Some “Adam Schiff Does X” videos from Gutfeld showed up in my Twitter feed, and when I went looking for them, I found this rant…which also includes said Schiff videos.
Gutfeld: The Better Trump Does, The More Insane The Left Acts
October 23rd, 2019BREAKING: Texas Speaker Bonnen Retires
October 22nd, 2019I meant to do a post on the whole Bonnen/Sullivan tape release issue, but it looks like events have gotten ahead of me:
Republican Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen on Tuesday announced he will not seek reelection to the lower chamber in 2020 as calls for his resignation reached a near majority among members of his own caucus.
Bonnen, who for months was dogged by allegations that he planned to politically target sitting Republicans, offered a hardline conservative activist media access to his organization and said insulting things about Democrats in the lower chamber, said in a statement that he respected “the manner in which [House members] have handled this entire situation.”
“After much prayer, consultation, and thoughtful consideration with my family, it is clear that I can no longer seek re-election as State Representative of District 25, and subsequently, as Speaker of the House,” Bonnen, who is from Angleton, said in a statement.
Bonnen’s political future was called into question in late July, when Michael Quinn Sullivan, who heads Empower Texans, revealed the two, along with one of the speaker’s top allies, had met at the Texas Capitol the month before. At that meeting, Sullivan alleged, Bonnen and state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, suggested Empower Texans go after a list of 10 House Republicans and told Sullivan his group could have media access to the lower chamber in 2021. Bonnen also disparaged multiple Democrats, calling one “vile” and another “a piece of shit.”
Possibly more later…
Texas Constitutional Amendment Election Recommendations
October 22nd, 2019Looks like another off-year Texas Constitutional Amendments election is sneaking up on us, and early voting started yesterday. Here’s my reminder to find your voter registration card, and my one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind recommendations:
- Proposition 1: “The constitutional amendment permitting a person to hold more than one office as a municipal judge at the same time.” Oppose. I see no reason to allow double-dipping by elected officials.
- Proposition 2: “The constitutional amendment providing for the issuance of additional general obligation bonds by the Texas Water Development Board in an amount not to exceed $200 million to provide financial assistance for the development of certain projects in economically distressed areas.” Oppose. Sounds like a potential graft pit for a function that should be handled at the local, not state, level.
- Proposition 3: “The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for a temporary exemption from ad valorem taxation of a portion of the appraised value of certain property damaged by a disaster.” Support. Reducing taxes? Good. Helping people in need keep more of their own money? Also good.
- Proposition 4: “The constitutional amendment prohibiting the imposition of an individual income tax including a tax on an individual’s share of partnership and unincorporated association income.” Strong Support. This one is the reason to get to the polls. It will drive a stake through the heart of Democratic plans to impose a state income tax on Texas.
- Proposition 5: “The constitutional amendment dedicating the revenue received from the existing state and use taxes that are imposed on sporting goods to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas Historical Commission to protect Texas’ natural areas, water, quality, and history by acquiring, managing, and improving state and local parks and historical sites while not increasing the rate of the sales and use taxes.” Support, though not particularly strongly, as many sporting goods have nothing to do with parks and wildlife.
- Proposition 6: “The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to increase by $3 billion the maximum bond amount authorized for the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.” Oppose. This earmark has the earmarks of a possible boondoggle/graft pit, and it’s not like there aren’t a lot of other agencies and organizations at the private and federal level funding cancer research.
- Proposition 7: “The constitutional amendment allowing increased distributions to the available school fund.” Support, if tepidly. Sayeth Empower Texans: “Securing additional revenue from the state’s oil and gas reserves was one of the alternatives adopted in lieu of an increased sales tax.” Fair enough, but I always hesitate to let bureaucrats spend more money.
- Proposition 8: “The constitutional amendment providing for the creation of the flood infrastructure fund to assist in the financing of drainage, flood mitigation, and flood control projects.” Oppose. This is a proper function of government, but one more properly handled at the city or county level. (Well, anywhere Sylvester Turner isn’t mayor…)
- Proposition 9: “The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to exempt from ad valorem taxation precious metal held in a precious metal depository located in this state.” Support. Not wild about any fixed asset taxation except land. And I’m not wild about that either, but at least I can see theoretical justification for in it being a finite resource and among the lesser of taxing evils…
- Proposition 10: “The constitutional amendment to allow the transfer of a law enforcement animal to a qualified caretaker in certain circumstances.” Support. Let’s law enforcement animals be transferred to their handlers when they retire, something previously prohibited by our long, weird state constitution. BattleSwarm Blog reiterates our longstanding “pro-dog” policy leanings.
Election Day is November 5. If you’re not voting early, remember, remember the fifth of November…
More background info from the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Brad Johnson at The Texan.
What It’s Like Inside China’s Gulags
October 20th, 2019Here’s a very grim look inside Chinese concentration camps for Uighers and other ethnic minorities:
Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.
Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.
Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.
Snip.
The camp’s commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the “black room” because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly. “There were all kinds of tortures there. Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”
Why were people tortured?
“They would punish inmates for everything. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was punished. Those who didn’t learn Chinese properly or who didn’t sing the songs were also punished.”
And everyday things like these were punished with torture?
“I will give you an example. There was an old woman in the camp who had been a shepherd before she was arrested. She was taken to the camp because she was accused of speaking with someone from abroad by phone. This was a woman who not only did not have a phone, she didn’t even know how to use one. On the page of sins the inmates were forced to fill out, she wrote that the call she had been accused of making never took place. In response she was immediately punished. I saw her when she returned. She was covered with blood, she had no fingernails and her skin was flayed.”
On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished. “One night, about 70 new prisoners were brought to the camp,” she recalls. “One of them was an elderly Kazakh woman who hadn’t even had time to take her shoes. She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days.”
Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification. She thinks it was done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. “The inmates would be given pills or injections. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them.”
What happened to those who did take them?
“The pills had different kinds of effects. Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile.” (That, at least, was a widely circulated rumor.)
On the other hand, when inmates were really sick, they didn’t get the medical care they needed. Sauytbay remembers one young woman, a diabetic, who had been a nurse before her arrest. “Her diabetes became more and more acute. She no longer was strong enough to stand. She wasn’t even able to eat. That woman did not get any help or treatment. There was another woman who had undergone brain surgery before her arrest. Even though she had a prescription for pills, she was not permitted to take them.”
The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh, Sauytbay notes: “On an everyday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and they didn’t come back to the rooms all night. The police had unlimited power. They could take whoever they wanted. There were also cases of gang rape. In one of the classes I taught, one of those victims entered half an hour after the start of the lesson. The police ordered her to sit down, but she just couldn’t do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment.”
Tears stream down Sauytbay’s face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp. “One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”
Read the whole thing, if you have the stomach to.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Blink-182, in Coordination With the Saucer People and DARPA, Are Developing A New Generations of Superweapons
October 19th, 2019I know that headline reads like a Simpsons gag (all it needs is the reverse vampires), but that’s the actual thrust of this Washington Examiner story from Tom Rogan. This story is about 99% bunk by weight, but there are a few interesting nuggets in here worth sifting around.
The U.S. Army has signed a contract to study and exploit materials from unidentified flying objects. It intends to use what it learns in order to develop new weapons platforms.
No, I’m not joking.
The facts are provided in a newly agreed cooperative research and development contract between the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (specifically, the Ground Vehicle Systems Center) and the UFO technology exploitation group To The Stars Academy. Established by Blink-182 founder Tom DeLonge, To The Stars Academy involves former U.S. government, military, and advanced aerospace engineers in the research and capability exploitation of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFOs.
The U.S. Army’s stamped and signed 26-page contract is quite stunning.
It says that To The Stars Academy has shown the Army that it “is a company with materiel and technology innovations that offer capability advancements for Army ground vehicles. These technology innovations have been acquired, designed, or produced by [To The Stars Academy], leveraging advancements in metamaterials and quantum physics to push performance gains.”
“The government is interested,” the contract explains, “in a variety of the collaborator’s technologies, such as, but not limited to inertial mass reduction, mechanical/structural metamaterials, electromagnetic metamaterial wave guides, quantum physics, quantum communications, and beamed energy propulsion.” The contract also entails the research of metamaterial exploitation for the purposes of “active camouflage and directed photo projection.” On that last point, an Army spokesman tells me that To The Stars Academy has conveyed it has means of supporting “camouflage concealment deception and obscuration” interests.
But what is this metamaterial?
I can confirm that at least some of the source material was retrieved from crash remnants or materials sourced from UFOs. Analysis of these UFOs suggests they are enabled with space-time, cloaking, transmedium travel, and gravity manipulation capabilities. That’s not crazy conspiracy talk. In a key credibility submission, the contract adds that “the Office of the Secretary of Defense can share historical reports of findings and origin of materiel solutions in the possession of [To The Stars Academy].”
Take a look at that giant leap from almost vaguely plausible to Above Top Secret level lunacy in the last quoted paragraph.
This is not the first time Tom Rogan has published a Washington Examiner piece about UFOs. A good bit of that piece is about the “Tic-Tac” UFO sighting, which got a fair amount of coverage at the time. But then you get paragraphs of true believer blather:
First, UFOs have repeatedly shown what seems to be intelligence in their operation and behavior-response to manned aircraft and monitoring systems in their vicinity. I am led to believe that the Russians (including in the Soviet era) have repeatedly tried and failed to shoot down UFOs, which have practiced evasive techniques.
In addition, UFOs have shown an ability to travel at hypersonic speeds with anti-gravity characteristics. Some underwater phenomena are also capable of supercavitation speeds of hundreds of miles per hour underwater. Note that when it comes to underwater objects, the recorded size indicates they are not torpedoes or vessels of any known type.
Third, UFOs manifest a continuing and special interest in military-nuclear technology (I believe it is notable that credible sightings began following the first use of atomic weapons). Former nuclear forces officers have testified that UFOs have, on occasion, even deactivated U.S. nuclear missiles during test operations.
Fourth, UFOs often show evidence of plasma manipulation, possibly in relation to manifested cloaking capabilities.
I am also extraordinarily confident these UFOs are not the creation of any current government or private interest. They are definitely not U.S. in origin, and they are far in advance of Chinese and Russian capabilities — including in the field of hypersonic capabilities (which the Russians lead in).
This is stuff that belongs in Fate or Fortean Times rather than the once-respectable Washington Examiner. That piece mentions To The Stars Academy as well:
You should, for example, listen to credible individuals such as Luis Elizondo — former head of the Pentagon’s former UFO research agency, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Elizondo does not talk about aliens. But you should not listen to Elizondo’s To The Stars Academy colleague, Tom DeLonge (the musician is overexcited and says things that are unbound from analytical credibility).
Oh good! The guy who says DOD is handing out money for UFO tech is saying the Blink-182 guitarist/company head is “unbound from analytical credibility.” Good to know!
DeLonge has long been interested in UFOs. So have a lot of people, but they don’t form companies based on that interest.
The nugget of interest here is that the contract cited appears to be real. Moreover, it’s not the first “crazy UFO technology” document to surface. In 2016, Google Patents turned up a patent for “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device” filed by the U.S. Navy with the inventor being one Salvatore Cezar Pais. It’s some wacky stuff:
Artificially generated high energy electromagnetic fields, such as those generated with a high energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), interact strongly with the vacuum energy state. The vacuum energy state can be described as an aggregate/collective state, comprised of the superposition of all quantum fields’ fluctuations permeating the entire fabric of spacetime. High energy interaction with the vacuum energy state can give rise to emergent physical phenomena, such as force and matter fields’ unification. According to quantum field theory, this strong interaction between the fields is based on the mechanism of transfer of vibrational energy between the fields. The transfer of vibrational energy further induces local fluctuations in adjacent quantum fields which permeate spacetime (these fields may or may not be electromagnetic in nature). Matter, energy, and spacetime are all emergent constructs which arise out of the fundamental framework that is the vacuum energy state.
Everything that surrounds us, ourselves included, can be described as macroscopic collections of fluctuations, vibrations, and oscillations in quantum mechanical fields. Matter is confined energy, bound within fields, frozen in a quantum of time. Therefore, under certain conditions (such as the coupling of hyper-frequency axial spin with hyper-frequency vibrations of electrically charged systems) the rules and special effects of quantum field behavior also apply to macroscopic physical entities (macroscopic quantum phenomena).
Moreover, the coupling of hyper-frequency gyrational (axial rotation) and hyper-frequency vibrational electrodynamics is conducive to a possible physical breakthrough in the utilization of the macroscopic quantum fluctuations vacuum plasma field (quantum vacuum plasma) as an energy source (or sink), which is an induced physical phenomenon.
The quantum vacuum plasma (QVP) is the electric glue of our plasma universe. The Casimir Effect, the Lamb Shift, and Spontaneous Emission, are specific confirmations of the existence of QVP.
It is important to note that in region(s) where the electromagnetic fields are strongest, the more potent the interactions with the QVP, therefore, the higher the induced energy density of the QVP particles which spring into existence (the Dirac Sea of electrons and positrons). These QVP particles may augment the obtained energy levels of the HEEMFG system, in that energy flux amplification may be induced.
I’ll save you the equations later in the document. I’m no expert, but it seems to be a mix of extremely advanced physics buzzword bingo mixed with highly speculative chain reasoning, of the “if V, then W, if W then X, if X then Y, if Y then Z, if Z then a miracle happens and Bob’s your uncle” variety. Do you think the guy at the patent office went “I’m going to consult with at least three quantum physicists to determine the plausibility of this patent” or just went “I don’t understand 1/10th of what’s going on here. It’s from the navy, and if I don’t approve it his boss is going to call my boss and then I’ll be stuck in two solid weeks of meetings, minimum! Might as well approve it. It’s not my problem.”
There are at least three possibilities for how the To The Stars Academy contract happened. The first…
I don’t give that possibility much credence.
A second possibility is that all of Washington is awash in stupid money, and some of it got slopped into the alien technology bucket, either because they were at the end of a fiscal quarter and had to spend it on something (and we all know not spending every cent of allocated taxpayer money is a mortal sin in Washington), or because a true believer congresscritter went to bat for them, and they went “Eh, this will shut him up for a while.”
The third possibility is that we’re just farking with the Chinese. Just like yesterday’s laughable Chinese helicopter, it’s designed to freak out opponents and make them possibly pour time and money researching dead ends, just in case it’s not bunk.
My money is on door number three.
(Hat tip: Jazz Shaw.)
LinkSwarm for October 18, 2019
October 18th, 2019Enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm.
Nationwide protests paralyzed Lebanon on Friday as demonstrators blocked major roads in a second day of rallies against the government’s handling of a severe economic crisis and the entire country’s political class.
The protests were the largest since 2015, and could further destabilize a country already on the verge of collapse and with one of the highest debt loads in the world.
The protests could plunge Lebanon into a political crisis with unpredictable repercussions for the economy, which has been in steady decline for the past few years. Some of the protesters said they would stay in the streets until the government resigns.
Time and again, the protesters shouted “Revolution!” and “The people want to bring down the regime,” echoing a refrain chanted by demonstrators during Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region in 2011.
“We are here today to ask for our rights. The country is corrupt, the garbage is all over the streets and we are fed up with all this,” said Loris Obeid, a protester in downtown Beirut.
Sounds like Baltimore…
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T CLOSE THE PENTAGRAM EDGES PROPERLY, GARY!
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) October 16, 2019
They Made Hypocrite Judgments After The Fact/But The Name Of The Game Is Be Hit And Hit Back
October 17th, 2019Boxer Patrick Day died after slipping into a coma following a knockout by Charles Conwell. The usual sorts are calling for a ban on the sport.
Who is to blame for Day’s death? As far as I can tell, no one. Or no one other than Day deciding to become a boxer.
Video of the last bit of the fight here:
About 10 seconds in, you see Day go down thanks to a right from Conwell that slips between his gloves in the ninth. Day takes a standing eight count, but looks entirely lucid.
In the tenth, about 1:20 into the video, the two boxers are trading blows, when Conwell connects with a right roundhouse that sends Day reeling, then connects with a left uppercut to Day’s chin a couple of seconds later, sending Day to the canvas.
All his blows were legal, not vicious by the standards of boxing, and the ref stops right after the KO. Sometimes fighters are injured or killed because the ref didn’t stop the fight soon enough despite clear signs a fighter was out of it. That doesn’t appear to be the case here. Sometimes, bad things happen and no one is to blame.
Note: Dead video embed replaced.
Science: Organism With No Brain, 720 Sexes
October 17th, 2019News from the world of science:
A Paris zoo showcased a mysterious new organism on Wednesday…a yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on display to the public on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it.
The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.
“The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries”, said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.
“It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn (…) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David added.
With 720 sexes and no brain, scientists have tentatively named the new organism “The Democratic Party.”
And in handy meme form:
