Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #65
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Chinese Dissident Ai Weiwei Warns Americans: ‘You’re Already In The Authoritarian State. You Just Don’t Know It’
Former political prisoner and authoritarian regimes expert Ai Weiwei appeared on PBS Friday, warning Americans that authoritarianism has already invaded the country.
PBS host Margaret Hoover asked Weiwei if he believes Donald Trump is an authoritarian. “If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you,” replied Weiwei. “You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.” (RELATED: ZHAO: The Current American Upheaval Echoes China’s Cultural Revolution)
WATCH:Weiwei went on to explain that many aspects of the U.S. today are similar to the Cultural Revolution in China. He mentioned political correctness as an example, calling it “very dangerous.”
Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom who escaped communism in China, gave a speech at the Loudoun County school board in June in which she compared Critical Race Theory (CRT) to China’s Communist Revolution.
“What is going on in our schools and in our country is really a replay of the cultural revolution in China, and I want people to see the similarities and similarities are terrifying. They use the same ideology and same methodology, even the same vocabulary, and reach the same goal,” Fleet said.
China’s Cultural Revolution occurred between 1966 and 1976 with the explicit goal of punishing supporters of capitalism that Mao Zedong claimed had...
Why you cannot trust US Covid data
In Connecticut, fully vaccinated people are rising from the dead
Unlike England, or Scotland, or Israel, or Germany, or many other countries that have semi-functioning governments, the United States has no nationally reliable source of Covid or Covid vaccine data.
Our famed Centers for Disease Control has turned out to be less famed than infamous. It has failed in every conceivable way since February 2020. Some inconceivable ways too. Worse, in the months since Joe Biden staggered into the White House, the CDC has slipped from mere incompetence into actively twisting science for its new political masters. It has become a true Dept. of Pandemia. (More on this to come.)
In place of centralized national data, we have state health department reports. The states are probably about as competent as the CDC overall, but a bit less political. Maybe.
They also run their own immunization registries and also closer to the local hospital systems and coroners that report Covid deaths. So their five o’clock folly body count reports go through a little less truth destruction.
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A note to younger readers: Body count doesn’t mean what you think it means.
During the Vietnam War, the United States military regularly reported its “body counts” - the number of Vietcong guerillas or North Vietnamese soldiers it had killed. These figures became infamous as the ultimate example of the way bureaucracies could release seemingly precise statistics that had no relation to reality. Reporters began to call the press briefings where they were disclosed the “five o’clock follies.”
(A note to older readers: the young ‘uns use “body count” to refer to the number of sexual partners they’ve had. Cute, huh?)
But I digress. (Not really. The Vietnam stuff is kinda important, since the Vietnam War was the last time our government messed up anything nearly as badly as it has messed up Covid, and for some of the same reasons - as was obvious basically from the start.)
The difference is that this time around the vast majority of the media and academia have happily lined up to join the truth gangrape, which makes stopping it much harder.
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So we are stuck with the state numbers. And the state numbers are all over the place, both literally and figuratively. Some states update their numbers weekly and are reasonably transparent. Others, not so much.
For example, on Nov. 11, Connecticut reported that “one hundred seventy fifty” vaccinated people had died of Covid since February. Beyond the fact that “one hundred seventy fifty” is not a number, the state had reported a week before that 226 vaccinated people had died since February. Which seems to imply that about 50 Connecticutians (?) were resurrected last week:
Jan. 6 Political Prisoners Chemically Attacked By Prison Guards: Court Filing
Multiple Jan. 6 political prisoners were taken out of their cells on stretchers at the District of Columbia jail on Nov. 11, indicated a court filing.
The situation began when after a defendant refused to wear a mask, a family member of Kelly Meggs, who is being held in the D.C. jail, told Meggs’s lawyer. Prison guards then sprayed a chemical substance at the defendant described as “some kind of mace or pepper spray,” according to a filing in federal court.
“They sprayed mace or some type of gas at an inmate and kept missing so it went into an intake that fed into other cells, and the lady with the key left because she didn’t like the gas, so the inmates in the cells who were being fed the gas from that intake were locked in for like 15 minutes while it was going into their rooms and they couldn’t see or breathe,” the family told Jonathon Moseley, the lawyer.
Multiple Jan 6. defendants were taken out of the cells on stretchers following the incident.
The news was first broken by reporter Julie Kelly on November 11th.
The U.S. Marshals Service also took action to tour the prisons at an unannounced date in mid-October. Officials deemed that prison conditions for the Jan. 6 detainees were suitable but found other parts of the same prison that “do not meet the minimum standards of confinement.”
Lamont Ruffin, the acting U.S. Marshal for Washington DC, told Quincy Booth, director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, in a letter that he himself went to the jail and saw “evidence of systemic failures.”
Prison guards were said to routinely shut off water to cells as punishment, and many cells had “large amounts of standing human sewage (urine and feces) in the...
Deranged Pentagon Spokesman Says Climate Change Is As Big A National Security Threat As China
The Biden administration’s refusal to distinguish between our principal military adversary and climate change is yet more evidence that the military is following ideology instead of winning our wars.
Focusing on climate change allows this administration to appease Chinese aggression and human rights abuses for the false promises of future climate action.
In a press briefing on November 10, Pentagon spokesman retired Adm. John Kirby gave further evidence of the Biden administration’s incoherent national strategy. He refused to distinguish between China and “climate change” as threats to U.S. national security.
In response to a question of “which is a bigger threat, the climate or China?” Kirby said, “You’ve heard the secretary talk about the climate as a — a real and existential national security threat . . . And we considered China as the number one pacing challenge for the department. Both are equally important. Both are — are challenges that the secretary wants the senior leadership at the Pentagon to be focused on, as well as many others, too.”
Kirby’s answer was a bit of a muddle. He first described China as “the number one pacing threat.” But he then immediately added, “Both are equally important.”
The questioning reporter then sought clarification: “So if you were to rank the two, climate or China, which would be first?”
Kirby could only say, “I think I answered your question.”
Others are more clear-headed. Despite Kirby’s refusal to clarify his comments, President Biden’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, has not hesitated in naming China as our “most significant threat [and] challenge” throughout the foreseeable future and said that “[o]ut-competing China will be key to our national security.”
The outgoing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten was brutally direct in recent comments reported by CNN. “Calling China a pacing threat is a useful term because the pace at which China is moving is stunning,” Hyten told reporters at a Defense Writers Group roundtable last month. “The pace they’re moving and the trajectory they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it. It will happen. So I think we have to do something.”
Burns’s and Hyten’s warnings are backed up by China’s aggressive military build-up, which leaves no room for doubt that its strategy is one of expansion and aggression. In 2020 the Department of Defense reported to Congress that what “is certain is that the CCP has a strategic end state that it is working towards, which if achieved and its accompanying military modernization left unaddressed, will have serious implications for U.S. national interests and the security of the international rules-based order.”
As part of that modernization, China’s navy has surpassed the U.S. Navy as the world’s largest. Its recent leap ahead of us in the development of a hypersonic nuclear-capable missile sent shockwaves through the military and intelligence communities.
Given the strategic threat posed by China, Kirby’s refusal to distinguish between the threats posed by it and “climate change” raises the question, “Why does Admiral Kirby still have a job?” The answer is because Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden approve of what he...
WATCH– Prosecution: Kyle Rittenhouse ‘Too Cowardly to Use His Own Fists’
The prosecution in the Kyle Rittenhouse case accused the teenager of being “too cowardly to use his own fists” when an enraged rioter and subsequent mob attacked him.
During the rebuttal on Monday, shortly after the Rittenhouse defense offered the jury its closing arguments, Assistant District Attorney James Kraus repeated lead prosecutor Thomas Binger’s line that Rittenhouse unfairly brought a gun to a fistfight:
Clearly, if there is a provocation, he is guilty. But even outside of provocation, why do you get to immediately just start shooting. As Mr. Binger said, he brought a gun to a fistfight and he was too cowardly to use his own fists to fight his way out. He has to start shooting.
Kraus had followed up on a previous line of argumentation from Thomas Binger, who lit up the internet when he employed an image from the 1980s Patrick Swayze movie Road House:
Let’s assume for a minute, yeah, Joseph Rosenbaum is chasing after the defendant because he wants to do some physical harm to him. He’s an unarmed man. This is a bar fight. This is a fistfight. This is a fight that maybe many of you have been involved in. Two people. Hand to hand. Who are throwing punches or pushing or shoving or whatever.“But what you don’t do, is you don’t bring a gun to a fistfight,” Binger added.
Bidenflation: Tyson Foods Says It Is Sharply Raising Prices
Tyson Foods sharply raised prices on beef, chicken, and pork, pulling its profits and sales above estimates in the most recent quarter.
The Arkansas-based meat giant—which produces around 20 percent of all U.S. beef chicken, and pork—said it had lifted prices across all of its major business units.
“Inflation has clearly had an impact on the business,” chief executive Donnie King said on Monday. “Our commercial teams have successfully pursued inflation justified pricing, delivering top-line growth for the business to offset the cost increases. As rates of inflation continue, so will our pricing actions.”
Sales jumped 20 percent in the fourth quarter and 11 percent during the fiscal full year, which the company concludes on October 2nd.
“Our sales gains were largely driven by higher average sales price,” King said. “Our teams have worked together with our customers to pass along that inflation through price increases. ”
The company said it has had to increase wages and faced increased costs for shipping, packaging, raw materials, logistics, and items such as feed grain.
“We have raised wages and across our business today we pay an average of $24 per hour, which includes full medical, vision, dental, and other benefits like access to retirement plan and sick pay,” King said.
Tyson shares rose by...
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