Dorsey’s “Black Twitter” algorithm serves as the faculty, teaching athletes, entertainers, journalists, bloggers and broadcasters the doctrine of Critical Race Theory.

I do not reject the legitimacy of CRT, the notion that some American institutions are constructed to advance the cause of white supremacy. I just happen to believe we’ve identified the wrong construction company.

https://www.outkick.com/whitlock-what-derek-masons-vanderbilt-failure-says-about-excuses-critical-race-theory-and-racism/

More Ice?

In the Southern Hemisphere, sea-ice levels just smashed through the previous record highs across Antarctica, where there is now more ice than at any point since records began. In the Arctic, where global-warming theorists preferred to keep the public focused due to some decreases in ice levels over recent years, scientists said sea-ice melt in 2014 fell below the long-term mean. Global temperatures, meanwhile, have remained steady for some 18 years and counting, contrary to United Nations models predicting more warming as carbon dioxide levels increased.

https://principia-scientific.org/ice-growing-poles-global-warming-theories-implode/

I don't know if this is more "sky is falling" or "emperor has no clothes" or "boy who cried climate alarmism". 

The Sky Is Falling! I see a wolf (no really I do)! And ... the Emperor has no clothes

 I feel like almost all of the Wuhan bug discussion is just proof that old allegories are the sum total of the human experience. 

I love my sister and admire her to infinity. She does "her" so much better than I've been able to "do me". Her authenticity scale is 1000%. 

I'm just WIP by comparison.

So I'm stunned that she's sucked in the #covidmadness. Maybe I shouldn't be. 

For one, my job has never been threatened by #covidmadness, and the business she and her husband created has been gut punched.

For two - I'm an idiot. I got into old USN airplanes and flew them at 300mph at 300' above the water. I also flew at a small margin above stall speed 200' above the the water to make fast passes over the submarines we were tracking. We did that for hours on little sleep with a crappy auto pilot (did I mention how old the planes were ...). 

Then when they sent me to an aircraft carrier I found a way to work in the world's 2nd most hazardous industrial environment - launching jets from the flight deck. 5000 launches, the airplanes crossing over my head while I - after directing the launch - crouched to the deck and held my goggles to my face so at least I I wouldn't have hydraulic fluid in my eyes.

And when they said "the good news is you get to go on an all expense paid vacation for 14 months, but the bad news is you are going to Bagdad and you leave in 5 days", I did it and ... dealt with it, became a better version of me while my kids and beloved wife were doing the same 12 time zones away. 

And that's what I wish the USA were doing now. 

Instead we pretend politicians and the CDC know what to do. We pretend that governments "can get this thing under control". We pretend that masks make things safe and social distancing must work since some expert says so (maybe it does, it probably helps, but makes things safe? Not likely). We talk about lock downs, as if they really were lock downs, and we say "15 days to flatten the curve". 

We act like humans act when in challenging, unfamiliar circumstances - we act the fool. We listen to the "news" - a group that earns their living by keeping us frightened and feeling like we have to know the latest thing that will make us all the more fearful and judgmental.

We listen to politicians who tell us they think they know what to do, when a brief review of the history of political judgement could prove they are lucky to find their assholes with the toilet paper. 

45,000 people per year die in cars - and we all just drive every day anyway, as we should based on the risk/reward curve. 

70+ percent of the 7000 to 8000 people who will die today (and have died every day for the last 20+ years) die a premature death from metabolic derangement from eating sugary, high carb diets - and before these unfortunate souls die they live a drastically diminished life characterized by vascular disease (heart attack, stroke) neurological disease (ALS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's) or cancer (a substantial majority of these predicted by diabetes or pre-diabetes). More than 5000 people per day, year after year, dead after a long suffering end state based on our food choices, most of which were advocated by our government's USDA food recommendations. 

What does that have to do with now?

This Chinese virus kills those who would die anyway. 40% of the deaths are from the .6% of those who live in long term care or nursing homes. 30% of those in those facilities die every year. The other 60% all have the pre-existing characteristics of high sugar, high carb diets (aka metabolic syndrome or full blown type II diabetes). If you are under 50 and have normal blood sugar and blood pressure - your death from covid would be extraordinary.

The politicians only have one incentive - to take action and use their monopoly on coercion. If they take action and people die - oh well, they did what they could, they "followed the CDC recommendations" or whatever. If the same number of people were to die but the pols were cautious of government over-reach, they would be pilloried. We see the witless ordering the timid to do those things which sound good but apparently just pave the way for more of the same government over-reach.

Government was wrong on everything - minimum wage, prohibition, the drug war, USDA food recommendations, the assessment of Iraq's nuclear capacity, the potential harm of home loan guarantees to risky lenders, the benefits of the CAFE laws, and so on and so forth. It's a miracle when the government gets anything right. And like freak show idiots we allow those morons to dictate the covid response. 

When fears are high enough, humans get tribal. "Tribal" means you are either for us or against us - there's no middle ground. That's when we all instinctively start to preach the religion of our tribe, and condemn the intentions of those who will not pretend to comply. 

And that's the part that vexes me. Once folks are tribal, they can only say "the sky is falling" and they can only "cry wolf". Any invitation to dialogue is a threat to the tribe and must be stomped. The need for certainty reaches multiples of atmospheric pressure. Fault lines interrupt human connection. We are deprived of our daily bread of feeling safe with the extended family members we love most. 

Covid will do what covid will do. There's little to be done about it until the vaccines are available, assuming they are effective like polio vaccine (but not like flu vaccine). You can continue to perseverate the risk of death from covid (less than 1% of the population so far), or you can face that risk like the many additional risks we face daily. You can join in the "sky is falling" freak out, or you and improvise, adapt and overcome. You can deal with the risks and get on with life or you can keep yelling about the wolf and adding to the fear. 

The dead? Heartbreaking.

What could I have done to prevent those deaths? Not one thing, nor would their deaths be more noble if I stood around fearful and grief laden. 

I will not be tribal. I will not cry wolf. I will not tell you the sky is falling. I will not wake up in fear of any of the many ways I may perish tomorrow. 

And if I do, I will curse myself, forgive myself and get it right the next day.

The goal: Be person worthy of the incredible liberty and safety you have been given, a birth right few or none have had in any generation before ours. And be merciful and kind and understanding to those who are not yet at the point of clarity. 

Absentee Ballot Abuse

Matt Braynard of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP) approached the 2020 results in a far less arcane fashion. His team analyzed publicly available data on absentee ballots, and he explained his findings in a way that any intelligent voter can understand. VIP looked at suspicious ballot activity in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the most significant VIP findings involved people who changed their state of residence, yet voted absentee using their prior address. In Arizona, which Biden “won” by 10,457 votes, there were 19,997 questionable votes. In Georgia, which Biden “won” by 12,670 votes, VIP found 138,221 such votes. In Wisconsin, which Biden “won” by 20,608 votes, there were 26,673 such votes.

https://spectator.org/legitimacy-of-biden-win-buried-by-objective-data/

Mail In Ballots Are an Injustice

 Maybe just accidental ...

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-new-analysis-shows-biden-winning-nearly-impossible-margins-on-mail-in-ballots-in-pennsylvania

Farewell to a Man Among Men

I highly recommend you read the whole tribute from Dr. Thomas Sowell. 

I remember the first time I heard Dr. Williams on the radio. Whenever I've seen anything he wrote, I read it. His analysis, his intellect, his humor - all first rate. I wish I could have shook his hand and said 'thank you'. A brave, original, powerful soul.

Fair winds on the journey sir!

 https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2020/12/02/walter-e-williams-19362020-n2580965

Perspective on the Evangelical "Threat"

Those about to fire off emails with refresher courses on the history of European Jewry, please save your efforts. For more than a century now, attacks on Jews have predominantly emanated from secular fascists and leftists, Arab nationalists and Islamists -- not Christians spreading the good word. It is in secular France, where gruesome murders of Jews are now an annual event, that men can't wear yarmulkes in public. And, rest assured, it is not because of Mormon missionaries. An American Jew is far more likely to encounter anti-Semitism on progressive campuses than anywhere else in this country.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/11/20/convert_me_if_you_can_144698.html

US Founded on ....

A useful review of the concepts that framed slavery in this country as it was born and grew from settlers to colonists to a nation, at about the same time that "civilization", for all of its many horrors, started to put its foot down to say human ownership is bad. Reading about the Comanche and the Navaho in the last few years, I was introduced to the ubiquity of slavery in pre-civilized humanity - it was a given. And, it might be regarded by some as a good thing, since those not enslaved were murdered. 

Civilization upped the ante by making it possible for tribes to profit by first capturing, then selling their competing tribesmen and women (and children). Fortunately for all of us, civilization also made the world a place of such profit and excess that it could afford to eliminate human ownership. 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/20/the-historical-record-shows-america-was-founded-against-racism-not-to-promote-it/

Violation of Voting Laws

Some of the stats in the article make it clear how obvious the cheating was - nasty! It's bad enough that it's possible that they'll get away with it, but I see no political will to change the systems to make them trustworthy.

There's no way Biden's lap dog media will ask about any of this.

"But there was a much bigger story behind Lai’s article: Election officials clearly violated the law by inspecting mail-in ballots before November 3. According to Pennsylvania’s election rules, county election boards were required to “safely keep the ballots in sealed or locked containers” until pre-canvassing legally began at 7 a.m. on Election Day."

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/22/something-rotten-in-pennsylvania/

Thank you Mr. Steele

 A writer I always look for, his stuff has a perspective like no other. 

This lack of victimization amounts to an “absence of malice” that profoundly threatens the victim-focused black identity. Who are we without the malice of racism? Can we be black without being victims? The great diminishment (not eradication) of racism since the ’60s means that our victim-focused identity has become an anachronism. Well suited for the past, it strains for relevance in the present.

Thus, for many blacks today—especially the young—there is a feeling of inauthenticity, that one is only thinly black because one isn’t racially persecuted. “Systemic racism” is a term that tries to recover authenticity for a less and less convincing black identity. This racism is really more compensatory than systemic. It was invented to make up for the increasing absence of the real thing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-inauthenticity-behind-black-lives-matter-11606069287?mod=djemalertNEWS

Thanksgiving 2020

 I spent Thanksgivings either in Florence or Demopolis, Alabama. We lived in Florence and had grandparents there. Demopolis held hunting camp with extended family, and family tradition that ran 50 years, and a huge feast with kid tables and all kinds of family stories.  

We were so white and professional and religious and polite and, at least for the kids, oblivious.

Most of my relatives were married and older and successful in their fields of work. Their professions were thinks like airline pilot, NASA engineer, accountant, doctor, civil engineer, lawyer and businessmen. I don't know that any of the spouses worked. Virtually all of the couples had children.

These were hard working people and very kind and mannerly. They could also hunt, fish, work a farm and had travelled the world. Many were veterans. They were what Brokaw called "the greatest generation", having lived through the world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, the depression, the Korean war, Viet Nam, the 60s and the Cold War. They grieved the Kennedys and King, and saw the attempted assassinations of Wallace, Ford and Reagan. 

I don't know if they were democrats or republicans. Much more relevant was that some were Auburn fans. We didn't love those folks any less, though, and enjoyed playing poker with them (gentlemen's poker, nickel-dime-quarter, max of 3 raises per round of betting, nothing wild), getting them some branch water for the whiskey (I never saw one drunk until later when my granddad's alcoholism was beyond hiding), letting them tell us about squirrel hunting weapons, and having them set up shooting challenges after lunch at hunting camp. 

I recently acquired a 20 gauge double barrel shotgun. My uncle Ellery, WWII pilot and NASA engineer, of the even, confident temperament and always ready with a warm greeting and grin, used to hunt with a 20 gauge double. I asked once why he didn't get a 12 gauge - bigger must be better, right? His reply was polite and firm and he noted he didn't need a bigger shotgun for squirrel hunting, the 20 was plenty. He may have pointed out how the 20 was also lighter and more pleasant to carry in the field. He probably remembered when hunting for food meant using the least expensive ammo (shells for the 20 being cheaper than for a 12). I had forgotten that exchange until recently as I described why I purchased the 20 to my youngest son. I dismissed Uncle Ellery's logic outright all those years ago, since I didn't value light weight or "big enough" - I was a teenager, I wanted "more".  I used magnum 5 or 6 shot for my 12 gauge semi auto, (although I had plenty of luck shooting squirrels with a single barrel 20 until I was deemed big and responsible enough to handle the 12 gauge at age 12).  I'm looking forward to toting the 20 gauge double next year for squirrels or turkey or some such game, to complete the circle of Uncle Ellery's wisdom. 

I liked some more than others, of course, but they were all admirable men. I never saw them say an unkind thing to another person of any race, or treat a spouse with anything but kindness and respect. They tended to their kids, they loved their sick or healthy spouses and they acted interested in all us kids. I didn't have as much luck success find friends my own age back then, and their care and interaction was a gift. Of course, I found out later their struggles were hidden to me, and some were not as kind as they seemed. Nonetheless, the strong, kind, competent man, even tempered and hard working, was the vision of masculinity I grew up in.  

I didn't know how profound and lucky that experience was. No doubt, what I believed would be "the good life" was what I saw from my parents and grandparents and that was reflected by these men and their families. 

Those days are gone. Most of them are gone. I live 2000 miles to the north. I've grieved having lost touch with them, but that's what a US Navy career will do to a person (and knowing that, I delayed joining for as long as I could).

Today I am thankful for them, for that time, and for the gifts they gave that still benefit me today.

Sloppy Thieves?

An unprecedented number of mail-in and absentee ballots were cast this year, and practically everyone expected that this would result in a higher-than-usual rate of ballots being rejected for various flaws, such as lacking a secrecy envelope or missing information. In Pennsylvania, tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots were likely to be rejected, based on historical patterns. Instead, a mere 0.03 percent of mail-in ballots were ultimately rejected—somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 votes.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/the-thieves-who-stole-our-election-got-sloppy_3592153.html?v=ul?utm_source=partner

Back to 2005

They called on states to increase voter ID requirements; to be leery of mail-in voting; to halt ballot harvesting; to maintain voter lists, in part to ensure dead people are promptly removed from them; to allow election observers to monitor ballot counting; and to make sure voting machines are working properly.

They also wanted the media to refrain from calling elections too early and from touting exit polls.

All of this may sound eerily similar to the issues in the prolonged presidential election battle of 2020. But these were among the 87 recommendations from the 2005 report of the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, known informally as the Carter-Baker Commission.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/20/7-ways-the-2005-carter-baker-report-could-have-averted-problems-with-2020-election/

Voting Sanity

 Back to paper? Sounds good to me unless the electronic systems would make it possible for me to see how my vote was tabulated. 

https://spectator.us/editorial-restoring-trust/

5-7 of these things are not like the others -

"Was this election stolen? Well, millions feel that way. The turnout numbers are odd in some states, like Wisconsin, which hit 89 percent. Now, is that figure impossible? No. Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel did the math, but it’s highly improbable given the turnout rates in the surrounding areas. It would require 900,000 people showing up for same-day registrations. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was blunter last Sunday, when he said, “I think he would have to do a lot to convince Republicans that this is anything except a left-wing power grab, financed by people like George Soros, deeply laid in at the local level, and, frankly, I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election.” He was commenting on Biden’s call for unity. Yet, he also gave a hat-tip to someone we have written about here: Democracy Institute’s Patrick Basham."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/11/14/democracy-institute-pollster-yes-i-think-this-election-was-stolen-n2579970

Paris Climate Accord and Other Foolish Bufoonery

"If power corrupts, as it is said, Americans are going to feel a jolt of degeneration when Joe Biden plugs back into the climate-change network. Rather than save the world from global warming, a President Biden would force Americans to spend more of their hard-earned dollars just to keep the wheels turning and the lights burning."

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/nov/12/editorial-a-return-to-the-paris-climate-accord-wou/

This is the kind of stupid that will define the JB tenure - shallow, pointless, symbolic and expensive. 

Right Place Right Time

 For 3 years wearing the badge, I wanted every day to be at the right place at the right time. This is a cool read. A few times I was. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/right-place-right-time-georgia-motorcycle-cop-finds-choking-teen-performs-heimlich-saves-life_3577321.html

Attkisson's Hard to Find Fraud Stories and Links

Obviously, I'd rather have no president than to have Biden/Harris, so I'm still in the make believe land hoping what Trump's team is saying will be shown to be true in court. 

 https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/11/hard-to-find-2020-election-fraud-stories-and-links/

Election Fornicatory Factors

"Before I became a novelist I was an accountant. In auditing you look for red flags. That’s weird bits in the data that suggest something shifty is going on. You flag those weird things so you can delve into them further. One flag doesn’t necessarily mean there’s fraud. Weird things happen. A few flags mean stupidity or dishonesty. But a giant pile of red flags means that there’s bad shit going on and people should be in jail."

https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/11/05/the-2020-election-fuckery-is-afoot/

"An Excellent President"

 My mom wrote a letter in which she informed me she was glad Biden won the election and that she was confident he would be an excellent president. 

And that surprised me.

How could anyone think the dude that:

-Has been at least low level corrupt for 47 years

-Has lied and lied and lied since he's been in office and most recently lied about his conflict of interest regarding his son's corrupt foreign business dealings

-Is about as deep as a piece of paper

-Never had an original thought

-Has believed every position he now disavows

-Is barely hanging on to sentience

Better than Trump? I can see lots of folks thinking that, Trump's polarizing to the say the least. 

But "an excellent president"? As I have so many times this year I wonder who changed the english language and when and why they were permitted to do so.

James Bond in the 2020 Election?

"It’s partly a matter of what I think of as the “Goldfinger principle,” after the avid gold smelter and nuclear weapons amateur Auric Goldfinger.

"Goldfinger was a sensitive man. He didn’t like it when people began looking into his business ventures with too much curiosity—largely, no doubt, because many were ostentatiously illegal and, in some cases, evidence of grandiose homicidal insanity.

"Nevertheless, his response to the repeated unscheduled appearance of James Bond in his life prompted him to make the eminently rational observation that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.”"

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-appearance-of-impropriety-dogs-this-election_3581707.html?utm_source=partner

That There Is Peculiar

 https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16770/stolen-election

41 Mag Nostalgia

 Lots of details that support why I have two 41 Mags but no 44 Mag. Fun read.

I read an article in 77 in Shooting Times from Skeeter Skelton making the case for the 41 Mag. That was about the time that Col Jeff Cooper began to advocate for the 10mm. 

I've yet to take deer with the 41 - but there's still time!

https://www.americanhunter.org/articles/2020/8/13/an-ode-to-the-41-remington-magnum

The Human Experience May Save Us From Ourselves

Maybe there's reason for hope still. Common values transcend ethnicity.

Modern liberalism is at odds with masculinity, free speech, religious faith, self-determination and belief in the nuclear family.

O’Shea Jackson is a married father of four. His music and approach to life are drenched in masculinity and devoid of political correctness. He’s made no secret of his affinity for religion, including Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. He lifted himself from poverty with an incredible work ethic and independence.

Like all men, he’s flawed. Like all wise men seeking enlightenment, he’s pragmatic and willing to adjust to new information.

https://www.outkick.com/rapper-ice-cube-joins-kanye-wests-bid-to-make-black-america-free-again/

Tamny's Brilliant Summary

"What lends what’s ridiculous a little bit of credibility is that stock markets were correcting at the time of the meeting between top Trump officials and Hoover board members. Except that the correction was unrelated to the virus. Markets had been pricing its arrival with great calm since January. Anyone with a pulse knew this.

"More realistically, in late February Bernie Sanders looked like he might take the Democratic presidential nomination. Markets logically corrected at the time to price at least the possibility of a socialist in the White House. Notable is that they stopped correcting after Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary. In fact, the Monday after Biden’s Saturday win the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its biggest one day point gain in history. This happened after Trump officials who are said to never be right and to never be truthful allegedly told the truth to Hoover types. Get it? The big stock movements were politics related, not virus related.

"No doubt stocks did eventually correct in March. The virus did factor this time. With good reason. Investors hadn’t priced in the horrid possibility that politicians would respond to the coronavirus by forcing an economic contraction."

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/10/16/the_new_york_times_cant_have_it_both_ways_about_trump_and_his_advisers_580977.html

If Only They Were Kidding

There will always be these nut jobs who can only see the world based on ethnicity. It is human to be tribal, and would have been a death wish in the paleolithic era to be an X and to go to Y turf.  But the number of people who are so damaged and so bereft of soul that they want to and are willing to hate others based on ethnicity gets smaller by the day. These supremacists are angry, weak and pathetic. They won't kill as many ethnic minorities in this country as will be murdered in any given big city today. 

The focus on this topic is exactly displacement activity, and it is absurd.

The media’s myopic focus on white supremacy is a displacement activity of epic proportions. For weeks now, the mainstream media, and much of the Democratic-leaning political class, have refused to speak honestly about the instability in the US and about the divisive, identity-based ideologies that have fuelled it. Perhaps nervous that their own role in fomenting the dogma of identitarianism will be exposed, or worried that criticism of Antifa and BLMcould accidentally benefit Trump, they have either ignored or downplayed the mayhem of the past couple of months. ‘Mostly peaceful protests’, they’ve said about fiery, nihilistic destruction. As statues were toppled and beheaded, as businesses were burnt to the ground, as people were accosted and attacked for being white or for failing to raise a fist in support of BLM, the media have shrugged their shoulders or said ‘It’s not a big deal’. And now they want us to get heated about the Proud Boys, an ineffectual bunch of muppets? Are they kidding?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/01/the-medias-mad-obsession-with-white-supremacy/

It's Going to Be Worse the 2nd Time Around

 I've been dreading the re-traumatization of all of us when this goes to trial. It will be like what happened with M Brown or T Martin - the facts will not support criminal charges because there was no violation of law in those deaths. The officers in the G Floyd case did what he asked and complied with their training. He died from his injection of lethal doses of drugs into himself.  

"As will be explained in detail below, throughout Floyd’s confrontation with the police, he was at imminent risk of death from sudden cardiac arrhythmia caused by excited delirium. So it was that these officers followed the MPD’s official procedures for how to properly and safely subdue someone in that life-threatening condition. In doing so, they were not only keeping Floyd in the prescribed “recovery position” to alleviate his risk of asphyxiation, they were also keeping an agitated and delirious Floyd from harming himself as they awaited the arrival of the ambulance that they had twice summoned to provide medical aid to him."

https://spectator.org/george-floyd-police-training-minneapolis/

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

There it was: How could the FBI charge Flynn with lying to investigators when they could not establish that there was any underlying crime -- violating the Logan Act or any other law -- that would justify going to the White House to question him? It was the fatal flaw of the Flynn pursuit.

That glaring weakness -- no underlying crime -- was also the fatal flaw of the Russia investigation as a whole. Mueller was appointed to investigate collusion. He could never establish that it even took place, much less who might have taken part in it. As I wrote in OBSESSION, that failure made the rest of his job essentially impossible. When he investigated allegations that Trump obstructed justice, he was investigating whether Trump impeded an investigation into something that did not happen. Likewise, when he sought to interview Trump, he would not point to a reason -- an underlying crime -- so compelling that he could meet the high standard for imposing on a President of the United States.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-damning-new-evidence-from-fbis-pursuit-of-michael-flynn

"So Called" Lockdowns Have Little Effect

 Cost benefit, based on the evidence, does not justify lockdowns.

https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-must-end

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/stats-hold-a-surprise-lockdowns-may-have-had-little-effect-on-covid-19-spread/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/case-you-missed-it-standford-professor-talks-about-disaster-covid

Free Your Mind and Your ....

Football exploits?

 https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/09/25/ignore_the_emotional_college_football_players_are_not_exploited_578191.html

About America

 Fascinating letter from OBL's niece.

https://spectator.us/being-pro-trump-caused-more-grief-bin-laden-niece-noor-bin-ladin/

It's nearly too crazy to be true. They framed a General to get Trump, and the General was so fearful of the prosecution that he pleaded guilty - out of his sense of honor? I don't know why, but he did.

From Rush:

Folks, I am of the opinion that it looks to me like everybody in that town was colluding with the Russians except for Trump. For crying out loud — and do you know we wouldn’t know what we learned yesterday, last night and today if it weren’t for Judge Emmet Sullivan?

If Emmet Sullivan hadn’t insisted on this stuff with Lt. General Flynn, then we would not have seen the documents that the FBI tried to hide. They were released some time ago’ now they were demanded to be produced. If it weren’t for the fact that Judge Sullivan can’t wait to put Flynn behind bars (which isn’t gonna happen), we wouldn’t have learned what we now know — and this has been known by so many people for so long.

Do you know that the people in this investigation actually went out and got liability insurance for themselves because they knew how rotten what they were doing is? They knew that the Mueller team was all about getting Trump? There are two investigators on this team telling each other, “This is not looking good, Jack.” “I know, Fred.” There’s a distinct get Trump attitude with these people.

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/09/25/everybody-in-washington-was-colluding-with-russia-except-trump/

Faux Drama

This is faux drama. If you dislike working for religious based organizations and dislike their health care policy, get another job - I can't believe this would impact more than about 12 women. If I'm wrong, I'd sure like to better understand where the impact would fall.

"Even with Ginsburg alive to dissent, the court majority – bolstered by Trump’s first two appointees – ruled last summer that practically all nongovernmental workplaces could flout ACA contraceptive mandates based on religious or moral objections, in line with Trump administration policy."

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/sep/26/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-donald-trump-womens-rights

The Enormity ...

These people ...

Just when you think you have grasped the enormity of the U.S. news media’s Steele dossier scandal, it gets worse. Much worse.

The “primary subsource” for the so-called dossier was suspected once of being a Russian operative and a “threat to national security,” according to newly declassified FBI records.

To put things more clearly: The document the FBI used to secure authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page is based largely on the say-so of an individual the FBI itself once suspected of being a national security risk.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-news-medias-steele-dossier-scandal-is-even-worse-than-you-thought

BLM - how many have they killed?

How many black people died in these BLM riots?

"Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer’s riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.

"ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project’s spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd’s death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him."

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/16/study-up-to-95-percent-of-2020-u-s-riots-are-linked-to-black-lives-matter/

"The cause of violence is not the police. It is not poverty. It is not one’s race. To say so is in fact a smear against poor people and people of the racial group identified. The cause of violence is the people who have chosen to be violent.

"Rather than assigning responsibility for violence to those who engage in it, the report constantly pushes the criminal victimization narrative that the rioters are not to blame for their rioting. This is abuser psychology 101: The abuser is never responsible for his or her abuse. The people who might object to it are. This is also false and manipulative."

Sturgis Was Another Victim of the Fake News

"Not so fast. Let's take a look at what they actually tracked and what's mere speculation.

"According to South Dakota health officials, 124 new cases in the state—including one fatal case—were directly linked to the rally. Overall, COVID-19 cases linked to the Sturgis rally were reported in 11 states as of September 2, to a tune of at least 260 new cases, according to The Washington Post.

"There very well may be more cases that have been linked to the early August event, but so far, that's only 260 confirmed cases—about 0.1 percent of the number the IZA paper offers."

https://reason.com/2020/09/09/no-the-sturgis-motorcycle-rally-didnt-spawn-250000-coronavirus-cases/?itm_source=parsely-api

Next verse, same as the first: "follow the money"

 That's about the size of it.

"All while Kaepernick and Nike cash in and financial donations pour down on Democratic voter drives. Everybody is using George Floyd’s death to make it rain. His memory is used to hype NFL and NBA games, power ad campaigns for podcasts and YouTube shows, leverage media members for promotions and, most importantly, fuel left-wing political funding. 

"Justice is not being sought. Cash and power are.

"The Criminal$ Justice Movement is the Wu-Tang video for the rap song C.R.E.A.M.

Cash Rules Everything Around the Movement. Dolla, dolla bills, y’all."
https://www.outkick.com/blm-101-history-lesson-the-2020-criminal-justice-movement/

All of the above is true, as is this:

"My cousin, Anton, was a paroled felon when sheriffs, in our view, needlessly tasered him to death. I loved my cousin. He had a huge heart. He loved his mother and his brother. He had the potential to be a doctor, lawyer, scientist or whatever he wanted to be. He was let down by his negligent father and a difficult zip code. Dealt a bad hand, he played it poorly and found himself in a dangerous situation he could not control.

"Everyone has a story. And I get why the people close to Blake, Floyd, Garner, Taylor, etc., are devastated. But the outsiders preening outrage and sadness and kneeling for cameras are using the tragedies to advance careers and personal finance."

Too Obvious?

A great read but boils down to conventional wisdom. Better to be bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, tougher, and more shrewd than one's opponent. In my view, liberty makes that all possible and China does not stand a chance if the US sustains economic liberty. 

The Great Nightfall, however, is fundamentally a book about how the United States can establish conventional and strategic deterrence in the modern world. “This book is not a call for war,” writes the author. “The best way to prepare for war is to be prepared to win it. We need to stop underfunding the military, especially in areas of research, non-conventional war, space, cyberwar, and artificial intelligence. War is changing, and we need to change with it. We cannot expect success fighting tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s weapons.”

Middendorf’s blueprint for protecting America in the twenty-first century stands out in two ways. First, he provides a detailed assessment of how to protect the U.S. capacity to build and sustain a modern military. Here, he addresses issues from research and development, to establishing secure, “clean” supply chains, to ship-building. Second, he delivers a comprehensive overview of future U.S. naval needs.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/avoiding-armageddon-checkmating-china-169198

Suing CNN

It's been a while, had forgotten this incident. Will be interesting to follow. 

I was asked to present the Constitutional argument against President Trump's impeachment and removal to the United States Senate this past January. For an hour and seven minutes, I argued that if a president does anything illegal, unlawful, or criminal-like -- if he commits treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors -- he satisfies the criteria for impeachment under the Constitution. But if a president engages in entirely lawful conduct motivated in part by the desire to be reelected, which he believes is in the public interest, that would not constitute grounds for impeachment. Everybody seemed to understand the distinction I was drawing. Some agreed, others disagreed. But the distinction was clear between illegal conduct on the one hand, and lawful conduct on the other hand.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

"But think of child labor laws ..."e

This is one of my favorite insights about such things as child labor laws - they take effect at the point that they are almost not needed. 

"Actually, it wasn’t child labor laws that let them escape from child labor: it was economic growth. As people grew wealthier, parents no longer needed their children to be productive. Instead, they could support the family without their children’s income and so instead could send their kids to school. And incidentally, as E.G. West showed in Education and the State, the state in Britain was not a major funder of education and yet schooling was widespread.

"It is true that child labor laws reduced child labor around the edges. But they’re an instance of what is almost a general law in economic policy. I’m using “general law” in the sense of regularity. The laws that pick up enough support are usually ones that require people to do what the majority are doing already. I believe for example, although I can’t find the source immediately, that the legislated 40-hour work week came about only after it had become standard practice."

https://www.econlib.org/orourke-on-the-millennials-and-socialism/

Limbaugh: Trump Did What He Said He Would Do

He has produced: on the economy, rebuilding the military, defending life and religious liberty, his stellar judicial appointments, his restoration of America's energy independence (which Biden wants to reverse through his quixotically reckless promise to eliminate fossil fuels) and his decisive rejection of the Democrats' nationally suicidal Green New Deal agenda.

Indeed, Trump has vigorously resisted enormous pressure from radical environmentalists to surrender our sovereignty to international bodies guided by pseudo-science and a Marxist worldview, hellbent on returning us to the horse and buggy.

He has also kept his promise to secure more favorable trade deals for the United States, and even Joe Biden recently admitted that the USMCA is better than NAFTA.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-win-november-david-limbaugh

"You Know Me, You Know My Heart" - Ha!

"The documentary's six chapters each dissect a different deal the Bidens made with the Chinese government — including one in which China planned to invest more than $1 billion in Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), an investment fund partly owned and directed by Hunter Biden."

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/riding-dragon-documentary-exposes-massive-biden-self-enrichment

So Wrong For So Long

There are not very many "journalists", those who claim the title are new entertainers who hustle for ratings like other entertainers.

"In researching my latest book, I determined that this is happening in 2020 because, above all, too many of us utterly failed to examine and correct what arguably was the biggest case of journalistic malpractice in recent times: the widespread misreporting on the failed Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Everyone from The New York Times to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, to former CIA Director John Brennan to former special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately acknowledged that many investigators and media took the wrong fork in the road. Yet we spent almost no time or energy examining how we could have been so blind, so wrong. We didn’t bother to dig into who was behind the bad information, illegal leaks, slander and libel, intelligence abuses, and destruction of evidence — the sorts of pursuits that used to make journalists want to get up in the morning and work late into the night."

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/516036-journalism-or-partisanship-the-medias-mistakes-of-2016-continue-in-2020

Come On In "Girl With A Gun"

Welcome to self responsibility and self defense.

"A veteran GOP political strategist told me he likens the current state of America to pressure building inside a volcano and predicts, “It will blow its top immediately after the election.”

"Living in Florida, perhaps I watch too much of The Weather Channel, but my own election natural disaster analogy resembles the tracking of a monster hurricane as it moves closer to the U.S. mainland. Based on present conditions, we know at least a Category 3 will strike late on Nov. 3 and gather strength on Nov. 4 or 5. Virtually everyone is aware of the potential for devastation, and millions are taking pro-active precautions — buying guns and ammunition."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/03/the_guns_of_november__144125.html

Do You "Believe" in Corona Virus Religion?

 In many ways this article only points out what we know - humans respond with too much focus on a novel threat and tend to ignore the everyday threats. 

The other gift from the writer is the clarity that human choice is invaluable to fight off the virus. 

"For one, economic growth has long been the biggest enemy of virus and disease precisely because economic growth produces the surplus resources that can be mobilized in pursuit of cures for what ails us. If something threatens us with sickness or even death, no reasonable person would respond with forced economic contraction.

"Second, the greater the presumed lethality of any virus, the more that any laws or rules meant to limit its spread are superfluous. Really, what about the high possibility of sickness or even death requires a law? People don’t need to be told to not hurt or kill themselves. No reasonable person would seek to expand government power over human action during the spread of a virus precisely because wise people would govern themselves.


"To which some who absolutely revel in being told what to do will respond that not everyone is rational when it comes to protecting themselves. So true.

"All of which speaks to the third reason any kind of governmental response to a virus is impractical. It is because accepted wisdom rarely ages well. Think back to AIDS in the 1980s, and the popular view that it could be spread by people merely existing in the same room."

China Virus Isn't Scary for the Young

CDC confirms — again: Youth aren’t at COVID risk

The latest data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm that young people face a negligible risk of dying from the disease, while people 65 and older face a much higher risk. That latter group accounts for about 16 percent of confirmed cases but four-fifths of deaths. The fatality rates are even lower among minors: 0.04 percent for children 4 or younger and 0.02 percent for 5-to-17-year-olds.

The crude case fatality rate indicated by the CDC’s numbers — deaths divided by confirmed cases — is about 0.25 percent for patients younger than 50 and nearly 16 percent — 63 times higher — for patients older than 64. While the overall crude CFR is 3 percent, the rates among adults range from 0.07 percent for patients in their late teens and 20s to 29 percent for patients 85 or older — more than 400 times higher.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/01/the-numbers-are-clear-covid-is-no-real-threat-to-kids/

Insight On Peace

Remembering my dear friend Al's joke: A man finds a lantern the beach and a genie comes out and offers to make real any wish the man has. The man asks for a bridge from California to Hawaii, because he hates flying and hates boating but wanted to go to Hawaii. The genie asks him to consider all the troubles of humanity and consider that the bridge would be incredibly wasteful and was an incredibly self centered request. Of all of the good he could do with one wish, surely there must be a better choice.
The man agreed and immediately asked the genie for peace in the Middle East.
The genie frowned and said "do you want that bridge with two lanes or four?"

"Anyone — you or I, for example — could play the role of impartial arbiter. What the U.S. can do that no other entity in the world can do is to underwrite the security risks of a peace deal for Israel. Israel will make far greater concessions for peace with the U.S. standing strongly behind it than without. That’s what makes the U.S. a valuable mediator to both the Israelis and the Arabs."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/israel-united-arab-emirates-accord-milestone-middle-east-peace/

The American Way

Could this happen in another country?

"With his studio humming, Perry is taking a page from Disney and Universal for lot development, with plans to build restaurants, shops and an entertainment complex with a theater and a theme park–like experience. Think Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, but with the feel of a down-home Southern kitchen. Perry admits that such a venture will take him outside of his comfort zone in terms of scope, control—and debt, since his business has always been, extraordinarily, a self-financed, all-cash operation. His plans also include housing for trafficked women and LGBTQ youth, and an academy to teach kids who grew up like he did the things he never learned—financial literacy, for one."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2020/09/01/from-poor-as-hell-to-billionaire-how-tyler-perry-changed-show-business-forever/?fbclid=IwAR16yeD0WsKNb9lcI-8sSjoFBkLWHyFnBhcAw172ZbzjGOx3Sd_GKVjZtiU#43e2626a34b5

"An African American man with the middle name Hussein, he began by embracing his unique heritage, punctuating the opening with a line offering the kind of praise for this country we rarely hear from the left side of the political spectrum these days: “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

"But this was not a speech about identity politics. It was, instead, his version of “the shining city on the hill.” America’s original source of greatness, Obama pointed out -- as had Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and, yes, Ronald Reagan before him -- was the Declaration of Independence.

"“Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy,” he said. “Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”"

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/16/could_barack_obama_be_nominated_today_143976.html

First Impressions

Without fail, the first narrative is not correct. 

"We are now in an era where initial visceral narratives shape our lasting attitudes. Images of men being lethally shot in the back or dying with a knee on their neck create strong impressions that are not easily changed by subsequently released information. These dynamics were previewed by Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Despite no corroborating evidence, despite her remembrance based on memory-retrieval therapy almost thirty years after the alleged event, her emotional testimony was riveting. It was compelling for many older women as they relived dynamics they had experienced in their youth. No amount of subsequent information that brought into question Blasey-Ford’s veracity made any difference to her supporters."

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/09/02/first_impressions_are_trumping_complete_facts_on_police_violence_576028.html

FBI Agent Pleads Guilty?

"“Gosh almighty.” Those words from former Vice President Joe Biden sum up plenty about the announced criminal plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Of course, Biden was not referring to the implications of the FBI lawyer who lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for the efforts to continue the surveillance of an adviser to the campaign of Donald Trump. Nor was he referring to growing evidence that the Russia investigation was launched based on false and flawed evidence.

"Biden was referring to the federal investigation by United States Attorney John Durham that led to the criminal plea by Clinesmith. Like most other Democrats, Biden previously denounced the investigation and the effort to look into criminality. Now that criminality has been found, Democrats and commentators still insist there are no reasons to continue it."

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/512152-democrats-continue-to-denounce-investigation-of-the-investigators

Super Computer Number Crunching = Progress Against the Virus

Whitlock on Target

It's comforting when a man with an experience so different than my own says something so closely aligned with my perspective. 

https://www.outkick.com/blm-101-continued-harassment-from-protesters-reveals-bigotry-and-hate-not-progress/

Hanson Been So Wrong for So Long

Bolstered by the sycophantic-praise he received following his 1988 Congressional testimony on man-made global warming, NASA climate scientist/activist James Edward Hansen continued his prophesies well into the 2000s–despite his ever-growing list of climate fails.

“The greenhouse effect is here,” pronounced doomsayer Hansen back on June 23, 1988.

“We’re [still] toast,” he repeated with a straight face 20 years later, in 2008.

https://electroverse.net/nasa-climate-prophet-james-hansen-said-the-arctic-would-be-free-of-summer-ice-by-2018/e

Just incorrect predictions, one after another, that doesn't mean he doesn't understand what's happening, does it?

"COVID Supremacists"

I also believe that my willingness to compromise demonstrates an ability to reason effectively. So it has become infuriating, to the point of feeling untenable, that the “lockdown indefinitely” crowd has become so unhinged as to label people like me morons, “deniers” and pro-murder because we find the reaction to this virus outsized and dangerous.

But Kira, you can’t compromise on DEATH! Why do you hate the elderly????

Can’t we? We compromise on death every day, pandemic or not. We calculate the risk to drive our vehicles, attend events, get on airplanes. We use a complicated equation based on what facts we know, our fears and our goals. If this virus had the fatality rate we were promised in the beginning, extended lockdowns might…might…be defensible. But we are looking at a virus with a 99.6% survivability rate.

https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2020/08/21/sick-to-death-of-covid-supremacists/

Action, Re-Action

 Wills the Dems pay again for their soft on crime "let them burn it" approach?

"This is bad news for the Biden/Harris campaign and gun control activists across the country. It’s not just red states that are seeing a huge influx in the number of new gun owners these days. Even anti-gun strongholds like New Jersey are seeing unprecedented interest from residents who’ve decided it’s time to exercise their Second Amendment rights."

https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2020/08/21/new-jersey-interest-in-2a-at-record-highs/

Lebron, Tell Me About Malcolm

LeBron James says he’s reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Is he?

On Wednesday, via Instagram, James posted a picture of himself, shirtless, riding a stationary bike and wearing earbuds while reading the iconic book. On Thursday, following the Lakers 111-88 victory over the Portland Trail Blazers, LeBron carried the book into his postgame news conference. Bleacher Report’s Taylor Rooks asked James for his biggest takeaway on the book. You can listen to his complete response on Rooks’ embedded tweet below.

https://www.outkick.com/lebron-james-claims-he-is-reading-malcolm-x-autobiography/

This Was Us

 The chaos, the cultural transformations, fascinating. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-first-farmers-arrived-in-europe-inequality-evolved/

3 for the Wuhan Bug

Examining why some clusters are mostly harmless and some are lethal. 

 https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2020/08/22/learning_our_lessons_from_asymptomatic_covid-19.html

Age 55 and up accounts for 92% of the fatalities, but many people don't realize this fact.

https://global.beyondbullsandbears.com/2020/07/29/on-my-mind-they-blinded-us-from-science/?fbclid=IwAR0DL755nrM1rZANS88ijj6GnCIyPGOeG-85rjRPq1-PCw99rnLgT9cpGRA

A brit visits Sweden and discusses the impacts in both places.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8652523/amp/No-lockdown-no-hysteria-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-asks-Sweden-proof-got-terribly-wrong.html?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0MiJMnCISbvq1EDnGykdJ1hWvV5Kfloyk-NOdPhRWWbp3viMMv872lPh4

Does He Know What He's Saying?

Now officially the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden offered himself to Americans this week as an affable, trustworthy and experienced alternative for the White House. But his five-decade record in politics offers plenty of controversies ranging from insulting confrontations over IQ and race to fabrications and plagiarism.

An episode from the first of his three runs for president provides a case study. Biden once sparred in 1987 with a political reporter who asked him about his law school record. A tart Biden responded that he “probably” had a “higher IQ” than the reporter. And he claimed he finished in the top half of his class.


https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/biden-has-history-controversies-involving-plagiarism-fabricated-stories

The More (CO2) the Merrier

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/08/17/lets_be_serious_more_c02_is_making_the_earth_uninhabitable_574271.html

And EM-DAT (The International Disaster Database) data show that since 1920, the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.

Sustaining a population that has grown by about six billion people, lifting most of those people out of extreme poverty, and reducing the number of natural disaster deaths by over 80 percent show that whatever impacts increasing CO2 emission and atmospheric levels and rising temperatures have, they are not making the planet “an inhospitable place for humans.”

The data instead suggest that increasing CO2 emission and atmospheric levels and rising temperatures are making the planet more, not less, hospitable for human life.

Peace in the Middle East?

The peace process did not fare well, chiefly because Israel made the mistake of bringing the unreformed terrorist Yasser Arafat back from exile to negotiate on the Palestinian side. It came to a complete halt during the Obama administration because Obama totally misunderstood what makes the U.S. so indispensable to the peace process. Tempted to think that his own sense of justice was the missing link, Obama tried to be an impartial arbiter. But the Arabs and Israelis couldn’t care less what Obama thought was fair. That’s not why they talk to the United States.

Anyone — you or I, for example — could play the role of impartial arbiter. What the U.S. can do that no other entity in the world can do is to underwrite the security risks of a peace deal for Israel. Israel will make far greater concessions for peace with the U.S. standing strongly behind it than without. That’s what makes the U.S. a valuable mediator to both the Israelis and the Arabs.

Today’s announcement demonstrates all of this. Where Obama cozied up to Iran and cooled towards Israel, President Trump has unabashedly supported Israel while confronting Iran. This peace agreement has come, not in spite of the U.S. moving its embassy to Jerusalem and killing Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, but precisely because of those moves. Israelis and more than a few Arabs have breathed an enormous sigh of relief at America’s renewed strength.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/israel-united-arab-emirates-accord-milestone-middle-east-peace/

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/covid-spread-cant-only-be-explained-by-whos-being-bad/ar-BB17VlsC

Rethinking what is known v. believed about this freaking bug that turned the world upside down but helped improve our capacity for blaming those with beliefs different from our own. The most widely held belief I see and try to push back against is "because this happened after that, it happened because of that". It's such an old logical flaw there's a cute latin phrase for it. We enlightened 20th century geniuses with the oh so great reverence for science seem as vulnerable to it as ever. "We may also be heterogeneous in our biology. A recent paper in Science suggests that many people who’ve never been infected with SARS-CoV-2 carry a kind of immune cell, called a T-cell, which recognizes this novel virus and may partially mitigate an infection. These cells may be left over from infections with related viruses — the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. "While scientists who authored the paper warn that it doesn’t imply that people with pre-existing T-cells can’t get infected, they leave open the possibility that it might account for some of the vast variability in symptoms. "Whatever the source of this heterogeneity, we know it exists. Most people on the contaminated cruise ship Diamond Princess remained uninfected, while others got asymptomatic infections and still others got severely ill."

Politics at its Worst

I hope this is the worst of US politics, but I fear it is not. 

_____________

Long-sought documents finally pried from U.S. intelligence agencies prove that the Obama administration used the occasion of providing a standard intelligence briefing for major-party candidates as an opportunity to investigate Donald Trump on suspicion of being a Russian asset.

I say investigate Donald Trump advisedly.

As I contended in Ball of Collusion, my book on the Trump-Russia investigation, the target of the probe spearheaded by the FBI — but greenlighted by the Obama White House, and abetted by the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies — was Donald Trump. Not the Trump campaign, not the Trump administration. Those were of interest only insofar as they were vehicles for Trump himself. The campaign, which the Bureau and its apologists risibly claim was the focus of the investigation, would have been of no interest to them were it not for Trump.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/new-disclosures-confirm-trump-was-the-target-of-obama-administrations-russia-probe/

The Dossier source ....

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/24/meet_steele_dossiers_primary_subsource_fabulist_russian_at_us_think_tank_whose_boozy_past_the_fbi_ignored_124601.html

Media Myths about Guns Prevail

Myth 1: Los Angeles Times: “Why the U.S. is No. 1 — in mass shootings”

This claim is based on one study by Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama. Lankford asserted that the U.S. accounted for 31% of mass public shooters from 1966 to 2012, despite having less than 5% of the world population. But for over four years, he refused requests from both academics and media outlets, including Real Clear Politics, Fox News, and the Washington Post, to release his data. When he finally released his list of cases after I had published an academic paper going through the data, it was clear why he had waited so long. He had over-counted cases in the U.S. and missed thousands of others in the rest of the world.

The United States accounted for just 1% of the shooters — far less than its share of the world population. France, Switzerland, Russia, Finland, and Norway all have substantially higher per capita fatality rates than does the U.S. Indeed, France’s rate is 111% higher than ours. By far, the worst mass public shootings have occurred in Europe.

Americans may be surprised by these numbers, because they hear so little about mass shootings in other countries. The dozens of times in recent years that such shootings are stopped by concealed handgun permit holders is also ignored. Something else the news media won’t tell you: Since 1950, 94% of the mass public shootings have occurred in gun-free zones, places where citizens are banned from having guns.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/01/myths_the_media_perpetuate_about_gun_control_143848.html

200 of 153000?

 Just over 153,000 Americans have been recorded as having died from the coronavirus – and fewer than 200 of them were below the age of 25.

In the most recent week of data available, a total of 408 people between the ages of 15 and 24 died in the U.S., 5 of which were from the coronavirus. For the 5-14 age range the figures were 53 total deaths, zero from coronavirus.

While teachers unions and Democrats are heavily protesting reopening schools, the consensus among the CDC, Dr. Fauci and even Bill Gates is that they should reopen (whom I chose to quote because perhaps liberal will listen to them). When it comes to the risks children face at school, there are already far greater public health risks children face that we don’t keep schools closed for, and the disparity in potential harm isn’t even close.

https://bongino.com/seasonal-flu-poses-4x-higher-risk-to-schoolchildren-than-coronavirus/

Putting Money in the Pockets of the Citizenry

Amy Johnson, a nurse practitioner, spoke at the South lawn event about how deregulation and modernization of the federal healthcare bureaucracy had aided healthcare providers in rural areas who are now able to use telehealth to dramatically expand the range of services available to patients.

Similarly, Arizona rancher Jim Chilton spoke of a much-needed reprieve from the Obama-Biden administration’s notorious Waters of the United States rule, which allowed federal bureaucrats to regulate private land with almost no restrictions. In Chilton’s case, the government decreed that the “dry washes” on his property constituted “waters of the United States” because, despite having no water, they have at least 12 inches of sand at the bottom.

During his first year in office, the president delivered on his campaign pledge to reduce the tax burden on ordinary Americans, signing into law historic tax cuts. But, because tax cuts get all the fanfare, not everyone is aware that deregulation is actually just as — if not more — significant.

For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, estimates that government regulation is a “$1.9 trillion ‘hidden tax’” which “is greater than the corporate and personal income taxes combined.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trumps-deregulatory-agenda-andy-puzder