“A protest that drew crowds and a heavy police presence in Shanghai”

Proud, scared and conflicted. What China Protesters Told Me

November 30, 2022 in World

They attended their first demonstrations.

They chanted their first protest slogans.

They had their first encounters with the police.

A protest that drew crowds and a heavy police presence in Shanghai on November 27, 2022. The New York Times.

Then they returned home, trembling with disbelief for having challenged the world’s most powerful authoritarian government and the toughest leader China has seen in decades.

Chinese youth are protesting against the harsh policy of “zero-COVID” of the country and even urging its highest leader, Xi Jinpingto which he resigns.

It’s something China hasn’t seen since 1989, when the ruling Communist Party brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protesters, mostly university students.

Regardless of what happens in the coming days and weeks, the young protesters represent a new threat for the Xi government, which has eliminated his political opponents and suppressed any voice that challenges his rule.

Such public dissent was unimaginable until a few days ago.

These same youngsters, when mentioning Xi online, used euphemisms like “X,” “he,” or “that person,” fearing even to utter the president’s name.

They endured everything the government threw at them: harsh pandemic restrictions, high unemployment rates, fewer books available to read, movies to watch, and games to play.

Then, something cracked.

After nearly three long years of “zero-COVID,” which has become a political campaign for Xi, China’s future looks increasingly bleak.

The economy is in its worst moment in decades.

Xi’s foreign policy has alienated many countries.

His policy of censorship, in addition to stifling challenges to his authority, has killed most of the fun.

As a popular post said Weibo, Chinese get by on books published 20 years ago, music released a decade ago, travel photos from five years ago, income earned last year, frozen dumplings from a lockdown three months ago, COVID-19 tests from yesterday and a freshly baked Soviet joke from today.

“I think all this has reached a turning point,” said Miranda, a Shanghai journalist who participated in the protest on Saturday night.

“If nothing is done about it, it could really explode.”

In recent days, in interviews with more than a dozen young people who protested in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Wuhan, I have heard of an outburst of suppressed anger and frustration at the way the government is conducting the “zero-COVID”.

But his anger and despair go further, to questioning Xi’s rule.

Two of these people said they do not plan to have children, a new form of protest among Chinese youth when Beijing is encouraging more births.

At least four of the protesters said they planned to emigrate.

One of them refused to look for work after being fired by a video game company following a government crackdown on the industry last year.

They came to the protests because they wanted to let the government know how they felt about being constantly tested, locked in their apartments, or cut off from their family and friends in the COVID-19 web.

And they wanted to show their solidarity with his fellow protesters.

They are members of a generation known as the children of Xi

the nationalist “little roses” defending China on Weibo, Facebook and Twitter.

The protesters represent a small percentage of Chinese in their 20s and 30s.

By standing up to the government, they challenged the perception of their generation.

Some older Chinese said the protesters made them feel more hope about the future of the country.

Zhang Wenmin, a former investigative journalist who goes by the pseudonym Jiang Xue, wrote on Twitter that she had been moved to tears by the bravery of the protesters.

“It’s hard for people who haven’t lived in China in the last three or four years to imagine the fear these people have had to overcome to go out on the streets, to shout:

‘Give me freedom or give me death,’” he wrote. “Incredible. I love everyone.”

Being their first time marching, most didn’t know what to expect.

A Beijing protester said she had been so tense that she felt physically and emotionally drained the next day.

More than one person told me that they needed a day to collect their thoughts before they could speak.

At least three cried in our interviews.

They are proud, scared, and in conflict with their experiences.

They have different opinions about how politically explicit their slogans should be, but they all said that shouting the slogans was cathartic.

Miranda, who has been a journalist for eight years, said she couldn’t stop crying when she chanted “freedom of expression” and “freedom of the press” with the crowd.

“It was the freest moment since I became a journalist,” he said, his voice cracking.

All the people I interviewed asked me to use only their first name, their last name or their name in English to protect their safety.

They had felt relative safety marching with other people a few days before, but none dared to put their names to the comments that would be published.

The slogans they remembered to chant were everywhere, illustrating the widespread frustration of their lives.

“End of lockdown!” “Freedom of expression!”

“Give me back my movies!”

Many of them were surprised at how political Saturday’s protest in Shanghai turned out.

They were just as surprised, if not more, when more people returned on Sunday to demand the release of protesters who had been detained hours earlier.

The six Shanghai protesters I spoke to thought they were going to a vigil Saturday night for the 10 victims who died in a fire Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region.

At first, the atmosphere was relaxed.

When someone first chanted “No More Communist Party,” the crowd laughed, according to Serena, a university student spending her gap year in Shanghai.

“Everybody knew it was the red line“, said.

Then the atmosphere became more and more charged.

When someone yelled “Xi Jinping, resign!” and “CPC, resign!” the screams were the loudest, according to Serena and other protesters who were also there.

In Beijing, a 25-year-old marketer surnamed Wu told her fellow protesters not to shout such politically explicit slogans because it would guarantee a crackdown.

Instead, he chanted slogans urging the government to follow the rule of law and release detained Shanghai protesters.

A protester from Chengdu and another from Guangzhou, separated by 1,600 kilometers, said they had been prevented from shouting slogans that other protesters considered too political and told to stick to the demands related to COVID-19.

For many of them, this weekend was their first brush with the police.

A protester named Xiaoli in Chengdu said she had never seen so many police officers in her life.

After being chased by them, she said she could hear her heartbeat as she passed officers on her way home.

It was clear that many protesters blamed Xi for the unpopular “zero-COVID” policy.

A young professional from Shanghai, surnamed Zhang, said Xi’s rule-breaking third term, won at last month’s party congress, spelled the end of China’s progress.

“We have all given up ours illusions“, said.

He cried when mentioning an old man’s question during this year’s lockdown in Shanghai:

“Why has our country come to this?”

Zhang, who said he grew up poor in a village, welcomed the government’s help with his education.

“I thought we were just going to move up,” he added.

The young protesters are very contradictory about the impact of their actions.

They feel powerless to change the system as long as Xi and the Communist Party are in power.

They believe that many people in the public supported them because the inflexible rules of COVID-19 have violated what they consider to be basic norms of Chinese society.

Once the government flexibilice politics, they worry that public support for the protests will evaporate.

At the same time, some of them argued that their protests would cause the public to be aware of their rights.

No one knows what the protests will turn into:

at a point in history or in a footnote.

The official state media have remained silent, although some pro-government bloggers on social media have pointed to the “foreign forces”.

Police have strengthened their presence on the streets and have called or visited protesters in an attempt to intimidate them.

I asked Bruce, a Shanghai finance worker in his 20s, whether the protests meant people had changed their minds about Xi.

He replied: “Probably not because public opinion has changed, but because those who are critical of him have spoken.”

“Eating bugs is the liberals’ plan, to which I can only respond: you go first”.

NOVEMBER 29, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

TIME TO START EATING BUGS?

Western nations’ commitment to “net zero” CO2 emissions is one of the greatest follies in world history. It is not just the fossil fuel industries that are under attack by liberals–although that would be bad enough, since it is fossil fuels that have created the modern world. They are the reason we are not going around in donkey carts. But it gets worse: agriculture is in the crosshairs, too.

We have seen it in Sri Lanka, where the government mandated “organic” farming and as a result, the Prime Minister’s residence was stormed by a mob and he was forced to flee the country. We have seen it in Canada and in the Netherlands, where the government is making war on that country’s highly successful ag industry. In fact, the Netherlands is second only to the U.S. in the value of food exports. But not for long: its government is moving to shut down farms.

The Dutch government is planning to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to be in compliance with EU environmental rules.
***
The government will conduct a “compulsory purchase” of large nitrogen emitters as part of a voluntary, one-time offer, announced Nitrogen Minister Christianne van der Wal….

The fact that the Netherlands has a “Nitrogen Minister” is a sign of how far off the rails liberals have gone. And oh, by the way, I will hazard a wild guess that the “Nitrogen Minister” is not a chemist or any sort of scientist.

In response to the decision, Executive Director of Consumers’ Research Will Hild told the Daily Caller “The Netherland’s war on farmers to pursue their ESG agenda serves as a stark warning. Americans should be vigilant against efforts by both governments and big Wall Street firms like BlackRock pushing these same dangerous ‘net zero’ carbon emissions targets here in the US. It is difficult to overstate the recklessness of undermining farmers during the greatest global food crisis in decades.

The international war on agriculture, which focuses mostly on the use of synthetic fertilizers, without which the productivity of modern agriculture is impossible, and on animal husbandry, is of course driving up the cost of food world-wide. If the war on agriculture continues, residents of wealthy countries will be impoverished by higher food prices while many residents of poor countries will starve.

Of course, liberals think there is an alternative: we should all eat insects instead of meat. Does that sound crazy? Well, it is. But nevertheless, that is their endgame. Just imagine how many CO2 emissions we would save if we didn’t use many millions of acres, augmented with synthetic fertilizers, to grow field corn for cows, pigs and other animals to consume! Not to mention the emissions for which the animals themselves are responsible.

Eating bugs is the liberals’ plan, to which I can only respond: you go first.

But that isn’t how liberals behave, is it? When the time comes, they will have special stores to which only those with high social credit scores can be admitted. They will eat meat, while you eat crickets.

Meanwhile, a rare voice of sanity asks, is there any reason to think that destroying the industries that made the modern world what it is will actually “save the planet” by staving off global warming? To which the answer is, No, there isn’t. Apart from the fact that the “science” of global warming is so deeply flawed that it is really a cult, not a science, fossil fuels–the best energy source that we have on planet Earth–will continue to be produced and used by countries that decline to drink the environmentalists’ Kool-Aid.

Thus we see headlines like this: UAE Plans $150 Billion Spending Spree To Boost Oil Output To 5MM Barrels By 2027.

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., also known as Adnoc, will invest $150 billion in the five years through 2027, it said in a statement Monday. That’s an increase on the previous spending plan of $127 billion over five years that was announced a year ago.

The spending spree will try to raise crude output capacity to 5 million barrels a day by 2027, earlier than the previous target of 2030 and comes at a time when Saudi oil giant Aramco is also planning to expand its output by 12 million by 2027.

It would be nice if that $150 billion were being invested in the U.S. to produce American oil and gas, but that won’t happen under the brain-dead Biden administration.

So far, “green” hysteria has been mostly talk and wasted money. The reality is that Western countries rely almost not at all on expensive, inefficient and unreliable wind and solar energy to power their economies. But the Left expects that to change. If it does, the international balance of power will shift rapidly. Standards of living in formerly-rich countries like the U.S. and most of Western Europe will rapidly decline, while, in relative terms, countries like Russia, China and Iran that continue to exploit far more reliable, efficient and affordable fossil fuels will come to dominate economically. To me, this seems like a dystopian outcome, but Western liberals are trying hard to bring it about.

“We know an election commission is going to do anything possible to make the Democrat win”.

November 30, 2022

Here’s How They Did it: Real-time Election Fraud

By Jay Valentine at American Thinker:

Database latency — a geeky term, but that’s how they did it!

A policeman pulls over a speeder.  The police computer reports that three hours ago a similar vehicle and person held up a liquor store — so the police are on alert. 

No database latency.

County election managers change the zip code of 31,000 voters on September 3. Ballots go out that week.  Those 31,000 are undeliverable.  Someone collects those valid ballots.  On September 15^th, those addresses are quietly changed back. 

National Change of Address Database (NCOA) will not pick up those address changes.  They didn’t happen because there is no history.

The 31,000 citizens were getting their mail just fine — except for ballots.  Ballot addresses were driven by the county mail-in ballot database — the one that was changed, then changed back.

Many states send ballots to everyone; the recipient is none the wiser that they never received a mail-in ballot.  They may vote in person.  Oops!  “You already voted!”  Ever heard that?

Welcome to database latency. 

Our bad guy pals know they can change voter rolls, take an action, then change them back.  Who would know? 

A thousand voters are changed from inactive, voted, then changed back, and how would you ever know?  With lots of complex footwork, you could eventually tell from their voter history file — months after the election.

What are you going to do about it?  Reverse the election? 

The new, and current “ballot gathering strategy” mandated by the almost universal mail-in ballots adds pretty cool database games — exploiting database latency.

Database latency, as you likely gathered, is when current reality lags the underlying record.  We all experience it in our electronics-driven society.

The ballot gathering scammers know about latency — it’s their ground game!

To Republicans, election engineering is civics.  To Democrats, it’s business — and they are great at it!

They know the Republicans have hundreds of diligent election sleuths working in basements and dining room tables checking voter rolls for the dead and the fakes.

They know those people rely on NCOA and Melissa and other highly latent services as their baseline.  If someone moved, it shows up in NCOA — two months later.

A real voter moved.  They want to keep getting their St. Jude’s donation cards.  They fill in their NCOA form to get mail forwarded to their new address.  Our fraud detectives find this person — and maybe someone voted for them. Cross out one phantom!

Our bad guys are happy to give up a few retail-level ballots to hide the wholesale-level ballot-gathering apparatus.  They count on it.

Here’s the fraud equation taking place across the country: 

• Count the in-person votes on election day. 
• Count the early, in-person votes. 
• Shut down the system (Atlanta water leak, Maricopa County everything). 
• Bring in undeliverable ballots gathered when you changed voters’ names, addresses, or zip codes, then changed them back.
• Determine the votes you need to win.  Press the “WIN” button.
• Wait for the Republicans to file a lawsuit months later.

Floating ballots are the lifeblood Democrats need to win — and win they do.

Ballot gatherers know Republicans use dumb technology — relational databases, SQL, NCOA, Melissa, all non-real time, highly latent systems. 

Bad guys are happy to watch Republicans waste time finding ones and twos, while the real action takes place by the thousands — invisible to these batch, latency-prone systems.

The RNC helps with its antiquated “big data” system equally oblivious to anything that happens within a month.

Want to run for office?  It’s uglier.

A latency-prone database, like the RNC’s, to pick one, tells you how your voter was prone to vote over the last 10 election cycles.  She “leans” Republican.

Unfortunately, it does not tell you that while she leaned Republican for years, she donated, this week, to Greenpeace, enraged at the Dollar Store being built across her street.  Real time means something:  what is going on here, now, today. 

Your Democrat opponent knows that — she is real time, you aren’t, you are RNC.

You, dear candidate, are using the RNC latency database to get out the vote for your opponent — because you are “latent.”

We explain this at www.Omega4America.com

Let’s take a short walk into the future of how we fight ballot gathering with technology — just a fun little peek.

We know an election commission is going to do anything possible to make the Democrat win.  Wisconsin Election Commission, Arizona’s Maricopa County, seven states in 2016, for instance.

Rather than wasting time on batch NCOA, we get a daily copy of the election roll. That’s expensive!  The list in Wisconsin is $12,000! But did you know your Democrat friends bought it 28 times before the 2016 election?

What is a governorship worth? How much does a contested Senate seat cost?  Maybe $50 million?  What is a presidential campaign worth?

Why would anyone spend $50 million on a Senate seat and let the other side own the election rolls?  That is a question Ronna McDaniel may be asked by Mike Lindell!

We take that election roll, with perhaps 15 million voters, Florida, for instance, or Texas — compare every voter against every other voter and address, down to the cell level, and see any differences — every day! 

What do we find?

In a real-life example, this month, we found a county that changed 31,500 zip codes, yet the voter remained at the same address.  Curious? 

That means the voter did not change their address, continued to receive all their mail, except one item — a ballot sent from a voter commission.

Our teams in Wisconsin and Florida are discovering this scam by the truckload — do not email me that it is not real!  And NCOA and Melissa?  They are totally blind to this — because the addresses are changed back!

The Fractal team spent the last 20 months, with guidance from Mike Lindell, encouragement from the great Sheriff David Clarke, and over a dozen election integrity teams advancing voter integrity analysis from the ancient, batch, latent to the modern, current real-time.

We learned the core strategy to fight ballot-gathering fraud in real time analysis of voter rolls and cast ballots.  It is also real-time analysis of ballot collection points — like large apartment complexes and dorms where ballots gather because there is not an apartment number.

The question now is whether Republicans want to start leading with technology or continue to spend millions on “big data” “data driven” batch buzzwords.

We are about to find out.

Jay Valentine can be reached at Jay@ContingencySales.com.  The Fractal micro site is http://www.Omega4America.com

“Twelve Republicans disregarded their constituents’ wishes and aided Democrats in deriding the First Amendment rights”

12 GOP Senators Help Democrats Erode Americans’ Right To Act On Religious Convictions About Marriage

BY: JORDAN BOYD at the Federalist:

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

The ‘Respect for Marriage Act’ enables LGBT activists and the DOJ to bring civil action against anyone they say violates the legislation.

JORDAN BOYD

Twelve Republicans disregarded their constituents’ wishes and aided Democrats in deriding the First Amendment rights of religious Americans by passing the deceptively-named Respect For Marriage Act without including any of their colleagues’ proposed protective amendments.

Of the 12 Republicans who voted to advance the RFMA to a vote on the floor, three needed to change their minds before a final vote on the bill to keep the bill from passing. It is clear from the 61-36 vote on Tuesday night that Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Rob Portman of Ohio, Mitt Romney of Utah, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Todd Young of Indiana did not change their minds.

Instead of using amendments as prerequisites for their support, these Republicans opened the door for their congressional colleagues to reject three separate attempts to give the bill robust legal protections for religious Americans who believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

The RFMA as it stands doesn’t just repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between male and female, by codifying the Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. It goes further by enabling LGBT activists, who have already made a habit of exploiting the legal system to target religious Americans, and the politically motivated Department of Justice to bring civil action against anyone they say violates the terms of the legislation.

Under the guise of vague language, the RFMA could allow for the legal victimization of wedding vendors, adoption agencies, bakeries, and any other entities run by people of faith who refuse to offer services condoning same-sex marriage based on religious convictions.

Despite the RFMA’s problems, the 12 GOP senators echoed their support for the legislation by once again voting in favor of it.

For their willingness to cave to the Democrats’ agenda, those Republicans were thanked by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer from the Senate floor ahead of the vote.

“I also want to acknowledge my Republican colleagues who voted in favor of advancing this legislation. Because of our work together, the rights of tens of millions of Americans will be strengthened under federal law,” he said. “That’s an accomplishment we should all be proud of.”

Other Republican senators, however, understood the risks the RFMA poses to Americans and offered solutions in the form of amendments that sought to clarify the bill’s cushioned language.

Sen. Mike Lee put forth an amendment that explicitly stated that the federal government “shall not take any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially on the basis that such person speaks, or acts, in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief, or moral conviction” that marriage is between one man and woman. The amendment would have also allowed anyone who is wrongfully targeted by the government over their beliefs about marriage to sue.

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That amendment, which required 60 votes to be adopted, ultimately failed.

Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. James Lankford also introduced amendments designed to clarify language and ensure religious liberty protections for all Americans.

Lankford’s amendment guaranteed that the RFMA’s obscurity would not be wielded against organizations with traditional marriage beliefs. Rubio’s amendment eliminated the private right to sue from the RFMA.

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Both amendments required a simple majority but failed.

Now that the RFMA has passed the Senate, the House is expected to vote on the updated bill as soon as this week.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who will likely assume the position of House speaker in January, told reporters early on Tuesday that he agrees with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) which says that the RFMA would “betray our country’s commitment to the fundamental right of religious liberty.”

“Catholic Bishops say religious protections in the Respect For Marriage Act are insufficient and far from comprehensive and treat religious liberty as a second-class right. As you know, that’s currently in the Senate. Do you agree with that assessment by the Catholic Bishops?” one reporter asked.

“I agree with them, yes,” McCarthy confirmed.

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McCarthy’s willingness to signal strong opposition to the bill, which garnered support from 47 House Republicans earlier this year, shows that he is listening to conservative voters who overwhelmingly reject this legislation.

…”it is fossil fuels that have created the modern world.”

NOVEMBER 29, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

TIME TO START EATING BUGS?

Western nations’ commitment to “net zero” CO2 emissions is one of the greatest follies in world history. It is not just the fossil fuel industries that are under attack by liberals–although that would be bad enough, since it is fossil fuels that have created the modern world. They are the reason we are not going around in donkey carts. But it gets worse: agriculture is in the crosshairs, too.

We have seen it in Sri Lanka, where the government mandated “organic” farming and as a result, the Prime Minister’s residence was stormed by a mob and he was forced to flee the country. We have seen it in Canada and in the Netherlands, where the government is making war on that country’s highly successful ag industry. In fact, the Netherlands is second only to the U.S. in the value of food exports. But not for long: its government is moving to shut down farms.

The Dutch government is planning to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to be in compliance with EU environmental rules.
***
The government will conduct a “compulsory purchase” of large nitrogen emitters as part of a voluntary, one-time offer, announced Nitrogen Minister Christianne van der Wal….

The fact that the Netherlands has a “Nitrogen Minister” is a sign of how far off the rails liberals have gone. And oh, by the way, I will hazard a wild guess that the “Nitrogen Minister” is not a chemist or any sort of scientist.

In response to the decision, Executive Director of Consumers’ Research Will Hild told the Daily Caller “The Netherland’s war on farmers to pursue their ESG agenda serves as a stark warning. Americans should be vigilant against efforts by both governments and big Wall Street firms like BlackRock pushing these same dangerous ‘net zero’ carbon emissions targets here in the US. It is difficult to overstate the recklessness of undermining farmers during the greatest global food crisis in decades.

The international war on agriculture, which focuses mostly on the use of synthetic fertilizers, without which the productivity of modern agriculture is impossible, and on animal husbandry, is of course driving up the cost of food world-wide. If the war on agriculture continues, residents of wealthy countries will be impoverished by higher food prices while many residents of poor countries will starve.

Of course, liberals think there is an alternative: we should all eat insects instead of meat. Does that sound crazy? Well, it is. But nevertheless, that is their endgame. Just imagine how many CO2 emissions we would save if we didn’t use many millions of acres, augmented with synthetic fertilizers, to grow field corn for cows, pigs and other animals to consume! Not to mention the emissions for which the animals themselves are responsible.

Eating bugs is the liberals’ plan, to which I can only respond: you go first.

But that isn’t how liberals behave, is it? When the time comes, they will have special stores to which only those with high social credit scores can be admitted. They will eat meat, while you eat crickets.

Meanwhile, a rare voice of sanity asks, is there any reason to think that destroying the industries that made the modern world what it is will actually “save the planet” by staving off global warming? To which the answer is, No, there isn’t. Apart from the fact that the “science” of global warming is so deeply flawed that it is really a cult, not a science, fossil fuels–the best energy source that we have on planet Earth–will continue to be produced and used by countries that decline to drink the environmentalists’ Kool-Aid.

Thus we see headlines like this: UAE Plans $150 Billion Spending Spree To Boost Oil Output To 5MM Barrels By 2027.

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., also known as Adnoc, will invest $150 billion in the five years through 2027, it said in a statement Monday. That’s an increase on the previous spending plan of $127 billion over five years that was announced a year ago.

The spending spree will try to raise crude output capacity to 5 million barrels a day by 2027, earlier than the previous target of 2030 and comes at a time when Saudi oil giant Aramco is also planning to expand its output by 12 million by 2027.

It would be nice if that $150 billion were being invested in the U.S. to produce American oil and gas, but that won’t happen under the brain-dead Biden administration.

So far, “green” hysteria has been mostly talk and wasted money. The reality is that Western countries rely almost not at all on expensive, inefficient and unreliable wind and solar energy to power their economies. But the Left expects that to change. If it does, the international balance of power will shift rapidly. Standards of living in formerly-rich countries like the U.S. and most of Western Europe will rapidly decline, while, in relative terms, countries like Russia, China and Iran that continue to exploit far more reliable, efficient and affordable fossil fuels will come to dominate economically. To me, this seems like a dystopian outcome, but Western liberals are trying hard to bring it about.

Fascist China’s IS THE WORLD’S HORROR!

November 29, 2022

Apple emerges as a villain in China, shutting down iPhone apps that help protestors

By Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

With China’s communist oligarchs tightening their grip on power as anti-COVID lockdown protests erupt across that country, who should step in to help the detested regime but wokester Apple, one of the most virtue-signally of all companies in the Silicon Valley.

According to a report in Quartz, via Yahoo! Finance:

Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

This isn’t their first China rodeo, either. Quartz notes:

Apple has repeatedly helped China control dissent, mostly by removing apps that protestors have used to coordinate, communicate, or gather information. (Quartz’s iOS app was removed by Apple, at China’s request, at the height of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong.) By hobbling the functionality of AirDrop in China, Apple is once again coming to the government’s aid.

So it’s not enough for Apple to stay silent, the way all the celebrities with a cash stream coming from China are doing. Apple is actively helping the regime repress the protestors by making apps unavailable to them which are available to everyone else. That’s censorship.

Their wan excuse is that soon they will do this to everyone, so there’s nothing to see here, move along, but that doesn’t hold much water. Why they did it now, just as protestors were airdropping each other with messages and gathering in the streets to protest these lockdowns and the terrible things that have come of them? It’s all just kind of … coincidental.

What’s more, Apple’s vow to do this to everyone and not merely Apple’s China users rather suggests they plan to import China’s repressive censorship of dissidents to America’s shores, an act with very bad smell about it.

It seems that the China protestors aren’t just up against the evil communists lording it over them and beating them in the streets for the sake of “health.” They are also up against Apple, which has proven itself now the regime’s faithful ally. Compare and contrast that with tech king Elon Musk’s swift move to provide Ukraine with his Starlink services, which was the Internet it needed, after the Russian invaders blew their communications systems out, and the contrast couldn’t be starker.

And sure enough, Apple is out to “get” Musk, too, on his company policies reducing censorship that are none of their business.

Elon Musk has accused Apple of threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store amid growing tensions between the two companies.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who last month purchased the social media site for $44 billion, also claimed that Apple had ‘mostly stopped advertising on Twitter’.

A number of firms have halted promotion on the site over concerns about Musk’s content moderation plans.

It’s as if they have a pattern of hating and opposing unregulated free speech. 

It’s linkages like this, between the Chicom oligarchs and old gray men ruling from Beijing and the tech baronies that make legitimate revolutions against bona fide tyrants so hard to win.

Ironically, neverTrump fanatic Anne Applebaum wrote a memorably good essay a year ago in The Atlantic, called “The Bad Guys are Winning,” citing just these kinds of relationships that make ousting hellhole regimes so difficult now. Writing in the magazine controlled by Laurene Jobs, heir to the Apple fortune, Applebaum naturally, “forgot” to mention Big Tech in her described interlocking partnerships, but did note the role of state enterprises and state entities bolstering one another to keep the repression high in each “bad guy” country, keeping their elites safely in place.

 Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines. 

Well, with Apple’s shutdown of its apps to please its Chinese overlords, sometimes it’s actual companies, and from the West, who are aiding the regimes in this nasty dynamic.

Meanwhile, their descent into bad-guyism also extends to their manufacturing operations, where protests at iPhone factories are met with brutal crackdowns:

Apple has a lot to answer for as it seeks to sell us iPhones and iPads, and Apple Watches with a side of woksterism and hectoring to us on the side.

Let them explain this to an incoming Republican Congress and to China’s people once they throw their shackles off.

Washington liars will not stop us from rescuing America

By 

Sen. Rick Scott

November 29, 2022 06:00 AM

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Earlier this year, I released a plan with more than 100 ideas for how Republicans can govern and rescue America from President Joe Biden’s radical, socialist agenda that has done nothing but destroy our country with debt, record inflation, and massive crime. The Democrats immediately lost their minds. Our disturbingly incompetent president tried to say that I was proposing to cut Social Security and Medicare and “put programs on a chopping block.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed this falsehood, and sadly, some Republicans parroted these Democrats’ lies.

I originally wrote this op-ed to respond to some of those criticisms directly, several of which have been published recently in the Washington Post. Sadly, the Washington Post refused to accept this piece. The Washington establishment, in both Congress and the media, is so committed to the status quo that it will do whatever it takes to silence anyone who thinks differently. So much for “democracy dies in darkness,” right?

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WASHINGTON VERSUS REPUBLICAN VOTERS

The attacks against me and my plan are a predictable reaction in broken, corrupt Washington, but it’s nothing but total fiction. It’s the same political smear the Democrats use every election, and it’s a lie. These fake, tired claims that “Republicans are going to throw grandma over the cliff” are ridiculous, and people know it’s a lie. It doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know any Republican who wants to cut Social Security or Medicare. But I do know that every Democrat in Congress voted to cut Medicare this year. I never have and never would. It’s just a lie to claim otherwise.

Yes, I put out a plan of ideas, and I don’t regret it one bit. Yes, one of them suggested sunsetting laws after five years — noting that if a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again. Washington has spent decades exploding the size of our government and wasting money, and it must be stopped. Anyone who is serious knows that my plan was never about ending Social Security or Medicare. Nor was it about sunsetting the Navy or any other absurd suggestion. Biden and Schumer are simply engaged in Washington political gotcha BS.

Unlike Biden , I’ve never once advocated cutting Social Security, Medicare , or Medicaid . During my time in the Senate, I’ve fought to protect these programs, many times against Democratic-driven cuts and bad policies such as the $280 billion Medicare cut we just saw Democrats pass in August.

The sad truth is that truth barely exists in Washington anymore. For today’s Democrats, words no longer have meaning. They can’t say what a woman is, they cut Medicare and then insist they didn’t, and they testify in hearings under oath and say that the border is secure. When they are talking, they are lying. For Biden and his party, falsehood is standard policy — it’s what they do.

So we have a choice to make: We can cower in a corner, or we can stand up and take them on. I will not be intimidated by these liars. When they smear me with false statements, I take it as a badge of honor.

Republicans must again become the party of ideas and have no fear of telling the public what we plan to do. It’s time for us to define the future we want for America and how we plan to get there.

We’ve done a fine job of telling people how terrible Biden and the Democrats are and how badly they are doing. And the polls clearly show that the public knows it — they know the Democrats are crazy. Voters overwhelmingly believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the economy is terrible, energy prices are horrible, crime is out of control, and the border is wide open.

The public knows all of this. What they do NOT know is what we Republicans are going to do about it. And the stunning part is that this is on purpose. That is the current strategy of many Republicans in Washington, to be against the crazy Democrats only and never outline any plans of what we are for or what we will do.

And if you dare step out of line and suggest that we give people something to vote for, they attack you, and they partner with the Democrats to twist your words and trash you and tell you to be quiet.

But I have good news — a new day is coming. Republicans and conservatives all over this country are demanding that we stand up, boldly defend our values, and fight like hell to save this country. It may take a little bit longer for those in Washington to get the message, but it is coming. A new era in which Republicans actually give the voters a positive reason to vote for them is coming.

I ran for Senate leader because the current plan of routinely caving in and allowing Schumer and Biden to win must stop and because we must become a party with a plan to rescue America.

My effort to change the way the Senate operates is not over. In fact, it is just beginning. We can no longer be merely a speed bump on the road to socialism.

Everyone says compromise is crucial in Washington. That’s fine. But it’s about time we stop compromising our principles and start making the Democrats compromise theirs.

The old Washington establishment Republican path of never having a vision is over, it’s dying. A new wave of bold and aggressive Republicans who will stand up and fight is demanding change from our leaders in Washington. It is happening, and it will happen. Count on it.

Republican Rick Scott represents Florida in the United States Senate. He is the former governor of Florida.

“Elon Musk has promised to throw open the doors of Twitter jail…”

Musk is right to throw open the doors of Twitter jail

The elites’ response to Twitter’s amnesty on banned accounts has been unhinged.

LAUREN SMITH AT SPIKED:

29th November 2022

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TopicsFREE SPEECHSCIENCE & TECHUSA

Elon Musk has promised to throw open the doors of Twitter jail and reinstate a large number of suspended accounts. Last week, Twitter’s proud new owner posted a poll asking whether users thought Twitter should ‘offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam’. The results came out overwhelmingly on the side that it should, with 72 per cent for ‘yes’ and 26 per cent for ‘no’. Signing off with the words ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’ (‘The voice of the people, the voice of God’), Musk announced that an amnesty will be granted this week.

Ever since Musk completed his Twitter takeover, the blue-check class has been losing its collective mind. These people are clearly terrified by Musk’s promise to ‘free the bird’ and make Twitter a haven for free speech. For someone who is not terminally online, this entire controversy might seem irrelevant. After all, Twitter is not real life. But the elites’ response to Musk giving a platform to people who have said offensive but nonetheless legal things is significant. It illustrates their antagonism towards free speech and their wider disdain for the public.

The suspension amnesty is only the latest in a string of controversial Musk decisions. He has announced mass lay-offs for Twitter staff and created outrage by suggesting users should pay for their official checkmarks. And then, just over a week ago, he welcomed the previously banned Donald Trump back on to the platform. Like the suspension amnesty, the fate of Trump’s account was also decided by Musk’s followers – 51 per cent thought the former president should have his account reinstated.

The backlash to the suspension amnesty was, naturally, immediate and unhinged. Musk has been accused of facilitating white supremacy, conspiracy theories and harassment. Some have even claimed that Musk now has blood on his hands.

Alejandra Caraballo of Harvard cyberlaw clinic described the decision as ‘like opening the gates of Hell’. Michael Edison Hayden, a reporter and spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, accused Musk of ‘bringing white supremacy back in a big way’. Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, warned that ‘superspreaders of hate, abuse and harassment will be the only people to benefit from this latest decision by Twitter’ and urged brands to continue pulling their ads from Twitter.

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This is a ridiculous overreaction. It also reflects an ignorance of the vast number of people who have been caught up in Twitter’s content-moderation policies, often when they haven’t said anything remotely controversial. I would wager that the majority of banned accounts never should have been banned in the first place, even under Twitter’s existing rules.

The obvious problem with Twitter’s automated content-moderation system is that it cannot identify irony, satire or hyperbole. It often flags jokes and sarcasm as violence. I have first-hand experience of this. I lost my old account because I told a friend that I was going to kill him after he posted a mundane opinion I disagreed with. Apparently, I had violated Twitter’s rules against ‘violent threats’. Meanwhile, Twitter has somehow allowed child sexual exploitation content to go under the radar.

The fact that woke leftists are terrified at the prospect of Twitter users being allowed to say and read what they like is telling. It shows that what they really oppose here is free speech itself, and that this opposition is driven by a contempt for the general public. The cultural elites seem to think that ordinary people cannot be trusted to critically digest the content they see online. It is the public, not Elon Musk, who they really fear.

Lauren Smith is an intern at spiked.

TRUMP FOR FOUR YEARS AND DESANTIS FOR VEEP AND EIGHT YEARS PRESIDENT FOLLOWING!

November 29, 2022

Should it be Trump or DeSantis in 2024?

By Edward Mike at American Thinker:

Should it be Trump or DeSantis in 2024?  The answer lies in these four words: Form Always Follows Function.  For example, if you’re shopping for a new vehicle, you must consider where the vehicle will typically be driven and for what purpose.  If you would buy a new rifle, you must consider what you plan to shoot with it.  The form must be matched to serve the function.

A classy Corvette wouldn’t be a good choice in the northern mountains.  Given the likelihood of blizzards and rocky back roads, a four-wheel-drive pickup will suit you better. Sure, they aren’t as classy looking and don’t get good mileage, but they are many times over more likely to get you where you need to go.

In a story about elephant hunting, the hunter reported that the tracks he followed were two feet wide.  Think of a large tree, two feet in diameter, thumping down every elephant step! That trusty deer rifle wouldn’t do if you’re planning to hunt elephants.  Elephant-hunting merits the biggest caliber you can find.  Sure, that ammunition is very expensive, and your shoulder will remember the kick.  But an elephant at 30 feet dictates a powerful gun.  Form always follows function.

Apply those two examples to managing a functional society.  What do we mean by a functioning society?  Instinctively, we know what that implies for us.  It works smoothly and allows every individual citizen to pursue his happiness.  These values are expressed in our Declaration of Independence (the sacredness of individual lives and the liberty that allows everyone to fulfill their potential), and the Bill of Rights in the Constitution (matching the laws of nature and of nature’s creator).  A functional society rests on the individual family unit, which is the cornerstone and model of society.  Individuals contribute responsibly what they are able.  We have the “feel” for a functional society because it works.

“America” today is bifurcated and seemingly, evenly divided.  There are the historical Americans we call patriots, who are convinced that America had it right in theory all along.  There are the “woke” progressive citizens, who sign on to the belief that America has it all wrong and needs to be trashed.  Their ideas of “function” don’t meet our definition and thus their form is contradictory.  

When Donald Trump and the patriots say they want to make America great again, they are envisaging the historical America, affirming the unalienable natural rights of the citizens.  When the progressives sign on to their own definition of function, they envisage creating a reset, called the Great Reset, with docile citizens as a collective, without individual rights but marching, lockstep, to the totalitarian agenda.  Contradictory functions are served by antagonistic game plans.  

Suppose we compromise and buy a front-wheel-drive sedan instead of that cumbersome pickup?  Suppose we take our trusty deer rifle elephant hunting after all?  It might work, but it’s not the best choice.  If we subscribe to making the former America great again, we are facing far greater threats than blizzards: the antagonistic agenda of the woke progressives.  We have a more hazardous route, by far, than rocky roads to get where we need to go.  And the Swamp that they promote has proven to be far more intimidating that a bull elephant at 30 feet.  So, we need to engage the very best program in existence to confront this daunting Swamp and support our function.  And we don’t have “all day” to figure it all out and get where we need to go — alive.  

Let’s say the apartment building is on fire.  Well, Sally just lay down for her afternoon nap and Alice is right in the middle of finding out who wins the most money on “The Price is Right.”  George and Bill are in the middle of their chess game.  But none of that is important now.  The apartment building is on fire!  Deal with it now, before the flames start licking at the door frame and you decide that well, maybe, this fire thing is serious after all!

What I’m getting at is which form or game plan — which vehicle or rifle, if you will — do we need at this juncture?  Our societal apartment is burning down.  Do we pick the front-wheel-drive sedan or the deer rifle?  Or do we go all-out?  I say we go all-out — now.

This Great Reset of human society is a far greater obstacle to keep us from getting where we need to go than blizzards and rocky mountain roads.  Our lives are on the line.  So, for my money — and my life — I go with Donald Trump.  I don’t think Donald Trump in 2024 can be the Donald Trump in 2016-2020.  That was the “Last Hurrah,” and that “Championship Season” is in the record books.  But Donald is still healthy, talented, and devoted.  Trump still galvanizes the patriots.  He is still the icon for taking on that Swamp, which is expanding by the day and threatens to flood the world instead of global warming.

While he has many critics, I’m on the same page with The Donald.  He speaks the language of blue-collar construction workers, who build America, because their cause is his cause.  But it is also the cause of grandma and the ladies of the guild.  We’re all in the same apartment building.  He isn’t always right — maybe, in this blizzard, he gets off-road sometimes.  But he’s the one driving on rocky roads, in the blizzard, to get us where we need to go.

I think Ron DeSantis is great.  Considering Trump’s successor, I can’t come up with a better man.  And, to belabor our analogy, in four more years Trump may have smoothed out those roads enough so that a front-wheel-drive sedan will do.  For now, we need all Trump’s four-wheel-drive muscle.

It was Florida that got the national ball rolling on self-defense and the “Castle Doctrine” — the right to use whatever force is necessary to protect our “castle,” our home.  DeSantis is doing a great job defending the Floridians’ castle.  He has proven that he is “a deadeye with his deer rifle.”  In the next few years, he may gain the skill and the courage to also take aim at large targets: national/international challenges; the Great Reset/the Swamp.  But Trump has already proven that he has the knowledge, the will, and the courage to confront them all, “at 30 feet.”

Form makes or breaks function — our functional society. We can’t remain asleep at the switch, hide behind entertainment, or play chess.  This is the real world, folks.  The apartment where we all live is burning down.  We need the form that matches our functional society now.

Edward Mike is a clinical psychologist with a background in theology.  His website is http://www.restoringourvalues.com.

As Our America DECAYS!

November 28, 2022

Remember when you could mail something and expect it to be delivered to the addressee?

By Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:

Benjamin Franklin, the founder of the U.S. Post Office, must be spinning in his Boston grave over what has happened to his creation.  I am sure that I was not alone in being shocked when, four weeks ago, just prior to the holiday peak mailing season:

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has warned people not to use its blue boxes on specific dates. It particularly warned about the chances of theft from these on Sundays and holidays.

I hadn’t ever noticed blue mailboxes being cut open and their contents stolen.  So how, I wondered, does this thievery work?  An answer has just come from Chicago, where civil order goes to die.  The invaluable CWBChicago reports:

A US Postal Service mail carrier was robbed at gunpoint in the West Loop on Saturday morning, according to a Chicago police report. It’s the latest in a series of similar crimes where armed robbers force postal workers to give up the master keys to the mail system.

Master keys, eh?  Just the sort of thing to use on a blue mail collection box.  And CWBChicago found mailmanscott to provide a photograph:

Via CWBChicago.

Of course, this being Chicago, the crooks were particularly egregious in their choice of location for the theft:

Saturday’s robbery occurred one block south of the Chicago Police Department’s training academy.

Two men, both wearing masks, rolled up in a dark SUV and pulled a gun on the mail carrier in the 1300 block of West Van Buren around 11:30 a.m., the CPD report said. After getting the victim’s work keys, the offenders told him to run away.

Experts say the stolen master keys, also known as “arrow keys,” are used by theft crews that steal checks, credit cards, and documents to fuel identity theft operations.

The loss of secure mail service is a clear sign of our decline to third-world status, a journey well underway now.