Climate Change on Trial

Partying On

 

But the one core belief that effete Continentals and firebreathing Mohammedans do share is that everything is Israel's fault. As I wrote a decade-and-a-half ago:

The Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction—from British banks' abolition of children's "piggy banks" to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.

Fifty-nine percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—i.e., the "moderate" Arab world—79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven't re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen.

... "What has become of us?" Bernie Farber is what became of you - the arse who thought me and Ezra were a bigger threat than the importation of legions of people famous around the world for their antipathy to Jews. You could try Googling it. It's a numbers game now:

"What has become of us?" Since 9/11 the Muslim population of Canada has increased from two per cent to 4.9 per cent, while the Jewish population has shrunk - just a little, but it's now down below one per cent.

You were an advisor to a putative PM, and you're entirely unaware of that?

Do the math: a five-per-cent Muslim population is more than enough to cost you the election. That Jewish point-nine per cent? Who cares? Certainly not enough for any Quebec politician mindful of his electoral viability to do any serious pushback on Montrealers partying over dead and raped Israelis.

"My city. Our city"? No. Their city. Your soon to be untended cemeteries. Same old story as the rubble-strewn Jewish graveyards from Tangiers to Baghdad and beyond. But this time it's because of policies enthusiastically supported by bodies supposed to represent the interests of the Jewish people.

I don't want to single out Bernie Farber, although he's a total prat. South of the border, there are few men in America I despise more than Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. See my column from a decade back: "Hath Not a Jew Eyes?" Because of fools like Farber and Foxman, there will be no Jews in Montreal - and very soon.

As for those on the western left and right making common cause with the rapists and child-killers of Hamas, I get that they don't dig the Jews and that therefore it has a certain logic. Except:

It's one thing to be "anti-Semitic" or "anti-Zionist", as millions of westerners now are. But that's not where your comrades in the fight against Israel are inclined to leave it: They're anti-Jew mainly as a subset of being anti-infidel - anti-the other. Just to keep it music-festival-wise, see that Orlando nightclub, and Ariana Grande, and the Bataclan concert.

So one day you may get your wish, and Israel will be gone. And then they'll turn, as they always do, from the Saturday people to the Sunday people...

Mark Steyn on totalitarianism in the West

Mark Steyn: Who's Making the Variants?

 

What does that mean? Well, everyone except the brain-dead and the more aggressive interns of Ofcom's fact-checkers now accepts that the Covid came from a lab leak. How long is it since you've heard anyone even on MSNBC or Facebook say the word "pangolin" with a straight face? But Messrs Tanaka and Miyazawa have taken it to the next level:...

What "synonymous" means in this context is that normally, when something mutates naturally, it does so mostly in ways that don't change the nature of the original: hence, such mutations are merely synonymous. When you have a "synonymous/non-synonymous ratio" as "abnormal" as that of the Covid variants, that means they are not occurring naturally:...In other words, not only did the Covid come from a lab, but so did the variants:..

But why would anyone do such a thing?...

Well, that's the question, isn't it? It's just about possible to believe that the original strain escaped from the lab accidentally. But is it possible to believe that every artificially created variant from Alpha to Omicron also escaped from the lab accidentally whenever the Covid showed signs of flagging? ...

Someone, somewhere, really is doing all this deliberately.

Mark Steyn on that coup in Russia

 ~This weekend there appears to be a mutiny underway in Russia. That's the term Vladimir Putin used, and it fits. A year ago western governments exaggerated, laughably, the fragility of Putin's regime in the face of economic sanctions. But this is different. Whether or not it expands into a coup or full-blown revolution, it is the first serious challenge to the current iteration of the Russian state since it came into being in the wake of another attempted coup three decades ago. Putin is colloquially known as "the Tsar" - ie, he wields absolute power. But Russian leaders are vulnerable to bungled warmongering: You could ask the real Tsar, if he hadn't been shot in a basement, stabbed, soaked in acid, burned, and tossed down a disused mineshaft for three-quarters of a century.

The Wagner Group are mercenaries and only 25,000 strong. But they're effective, which is more than you can say for the Russian Army. They have spirit and swagger - again in contrast to the demoralised and defeatist regulars - and are battle-hardened not only from Ukraine but from Syria and Central Africa and various other undercovered spots on the map. After taking Rostov-on-Don, down south near the Ukraine border, Yevgeny Prighozin's men then apparently covered half the ground between there and Moscow in nothing flat, and as of now are reported to be north of Lipetsk - or within 250 miles of the Kremlin.

Twenty-five thousand men cannot take the largest country on earth without backing from the 800,000-strong regular army and/or the people. On their quickstep march to the capital, the Wagner troops are not encountering any serious resistance - which is not quite the same as getting active support. The poor bloody infantry are sick of the Ukraine war and want to go home. Prighozin, on the other hand, thinks it has been fought ineffectually and insufficiently seriously by hack commanders in the Kremlin; he is in favour, for example, of putting Zelenskyy & Co on the receiving end of tactical nukes. So the Wagner Group and the regulars are not really on the same page, but they have the same enemies, which may be enough.

Russia in 2023 is not Romania in 1989, when it took just four days from Ceaușescu's final speech to propping him up against a wall and putting 120 bullets in him. But perception of power is what matters: the Romanian "strongman"'s balcony moment, when the boos of the crowd forced the abandonment of his speech, signaled to the army's commanders that it was safe and, indeed, prudent to switch sides. Putin is a great student of history, and knows in detail the final hours of doomed leaders.

In Washington, meanwhile, unlike the QAnon shaman, the man on the march is an insurrectionist western liberals can really get behind - notwithstanding his increasingly Gollum-like appearance:

And that is more or less where we are as of this hour. All the rest is speculation, which is already galloping far ahead: The Wagner Group are mercenaries after all, and are paid in cash. Would it be possible, therefore, for someone to pay them more cash and redirect them from Bakhmut back to Rostov? You would need a lot of the folding stuff - but then, thanks to the US Government, Ukraine is more liquid than any other place on earth. From here, the conspiracies run their merry ways:

a) The Ukraine war is over. With Russia's least worst soldiery marching on Moscow, what's left on the western front can't do diddly;

or

b) The Ukraine war is about to mestatasize. There are generals in the Kremlin awaiting Prighozin with open arms, because, like him, they're itching to nuke Kiev.

And these are merely the most obvious possibilities. The ease with which Wagner have taken the military facilities of a state with more nuclear weapons than anywhere on earth raises all kinds of darker scenarios.

UPDATE! But then again - from The Daily Mail:

'We are turning back': Wagner chief sensationally agrees to END his mercenary group's march on Moscow.

Mark Steyn on rape in England

Only 1.3% of the rapes reported to police in England and Wales result in criminal charges, but if you dare to sing "Delilah," the Welsh police would like a word with you.

Watch the full episode of The Mark Steyn Show here: https://t.co/2L9i5hSvl3 pic.twitter.com/TGiWf78GJZ

— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) March 4, 2023

Mark Steyn: Krill or Be Krilled

 Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about – stop me if you've heard this one before – global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone.

And all this will happen if the temperature goes up two degrees, from butt-numbingly freezing to marginally less butt-numbingly freezing. "It is going to be really unpleasant," Prof Peck tells the Guardian. "We are going to lose things – we just don't know how much."

Each to his own. I like whales. I spend a lot of time on the north shore of the St Lawrence and around the Saguenay fjord in Quebec, and it would certainly be a duller place without the whales gaily plashing hither and yon. But what I find curious about this sort of thing is that Prof Peck is supposed to be a scientist and the newspaper reporting his views is famously rational. A month ago, for example, it was mocking the kind of folks who'd re-elected George W Bush – men of faith, not science, many of them from jurisdictions where the school boards are packed with creationists who look askance at Darwin, evolution and the like.

Evolution posits that species will come and go: some die out, some survive and evolve. I don't regard myself as anything terribly special but in a typical year I'm exposed to temperatures from around 98 degrees to 45 below freezing, in the lower part of which range I evolve into my long underwear.

Maybe if the Antarctic food chain is incapable of evolving to cope with a two-degree increase in temperature across many decades, it isn't meant to survive. Science tells us that extinction is a fact of life, and that nature is never still: long before the Industrial Revolution, long before the first lardbuttus Americanus got into his primitive four-miles-per-gallon SUV to head to the mall for the world's first cheeseburger, there were dramatic fluctuations in climate wiping out a ton of stuff. Yet scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists at the progressive newspapers, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen – literally, in the case of Prof Peck and his beloved algae – in some unchanging Edenic state.

Well, good luck to him. If I see a chap with a "Save the algae" collecting box, I'm happy to chip in a fiver. But, at the same time as the Royal Institute and the Guardian and all other bien pensants are in a mass panic at the thought of the krill having to adjust his way of life, they're positively insouciant about massive changes to our own habitat. You like fox-hunting? You're not entirely cool with gay marriage? You prefer English common law to this new Euro-pudding legal code? Tough, shrugs the Guardian.

Stuff happens, things change, adapt or die. Perhaps he'll give us some hard numbers in his lecture but, insofar as I can tell, Prof Peck's doomsday scenario depends on a lot of "ifs". In the course of several decades, the temperature might indeed increase sufficiently, and that might reduce the algae, and that might diminish by several billion the number of krill, and that might impact the lifestyle of the Antarctic penguin by, oh, 2050, 2060.

But, on the other hand, somebody might have invented a thing the size of the Palm Pilot you staple to the seabed that automatically lowers the temperature by two degrees and we'll have wall-to-wall algae. Who can say?

What we do know for certain is that the krill's chances of survival are a lot greater than, say, those of the Italians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards, all of whom will be in steep population decline long before the Antarctic krill. By 2025, one in every three Japanese will be over 65, and that statistic depends on the two out of three who aren't over 65 sticking around to pay the tax bills required to support the biggest geriatric population in history.

Does the impending extinction of the Japanese and Russians not distress anyone? How about the Italians? They gave us the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Gina Lollobrigida, linguine, tagliatelle, fusilli. If you're in your scuba suit down on the ice shelf dining with the krill and you say you'd like your algae al dente in a carbonara sauce, they'll give you a blank look. Billions of years on Earth and all they've got is the same set menu they started out with. But try and rouse the progressive mind to a "Save the Italians" campaign and you'll get nowhere. Luigi isn't as important as algae, even though he, too, is a victim of profound environmental changes: globally warmed by Euro-welfare, he no longer feels the need to breed.

And, if he doesn't care if he survives, why should the penguins and the krill feel any differently? Given the choice between the krill's hypothetically impending extinction and their own impending extinction already under way, Europeans would apparently rather fret about the denizens of the deep. Even Chesterton, who observed that once man has ceased to believe in God he'll believe in anything, might have marvelled at how swift the decay from post-Christian to post-evolutionary. Like the old song says: What's it all about – algae?

~from The Daily Telegraph, December 14th 2004

Criminalizing Opposition in a Pseudo-Republic

 

Here's Mark Steyn's prediction three days after the last election:

It's my view that after the Biden regime takes power, as in many coup situations, they will want to have the previous leader arrested. I'm being perfectly serious here. It is the intention of the Democrat Party to put Trump in jail. So, when he launches the 'Trump News Network', it's gonna need to be based out of Costa Rica or the Turks and Caicos or somewhere.

Does that sound a little extreme? Well, here was The Washington Post's recovering "conservative" columnist Jennifer Rubin round about the same time:

It's not only that @realDonaldTrump has to lose, his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them. Because if there are survivors....they will do it again.

[snip]...

 In our first Clubland Q&A after the "insurrection" I put it this way:

In the early hours of November 4th, the Dems made it plain that Trump was no longer going to be president.

What they've done this last week is decided.....it's not enough for him not to be president, they don't want him to be a former president either. They don't want the Grover Cleveland scenario, where he comes back in four years. So it's important to them, as I said this morning, that he be the most ex ex-president ever, more ex- than Nixon. Nixon they still invited when they had these photo ops in the Oval Office, where all the presidents get together and stand around the desk with the incumbent. They're not gonna be inviting Trump to that. They want Trump to be an ex-president, they want to put him in jail... The Paul Ryan view of conservatism is never let a victory amount to anything, whereas the Democrats' view is never let a crisis go to waste. So they weaponized, they seized their moment with what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday, and they are determined to make Trump the most ex ex-president in American history...

He's going on the nineteenth, he's leaving a day early, the entire family are flying to Mar-a-Lago. And we're told this is because he wants to be able to fly out on Air Force One, whereas the departing president on the twentieth usually leaves on what's designated as Air Force Two... If I were him I would fly on my own plane, because I don't entirely trust, I'm not sure I'd entirely trust anyone, anything operated by the federal government, if you know what I mean.

They actually would like to get him in jail... The district attorney in New York would like to put Trump in jail... It's nothing to do with Trump, it's way beyond Trump, it's to teach you guys the lesson, the same lesson that the European Union has tried to teach some of its member states, that you can't do this...

In the modern era you get a choice between a left-of-center party and an ever so slightly, barely discernible, right-of-left-of center party. So you guys, you losers, you didn't play by those rules, you supported Trump and you let him hijack the ineffectual, ever so slightly right-of-left-of-center party that had basically outstayed its welcome for whatever it is, two generations now. And that's not gonna happen again... You stay within the house-trained choices because the Trump moment is never gonna happen again.

Looking for the Off-Ramp

 

All the Warmongers want to fight to the last Ukrainian.  

The ladies at the Virginian Pilot are cheerleading Armageddon.  

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn prefers to stop before the nukes or bioweapons are launched.

The World Health Organization (WHO) advised Ukraine to destroy any dangerous pathogens being kept in research laboratories to prevent "any potential spills" that could harm the public, an official told Reuters news agency on Thursday.

Like other countries, Ukraine has public health laboratories that study dangerous diseases in humans and animals, including Covid-19. Some of these labs have received support from the US, EU and WHO in the past.

Nothing to see here, move along.  (Start Mark Steyn's comments and interview at 6:45)  

(For predictions of a billion dead see the interview starting at 32:50)

"Freedom"'s Just Another Word for ...er, "White Supremacism"

 

This is the CBC Canadian Broadcasting Company):

Why the word 'freedom' is such a useful rallying cry for protesters

The word has become common among far-right groups, experts say

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength: Just "follow the science"

Aldous Huxley, in a 1946 preface to Brave New World (1932), wrote of a people of slaves who would love their enslavement: 'A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude'.

Freedom is servitude: just ask the CBC.

People who wear masks driving alone in their cars or walking in the park love their servitude; they are exhibiting their goodness, their virtue, and their loyalty to the State.

You can see my full interview with @MarkSteynOnline on @GBNEWS here (beginning at 39:39):https://t.co/KoX7stgIch

— David Frost (@DavidGHFrost) January 21, 2022

Mark Steyn on GB

America Sticks Out Its Tush

 

Mark Steyn makes a few timely comments on America's crazies.

America, on the other hand, has cut to the chase - indeed, beyond the chase. We have reached that moment in Blazing Saddles when Mel Brooks throws away the script, and the brawling cowboys on one Hollywood soundstage crash through the wall into the next soundstage and start slugging the gentlemen of the chorus rehearsing a dance number called "The French Mistake":

Throw out your hands!

Stick out your tush!

Hands on your hips

Give 'em a push

You'll be surprised

You're doing the French Mistake...

 America has literally lost the plot. On the last soundstage, all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, and the grizzled butch coaches of college athletics can't wait to put 'em on the ladies' track team. Women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a "maternity ward". Warner Bros gives J K Rowling the bum's rush for being so out of it as to think periods are something women have. In the TERF wars, lesbians are transphobic because they don't wish to date women with penises. At dark on the streets of US cities, wispy, spindly, elderly eternal "college" boys cheer on hefty psycho-trannies with purple hair and hirsute cleavage as they light up precinct houses. Indulgent prosecutors release them without bail - or, if bail is still quaintly required, Seth Rogen or a Joe Biden staffer will cover it. Stories with less helpful narratives - Democrat Congresswomen getting carjacked, or blacks slaughtering blacks every weekend in Chicago, or black criminals (sprung from the big house by woke DAs) mowing down white grannies at a Christmas parade - are instantly memory-holed. Even real people adjust their actual lives to conform with the needs of the greater narrative: Thus the Vice President of the United States, the first in history to announce her pronouns on Twitter, purports to have celebrated "Kwanzaa" during her childhood in, um, a high-caste Indian household in, er, Quebec.

This is a way more surreal finale than Blazing Saddles. In today's America, everything's ablaze:

Christmas Crackers

2020 man was already on his way to becoming a post-social animal

 Way back at the turn of the century, the manufacturing got shipped to China and low-paid service jobs became the norm for increasing numbers of Americans. If that's the job, it turns out that the state doesn't have to give you all that much dough for you to figure you'd rather sit at home and text and watch Netflix. In many parts of the west, the WuFlu quickly became a pilot program for Universal Basic Income.

The last two years have sharpened the contrasts: If you're a government worker, you didn't lose a dime. If you're a hairdresser or a gym-owner, your business exists at the whim of government, and the state imposes conditions that change from week to week and remove or restore its economic viability according to whether or not one unfortunate individual has died "with" this month's variant. Meanwhile, if you're one of those people who thought the only problem with Amazon was that its hammerlock on global market share was not yet total, the Covid era has been a colossal boon to Jeff Bezos and a few other woke billionaires.

Before you get too excited, who wants to bet the Younkin will be more than a seat warmer?

 Every Republican I met over the weekend was excited about the last election.  Republicans got the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General's offices and also captured the House of Delegates.  

So just how excited should we be?  OK, the "Woke" Democrats will not be promoting transgender bathrooms from the Governor's Office for a while.  But does taking office mean anything more than pausing in the rush to go over the cliff?  

Here's Mark Stey's opinion, and if he's right we are going to be very disappointed.

The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not have chosen save for public outrage - the state of Virginia schools in an age of "critical race theory" and trans-mania. It's bigger even than an education issue: The left is so boundlessly ambitious that it is abolishing biological sex, and if it gets away with it will leave an awful mountain of human wreckage in its wake, bigger even than its other innovations.

Every Virginian should vote on Tuesday - because Youngkin's campaign is a classic example of Milton Friedman's dictum: in politics you don't wait for the right people to do the right thing, you create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing. That is what parents at school-board meetings have been doing, and they deserve to be rewarded for it.

Virginia is a state where a rapist gets transferred to another school because he/she belongs to a protected class, rapes again, and, when you protest the anal rape of your daughter by a known rapist, you're the guy who gets thrown to the ground and arrested. Whether one finds the foregoing objectionable shouldn't really be a Republican/Democrat thing, but such is the moral depravity of the cultural heights that Dems are all in on the convicted sodomizer and only squaresville low-status GOP candidates can muster even pro forma objections. So in 21st-century Virginia insouciance about schoolgirl anal rape is now a partisan thing. ....

Steyn wrote this on 2010:

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

'Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?'

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

Read Mark Steyn's "The Shadow of Your Stall"

 

At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." But not this much - not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan "translators" and Haitian "refugees", Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America's manufacturer and America's loan shark...

Do you know Aladdin? No, not the ancient folk tale about the penniless Chinese boy who gets given a golden lamp by the US Chamber of Commerce that grants his every wish and makes him rich beyond his wildest dreams. No, I mean the Broadway musical thereof: It came back for one night, and then closed down again because of a bad case of the Covid. One step forward, seventeen back, and so it goes. If you seek alternative entertainment, there's always the leaden dinner theatre in Washington where they're arguing about whether to pass an unread bill authorizing the spending of $6 trillion or an unread bill authorizing the spending of $47 trillion, neither of which number has any meaning over in the real world, where the Government of the United States has to pay $30 trillion just to get back to having nothing at all. Nonetheless, Republicans are yet again going through the motions of pretending to be possibly considering mulling over the option of musing on not raising the debt ceiling and thereby putting America at risk of default - in the same way that you not raising your overdraft limit with the First National Bank of Dead Horse Junction from 700 bucks to four mil could put your family at risk of default...

Is the United States Constitution going to save you from the above? No, the Constitution enabled it - or, to put it at its mildest, failed to prevent it. James Kirkpatrick:

'Constitutionalism' is flawed because legalism can't restrain power. Power shapes law. If 'constitutionalism' worked, we wouldn't be here, especially when it comes to immigration. If the 'rule of law' meant anything, we wouldn't have millions of illegals. Adherence to largely symbolic ornaments doesn't prevent a country from being utterly remade.

Once you abolish the principle of equality before the law, any law - from the Constitution down - is irrelevant. Almost all the examples above are about the replacement of a land of laws with a land of men: antifa are privileged above "insurrectionists" for the purposes of mostly peaceful protests; the vaccinated are privileged above the naturally immune for the purposes of dining in a New York restaurant; illegal aliens are privileged above US citizens for the purposes of the paperwork necessary to enter the country; subscribers to the official narrative are privileged above contrarians for the purposes of access to the monopoly social-media platforms...

Read the whole thing. 

Chimeras, Cleavage and Bounced Czechs - Mark Steyn

 

Ever wonder why the question about the origins of the Wuhan virus are quietly being ignored when they are not being suppressed?  There is a total lack of interest at the highest levels of government while the Corporate media are totally disinterested in a story that's vitally important if we ever want to avoid this epidemic - or one even worse - ever again.  The lack of interest tells you something.  

 

... the public deference to political leaders who claim to be "following the science" - already fraying badly in France and Australia - would take a huge hit once it became clear that the killer virus is itself the creation of "science" and of a Washington public-health bureaucracy that followed it all the way to an insecure lab in Wuhan.

From my old friends at the Telegraph:

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing "novel chimeric spike proteins" of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the work.

Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce "human-specific cleavage sites" to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.

 This is where blind veneration of "science" gets you: gain-of-function research offshored to the virological equivalent of CIA "black sites", and with a body count pushing five million.

"Peer Reviewed" now means "probably fake"  The Lancet published hundreds of fake papers every year:  

Nature has tallied 370 articles retracted since January 2020, all from authors at Chinese hospitals, that either publishers or independent sleuths have alleged to come from paper mills (see 'Fraud allegations'). Most were published in the past three years (see 'Chinese hospital papers on the rise'). Publishers have added expressions of concern to another 45 such articles.

Nature has identified a further 197 retractions of papers from authors at Chinese hospitals since the start of last year.

 Read the whole thing including this little gem about "Sister Cities": 

America builds expensive weaponry to give to the Taliban; China takes over the world one piffling inconsequential "agreement" at a time.

Conservatives playing small-ball

 

Mark Steyn's essay: "The Long Term's Express Check-In"   gets it exactly right when he says:

The western world's descent into suicidal madness is so well advanced that even so-called conservatives cling to small-ball arguments: oh, why hasn't Kamala or the Homeland Security guy visited Del Rio? Who cares? And what exactly is the "crisis" at America's southern border?

Why does my e-mail consist of dozens of whiney messages from emasculated Republicans complaining that Nancy Pelosi or President Asterisk is breaking the rules?   When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the Chinese to tell them that he will call first and give them a heads up before any attack he's actually planning to have his own soldiers killed as they rush into an ambush.   Having a traitor as America's top military officer makes Milley a modern day Benedict Arnold.  That's a worse problem than Biden mumbling a speech and walking away from the podium without answering questions.

And what questions would he get from the bought-and-paid-for Washington Press Corps?  They helped him get elected, covered up for his drug-addled son, and hid the fact that his entire family is wealthy because it was bought and paid for by American corporations and foreign governments.  Joe Biden is the Manchurian Candidate in the flesh, the Chinese Communist Party owns him.  They also - not so incidentally - own Disney as well as the parent companies of all the major news networks, all the multinationals who bet their bottom-line on selling stuff to 4 billion Chinese consumers, the sports leagues like the NBA who earn billions from Chinese sports fans ... and the list goes on.  They're scared to death to say anything bad about the CCP because if they do, Chairman Xi shuts the door to them and the gravy train stops.

Most people have great difficulty comprehending "long-term" trends, even after they've happened: Listen to the pitiful wankers on talk-radio bleating about where Ronald Reagan's California has gone or whatever happened to Orange County. Listen to the ludicrous constitutional fetishists thinking that a magic piece of parchment can convert to the cause of liberty and small government hundreds of thousands of unskilled economic migrants wading across the river every month and going straight on welfare. Where are they gonna learn that? Thomas Jefferson George Floyd Elementary School?

The first step for saving America is to rid ourselves of every so-called "leader" claiming to be Conservative.  Get rid of every single one.  To quote "Aliens" Ripley: "nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."  After we get rid of the traitors in our midst, we can begin to re-assemble the country.