90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Visage à trois #763

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #943

Biden admin under fire for pursuing diversity over merit: They're finding people 'who aren't highly-skilled'

President Biden's judicial nominees are sworn in during a hearing with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 25, 2023. (REUTERS/Leah Millis

Biden has nominated record numbers of women and people of color to the federal judiciary

Project 21 co-chairman Horace Cooper weighs in on the Biden administration's history of race-based hiring on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'

President Biden has nominated a record number of diverse judges to the federal judiciary, with nearly 65% being people of color, according to an analysis by Balls & Strikes.

The outlet found that out of 97 confirmed federal judges, five are White men and 22 are Black women. Female judges make up 66% of the confirmations compared to 24% under former President Donald Trump and 42% under former President Obama.

Project 21 co-chairman Horace Cooper called out the Biden administration for its seemingly race-based confirmations Monday, arguing it is trying to replace excellence and merit with diversity.

"What we're seeing from the Biden administration, and which is what we're seeing generally from the progressive movement, is this idea that we just need to reshape the judiciary in a way under color," he said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

"I use that term in a duplicative way by pretending that we're making the courts look more like America. But the truth of the matter is we're finding people - they aren't talented, they aren't highly-skilled, but they know progressive vision just like the back of their hand."

Cooper added that America ultimately "suffers" because of this...

A whistleblower has revealed that Scotland's wind turbines ran on fossil fuels for up to six hours a day, adding to the anger over the Scottish Government's environmental credentials

The SNP and Greens are being held responsible for a damning incident that led to fossil fuels being used to run a number of wind turbines in Scotland.

Despite the environmentally friendly credentials of turbines being lorded by ministers, ScottishPower has admitted that 71 have been linked up to generators burning diesel fuel.

The power company said they were forced to step in due to a fault on the national grid during the freezing spell in December but political opposition has slammed the Scottish Government for being untrustworthy with their environmental policies.

Labour MSP Colin Smyth said the scenario is further evidence of the SNP and Green Party's "dishonesty" over Scotland's renewable potential after they came under fire for using data they knew to be inaccurate. Ministers were slated for incorrectly stating that Scotland possessed 25 per cent of Europe's wind energy potential.

On top of this not being true, the recent revelation found 60 turbines at Arecleoch Wind Farm in South Ayrshire and 11 at the nearby Glen App Wind Farm were connected to six huge diesel generators.

Mr Smyth said: "The SNP and Greens have proven time and time again they cannot be trusted on environmental issues.

"They laud Scotland's potential for renewables yet don't appear to ensure those already in existence are properly run. This isn't the first problem raised - and there is concern at a lack of openness when problems arise.

"Whatever the reasons, having to use diesel generators to deice faulty turbines is environmental madness. This level of dishonesty cuts to the very core of the SNP and Green Government where their rhetoric on net zero is very different from the reality."

The wind farms are operated by ScottishPower Renewables, a subsidiary of the Spanish-based company Iberdrola, which operates 1,183 onshore turbines capable of producing enough electricity to power two million homes.

The use of diesel generators was revealed by a whistleblower who told the Sunday Mail: "During December, 60 turbines at Arecleoch and 11 at Glen App were de-energised due to a cabling fault at Mark Hill wind farm.

"In order to get these turbines re-energised, diesel generators were running for upwards of six hours a day."

A ScottishPower spokesman said: "Due to an external fault on the network, the three wind farms were unable to operate.

"During the extreme cold in December, in line with manufacturer's recommendations, the turbines' internal temperature were returned to safe levels by six diesel generators for...

Visage à trois #762

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #942

Covid and the Three Tests of Compliance

Jesus in the wilderness faced three temptations from the Devil himself: material comfort, fame, and power. Needless to say, he declined every temptation and passed all three trials.

So too did the couple seeking to enter the order of virtue in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. They blasted right through the tests of silence, isolation, and fear. In the opera, much celebration ensues.

Fairy tales too are often framed by three chances. The Miller’s daughter is given three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, and I’m sure you can think of other instances.

The final movement of the 6th “Tragic” Symphony by Gustav Mahler features three hammer blows, the third of which was later removed by the composer for superstitious reasons: the fear that the third signifies death. To this day, audiences wait in anticipation to see if the conductor will motion the percussionist to deploy the third or not. When he does not, the blow is even more conspicuous in its absence.

And here we are in year three of the times after the pandemic response sent our lives and those of billions into extraordinary upheaval. To most of us, it seems like a crazy blur of edicts, propaganda, revelations, fear, confusion, division, and shock, so much so that it is hard to keep the history straight. Indeed, many people just want everything forgotten or at least completely mis-remembered.

Daily, we are bombarded by fake history that we know is wrong. We lived through it. Brownstone has been accumulating all the receipts: the emails, speeches, edits, threats, impositions, demands, and so on. In the face of all this attempted revisionism, it’s hard to keep one’s bearing.

One way to think about these last three years is a succession of compliance tests: how much liberty and good sense are we willing to surrender to the regime and on what terms? The policies seem to be constructed for just that purpose.

As if to fit the model, they came in three great waves: lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Let’s examine all three stages and reflect on their demands and terms. It begins to make sense, at least from the point of view of those in control.
Lockdowns

“Thank goodness for the lockdowns; this will end the pandemic.”

The lockdowns hit us hard from mid-March 2020 and onward, imposed as if they were a conventional response to a circulating new pathogen, though they literally had no precedent in history. They were sweeping, closing churches, schools, small and medium-sized businesses, civic clubs like AA, bars and restaurants plus gyms, and even venues that host weddings and funerals. Many states imposed stay-at-home orders. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, while medical services were reserved for only Covid cases and other extreme emergencies while everything else was shut.

All of this was based on the astonishing announcement by the Trump administration: “Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission” and “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

At the March 16, 2020, press conference, not one reporter asked a critical question. Even if this was only for two weeks, as was promised, how is any of this compatible with law and the Bill of Rights? How is it that bureaucracies, without any vote of any legislature, can simply “shut down” an entire country? It was completely bizarre, so much so that most people figured that there had to be some legitimate underlying rationale.

Not everyone went along. Some hair salons, bars, and churches remained open but found themselves pilloried by the media. Then the cops arrived, even SWAT teams, closing them by force. The kids had to stay home too, and moms and dads were forced to leave the workforce to care for them at home, splitting their days pretending to work on Zoom calls while their children pretended to be in school on Zoom too. It was a massive crush of technology and everyone had to adapt.

There was nowhere to go and most American towns suddenly looked like ghost towns. President Trump announced that it would surely all be over by Easter but this itself was something of a shock: Easter was more than two weeks away, so his announcement amounted to extension of lockdowns. His advisers Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx seized the moment and successfully talked Trump into another full 30 days of lockdowns.

These weeks were excruciating. Many if not most people knew that there was something very wrong but it was unclear what. We could no longer meet with friends and neighbors to discuss. Plus many people in our online communities seemed to be all in on the lockdowns, fully believing that this was the way to control and eventually stop a pandemic.

And yet there we were, all of us living in this surreal scene, asked to believe the implausible and give up what we loved the most by deference to a handful of people who said that they knew more than we knew. Those who did not do the right thing were considered horrid and unscientific, insufficiently credulous toward our betters.
Masks

“Thank goodness for masks; this will end the lockdowns.”

In these early days, there was no thought put into universal masking. It was never part of our history. There was a moment during the 1918 pandemic that one city tried masks but not only did it not work; it produced a massive political revolt. Not since then had masks for the general population ever been tried. Plenty of countries in the Far East had used masks to filter out smog on bad days but that problem had never been something that affected the US enough to make them a norm.

Plus, in those days, the experts told everyone not to bother with them. The masks should be saved for medical personnel. In any case, they don’t really work to control the spread of viruses like this. They are not the equivalent of using condoms to avoid infection from AIDS. A respiratory virus is something else entirely, and we are a people informed by evidence and science. The evidence was nowhere in...