RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/topic/big-tech-bullies-facebook/

I was in the kitchen preparing the family’s dinner when the inauguration of Joe Biden was on TV, so I caught only mysterious fragments of his speech, over the noise of the blender and stuff. ‘I want an hour — an hour — with my own teen wolf,’ Joe seemed to say at one point. And then: ‘America, America, I give to you my vest.’ I raced through to the living room when someone announced that Garth Crooks was going to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ — good choice, Joe, I thought. Garth seems to have lost a little weight and indeed color, but he did a decent job.

It all went well enough, given the circumstances, and at no point did Joe ask why all those people were there and was it his birthday or something. A very self-regarding young woman appeared and read an awful poem, so I went back into the kitchen. Truth be told, I can’t bear the chest-beating pomposity of the Americans on occasions like this, and the kitsch and the confected emotion and the dire music. I think I preferred the nonagenarians of the old USSR standing implacably as loads of nukes trundled by. Certainly the Russians have the better national anthem.

Still, the BBC presenters seemed to like it, sobbing with happiness at every juncture. I hope the new director-general, Tim Davie, was watching the coverage and noted the somewhat different tone to that which accompanied the inauguration of Donald Trump four years previously. It was a close call between Auntie and CNN as to who could provide the most dementedly partisan coverage — the difference being that we don’t have Fox to offer a bit of balance.

https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1354580111849381888

Senator Ron Johnson

@SenRonJohnson

Social media censorship just ratcheted up to a new level. Google’s YouTube removed two videos of doctors testifying under oath at my US Senate hearing on early treatment of COVID. Another body blow to freedom of speech and expression. Very sad and scary. Where does this end?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/29/tracking_twitters_growth_did_trump_ban_cause_a_dip_145154.html

As COVID-19 began sweeping across the world last spring, Twitter experienced phenomenal growth with much of the planet’s population confined to their homes, helping the platform recover from a seven-year slump in daily tweet volume. As the pandemic has worn on, has Twitter continued to grow? How did the changes the platform made around the 2020 presidential election affect its growth and has its banning of Donald Trump caused it to lose users?

While Twitter itself does not publish detailed usage statistics, it is possible to estimate its growth from the daily random sample that it makes available of 1% of all tweets, which is highly correlated with its actual growth. Using this approach, the timeline below shows the estimated number of tweets per day on Twitter from Jan. 1, 2012 through Jan. 5, 2021 (gaps are days with missing data).

Since its peak in July 2013, Twitter was on a years-long decline through the end of 2018, but had begun slowly growing again over the course of 2019. Then, in the space of just two weeks in the middle of March 2020, as lockdowns swept the world, the platform grew by almost 100 million tweets a day, rising back to its July 2013 numbers.

The timeline below zooms into the Jan. 1, 2020 through Jan. 5, 2021 period, showing this phenomenal growth. Even as lockdowns eased across the world earlier this year, Twitter use did not decline, showing remarkable staying power. From Oct. 7-20, daily Twitter volume increased another 50 million tweets a day as all eyes focused on the U.S. election, then suddenly dropped by around 70 million tweets a day almost overnight on Oct. 21-22, and only began to recover on Dec. 17. What might explain this strange anomaly?

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/25054/gaslighting-technocracy-preferred-weapon-of-war http://goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: http://lindagoudsmit.com

It is my opinion that the Democrat bill, For the People Act 2021 H.R. 1 – 117th Congress (2021-2022), a laughable title, is the fatal blow to free and fair elections, and the end of the United States of America as we know it.

In case you think I am exaggerating, consider this checklist:

● The coronavirus “pandemic” was an economic bioweapon designed to collapse Trump’s roaring U.S. economy, terrify Americans into submission, and justify mail-in ballots. The pandemic is and always was political medicine disguised as public health ✔︎

● The mail-in ballots augmented the digital interference via Dominion Voting Systems/software to steal the 2020 election ✔︎

● The stolen election installed China-centric puppet Joe Biden ✔︎

● Biden’s administration can now pack the court and enable imposition of the lethal For the People Act of 2021, which puts the Uniparty of corrupt Democrats, Republicans in name only (RINOs), and Americans in name only (AINOs), in control of U.S. elections in perpetuity ✔︎

● The globalist Uniparty will have succeeded in establishing planetary governance through “legal” means by duping the public with catastrophic humanitarian hoaxes that have deceitful names like “For the People Act 2021.” No bullets required ✔︎

I am witnessing the greatest, freest republic on earth being transformed into a technocracy that resembles communist China, the most oppressive regime on earth. The coordinated disinformation campaign of the Democrat/technocrat/globalist narrative is an orchestrated effort to make Americans believe the unbelievable, and accept the unacceptable.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/andrew-cuomos-shame/

‘We were ambushed like no other state,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo contended to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on January 26. “Again, it was from federal incompetence. They thought the virus was in China, it left China, it had left China, it had gone to Europe and it came here for three months before they ever knew. Incompetent government kills people.”

Two days later Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, who is a liberal Democrat like Cuomo and who enjoyed Cuomo’s backing when she sought her current office, released a cautiously worded yet infuriating 76-page report suggesting that Cuomo’s incompetence cost lives.

Extrapolating from a survey of about 10 percent of state nursing homes, James estimated that the actual number of COVID deaths related to such facilities was about 50 percent higher than the official figure, which was about 8,700. Within hours, the state Department of Health scrambled to add to its nursing-home total 3,800 souls who had died in hospitals after becoming infected in nursing homes, bringing the official number up to 12,473.

As New York City mayor Bill de Blasio put it with uncharacteristic eloquence, “These are our loved ones we lost, you know, it’s someone’s grandma, someone’s mother or father, aunts or uncles, this is families missing someone dear to them.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/29/caught-with-their-hands-in-the-cookie-jar/

If you have a number of children, as I do, you might be familiar with something like the following scene: A child is caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t, say, stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. When confronted, he immediately begins to deny guilt and deflect blame.

“My sister ate the cookie! I was just reaching my hand in to make sure it was gone so I could tell you,” the child might exclaim, while dusting cookie crumbs off of his shirt. If pressed about his obvious guilt, he might become angry and lash out.

This is just the sort of behavior we are witnessing from the election-rigging Democrats over the past several weeks. They scream “insurrection” and “coup” at 74.2 million Trump supporters who supposedly bear collective guilt for the actions of a few hundred rioting LARPers at the Capitol, who were immediately denounced by virtually everyone on the Right (in sharp contrast to leftist rioters over the summer, who were coddled and encouraged by the Democrats). 

Meanwhile, these same election riggers have launched a “domestic terrorism” witch hunt against Trump supporters, in a clear and obvious attempt to suppress political opposition to the new regime.

Like the child with his hand in the cookie jar, the more guilty the Democrats are of “winning” a blatantly rigged election versus Donald Trump, the louder they must scream about their noble crusade to save “democracy” from “fascism.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-good-vaccine-deed-11611963112?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Donald Trump spearheaded the warp speed development of vaccines for COVID  and deserves the most praise……rsk

Johnson & Johnson and Novavax this week reported that their vaccines were effective in clinical trials, and what fortunate timing. The U.S. urgently needs a supply boost. But at this juncture it’s also worth noting how former Operation Warp Speed chief Moncef Slaoui positioned the Biden Administration for a vaccine triumph.

One of Mr. Slaoui’s inspired ideas was to diversify the federal government’s vaccine bets with six manufacturers when nobody knew which, if any, would work. The vaccine candidates used different technologies—Moderna and Pfizer -BioNTech (mRNA), J&J and AstraZeneca (adenovirus), and Novavax and Sanofi -GSK (recombinant protein).

The J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines were hobbled by trial delays in the fall. But J&J reported Friday that its vaccine was 66% effective at protecting people from moderate to severe disease in a global trial, and 85% against severe illness. Early trial data from AstraZeneca suggests similar efficacy. Novavax reported Thursday its shot appears to be nearly 90% effective.

The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are about 95% effective, so it’s fortuitous that their trial results came first so their shots could inoculate the elderly and others most at highest risk. But even if somewhat less effective, the other vaccines may be good candidates for young people and boost supply this spring.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

We’re barely a week into the Biden presidency, and it’s been a literal blizzard of Executive Orders, so many that nobody can even keep up with them. Trying to review them in at least a general way, I can’t find a single one that is a good idea. They range from bad to catastrophic.

The overall summary is that the dopes have taken full control. All adult supervision has now been banished from the vast federal government, and the wokest (and stupidest) of the woke progressives are to have the full run of the place. Resources are now infinite, tradeoffs among competing priorities are no longer necessary, and all human problems are to be solved and perfect fairness and justice instituted within a matter of weeks if not days. Best of all, the Bidenistas think that all this will work because they are so “smart.”

At Jacobin magazine, writer David Sirota captures the spirit of the moment in a piece titled “There’s Really No Need to Compromise, Joe.” The specific focus of the piece is advocating for immediate legislation to pass out checks for $2000 each— as opposed to any smaller amount — to most every American. But the bigger theme is that compromise is not needed because now there are no more limits on how much money the federal government can pass out, nor is there any cost or other downside to just throwing out money as fast as possible. The route to improving your and everyone else’s life is endless big handouts of free money from the Feds:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/speech-and-sedition-in-2021-11611962910?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

We highlight this as one example among many of the emerging appetite for viewpoint suppression among journalists, intellectuals and Democrats in the wake of the Trump Presidency. They increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.

***

Many calls to sanction opposition media come from voices that claimed to be most alarmed by Donald Trump’s attacks on the free press. Margaret Sullivan, the Post’s media columnist, wrote this week that “corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away,” declaring that the outlet’s “role in the 400,000 U.S. lives lost to the pandemic and in the disastrous attack of Jan. 6” has been “deadly.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/marginalising-conservatives-until-we-vanish/

Pithy quote:

It is divisive by definition to recognize there can be two or more points of view, which is not a bad thing if people of good will anoint their disagreements with the oil of civility. But when a dominant group insists on its version and silences those who dare to differ in part or whole, as we are seeing today, purges and show trials are not too far down the road.