Why Is Biden Smearing Ukraine Support?

NEWS

Poland offers to supply Ukraine with jets — only to be shot down by US

By  Jesse O’Neill at New York Post:

March 8, 2022 8:35pm 

 Updated

“It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.AP Photo/ Andrew Harnik

MORE ON: UKRAINE WAR

Poland said Tuesday it was ready to deploy 28 MiG-29 jets to a German base so the US could transport them to Ukraine — but the United States threw cold water on the plan.

The Polish proposal, which involved Soviet-era jets owned by NATO allies, “raises serious concerns” and is not “tenable,” US defense officials said.

Poland had said it would provide the aircraft on the condition that Washington would reimburse it with F-16s.

“The prospect of fighter jets ‘at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America’ departing from a US/NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby wrote in a response to Poland’s surprise announcement.

The proposed deal to bolster Ukraine’s air force in the face of Russia’s unprovoked blitz was bogged down with “logistical” concerns, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

A day before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the plan was given a “green light” after a desperate plea from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

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Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with The Post’s live coverage.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken supported Poland’s offering.

Poland was ready to deploy 28 MiG-29 jets, until the US declined.

The US has rejected Zelensky’s calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, saying it could result in “a potential direct war with Russia.” At the same time, Russia has said efforts to beef up Ukraine’s thin air force by the US would be seen as direct participation in the conflict, which Washington wants to avoid.

“It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Kirby said of helping with the plan transfer, which he said was “ultimately” a decision for the Polish government. 

“We will continue to consult with Poland and our other NATO allies about this issue and the difficult logistical challenges it presents, but we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one.”

The US has said it would not send troops to Ukraine, instead deploying thousands of ground forces to neighboring NATO countries such as Poland and Romania.

“Belongs To A Russian Oligarch”

Spain seizes another Russian superyacht

by JOHN SEXTON Mar 18, 2022 at HotAir:

This is actually the third superyacht seized in Spain but this one, Cresent, is a really large one, one of the largest in the world.

Spanish authorities have impounded a third superyacht believed to belong to a Russian oligarch, a seizure that is part of a global crackdown on those seen to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crescent, a yacht registered in the Cayman Islands, had requested to depart the Spanish Port of Tarragona on March 4, authorities said, but it did not set sail. The 443-foot yacht has an estimated value of about $600 million, according to SuperyachtFan, a website tracking luxury yachts, which cited its owner as an “unknown billionaire.”…

The Crescent is supersized even by global elite benchmarks — few of the world’s biggest yachts measure more than 400 feet. It was built by the German shipyard Lürssen, which constructs many of the largest yachts, and reportedly features a retractable helicopter hangar and a big glass-bottomed pool.

Cresent is that it’s a sister ship to a slightly larger vessel called Scheherazade:

The Crescent, valued by the SuperYachtFan website at $600 million, appears to be the sister ship of the slightly larger, slightly more expensive Scheherazade, a 459-foot superyacht that U.S. officials said could be associated with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Both were built at the same German shipyard, Lurssen, where the Crescent was given the project name “Thunder,” while the Scheherazade, put into service about two years later, was called “Lightning.” Both share the same interior and exterior designers and have been managed by a Monaco company, Imperial Yachts, which caters to Russian oligarchs.

The two yachts also share another, unusual characteristic: Photos of the Crescent taken on March 13 by a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, Alex Finley, in the Spanish port where it was impounded appear to show that the Crescent conceals its nameplate while in port, just like the Scheherazade.

the Scheherazade is significant because it has been connected to Vladimir Putin. But if US or EU authorities can prove he owns it he may not own it for much longer because the superyacht is currently sitting in an Italian dry dock.

Meanwhile, NPR reported Wednesday that another Russian superyacht was stuck in Norway because it had run out of fuel.

A Russian-owned superyacht can’t leave a dock in Norway — not because of sanctions, but because no one in the port will sell it fuel. The Ragnar is owned by Russian oligarch Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB agent who has long been linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We find the discrimination against us, extremely unjust,” the yacht’s captain, Robert Lankester, wrote in a message decrying the ship’s predicament. He noted that Strzhalkovsky is not currently on a European or U.K. sanctions list. And, he said, the yacht’s crew is not Russian.

The Norwegian news site that ran the original story on Ragnar spoke to some of the fuel companies refusing to sell them fuel. Steve Holmlund of Holmlund oil service told them “I have nothing left for the Russians’ conduct in Ukraine. Why should we help them? They can row home. Or use sails.”

Finally, here’s another report from SuperYachtNews about the seizure of the Crescent.

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IF YOU’RE BORN AMERICAN UNDER 50, YOU KNOW DEMS, NOT HISTORY!

March 18, 2022

Putin’s Sudetenland

By Rick Fuentes at American Thinker:

The Treaty of Versailles, doling out spoils to the victors at the end of the  First World War, was a Carthaginian peace that sliced and diced Germany, surrendering provinces to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and cutting homeland ties to seven million ethnic Germans.  Three and a half million landed in the eastern region of the former Czechoslovakia, then called Sudetenland.

A postwar, impoverished, and decadent Weimar Republic gave rise to Adolf Hitler, who viewed the Sudeten ex-pats as a hindrance to his plans to unify Germany. Demands for their repatriation sounded the alarm for another world war.  Fearful European leaders rushed eastward to placate Hitler’s aggression, hastily signing onto the fateful Munich Pact of 1938.  The agreement ceded not only Sudetenland to the Third Reich but nearly all of the country’s mining resources, iron production, and electrical grid, putting the Czechs under German domination without firing a shot.  So began the Wehrmacht’s two-year march to the Atlantic, leaving history to put numbers on a half-century of wars to end all wars.

With six million European Jews added on to seventy million military and civilian deaths, roughly three percent of all humankind, the free world issued a crucible: never again.  Eighty-four years later and those words still ring hollow.  Dictators, driven by a lust for militarism and power, trigger regional conflicts and world wars.  Petty tyrants seek advantage from them.

Despite his jawboning during the presidential campaign about bringing Vlad Putin to heel, Joe Biden as commander-in-chief has handled him with kid gloves.  For Putin, influencing the foreign policy of the Biden administration has hardly tested the mettle of the KGB’s most famous alum.

Determined to keep NATO off his western flank, Putin followed Der Führer’s playbook, seizing the pro-Russian eastern Ukraine provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk and claiming self-determination for its inhabitants as he absorbs them into a Soviet redux.  The annexation was almost an open invitation, a “minor incursion” of little interest to the White House.

Emulating Chancellor Bismarck, who unified the German state after three mid-19^th-century wars in Europe, Putin crossed his Rubicon in a three-pronged attack on the Ukrainian motherland.  The Russian army heaved forward, then sputtered in places and bogged down in the hedgerows and muddied routes to major cities, exposed to Ukrainian forces.  Inspirited by the zeal of their leader, city folk got their hackles up, turning into irregulars stockpiling bottle bombs and small arms on apartment windowsills and erecting Czech hedgehogs in town squares. Fearing a plebeian army, Putin has resorted to destroying the urban high ground.

If Putin has underestimated the moxie of his political peer in Ukraine, he is at no such loss with Joe Biden.  Still driven by antipathy towards his predecessor, Biden has shown the world a willingness to sacrifice the welfare and security of his own people as payback for the 2016 election.

A tiresome refrain from the Left claims that Donald Trump was a Putin stooge, but the actions of the Biden administration are more categorical, going so far as to achieve both cause and effect in the Ukraine crisis.  After destroying much of America’s natural gas and oil production on Inauguration Day, Biden gave three cheers to Russia’s Nordstream 2, then cleared its path of all competition by removing support for the Israeli East Mediterranean pipeline, offering only the long face of John Kerry as an anemic challenge to Putin’s expanding carbon footprint in Europe.

The invasion of Ukraine has put more wind in the sails of the socialist powerplay called the Green New Deal than all the skewed charts and statistics, European conferences, Sandy Cortez premonitions, and papal blessings combined.  We’re told that prices at the gas pump will continue to climb because we’ve divested ourselves of Russian oil, although Putin satisfies only three percent of our energy needs and the fruited plain upon which we live covers the largest reserves of oil and gas in the world.

The triumvirate axis of China, Russia, and Iran are all playing off each other to hustle the Biden administration.  Biden furthered Russian imperialism and China’s treachery by tipping Xi Jinping to American intelligence, then heavily sanctioned the invasion of Ukraine while beseeching Putin for help in normalizing relations with Iran.

In turn, Biden’s need for Putin’s mediation with Iran weakens our resolve towards Ukraine, pulling in the reins short of breaking the back of the Russian economy or preventing the flow of fossil fuels to Europe.  If Putin plays along, Biden will relinquish America’s energy needs to the whims of the ayatollahs, throwing away billions of dollars to resurrect the Obama-era JCPOA agreement and threatening the Jewish State by putting fuel in their nuclear warheads.  Now willing to sleep with any enemy for oil, Biden’s phone calls to the henchman of Venezuela and the Saudi royals have gone to voicemail and the mullahs in Tehran showed him the back of their hand by raining a dozen missiles on an American consulate and Army outpost in Iraq.

Sadly for this momentous time in American history, Biden is still playing the part of an Amtrak politician, putting in a cinch of a workweek betwixt weekends at his Wilmington lakefront as the nominal leader of a shadow regime chock full of Obama retreads and Sanders’ acolytes.  Despite the Botox and hair plugs, his cringe-worthy ramblings in the Briefing Room and faux pas on the world stage serve as a sad example of what advanced age has in store for all of us.

After just one year, the Biden administration has created a progressive utopia that has cultivated a political elite and deprecated the middle class.  The sticker shock of inflation follows from an offshore supply chain breakdown further aggravated by vaccine mandates and restrictions on the trucking industry.  Energy independence has been lost to our global antagonists, a sign of weakness that likely hastened the Ukraine crisis.  Billions of dollars have been set aside to ensure border integrity in countries other than our own.  At home, a plague of violent crime and homelessness has lowered a dark curtain over America’s largest cities.

Beltway Republicans are sitting back, self-assured. Down the barrel, they glimpse a sweeping victory in the crosshairs, although they are known to underestimate the Machiavellian plots of their opponents.  If history follows suit, the party of the incumbent president faces political headwinds in the midterms, and the de novo Democrat Party has a better chance of hawking snake oil on a soapbox than running on their referendum.  Of course, that was before democratically-run elections in America took a turn to the Stalinist school.  

The invasion of Ukraine increasingly serves a utility for America’s green putsch, but Joe Biden risks overplaying his hand with a nuclear-powered rival who has taken the measure of five presidents,  draws his nationalist fervor from Tsar Alexander and his military doctrine from the warring princes of Germany.  History will note unkindly that Putin found his Sudetenland in Eastern Ukraine because he had his Neville Chamberlain in Biden.

Image: Das Bundesarchiv

Why ARE Liberals So Psycho Needy??? BECAUSE THEY ARE NEITHER LIBERAL NOR HONEST!!

 MARCH 18, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at PowerLine:

WHY ARE LIBERALS SO PSYCHOLOGICALLY NEEDY AND INAUTHENTIC?

There is a strange pattern among liberals: over and over again they seem compelled for some strange reason to embellish their personal stories with exaggerations and falsehoods, apparently in an effort to make themselves seem more authentic. Like Hillary Clinton claiming she had been named for British mountaineer Edmund Hillary after his conquest of Mt. Everest, even though that event occurred after Hillary was born. Or claiming that she landed “under fire” in Bosnia. Or Bill Clinton claiming first-hand recollections of fires at black churches when he was growing up in Arkansas, when a check of the historical record finds there were none during the time period he claimed. Or NBC’s Brian Williams. About Al Gore’s serial exaggerations an entire book could be written, and Joe Biden’s falsehoods would require several volumes, with a separate appendix for his plagiarisms.

The latest such example is President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Turns out she’s a fan of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, and I certainly hope she is asked in detail about these views in her confirmation hearings.

Never mind the issues of her views on CRT for the moment. Two years ago she gave a lecture embracing CRT at the University of Michigan Law School, which includes a curious detail in this passage:

Dr. Janet Bell’s late husband, Professor Derrick Bell, who was a civil rights lawyer and the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard Law School, wrote a book in the early 1990s about the persistence of racism in American life that he entitled “Faces At the Bottom of the Well.”  My parents had this book on their coffee table for many years, and I remember staring at the image on the cover when I was growing up; I found it difficult to reconcile the image of the person, who seemed to be smiling, with the depressing message that the title and subtitle conveyed. I thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years when I started preparing for this speech, because, before the civil rights gains of the 1960s, black women were the quintessential faces at the bottom of the well of American society, given their existence at the intersection of race and gender — both of which were highly disfavored characteristics.

The boldfaced passages are the odd part. Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well was published in 1992, when Judge Jackson was 22, when she was working at Time magazine. It is impossible that her parents had the book on their coffee table “when I was growing up,” unless she was still “growing up” at age 22. It is also impossible that she “thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years” when the book is only 30 years old today. Judge Jackson is 51 years old; the math doesn’t add up here.  Judge Jackson even notes the book was written “in the early 1990s,” yet somehow this basic chronology doesn’t interfere with her subsequent claims in the same paragraph.

Perhaps she simply mis-remembers, in the same way that Joe Biden mis-remembered that he was not, in fact, descended from coal miners, or mis-remembered that Robert Kennedy had said the same things Biden did 20 years later. Funny how these kind of “mis-rememberings” among liberals all skew the same direction—toward aggrandizing their personal “narratives.”

Or maybe people who embrace the creed that truth is relative, and that the world can be bent endlessly to our own good will and idealism, who think the most important thing is “the narrative,” don’t think it’s a big deal to make stuff up in service of their cause. The point is, Judge Jackson appears to be another phony.

Romney Acting Romney!

Romney stirs ugly treason talk

by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent at Washington Examiner: 

  March 16, 2022

ROMNEY STIRS UGLY TREASON TALK. It’s one thing for the usual suspects in over-the-top commentary — the Keith Olbermanns, the cast of The View, the Lincoln Project, and others — to call their fellow Americans traitors. They’re not known for thoughtful, measured opinion. But it’s quite a different thing for a senator and former presidential candidate, known for his careful approach to politics, to throw around accusations of treason. And yet that is exactly what Republican Sen. Mitt Romney has done in his attack on former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. And the fact that a man of Romney’s position and influence is engaging in such rhetoric will surely give others the belief that they have license to do it, too.

Romney started two weeks ago, with an appearance on CNN. Host Dana Bash brought up two GOP representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, and asked about “the pro-Putin sentiment that you are seeing from some corners of your party.” In response, Romney questioned “how anybody in this country, which loves freedom, can side with Vladimir Putin, who is an oppressor, a dictator — he kills people.”

“It’s almost treasonous,” Romney continued. A moment later, Bash responded, “‘Treasonous’ is a big word, so I just have to quickly follow up. Would that include the former president?” Romney hedged. “Well, I said it’s nearly treasonous,” he answered.

On Sunday, Romney did away with the “almost” and the “nearly” in a tweet about Gabbard. “Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda,” he wrote. “Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

Romney was apparently responding to a video posted by Gabbard in which she said the following:

Here are the undeniable facts. There are 25 to 30 U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine. According to the U.S. government, these biolabs are conducting research on dangerous pathogens. Ukraine is in an active war zone, with widespread bombing, artillery, and shelling. And these facilities, even in the best of circumstances, could easily be compromised and release these deadly pathogens. Like COVID, these pathogens know no borders. If they are inadvertently or purposely breached or compromised, they will quickly spread all throughout Europe, the United States, and the world, causing untold suffering and death. So in order to protect the American people, the people of Europe, the people around the world, these labs need to shut down immediately, and the pathogens that they hold need to be destroyed. And instead of trying to cover this up, the Biden-Harris administration needs to work with Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the U.N., to immediately implement a ceasefire for all military action in the vicinity of these labs until they are secured and these pathogens are destroyed. Now in addition to all this, the U.S. funds around 300 biolabs labs around the world, [which] are engaging in dangerous research, including gain of function, similar to the lab in Wuhan where COVID-19 may have originated from. After realizing how dangerous and vulnerable these labs are, they should have all been shut down two years ago. But they haven’t. Now, this is not a partisan political issue. The administration and Congress need to act now for the health and well-being of every American and every person on this planet.

Romney said Gabbard’s statement was “false Russian propaganda” that “may well cost lives.” Gabbard’s words, he concluded, were so serious in nature that they were “treasonous.”

Romney was reacting to reports that Russia has been trying to spread the false story that Ukraine was developing biological weapons for an attack on Russia. Several fact checks noted that while Ukraine had bioweapons laboratories years ago during the Soviet era, it no longer has any facilities developing weapons. The biological-attack-on-Russia story is false.

But that is not what Gabbard said. She said that there are U.S.-funded biolabs, not bioweapons labs, and that some of them are conducting research on “dangerous pathogens.” As an example of “dangerous pathogens,” Gabbard mentioned COVID-19. There has been extensive confirmation that the U.S. has, indeed, funded biological research in Ukraine, as it has in other countries.

Gabbard made the reasonable point that there are a lot of munitions flying around in the Ukraine war, including rockets, bombs, tank rounds, and firearms, and it would be a good thing to protect Ukraine’s biolabs from damage. To do that, she recommended that the labs be “shut down immediately” and, if that is not quickly done, that the various countries and international organizations involved should “immediately implement a ceasefire for all military action in the vicinity of these labs.”

That is what Gabbard said, and it is what set Romney and others off. Why did it set them off? Suppose, for purposes of argument, that Gabbard has malign motives and that she is really trying to suggest, without saying so, that Ukraine is working on biological weapons — in other words, that she is spreading the story Russia wants spread. Assume the worst. And then ask: Is that treason?

The answer is no, it is not. Treason is actually defined in the Constitution. This is it:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same over Act, or on Confession in open Court.

It’s a pretty clear definition. But just to add context, look at this, from scholars Paul Crane and Deborah Pearlstein at the National Constitution Center:

Treason is a unique offense in our constitutional order — the only crime expressly defined by the Constitution, and applying only to Americans who have betrayed the allegiance they are presumed to owe the United States. While the Constitution’s Framers shared the centuries-old view that all citizens owed a duty of loyalty to their home nation, they included the Treason Clause not so much to underscore the seriousness of such a betrayal, but to guard against the historic use of treason prosecutions by repressive governments to silence otherwise legitimate political opposition. Debate surrounding the Clause at the Constitutional Convention thus focused on ways to narrowly define the offense, and to protect against false or flimsy prosecutions.

Now ask yourself: Did Tulsi Gabbard, in the paragraph quoted earlier, commit treason? Of course not. The only question is why Mitt Romney, a Harvard-trained lawyer, would say she did. In the absence of a clear and detailed explanation from Romney, perhaps it will suffice to say that he simply lost his head in the midst of a superheated discussion over Ukraine. It can happen. Perhaps the same can be said of Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who tweeted that Gabbard’s statement was “Actual Russian propaganda. Traitorous.”

After Romney and Kinzinger came a parade of lesser lights ready to accuse Gabbard of betraying her country. On The View, political talking head Ana Navarro said, “I think [the Department of Justice] … should look into people who are Russian propagandists and shilling for Putin. If you are a foreign asset to a dictator, it should be investigated.” Host Whoopi Goldberg said, succinctly, “They used to arrest people for doing stuff like this.”

Former TV talker Keith Olbermann picked up the topic to suggest that Gabbard, along with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, should be taken prisoner and tried. “They are Russian Assets and there is a war,” Olbermann tweeted. “There’s a case for detaining them militarily. Trials are a sign of good faith and patience on the part of democracy.” Olbermann’s last sentence seemed to suggest that the authorities would be doing Gabbard and Carlson a favor by putting them on trial rather than immediately in front of a firing squad.

What is going on? These are people who have made a living for a long time saying irresponsible things. But in this instance, those irresponsible things had the imprimatur of Romney, the respected senator who, as presidential nominee, once led the Republican Party. Perhaps now Romney could try to limit the damage he has done by taking back his words and using his influence to urge that everyone cool down in the debate over Ukraine.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.

Returning To WWII VICTORY GARDENS? Is Biden TODAY’S ADOLF, OR BECOMING WORSE?

March 17, 2022

Food Shortages Soon Come – What To Do?

By Anony Mee at American Thinker:

A concatenation of events is dropping on us like an imploding building and there’s not much we can do to stop it. However, we can mitigate some of the potential damage through our individual efforts and need to get started now.

But first, one bit of good news. H. Douglas Lightfoot and Gerald Ratzer have published a paper, “The Sun Versus CO2 as the Cause of Climate Change Projected to 2050,” that thrashes the IPCC’s global warming model.

However, the paper also kicks off this food shortage discussion. The authors say the earth “is now in the early stages of cooling that might be similar to the Dalton Minimum and last for three or four decades. Average temperatures can drop by up to 1.5 degrees C and increase the rate of crop failures that have already started. It won’t be easy to maintain the benefits of the recent warm phase of the Sun during the upcoming solar minimum.” That’s 2.7 degrees F, and significant.

Lightfoot and Ratzer confirm that we’ve already entered the Modern Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) and that negative impacts on crops are already occurring. We’ve seen harvest shortfalls in a variety of crops around the world over the past couple of seasons. Coupled with these shortfalls, a few countries have limited or halted exports of staple products, mostly grains and legumes.

For two years and continuing until today, there have been interruptions in commodities for sale. A number of factors contribute to this stuttering availability of commercial goods. Labor shortages in picking, packing, processing, and transportation led to gaps on some grocery shelves. Delayed imports of raw materials for canning, bottling, and bagging due to shutdowns in countries of origin will likely continue, especially now that China is locking down whole cities again.

Because of recent crop failures and lackluster harvests, many regional grocery warehouses, which usually have about 18 months’ worth of packaged and frozen food in stock, are practically empty according to a friend whose family owns a large chain of stores. Low stocks of livestock feed and hay due to drought are reducing meat, poultry, milk, and egg production in some areas.

Monica Showalter’s excellent article the other day—Biden is about to get caught flat-footed on another crisis: Ukraine war–generated global food shortages— examines the impact that Russia’s war on Ukraine is having and is expected to have on global grain and fertilizer availability, as well as food production.

Besides the drought hitting the mid-plains and potentially causing the abandonment of this year’s winter wheat (that’s for flour) crop, the La Niña system is expected to bring above-average rains to the eastern and southeastern parts of the US, potentially delaying planting and harvest. If California continues to value a practically nonexistent smelt over its people, there will be little water for the Sacramento-area rice farmers. They’ve already pulled down avocado and almond orchards due to restricted water allocations elsewhere in the state.

Farmers are being hit hard by shortages and skyrocketing inflation, just like the rest of us. Anhydrous ammonia, used to fertilize most grain and many row crops, has had a massive jump in price from $487 per ton in 2020, to $746 in 2021, to a record-breaking $1,492 per ton the first week of February this year. Demand for fertilizer is expected to grow, but high prices in Europe for natural gas (from which the fertilizer is made) caused a slowdown in manufacturing last winter.

Agriculture production runs on a very tight margin, with producers taking all the risk for seed, livestock, machinery, and labor, along with weather, with no guarantee of success or profit at the end of the year. Some farmers and ranchers, faced with such increased costs, as well as insupportable costs for fuel and repair parts to run farm machinery, are looking elsewhere.

Opportunities currently exist for farmland to be put into paid conservation easements or fallowed into carbon credits. These require no inputs other than an occasional mowing but produce a guaranteed payment. Some farmers have taken advantage of these already.

I had recommended before that folks begin to stock up on long-season pantry items like grain, pasta, oils, and the like to carry them through the worst of the GSM. Variable weather is the hallmark of these cyclical events.

Christian over at Ice Age Farmer pulled together a compendium of disasters that occurred during the Maunder GSM of 1645 through 1715. It shows that colder and harsher weather resulted in a patchwork of drought, flood, hard winters, and famine throughout the minimum. We need to remember that, of the general population in the late 1600s, about 90% were engaged in farming. Today, less than 1% of Americans are farmers and ranchers, and only 2% of us live on farms.

Already we are hearing about food rationing in various places in Europe. We’ve seen some of that during the worst of the pandemic shortages, but it’s been managed by local vendors. It’s likely to get much worse before it gets better.

Let’s Go Brandon’s expertise lies in making the worst possible decision given any type of choice and regardless of the number of options available…that much is painfully obvious. We can rest assured that, when the government wakes up to this problem, it will be too late.

The demands of equity will ensure that those at the head of the food and farm assistance lines are the ones with the most victimhood points. Even if the food we are used to is available, the cost will be close to prohibitive for those on a budget. Also, it’s very likely nothing will have been done in the meantime to secure our food stocks from the depredations of the export market. It will be another case of the political class waiting until the last minute and then going overboard trying to react.

So, we must take care of ourselves as best we can. Most of us can’t grow sufficient grain or press enough oil to meet our needs, so we need to set aside what we can for future use. We should begin to produce as much of our own food as possible though. It’s time to Make Americans Gardeners Again.

Potatoes, other root crops, and winter squashes are tasty, good for us, and are calorie-dense. They are fairly easy to grow and store. Greens can be grown year-round with a little help from inside lighting. Dwarf fruit trees are attractive, produce early, and can be sheltered fairly easily during harsh weather. We can preserve the rest of our produce by dehydration, canning, pickling, and many other ways. The time to buy seeds is now.

Backyard chickens take a little more effort and input, but more recent breeds will lay 200 to 250 eggs or more a year. One hen will need about 90 pounds of feed a year; less if supplemented with garden and kitchen scraps, and moved around the yard for fresh greens (Look up chicken tractors.) Hens are multi-purpose: they provide eggs, meat and, with a rooster, perhaps even a fresh crop of baby chicks. They will clean up the late summer garden and eat all the bugs they can reach. Again, the time to buy chicks is right now. Vendors will happily help anyone get started.

It’s up to us. We The People must demand that our government secures our bounty for hard times coming. We must also be prepared to be ignored. Home gardens, community gardens, urban farming, and school and workplace food production will be our generation’s Victory Gardens. Let us pray that we prevail.

Anony Mee is the nom de blog of a retired public servant whose baby chicks are peeping happily right next to her.

Seems Our Fascistic Press Lied About The Biden “Bounce” ON SOTU DAY!

SOTU bust: Biden approval “bounce” fantasy dissipates

ED MORRISSEY Mar 18, 2022 9:31 AM ET

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Saul Loeb, Pool via AP

Remember when media outlets reported on Joe Biden’s post-State of the Union “bounce” and his recharged job approval? Good times, good times. A look at the week-ending graph at RealClearPolitics shows that NPR/PBS poll and a lot of reporting turned out to be wishful thinking, if not cooked up entirely:

So let’s take a look at some of the polling that contributed to this aggregate flop. We can probably dispense with Rasmussen, not because it’s inaccurate — it’s closer than the NPR/PBS poll was to the aggregate, and it’s less than four points off the aggregate — but just because it’s not necessary. Every poll that has published over the last week-plus has Biden under water by double digits. That includes the latest tracking poll by Reuters/Ipsos (43/53), which initially showed a bounce for Biden after the SOTU speech (45/49).

Besides Reuters and Rasmussen, take a look at the polling of the past week:

• Monmouth: 39/55 (-16)
• Quinnipiac: 40/53 (-13)
• Economist/YouGov: 41/53 (-12)
• Politico/Morning Consult: 41/56 (-15)
• Trafalgar: 42/52 (-10)

Trafalgar is, of course, a Republican polling firm … and they give Biden his best marks this week.

Monmouth’s poll is particularly instructive, relating as it does to Biden’s SOTU:

President Biden currently holds a job performance rating of 39% approve and 54% disapprove, which is unchanged from January. This comes at the same time he receives a split decision on his handling of the Ukraine crisis. Trump had an identical 39% to 54% job rating at the same point in his term (March 2018) – which was down slightly from 42% to 50% in January 2018, shortly after passage of his signature tax reform plan.

Overall, 26% say that Biden’s first year agenda has focused a lot on issues important to average Americans, 38% say it has focused a little on these issues, and 35% say it has not focused at all on the concerns of average Americans. Trump did somewhat better on this metric (37% a lot, 34% a little, and 26% not at all in January 2018).

Just 38% of Americans feel optimistic about the policies Biden will pursue over the next few years, which is down significantly from 61% who felt optimistic as he took office last year. By comparison, 50% were optimistic about Trump’s policy agenda both when he first took office and a year into his term. Four in ten Americans (41%) feel very pessimistic right now about the policies Biden will pursue, which is more negative than it was a year ago (26%) as well as the same metric for Trump one year into his term (31%).

A look at the crosstabs makes Biden’s flop even more apparent:

• Independents: 36/52
• Women: 46/48
• 18-34YOs: 35/52
• 35-54: 33/62
• Childen in home: 31/61
• People of color: 45/48

Biden’s job approval is underwater in every age demo and every income demo. The income demos aren’t even close; among under-$50K households, his best result, Biden only gets to 42/50.

Remarkably, this comes at a time when Biden faces a foreign policy crisis and has largely backed popular actions in regard to it. Other polling shows that the American public is lined up almost entirely behind sanctions against Russia, for instance. Yet Biden isn’t getting any credit for it, likely because the American public lost confidence in Biden months ago after Afghanistan. This is not a president who can “bounce” back into favor on the basis of a tired retread of his campaign speeches. Either Biden needs to dramatically change direction or get left in his dead-cat bounce.

 

Whatever Happened To The American Doctor?

MARCH 17, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

IF HE’S NOT A MAN, IT CAN’T BE RAPE

From the Telegraph comes a story that exemplifies the bizarre time in which we live:

A hospital told the police that a patient could not have been raped because her alleged attacker was trans, the House of Lords has heard.

The attack took place a year ago and the woman reported it but when officers contacted the hospital, which has not been named, they were told “that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened”.

QED.

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, who raised the issue during a debate on single-sex wards, continued: “They forgot that there was CCTV, nurses and observers.

“None the less, it has taken nearly a year for the hospital to agree that there was a male on the ward and, yes, this rape happened.

“During that year she has almost come to the edge of a nervous breakdown, because being disbelieved about being raped in hospital has been such an appalling shock. The hospital, with all its CCTV, has had to admit that the rape happened and that it was committed by a man.”

The concept of a “man” being apparently too complicated for the NHS bureaucracy to understand. By law, in order to protect women, NHS wards are single-sex. But NHS policy is to put allegedly “trans” women (i.e., men) in women’s wards. Hence the rape at issue in this case.

Lady Nicholson said that the case had arisen as a direct result of the NHS policy – known as Annex B – which allows patients to be placed on single-sex wards according to the gender with which they identify at the time.

At the time.

“The result of Annex B is that hospital trusts inform ward sisters and nurses that if there is a male, as a trans person, in a female ward, and a female patient or anyone complains, they must be told that it is not true – there is no male there,” she told the upper chamber.

This is another instance of liberal “science.” One might think that the collective IQ of humanity is in steep decline.

Meanwhile, Lia Thomas is crushing the competition in the NCAA “women’s” swim championships. There is a tangible parallel to the Telegraph’s NHS story:

…Lia Thomas — who was born a man and has still not undergone any surgical alterations to his genitalia — is competing against biological females.

Like the NHS rapist, he can’t possibly be a “man,” despite obvious indications to the contrary.

With a civilization as badly in decline as our own, it is hard to pick a low point. But the “trans” fad certainly ranks as a contender.

Note from Glenn: In Truth in today’s America, there is no such person as a REAL DOCTOR, an old fashioned doctor of forty years ago…..the one who knew his clients well and honestly…..AND CARED FOR HIS CLIENT!

My father was a pharmacist and for a number of years owned a drugstore in St. Paul, Minnesota. There were countless hundreds of “corner” drugstores in our Twin Cities in those days….with thousands and thousands of pharmacists doing their job arranging pharmaceutical matters to keep clients alive and well.

Each store druggist had direct connections with several doctors….DOCTORS WHO KNEW THEIR PATIENTS DIRECTLY……AND CARED FOR THEM DIRECTLY!

THEY WERE CALLED “FAMILY” DOCTORS ……THE ONES WHO DISAPPEARED BEGINNING ABOUT FORTY YEARS AGO FROM OUR AMERICAN SCENE!!!

Today the American human being becomes a victim in a factory if anything goes wrong with ones health!

Why Are Our Todays’ Dems SO FEMINIZED, SO FASCISTIC, SO UNAMERICAN EXCEPT FOR JOE MANCHIN?

Manchin: Why are we beating up an industry that wants American energy independence?

ED MORRISSEY Mar 17, 2022 at HotAir:

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Good question, and one that other Democrats will have to answer as they strategize on blame-shifting for gas prices. The White House and party leadership has vacillated at times between blaming “Big Oil” and its “corporate greed” for a lack of production, and Vladimir Putin for oil prices that had risen 52.5% over the previous year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and 75.4% when counting from Joe Biden’s inauguration and his EO 13990 adding all sorts of red tape for the oil industry.

Punchbowl reported this morning that the political damage from energy inflation has prompted Democrats to consider a number of different strategies for the midterms … none of them coherent:

There’s the gas-tax holiday. This has been something that the White House has weighed in recent weeks. A group of vulnerable Senate Democrats floated this proposal several weeks ago, as have their House counterparts. Several Democratic governors are also pushing for this option.

But House Democratic leaders have gotten pushback from their rank and file and GOP colleagues about starving infrastructure of its main funding source just months after Congress passed a $1 trillion public works bill.

That’s certainly one consideration, but it’s not the only one. A gas-tax holiday would not actually address the causes of gasoline/diesel inflation but only its most obvious symptom. In doing so, it might spur more demand, which would then hike the price again as supply remains an issue. It would become a game of “chase the dragon” within a short period of time, and the expiration of the holiday would provide yet another price shock to consumers.

That’s still better than the other two options:

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, sounds like he would rather implement a “windfall profits” tax on the oil industry than a gas tax holiday. DeFazio believes oil companies would just pocket any tax rollback instead of passing it onto consumers. Here’s DeFazio:

“Do my colleagues really think the oil companies are gonna say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll give ‘em the 18.4 cents per gallon at the pump?’ The distributors will say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll give them 18 cents?’ And the retailers, who are always on the edge?”

In the first place, the tax takes place at the point of retail sale. Retailers collect it, not the suppliers. It’s taxed per gallon dispensed, not supplied. But even if that weren’t the case, why wouldn’t oil companies also pass along the cost of any “windfall profits” tax along to its consumers? That doesn’t even address the idea that oil companies make “windfall profits” in the first place, especially in terms of profit/loss balance sheets and margins. According to an analysis at CSI Markets, the average net profit margin for oil and gas producers was 4.94% in the fourth quarter of 2021 — decent but hardly “windfall.”

Some Democrats want to pursue the hair of the dog that bit ’em:

→ Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) has been working on legislation that would offer Americans a rebate, offset by leveling tariffs on countries that still buy Russian oil.

→ The leadership has also heard arguments about sending Americans direct payments for gas. Some Democrats on the influential Ways and Means Committee prefer this method. And it’s under consideration in some states, including California.

In essence, these Democrats want to force another extraordinary monetary expansion to deal with the outcomes of their previous extraordinary monetary expansion. That’s what off-budget stimulus spending requires, after all. And so … really? It appears no one’s paying attention to Larry Summers, even after his dire warnings about the American Rescue Plan turned out to be entirely prescient.

Finally, Joe Manchin wonders why his fellow Democrats assume that American oil and gas producers are the problem. Before tossing around such accusations, Manchin suggests asking them for their input first:

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A day earlier, Manchin argued that North America needs energy self-sufficiency and net export capability now. We need to be Europe’s alternate to Russia and Iran for strategic reasons, while we “walk and chew gum at the same time” on alternate-energy development:

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Manchin earlier argued that Biden should rescind his EO 13990 and eliminate all the red tape Biden erected to exploration and drilling. That certainly would send a big price signal to futures markets, and a resulting surge of production would amplify it, to the benefit of consumers and America’s strategic positioning against Iran and Russia. Biden remains, however, in thrall of the radical climate-change lobby, which means gas prices will continue to rise and Biden et al will continue to attempt to evade responsibility for it. And Democrats will pay a very large price for gas in November.