 |
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Democratic voters believe supporters of Donald Trump are a serious threat to the nation.56% of those in President Biden’s party also consider the unvaccinated a serious threat. That’s a higher level of concern than Democrats express about the Taliban (44% see it as a serious threat); China (44%), or Russia (37%).For Republicans, the top concerns are the Taliban (66%), Defund the Police Activists (62%), and China (58%).The top three concerns for Independents are the same as the GOP (though in a different order). The Taliban is the biggest concern for independent voters (46%) followed by China (45%) and Defund the Police Activists (36%).
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
"that during the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff betrayed their constitutional duties by failing to provide their honest military judgment to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the quagmire of Vietnam. When McMaster’s book was published in 1997, during the Clinton administration, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the JCS chairman, ordered all his service chiefs and commanders to read it and follow its lessons to the letter—to express disagreements to their superiors, even at the risk of getting yelled at." (The Revolt against Donald Rumsfeld)
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
"The Jim Crow Republican Party and larger neofascist movement are escalating their war on democracy by passing laws across the country designed to stop Black and brown people from voting.""Fascist violence continues unabated.""The Taliban, all of them together, plus every Al Qaeda fighter in the world, do not pose the threat to the United States that Trump or Trumpist extremists do."
It's pure fantasy, especially when one considers Jan. 6 wasn’t even the worst attack on the Capitol building. Indeed, between the 1915 Capitol bombing, the 1954 shooting by Puerto Rican nationalists, the 1971 Weather Underground bombing, and the 1983 M19 bombing there's stiff competition for the title of "worst" attack on the People's House.
Former CIA Director Halspel: The US was 'on the way to a right-wing coup' after Trump lost the election!
Gen Milley feared President Trump would "go rogue," so he convened a secret meeting of senior military officials. (If anything looks like a potential coup, it's generals meeting secretly)Stan McChrystal and other 'experts' have compared Trump voters to Al Qaeda and radicalized home-grown terrorist insurgents.
Bush is legitimizing the US turning the vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus he built to fight Islamist terror onto American citizens who dissent.It is the duty of we who are old enough to remember what happened in the year and a half between 9/11 and the launch of the Iraq War to remember how the US Government and a compliant media manufactured public consent for that war.We have to tell our children about it — about how the people in power told lies to make us deathly afraid of the people they wanted to punish, even though those people (the Iraqis) had nothing to do with 9/11. ... It’s starting to happen again — and George W. Bush yesterday laid down an important marker in that speech.
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
"We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us." (Yahoo News)
This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. (F.A. Hayek)
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
“We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.”
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Indeed, in its hostility to freedom of speech, its Manichean worldview, its suspicion that its opponents are fascists, and the belief that politics should be inserted into everything — from science to children’s books — it is closer to the totalitarian tradition. American progressivism is not communism, obviously, anymore than its opponents are Nazis; the market is perfectly capable of achieving most progressive goals, and America has become more culturally Left-wing as Right-wing economic policies have dominated, globalisation being the common theme that links the two.
Saturday, 28 August was the big day for AOW and Warren!
Open forum for all of us to extend them our well wishes for a wonderful life together!
Congratulations you two lovebirds!
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Only a fool would trust the emanations of America’s leading experts.
This week’s trophy, however, goes to America’s leading experts in foreign and defense policy, who assured us mere weeks ago that Afghanistan was secure. Are America’s top generals really that ignorant of military realities? Or were they playing to a domestic political agenda and hoping they could keep the fiction going long enough to gain plausible deniability and confuse the public?Answer: You don’t get to be a general while being that ignorant of military facts on the ground. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a top general unless you know how to curry favor with politicians, diplomats, pundits, and the press. Which skill do you think dominates among those who’ve made it to the very top?The same is true throughout America’s elite expert class. Those at the top are those who excel at getting promoted. With some exceptions, their mastery of subject matter and methodology is third rate; their mastery of professional politics is world class.
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
"Why should American citizens risk their lives to determine how Khanadar is governed when instead, Americans aren't being governed very well at all, in life expectancy and every idea of happiness is declining." -- Glenn GreenwaldMatt Taibbi: We Never Learn
"As the Taliban waltzes into Kabul, the look of surprise on the faces of top officials should frighten us most of all." -- Matt Taibbi
Mark Steyn: The Scale of Humiliation
J.D. Vance: America's Regime is Not Fit to Lead"One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket - including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that's an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn't won a war in three-quarters of a century.America is not "too big to fail": It's failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we're Weimar with smartphones." -- Mark Steyn
My heart breaks that these dead may have died in vain. But they won’t if we learn the long-term lesson of Afghanistan: the people who lead this country aren’t fit for the task.But this is not merely the consequence of seven months of disastrous Biden policy, it is the failure of the entire American regime. Every major institution in our country revealed itself as a farce.What Afghanistan shows, not just over the last two chaotic months but over the last two tragic decades, is that the American regime is not fit to lead this country. That regime, unfortunately, operates independently of political leadership. It is the Pentagon bureaucracy that lies to our president about troop levels, the State Department that thinks the women of Afghanistan need gender studies programs more than security, the “top” universities that teach our elites to be stupid conformists, and the media that cover for these institutions instead of telling the truth about them.
We tried to change the regime in Afghanistan, and we failed. If there is a silver lining in that failure, it reveals that one regime in the world is desperately in need of change: America’s. -- J D. Vance
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Washington (CNN) - Factions within the Biden administration are embroiled in a blame game over why the US government didn't act sooner to withdraw American citizens and Afghans who helped the US over two decades of war, leading to a rushed and dangerous evacuation.
Bremmer said the United States failed in four major ways in drawing down its military presence in Afghanistan: intelligence, coordination, planning and communication. He said the Biden administration overestimated the Afghan military's capabilities, failed to work with American allies to formulate an exit strategy, did not seem to have contingency plans in place for a rapid collapse of the Afghan government and failed to communicate effectively with the American people. (Ian Bremmer, Houston Chronical)
As Afghanistan implodes, such flawed assumptions need to be fully owned by those who constructed and sustained this ideologically laden strategic framework. We will be paying for their hubris for years to come, for going forward both our allies and partners will factor into their decision-making and their policy choices the lessons of the past twenty years.As we watch authoritarianism surge worldwide, alongside a growing skepticism about American leadership, what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria should bring us back to the fundamentals of realist foreign and security policy. We need to re-learn the art of power-balancing, of building coalitions not around high-minded ideals but around shared interests and threat perceptions, all the while remembering that America’s military is a precious resource and that it must be the means of last resort, not the first tool in our foreign policy toolbox.
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Although an increasing percentage of Americans perceive the COVID-19 situation to be worsening and more are concerned about catching the disease, there is little evidence that people are altering their behavior to avoid exposure to it.
Sixty percent of Americans, down from 68% in June and 79% in May, report they wore a face mask in public in the past week.
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Yesterday’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire,” is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.He describes NPR as "a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish," and then gets to the heart of the matter:
The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn’t have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR’s complaint is that a conservative media figure not only “has more followers than The Washington Post” but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, “experts worry,” may be “furthering polarization” in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
During April to October 2020 in the US, emergency room visits linked to mental health problems (e.g. anxiety) for children aged 5-11 increased by nearly 25% and increased by 31% for those aged 12-17 years old as compared to the same period in 2019. (Masking Children: Tragic, Unscientific, and Damaging)
“I have practiced pediatric ICU for almost 15 years and I have never taken care of a single patient with a vaccine-related complication until now,” Ross told KHN. “Our standard for safety seems to be different for all the other vaccines we expose children to.”Kids aren't Spreaders - They belong in school, unmasked:
“Young children are not the vectors of disease, nor are they driving the spread of the epidemic,”
School outbreaks do occur and are proportionate to the degree of community transmission. In Australia’s current Delta outbreak, we’ve seen very few school-related infections.
But it’s important to understand adult staff are responsible for most transmission in schools. And most transmission — linked to schools or generally — occurs in households. We’ve seen this even in the UK with the Delta variant.
A Scottish study with data up to February found the highest risk factor of infection in people at risk of severe COVID-19 was the number of adults in their household. Living with children was not a risk factor. (Let's Hold Off on Vaccinating Children and Teens)
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Masks in this case remain what they always were: a tool to prod the public into compliance with other mandates and dictates, purely a symbol of fear and its unrelenting trigger. And with fear comes obedediance. Maybe. (Jeffrey Tucker - RCM)What we have now is a mini-pandemic working through the unvaccinated, and the vaccinated are losing their minds. There are breakthrough cases, but...
Less than 0.004% of people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 experienced a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization and less than 0.001% died from the disease, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The Mercury News)
|
| Silverfiddle Rant! |
is it because the media constantly race-bait them with false narratives? Ma’Khia Bryant? “Hands up, don’t shoot”?
In this case, the alternative is the same media that smeared Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist.
It’s the media that fell for the Jussie Smollett hoax and the Russia hoax... and that cut video footage to paint a Catholic teenager as a smug racist.
It’s the media that saw the Hunter Biden laptop story and said “nothing to see here,”
...that stood in front of burning buildings and called it “peaceful protests,”
...that wrongly claimed Trump tear-gassed “peaceful protesters” in Lafayette Park for a photo op.
...wrongly insisted MAGA insurrectionists bludgeoned a Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.
They concocted a false narrative out of thin air about Gov. Ron DeSantis and Publix pharmacies when they needed to make a successful Republican leader look bad.
They opted for comedy hour with Gov. Andrew Cuomo instead of asking him and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer real questions about their lethal nursing home policies.
They lied about Russian bounties and downplayed Fauci’s emails.
