About Julie Kelly

Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness.

House Republicans Release J6 Videos to Tucker Carlson

By Julie Kelly at American Greatness:

February 20, 2023

According to an exclusive posted on Axios today, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has turned over the full trove of surveillance video captured by Capitol police security cameras on January 6 to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds,” Mike Allen reported. “Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks.”

American Greatness first reported on the massive trove of security video in May 2021. Since then, several lawmakers including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have called for the public release of 14,000 of footage related to the events of January 6.

McCarthy told reporters on January 12 that he supported making the tapes public. “I think the American public should see all what happened instead of a report that’s written for a political basis,” McCarthy said, referring to the January 6 select committee’s final report.

In March 2021, the Justice Department designated the footage as “highly sensitive government material” subject to strict protective orders. Defendants and their lawyers have complained about lack of access to the surveillance video; a digital platform to archive all footage was delayed for months. Those protective orders, however, did not apply to House Democrats, who accessed surveillance clips to use in the second impeachment of Donald Trump and the January 6 select committee.

Further, the Justice Department claimed only 14,000 hours of video—footage from noon until 8:00 p.m. that day——was relevant to the January 6 investigation. But Axios reported Carlson’s team received 41,000 hours of video, which likely represents the full 24-hour period that Capitol Police gave to Congressional committees.

Carlson’s team of producers and researchers from his three Fox News programs—his nightly program on Fox News and two long-form shows on Fox Nation—are now combing through the raw footage. Axios reported clips will begin airing “in the coming weeks.”

Greene told American Greatness this morning she is pleased that McCarthy fulfilled his commitment to release the footage. “The two-tiered justice system and the unfair treatment of pretrial J6 defendants is one of the most important issues of our time,” Greene said in a text message. “I supported Kevin McCarthy for Speaker because of many promises he made way before the Speaker’s fight. Releasing the tapes was one of the big ones that matters to Americans. I’m so happy to prove again my voice was right.”

The secret video could finally show the use of undercover agents and informants both inside and outside the Capitol as well as those responsible for erecting the “gallows” on Capitol grounds. Footage will also shed light on how photographers and videographers were stationed in key locations before the breach occurred.

When Joe Biden was asked recently how long the combat might persist, the politician replied: “As long as it takes.”

February 20, 2023

Forever Wars

By G. Murphy Donovan at American Thinker:

“When fanatics are on top, there are no limits to oppression.” — H.L. Mencken

February 24 will mark one year since the conflict between Ukraine and Russia reignited into armed hostilities.

When Joe Biden was asked recently how long the combat might persist, the politician replied: “As long as it takes.” Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what “it” is. In short: no talks, no diplomacy, no strategic goals, and apparently still no exit ramps for the next two… or six years. Clearly, Biden believes he can ride the Ukraine war horse to a second term.

Biden may be correct. Another “forever” foreign war seems to have overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington.

Concurrently, whilst POTUS fielded soft balls from Judy Woodruff on PBS, Jan Stoltenberg raised troubling questions in Europe. Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, claimed that the Ukraine army is using artillery shells faster than NATO (including the U.S.), can produce… or replenish.

No reports of ammo shortages on the Russian side, however.

Recall then, that America alone has already provided $100 billion to Kiev and the Zelensky oligarchs to cope with Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation.” As the first anniversary of the Ukraine cage match draws nigh, Putin has abandoned euphemism and now calls the conflict a “war.”

The difference between an operation and a war is a little like the difference between a tremor and an earthquake. Still, Washington and Moscow are on the same page on at least one issue.

Putin seems to have accepted the fact that Russia and America are now at war; albeit for the moment, a hybrid, proxy, or surrogate war. NATO and the EU will continue to identify as catamites, playing follow the American leader. All sides also seem to agree that Ukraine will continue to serve best as cannon fodder; that is, if Ukraine and Russia don’t run out of fodder in the next two to six years.

Proximity to Russia, ethnic affiliation, and considerable sentiment makes Ukraine a strategic interest for the Kremlin. For Cold Warriors in the West, Ukraine is just another opportunity to bait the bear, a confirmation of the Russophobia that seems to work so well in American domestic politics. 

Seems the genuine historical meme playing out on the Russian frontier is a 21st Century edition of the Great Game where American/EU/NATO imperialism could be substituted for the British Empire. Russians may have replaced “WOGs” or “Orientals” in the vernacular, but race still trumps ideology. The ugly Soviet man is now the ugly Russian, a Slavic demon. General Clapper (former DNI), you may recall, claimed that Russians were “genetically” driven.

Race is the weapon of choice in all political arguments today. As the American left likes to say: “it’s only White people killing Whites” in Ukraine. So what’s the problem? America views itself, the world, and war today through melanin-colored glasses.

Recall, too, that even Volodymyr Zelensky knows how to play the race card. When challenged about his neo-Nazi associates, Zelensky claimed to have Jewish ancestors.

Recall, too, that Afghanistan was similarly another proxy small war circa 1979-89, when American clandestine forces engaged the Red Army at Russia’s back door. America tried to ally itself with the mujahideen jihad in Afghanistan, and that strategic error became a 30-year case study of blowback, punctuated by 9/11, the rise of global Muslim terror, and America’s ultimate 2020 humiliation in Kabul.

As for leadership today, behind Biden and Putin and with Ukraine’s Zelensky, we have a beatified pawn—and a veritable foreign aid ATM, again withdrawing $100 billion to date from the U.S. alone. Still, Zelensky is both a tool and a fool, maybe even a “useful idiot.” NATO and Washington are willing to fight Russia right down to the last Ukrainian. All wars are absurd, but Ukraine is unique for its corruption and mushroom cloud potential.

The indiscriminate fiscal fire hose that corrupted Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul is likely to do the same in Kiev.

And yes, forsaken by the EU, Moscow seems to be tilting east, but Russia is at its core, a European nation. The Kremlin knows that Lenin’s Marxism is just history now, along with religious fascism and those jihads in the Ummah. The Chinese political model today is the best cautionary, if not toxic, hybrid: a bizarre and untested strain of totalitarian communist capitalism.

The state is the culture in China these days.

Beijing also owns $980.8 billion or $1.8 trillion dollars of U.S. debt, depending on who you ask. America is the world’s biggest debtor nation; Russia doesn’t even make it to the top 20. Some argue that China has already purchased the Biden family. As they used to say back in the Nixon era, if you want to know who is screwing whom, “follow the money.”

The so-called sanctions against Russia is another self-inflicted, counterproductive Charlie Foxtrot.

What’s the point of sanctions that hurt potential allies or bystanders? Even German left-wing economic seers like Sahra Wagenknecht believe that sanctions are doing more damage to Europe and the U.S. than Russia. Some analysts believe that the economic tit-for-tat could precipitate a global recession.

Who wins that war?

When you boycott a creative, industrious, entrepreneurial state, take Israel for example; the populace becomes tougher, more resilient, more productive, and ultimately, more successful.

National character is forged with fire. No pain, no gain.

And observe Mr. Putin too: putative villain, former Chekist, and former communist. He restored traditional religion, rehabilitated the Czars, and until recently was a decent business man — indeed a capitalist. If Putin were running for office in a globalist resort like Davos, he might run as a progressive.

Surely, Putin is not the perfect autocrat, but compared to whom?

Speaking of Davos, that crowd is correct about a great “reset,” just not the global corporatism about which George Soros and Klaus Schwab speak. The real reset in Europe was the fall of the Soviet bloc and the demise of Russian Communism. The entire left/right political paradigm in Europe and America was turned on its head at the turn of the 21st Century. 

The global left, especially the British Commonwealth and America, is more Marxist today than Moscow. Remember when the American Democratic Party and British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand left used to be the anti-war, peace parties? Former refusenik parties in the West are now underwriting another “forever war” in Ukraine.

“Democratic” socialism, a Marxist mutation, is trending toxically in the Commonwealth and America. Indeed, the global left, taking some cues from China, is nostalgic for the Orwellian Internationale, a world led by a Davos /WEF (or better still, WTF) elite… a kind of global oligarchic nomenclature (if not Animal Farm).

Globalism and imperial “democratization,” in places like the erstwhile Yugoslavia is now viral. NATO’s dismantling of Yugoslavia was the trigger that stimulated Putin to draw a line in the sands of Ukraine. Indeed, those incursions into Georgia and Ukraine were Putin’s way of saying “enough is enough.”

We are still feeling the blowback from Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Kosovo, the two new Muslim majority states carved out of Tito’s old coalition in Eastern Europe, now provide the majority of ISIS jihadists to the Levant.

Global jihad now has two recruiting depots, and two jihadist sanctuaries in the heart of Europe.

Blowback is the failure to consider the consequences of political, if not arrogant imperial stupidity. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, and nuclear weapons were cleared from Ukraine, neither Brussels nor Washington could take yes for an answer from the Kremlin. And consider Libya too, once the most prosperous nation in North Africa; after the American blitz, now just another refugee slum, embarkation pier for most of the European Union’s illegal immigrants.

The Clinton legacy was not just Monica Lewinsky.

So here we are. “Progressive” doesn’t mean progress any more.

In the smaller universe of common sense, what used to be traditional conservative political parties, some say nationalists, are now the champions of democracy, the working man, the lumpenproletariat, personal freedom, and free speech. Pragmatic utilitarian nationalism might be trending again, according to Yoram Hazony in Israel.

When we think about Russia, Europe, and America, we need to assess history, culture and people; not just the puerile politics of the day. For the moment, Europe and Russia are like feuding neighbors, agitated and hopeful, yet very wary of public conversations or commitments. Recall, if you will, that it was Britannia and Rodina who sacrificed the most to defeat Nazis and fascists in the last century.

Yet, as a part of a nervous ménage à trois with Uncle Sam, the Big Three managed to prevail.

So there’s relevant history to contemplate and more than a little hope for better days. 

In the long run, the logic of shared culture, tradition, and common sense will overcome the venality of expedient politics. Europe, writ large, without Great Britain and Russia as cultural and geopolitical bookends, is a house of cards.

G. Murphy Donovan is a former USAF Intelligence officer, Director of Research and Russian (nee Soviet) Studies under James Clapper at USAF Intelligence. He now writes about the politics of culture and national security.

President Day’s Weekend?? What President?

FEBRUARY 20, 2023 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

THE DAILY CHART: AMERICA GOES SHOPPING

Isn’t President’s Day weekend when we are supposed to go shopping for discount mattresses or something? Consumers seemed to be primed for it just now. The latest retail sales data released late last week, showing a strong surge in consumer spending, spooked the stock market, because Wall Street thinks it will spook the Federal Reserve, and then we’re all spooked. The breakdown is interesting: the largest growth was in restaurants and bars. People are eating out again. That’s usually a counter-recessionary indicator.

I’m curious about air travel, which seems to up up sharply judging by the jammed airports and full flights I’ve experienced lately. The latest air travel data is only available through last November, which showed a roughly 10 percent increase over November 2021, but my anecdotal perception is that people are flying like it’s 2019. But with staffing shortages and other obvious problems at airports and on planes, air travel is more miserable than ever.

“Biden was blaming Nichols’s death on systemic racism”

What Killed Tyre Nichols

His fatal torture was a tragic culmination—not of racism, but of the racism-in-policing narrative.

Heather Mac Donald at City Journal:

February 19, 2023 

Public safety

The Social Order

Is U.S. policing in a death spiral? Yes, as long as the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers is portrayed as a manifestation of racism. The problems underlying that horrifying episode—the recruitment crisis, lax hiring standards, and depolicing—will worsen, intensified by the very policies ostensibly adopted to prevent another such travesty. The vicious circle of rising crime and a flight from the profession will accelerate.

President Joe Biden adopted the racism narrative before much was known about the Nichols beating. Even before the videos from the officers’ body cameras had been released, Biden was blaming Nichols’s death on systemic racism. After the video release, Biden claimed that the killing was representative of what “black and brown Americans experience every single day.” He reinforced that theme in his recent State of the Union speech. “Every single time” a black child walks in the street, plays in a park, or gets into a car, Biden said, his parents rightly worry that racist cops might kill him before he makes it home. “What happened to Tyre in Memphis happens too often,” Biden alleged.

Other Democrats spread that same message, amplified by the mainstream media. According to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Nichols was killed by “white supremacy. Killed by America.” Blacks “live in a constant state of terror,” Bowman said in a fundraising pitch. “We feel it every day.”

That the five cops charged with Nichols’s murder were black does not refute the racism narrative, argue political and press elites. Black cops, no less than white cops, absorb the police culture of anti-black racism, the argument goes.

The idea of black anti-black racism is not nonsensical as a speculative construct. And conservatives who reflexively seize on a black officer’s race to rebut a bias charge risk legitimating the view that an officer’s whiteness creates a valid presumption of bias when a police-civilian encounter is interracial.

The only question should be: what is the actual evidence that race affected a use of force? Those who contend that racism killed Tyre Nichols have no evidence to back up their claim, so they offer a thought experiment instead: Would the five Memphis cops have behaved as brutally had Nichols been white? To anti-cop activists, the answer is self-evidently no.

But another thought experiment is in order: Did these cops possess the tactical skill and psychological disposition to conduct any high-risk car stop according to professional standards? Given what is shown in the videos, the answer, even more self-evidently, is no.

The officers ignored protocol for car stops, whereby a driver is told to stay in his car and show his hands; instead, for no apparent reason, they dragged Nichols out of the car and manhandled him to the ground. They failed to tell him the reason for the stop. They failed to follow a chain of command, whereby the officer who initiated the stop usually takes the tactical lead; instead, they operated without coordination and at cross purposes. They issued contradictory commands that could not be simultaneously obeyed. They escalated their use of force without provocation. They increased everyone’s stress by screaming profanities at a cowering Nichols; it is Nichols, not the officers, who poignantly tries to deescalate the situation by pointing out his compliance. Having unjustifiably resorted to a taser and pepper spray, the cops botched their deployment of those devices. They were unable to handcuff Nichols, despite his low level of resistance and the officers’ superior numbers. They either never turned on their body cameras, turned them on belatedly, turned them off again, or removed them altogether. One officer texted a cell phone photo of a beaten and bloodied Nichols to five people, as if Nichols were a big-game trophy. The officers failed to alert a supervisor after they used their stun gun and pepper spray.

All this before one even gets to the gratuitous violence. The kicks and blows that rained down on Nichols’s head as he is hoisted up by some of the officers to receive those blows are heartbreaking. Officers are taught never to strike a suspect in the head unless he poses an imminent threat of deadly force. Yet these officers laughed and bragged to one another about their lawless brutality.

Either Memphis’s police training is grossly inadequate, or these officers were incapable of processing it. In either case, it is fully conceivable that they would treat a white driver with as much savage incompetence.

The Nichols beating is not the product of racism; it is the tragic culmination of the very narrative being offered to explain that beating. The idea that policing is racist, both in its treatment of black suspects and in its hiring of black officers, has led to manpower loss, a lowering of standards, and a drop in proactive enforcement. The resulting increase in crime then puts more downward pressure on hiring standards in order to try to replenish the depleted ranks. Unable to compensate for officer attrition, police departments are left without enough well-trained sergeants and lieutenants to supervise officers who maybe should never have been hired in the first place.

Since 2014, Black Lives Matter agitation has decimated police ranks and driven away potential applicants who do not want to be presumed racist from their first day on the job.

The Memphis Police Department is typical. It lost more than 300 officers in the last two years to resignations and retirements, and 1,350 officers over the last decade; its numbers are down 22 percent since 2011. In 2015, as the first round of Black Lives Matter rioting spread around the country, a fatal police shooting (of the preferred white officer–black victim configuration) spurred demonstrations against the Memphis PD. (The family of the teenage victim is now making its second bid to reopen the criminal case against the officer, its 2020 post–George Floyd effort having failed. This time, it will likely succeed.)

In 2018, the MPD eliminated the requirement of a college degree. The department regularly requested permission from the police licensing board to hire rookies with felony and misdemeanor convictions. A former lieutenant in charge of recruiting complained to the Associated Press that the department let “just pretty much anybody” become a police officer. The most brutal officer in the Nichols beating, Emmitt Martin III, joined the force in 2018. He had at least one arrest on his record, whose details have been redacted. The criminal history of another officer in the beating, Demetrius Haley, was also redacted from state records. Haley joined the force in January 2021.

Meantime, Memphis crime soared. The years 2020 and 2021 saw record levels of killings. Memphis has the highest violent-crime rate in the United States; it ranks ninth in homicides per capita. Reckless driving also spiked, providing an additional impetus for the creation of the specialized enforcement unit where the five Nichols cops worked. (The Nichols officers initially claimed that Nichols was driving the wrong way down a street.)

Memphis’s manpower woes are hardly unique. In a national sample of 194 police agencies, retirements rose 45 percent in 2020, compared with 2019; resignations rose 18 percent. Departments with 500 or more officers saw a 36 percent decrease in hiring in 2020. These trends almost certainly worsened in 2021 and 2022.

Yet across the country, even as the political stigma against police poisons recruiting, the pressure to align police demographics with local demographics remains unrelenting. Vanita Gupta, the third-highest ranking official in the Justice Department and the former head of the department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, told the Washington Post last week: “We have all been promoting . . . police officers that will reflect the communities that they serve.” Such diversity hiring is in part a response to the “recognition” of what Gupta calls “racial bias in our criminal justice system.” And one of the alleged sources of bias is hiring criteria that have a disparate impact on blacks.

This disparate-impact thinking is the second cause of watered-down hiring standards. It has a long history. In a prototypical case, a 1990 federal consent decree required the Philadelphia Police Department to stop ranking applicants based on their performance on the police hiring exam. That exam was presumptively racist since whites passed it at four times the rate of blacks. The possibility that black candidates, on average, lacked the requisite academic skills to pass the exam was outside the realm of allowable thinking. The consent decree mandated that the department admit blacks based on their numbers in the applicant pool, not on their test results. A devastating misconduct episode, the 39th Police District scandal, followed.

A 1998 report from the department’s anti-corruption office, created in response to that scandal, described a typical recruit under the new hiring standards: unable to spell simple words or write a basic sentence, unable to pass a polygraph test about drugs on his first five tries, unable to get credit because of his lousy payment history—yet hired anyway. A current Philadelphia police inspector applied in 1994, along with 30,000 other applicants. Whereas most whites clustered at the high end of entrance exam scores, most of the blacks in his entering class of 150 scored below the passing score of 70 but were admitted anyway. Fifteen recruits were fired before completing training. Reasons included the commission of felonies while in the academy or testing positive for drugs. All the fired recruits were likely affirmative-action hires. The 1998 report analyzed a six-month stretch in 1997 and found that 17 officers during that time frame had been charged with homicide, rape, statutory rape, off-duty assault, and theft—a crime wave of “startling proportions,” according to the department’s integrity and accountability officer, James B. Jordan.

Philadelphia’s academy classes in the post–George Floyd era are two-thirds smaller than in the 1990s, though entrance requirements remain minimal. The several dozen or so recruits who graduate from academy training do not begin to make up for the hundreds of officers who retire or resign each year, leaving the PPD about 1,300 officers short of its target staffing level. And so the downward pressure on qualifications continues.

Gupta may believe that officers should reflect the communities they serve. But if such racial proportionality is achieved at the expense of competence, the results do not serve those communities. An Obama-era report on the Philadelphia Police Department, for instance, found that black and Hispanic officers were more likely than white officers to shoot an unarmed black man based on threat-perception failure—mistaking a cell phone for a gun, say.

Philadelphia’s 39th Police District scandal has been replicated widely. A 1998 report from the federal General Accounting Office blamed lowered hiring standards for a spate of police drug convictions across the country. In 1993, 113 Washington, D.C., officers were indicted for felonies ranging from drug dealing to murder after a period of racial favoritism in hiring and the watering down of the hiring exam. Twelve officers from the New York Police Department’s 30th precinct were indicted in the early 1990s for extorting drug dealers, intimidating and assaulting witnesses, and tampering with evidence. Several had been hired despite rock-bottom test scores and known ties to drug gangs. By the late 1980s, nearly 10 percent of the Miami Police Department had been suspended or fired for crimes such as murder, robbery, and drug dealing. The city’s commissioners had previously declared that 80 percent of new hires be minorities.

More departments are jettisoning the requirement of clean criminal records, among other expectations, driven by the twin imperatives of getting more recruits, period, and of getting more minority recruits. The results will not be good.

Interpreting the Tyre Nichols beating as a function of police racism will make recruiting harder still. A poster in a St. Paul high school, erected before the incident, shows a raised fist breaking a police badge, over the slogan: “No more police hatred towards minorities.” Good luck coaxing people into the profession in the face of such messages.

An insufficient number of officers means more crime. Those officers remaining on a force will be less likely to intervene in suspicious behavior. They know that if an interaction turns violent, back-up may be slow to arrive.

Potential criminals will be more likely to break the law as the risk of being stopped or arrested plunges. With crime rising, existing officers will work longer hours without time off or adequate rest, increasing the possibility of threat misperception. Without sufficient back-up, an officer confronting a resisting suspect may be more inclined to escalate his own use of force beyond what appears justified to civilian observers, starting the anti-cop cycle all over again. Yet with crime rising, the political pressure to hire more cops, by any means, goes up in tandem.

Meanwhile, the tactical tool kit is shrinking. The call to reduce car stops is being renewed. The decline in such stops after the Floyd riots already led to a massive increase in fatal car crashes, especially in high-crime minority areas. Specialized units, such as Memphis’s Scorpion team, where the officers in the Nichols case worked, also find themselves in the crosshairs. But the problem is not specialization: it is lowered standards and lack of oversight. Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis told the Memphis city council last week: “None of our units have a sufficient amount of supervision.”

We don’t know yet what the caliber of police training was in Memphis. Its police chief insists that officers are given all the necessary tactical skills to perform lawfully and effectively. If so, then even more blame falls on its hiring standards.

We do know that police training across the country is woefully inadequate. The initial academy period is comparatively brief. Once on the job, officers receive only the most perfunctory refreshers in tactics. They desperately need more practice in de-escalation and stress control. But even a day of in-service training takes officers off the streets at a time when force levels are already dangerously low. So the pressure is on to limit such training. In the wake of the Nichols death, expect implicit-bias and cultural-competence training to increase, draining precious time and resources from subjects that actually help officers perform.

The only thing that will get policing out of its death spiral is the widespread repudiation of the racism narrative. It is not racism that brings officers into more frequent contact with minorities; it is exceedingly high rates of crime in minority communities. It is not the police who are responsible for the fact that blacks between the ages of ten and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites in that age bracket; those black victims are shot almost exclusively by black criminals. In 2022, seven allegedly unarmed blacks were fatally shot by police officers, out of a national homicide death toll for blacks that will likely exceed 10,000 and a black population of 44 million. Meantime, dozens of blacks are killed every day (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the U.S. population), to no attention from the mainstream media or from Black Lives Matter activists, because their assailants are not cops and are not white.

Departments across the country must urgently review their training and hiring standards to ensure that another abomination like the fatal torture of Tyre Nichols does not reoccur. But they will be less able to provide the protection that law-abiding residents of high-crime communities desperately deserve so long as the president, academia, and the media insist that police are the embodiment of America’s allegedly lingering white supremacy.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, now available for preorder.

“Things will not end well for societies and cultures that worship false gods…”

February 20, 2023

When Stuff Happens – Blame it on Climate Change!

By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. at American Thinker:

Omnipotent is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “having total power, able to do anything.” This word is typically used to describe God, but in the new world religion of environmentalism, climate change has replaced God. Climate change is omnipotent, possessing the power to do anything.

This recent headline in the Daily Mail makes the case for climate change’s omnipotence, “Deadly fungal infection ‘Valley Fever’ that kills one in 100 sufferers is spreading across the US because of climate change”. This is one of many of the magical powers of climate change, but let’s take a deeper look at “Valley Fever.”

Valley Fever is a fungal infection due to coccidioidomycosis. According to the CDC, “Coccidioides lives in dust and soil in some areas in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and South America. In the United States, Coccidioides lives in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. “

If this fungal infection is caused by omnipotent climate change, it must be a recent phenomenon. After all, climate change hasn’t been around that long. When did climate change become a thing, replacing global warming?

According to the United Nations, global warming, “is widely believed to have been coined in 1975 by Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker.” As snow and cold weather needed to be accounted for, a convenient pivot was required along with a new name, “Climate change, which describes a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, appeared a few years later in a 1979 National Academy of Science study on carbon dioxide.”

If Valley Fever is due to climate change, it should not have existed before climate change was inaugurated in the late 1970s. What if it started almost a century earlier?

As published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, “Coccidioidomycosis was first discovered by a medical student in Argentina in 1892.” Cases were then found in the San Joaquin Valley of California in the 1930s, “when people migrated there from the ‘Dust Bowl’ of the Midwest.”

So why is Valley Fever, first described over a century ago and likely around far longer, now due to climate change, first popularized only about 40 years ago?

The Daily Mail explains, “Cases of ‘Valley Fever’ – which is 10 times more deadly than flu – have risen 20-fold since the turn of the century.” And further, “It is caused by the fungus Coccidioides, which releases spores in the air when soil is disturbed. The spores are then inhaled by people, most commonly construction workers.”

What has also increased more than 20-fold over the past century? Arizona’s population in 1900 was 124,000. In 2022, the population was 7.4 million, a 61-fold increase. California’s population grew similarly, from 1.5 million in 1900 to 39 million in 2022, a 26-fold increase.

More people means more homes, restaurants, shopping malls, stadiums, highways, and so on with more construction disturbing more soil, releasing fungal spores into the air. These spores may have been present in the soil since before the last ice age when the climate changed from warm to cold, forming the ice, then from cold to warm, melting the ice, all part of the Earth’s constant changing climate.

This was all long before gasoline powered automobiles, barbeques, and gas stoves supposedly caused the planet’s ongoing changing climate. Yet omnipotent climate change is still the cause, time course be damned.

What other magical powers does climate change have?

Climate change causes heart attacks.

Since that heat wave in 1995, climate change has intensified globally with wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and cold spells leading to famine and drought. As a result of these extreme changes, the medical community is noticing an increasing rate of heart disease.

Association versus causation. Assuming extreme weather is increasing, which it is not, is that why heart attacks are on the rise? Or are inactivity, diabetes, poor diets, and obesity increasing, all major risk factors for heart disease?

Diabetes, too, alledgedly increasing due to climate change, without regard to diet, obesity, and exercise, actual causes for diabetes.

Between 1996 and 2009, as outdoor temperatures rose across the United States, so did the prevalence of diabetes.

During that same time period, the prevalence of smart phones and electronic books also increased, as did the national debt. Were those due to climate change too?

Let’s not leave out cancer. Researchers at UCSF claim, “Climate change will give rise to more cancers.”

What about headaches? “Climate change is worsening headaches and other neurological diseases, study says.”

Diseases like lupus, too. “Potential adverse health consequences of climate change related to rheumatic diseases.”

For those that thought the absence of a southern border or disregard for existing immigration law was responsible for millions of illegal migrants currently streaming into the US, it’s actually climate change. Trump era policies and efforts to build a wall had nothing to do with less illegal immigration 4 years ago versus now. “Climate change is a major factor behind increased migration at U.S. southern border, experts say.”

Is America’s spike in violent crime due to factors like no-cash bail, catch and release policies, and efforts to defund the police? Nah. The Washington Post tells us the real cause. “There’s a surprisingly strong link between climate change and violence.”

Not only human violence, but airline crashes. “Could climate change have played a role in the AirAsia crash?”

Climate change magically affects almost all businesses, “Almost all industries are threatened by the effects of climate change, either directly or indirectly.”

Asteroids may be “connected to climate change.” Black holes too, “Cosmic climate change may have stunted black holes.”

And finally sports, “Climate change is associated with the following increases of health-related risks for athletes.” Maybe that’s why young healthy athletes are dying suddenly lately, omnipotent climate change. “Climate change’s extreme temperatures could mean more heart deaths.” Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna must be relieved to hear this.

Bad stuff happens, always has and always will. Blaming everything on climate change is an avoidance of thought and analysis, much like a child blaming the bogey man for everything. Or as the Biden administration and their media propagandists blame “Russian interference” for any news or facts that are contrary to their preferred narrative.

If climate change causes everything, it causes nothing. Ascribing God-like powers to the normal ebbs and flows of weather and temperature is intellectually vacuous, designed not for thoughtful discussion but instead for suppression of challenging or opposing views, meaning censorship.

Things will not end well for societies and cultures that worship false gods, in this case the omnipotent god of climate change.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer. Follow me on Twitter @retinaldoctor, Truth Social @BrianJoondeph, LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph.

“The administration’s actions make no sense, and can only reflect an alarming degree of disarray and dysfunction”.

FEBRUARY 19, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

NO MORE BALLOONS, EVER!

I was a guest on last night’s Outsiders show in Australia. The hosts had a merry time laughing at Joe Biden and his administration, as well they should. Biden’s goofy balloon policy–sit back for a week while an admitted Chinese spy balloon traverses the country, then start shooting down weather and hobby balloons, one of them apparently launched by a club called the the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade–is emblematic of what must be the most incompetent administration since the mid-19th century.

This morning on Meet the Press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed the irrationality of the administration’s conduct:

[W]hat I can also tell you is this was an opportunity to speak very clearly and very directly about the fact that China sent a surveillance balloon over our territory, violating our sovereignty, violating international law. And I told [Wang Yi] quite simply that that was unacceptable and can never happen again.

But–to ask the obvious–if sending a spy balloon across America is “unacceptable” and “can never happen again,” why was it allowed to happen the first time? The Chinese balloon could have been shot down over the Aleutians, over Canada (as the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade’s balloon was), or over Montana. Instead, it was allowed to cruise across America for a week, finally to be destroyed after it had completed its mission.

The administration’s actions make no sense, and can only reflect an alarming degree of disarray and dysfunction.

Trouble, Trouble, Trouble In Ohio Town Water Area

‘We just need answers’: distrust grows in Ohio town after toxic train derailment

Residents have received contradictory information as to how to clean their homes. Photograph: Michael Swensen/Getty Images

Residents of East Palestine grapple with mixed safety messages two weeks after leak of hazardous chemicals from train

Tom Perkins in East Palestine, OhioSun 19 Feb 2023 03.30 EST

During his Thursday visit to the site of a fiery train derailment that may have poisoned a small eastern Ohio town with a range of highly toxic chemicals, the Environmental Protection Agency chief, Michael Regan, told residents: “All families need to know that they are safe.”

But Regan’s words, along with those from the Ohio governor Mike DeWine’s administration and Norfolk Southern officials, have been of little comfort to Jami Cozza.

After evacuating for days after the 3 February derailment, she was told it was safe to return home, but a chemical odor still lingers in her flat. She urged a Norfolk Southern official to visit, and the company is now offering to pay for her relocation over safety fears.

Cozza noted East Palestine residents were told the municipal water was safe to drink, but also advised to buy bottled water, and many have complained of rashes after they shower. Residents were told they only had vinyl chloride to fear, then the list of dangerous chemicals spilled by the train grew. Federal agencies may not release the full list of chemicals for months.

Each day seems to bring new contradictions and every bit of information from officials feels like it raises more questions than it answers, Cozza said. The uncertainty is generating a deep sense of distrust.

“People are just angry but they don’t know who to be angry with because we’re not getting enough information to know who to be mad at,” Cozza added. “‘The air is fine, but don’t go outside. Your water is fine, but drink bottled water.’ You can’t trust them.”

A chemical sheen still coats parts of small creeks in the town. Photograph: Michael Swensen/Getty Images

About 50 out of 141 cars on the Norfolk Southern train derailed and exploded in a towering fireball over the town of 4,700 at the edge of the Appalachian hills. The fire burned near tankers carrying vinyl chloride but caused no immediate injuries. Two days later, officials feared a “major explosion” and conducted a controlled burn of vinyl chloride as a prevention measure.

Most residents had evacuated, and on 8 February they were given clearance to return, but many still see dangers. At the site of the wreck, crumpled and charred tanker cars still lay in the mud aside the tracks.

In the immediate vicinity and in pockets throughout the city, a potent chemical odor hangs in the air. Residents have described it as similar to turpentine or bleach, and said it “sticks to your nose”. Breathing it in for a few minutes may leave a metallic taste “like pennies”.

In recent days, some have reported dead pets or foxes, and the birds or outdoor cats they feed have disappeared. A chemical sheen still coats parts of small creeks that run through town, and dead fish have been found throughout local waterways as the pollution plume moves downstream. Temporary dams placed throughout the creeks pool the chemicals, which are sucked out with industrial pumps that filter the water.

The ongoing issues are what alarms Candice Desanzo. Like many neighbors, she wants to leave, but her family does not have enough money. She fears for her children and husband who have developed rashes after bathing. As she discussed the plight on her front porch, her eyes were red and swollen, and one of her children had gone hoarse, symptoms she said developed after the wreck.

“I can’t help but feel like I’m slowly poisoning my kids by staying,” she said.

Some suffering from symptoms are skeptical of local physicians’ diagnoses. They have been told they have eczema or a sinus infection, or have been given antibiotics. Some scientists have advised residents to call the Poison Control Center because family physicians are not trained to treat chemical exposure.

Children returned to school early in the week only to find a chemical smell in the East Palestine high school hallways, despite the fact that custodians had cleaned, said Jenna Cozza, niece of Jami Cozza. A contaminated creek runs next to the school, and children are “stressed [and] worried” she said, adding that she lives in “constant fear of this tragedy happening again.

“When I smell that chemical smell it takes me back to when all this happened, and I panic and get anxiety from it,” she said.

Some also question air test results. Though the EPA website states it has tested air in nearly 500 homes, Norfolk Southern hired contractors to conduct the studies, so some are skeptical of the results. The rail company depleted more of its remaining credibility when it refused to take part in a Wednesday town hall meeting over alleged threats it had received.

“At this point nobody trusts them, so we don’t want to hear what they say is going on in our homes … they’re going to tell us whatever the hell they want,” said resident Chris Wallace.

A company spokesman on Wednesday highlighted more than $1.5m spent on resident assistance, including direct payments of $1,000. Norfolk Southern this year announced $10bn in stock buybacks and reported $3.2bn in profits last year.

Residents were told the municipal water was safe to drink, but also advised to buy bottled water. Photograph: Michael Swensen/Getty Images

Residents say $1,000 will not cover much of the fallout. As Jackie Johnson picked up sticks in her large yard just a few blocks from the wreck site, she said she no longer feared the health threats, but said her life had been damaged in a different way.

She and her husband just retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and had planned to sell their house so they could buy a new home in Columbus near their grandchild. They were waiting for home prices to inch up a bit further before selling their tidy house, but the wreck has likely cratered their property value. Their life plans are indefinitely on hold.

“It might get to a point where we don’t have an option – we’ll have to sell it for what somebody will buy it for,” Johnson said.

Cozza said Norfolk Southern has offered to pay for her relocation because her front door is mere steps from a creek; the contaminated water will likely leak into their basement and she has a three-year-old child. But standing outside her home, she motioned toward her neighbors, who are also within about 50ft of the creek. They have not received the same offer.

“Their kids deserve to live, just like mine do,” Cozza said.

Up Market Street, about 0.6 miles from the wreck, Desanzo wonders why the company is not paying for her to relocate, or for more of her costs. Officials considered Cozza’s home to be safe, she noted, until Norfolk Southern later changed its assessment. Desanzo wonders about her home’s safety. She has received contradictory information about how to clean her home and suspects she made her clothes worse by washing them with city water.

“We just need answers,” she said in tears. “This city deserves answers and compensation.”