tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53715016917229596422024-03-13T10:50:28.642-07:0021st Century Social Critic21st Century Social Critic....Comments about politics and letters to the editor by Fernando L. Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.comBlogger316125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-81135785811974512582021-07-10T02:26:00.000-07:002021-07-10T02:26:26.766-07:00Martyr Made discusses the 2020 elections<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> An individual who uses the Twitter handle @martyrmade wrote a long thread I copy below. I'm also providing the link to his site, full of excellent post casts (don't miss "The Anti-Humans"). </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The twitter thread roll up follows:</span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Here are the facts - actual, confirmed facts - that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan's July 2016 memo, etc). </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff - who were on TV saying they'd seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn't - all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn't make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov't when it didn't happen.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele's source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution - agencies, the press, Congress, academia - gaslit them for another year.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov't destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected administration. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">It's hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov't as a conspiracy... Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don't stand for the Anthem.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov't official, because they feel most betrayed by them. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they'd be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don't know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it's probably true.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don't. It's a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn't just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Re: "fake impeachment", we now know that Trump's request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden's $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a "mistake" - but, ya know, the election's over, so who cares?</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr's laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn't have been banned.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, "no fair!" That's how they felt about Romney's "binders of women" in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange - the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc - but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr's laptop would've been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would've been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Even the courts' refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They'll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he'll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">It's a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were "protests", but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">Forget the ballot conspiracies. It's a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">They knew it was unconstitutional, it's right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn't see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn't implied, it was direct.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2">They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov't is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might've kept him alive. /end</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"><a href="https://martyrmade.com/">https://martyrmade.com</a></span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 25.1px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s2"></span><br /></p><p><br /></p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-77681654095602628642021-03-08T11:18:00.000-08:002021-03-08T11:18:41.879-08:00CDC Guidelines for Vaccinated Individuals <p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px;">The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines to impose restrictions on Americans who are fully vaccinated against Wuhan disease. Unfortunately the CDC didn't clarify if the guidelines apply to non citizen legal residents or their recommendations to President Biden on how to deal with illegal aliens who are being allowed to enter and are being bused all over the US even if they are infected. </span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2">The agency’s guidance states those who have received a full course of Wuhan vaccine may get together with other fully vaccinated individuals in small groups inside their homes without masks or physical distancing (duh). However, I believe it's healthier to meet in larger groups in bowling alleys, bingo parlors, shooting ranges, and other locations. They can also visit with unvaccinated people from one other household who are at low risk for severe disease, most of whom probably already got infected and are immune. Hell, go to Florida and spend time on the beach! </span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2"><br /></span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2">The guidelines should also say (but they don't) fully vaccinated people don’t need to quarantine or take a Wuhan test if they’ve been exposed, unless they’re symptomatic. However, they should still gargle three times a day with Listerine. </span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2"> </span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2">“You can visit your grandparents if you’ve been vaccinated and they have been, too,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a White House briefing Monday. “If grandparents have been vaccinated, they can visit their daughter (what about their sons?) and her family even if they have not been vaccinated, so long as the daughter and her family are not at risk for severe disease.” This display of anti male feminist ideology will be typical of government agencies under that dementia ridden bastard in the White House. </span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2"><br /></span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2">Vaccinated individuals should still wear a mask and social distance in public settings and avoid medium- to large-sized gatherings. The agency has yet to figure out those who already survived the disease are free to party with those vaccinated. </span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2"><br /></span></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2">CDC will release updated guidelines on travel for those who have been vaccinated. The CDC doesn't want people to travel but provide a list of public health measures in the case that someone must travel (illegals are excluded from these controls). Given their mistakes and woke ideology we can continue to expect the CDC will keep on issuing dumb guidelines. </span></p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-80846201347313392212020-09-15T11:23:00.000-07:002020-09-15T11:23:09.350-07:00Cultural War by Juan Carlos Girauta <p style="text-align: justify;"> In its modern sense, the culture war does not come from the United States but from Italy, specifically from a man who elaborated his theories in prison almost a century ago: Antonio Gramsci. If one conquers literalist laziness, he will find out that the culture war, or the cultural battle, does not mean being a warrior all day but in gaining hegemony in institutions, the media, the University, the school, the publishing world, etc. . That is why Gramsci's is a "passive revolution" and gradual.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-29f2SpADmps/X2EFcKKeGOI/AAAAAAAAWAA/5WY5-Lf-f4ggIJ8-ZfibqL3q-aqBJX9UgCPcBGAsYHg/s1615/IMG_4190.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="883" data-original-width="1615" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-29f2SpADmps/X2EFcKKeGOI/AAAAAAAAWAA/5WY5-Lf-f4ggIJ8-ZfibqL3q-aqBJX9UgCPcBGAsYHg/s320/IMG_4190.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> Of course a communist, Gramsci is the most alive thing that Marxism has. What is Marxian (the work of Karl Marx) is no longer bought by anyone serious and endowed with good intellectual faith once its central theories, such as that of labor value, have been demolished and crushed; once milked by the Frankfurt School (in the United States and in Germany) and by Sartre, Althusser, or Deleuze in France, a series of superstitions with scientific overtones: "reification," "commodity fetishism," and other quibbles. Bad vinegar gave the milking. The exception, Gramsci</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> Because he is the highest and most attractive point of the Marxist paradox: it turns out that the active agent of historical change is political and intellectual. Areas that, for Marxism, belong to the superstructure, smoke that does not change history. Well, no! If Marx turned Hegel around like a sock, Gramsci did the same with Marx. Of course, there is no paradox but contradiction. Or not even that. As Scruton, the great British conservative theorist, wants, Gramsci simply disproved Marx's theory of history, although neither he ever said it nor did his countless followers mention it. The reasons have to do with the prestige of the intellectual within the "bourgeois society" that he wants to destroy.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> And now let's look back at the Spain of today. If someone other than Jon Juaristi announced the funeral of our liberal democracy, it would be considered literary license. But he just did it on these pages. You have to take it very seriously. If it is not dead, the Spanish liberal democracy is dying. It is the result of a process started long ago in the University and the school, in the arts and in publishing houses. And, with more resistance, in the institutions. We can affirm that this process has followed the guidelines of Gramsci's Theory of Hegemony. It has followed them within a larger trend, western in scope. Locally, the path has been walked without awareness of the purpose. Except in the case of Podemos, which has successfully precipitated events by consciously following the teachings of the Italian communist.</p><p> Look if we will be kaffir, bellicose and sectarian those in favor of undoing the operation following those same guidelines, after public signaling of the precise mechanisms used, that in reality we are recognizing the undeniable effectiveness of Antonio Gramsci's ideas.</p><p><br /></p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-90418940501002998472020-09-10T00:25:00.001-07:002020-09-10T00:25:15.992-07:00Kamala Harris the Antivaxxer<p>As it turns out, Kamala Harris isn't satisfied with the results of the Democrats' riot and vandalism campaign. Now she wants to undermine public health by sowing distrust in the Wuhan virus vaccine...</p><p><br /></p><blockquote style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; caret-color: rgb(45, 45, 45); color: #2d2d2d; font-family: Assistant-Regular, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><p>DANA BASH: As you know, President Trump has promised a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year or maybe sooner. Would you trust that vaccine?</p><p>HARRIS: I think that we have learned since this pandemic started, but really before that, that there’s very little that we can trust that can comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth. From the beginning of this pandemic, he has called it a hoax. He has muzzled the public health experts. He has minimized the seriousness of it. He has created false expectations for the American people and American families, even though, if he had listened to the scientists and the experts, he would have understood the gravity of it and the power that he, as president of the United States, has to actually save lives. And none of those were his priorities. His priority was to do whatever he thought was politically expedient. And so, no, I would not trust his word. I would trust the word of public health experts and scientists, but not Donald Trump.</p><p>BASH: But do you trust that, in the situation where we’re in now, that the public health experts and the scientists will get the last word on the efficacy of a vaccine?</p><p>HARRIS: <strong>If past is prologue, that they will not, that will be muzzled, they will be suppressed, they will be sidelined, because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he has been a leader on this issue, when he has not.</strong></p><p>BASH: So, let’s just say there is a vaccine that is approved and even distributed before the election. Would you get it?</p><p>HARRIS: Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about.</p></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6B7x8luGwHc/X1nU0Njrl2I/AAAAAAAAV4k/Vkbdj2PB4YsCjwOdc_CQgzrfvMrp_kcIgCPcBGAsYHg/s422/IMG_4020.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="422" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6B7x8luGwHc/X1nU0Njrl2I/AAAAAAAAV4k/Vkbdj2PB4YsCjwOdc_CQgzrfvMrp_kcIgCPcBGAsYHg/s320/IMG_4020.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /></p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-22903664226311875062020-09-05T03:12:00.001-07:002020-09-05T03:12:24.755-07:00November 2020 US elections <p> I will be voting Republican. I understand the Democrats' identitarian (aka racist) ideology classifies me as "person of color" (POC), which entitles me to privileges, and, if the Democrat Green New Deal gets passed, I will benefit from reparations paid by pale skinned male adults between 18 and 65 (go read House Resolution 109 and you will find this included in the text, although it's worded in a subtle fashion). So even though I will benefit from those handouts, things look grimmer for my grandchildren, because my family is integrated into US society quite well, and some of them are too pale skinned and too Texas Bible belt to sell themselves as POC. So they will become part of the abused and discriminated against population because their skin is too pale, and they will suffer all sorts of indignities because supposedly they were born privileged and are racists. And I definitely don't want that future for them. </p><p>Then there's foreign policy. Trump has performed much better than previous presidents, avoided getting soldiers into stupid wars, and is trying to disengage from foreign entanglements. This gets me on a personal level because I have a grandson in the military and he already served in South Korea and the Middle East, and I hate the idea that a Democrat like Obama or a neocon Republican like Bush will make more mistakes. Obama in particular made many serious mistakes, such as helping Libya become a failed state, igniting civil wars in Iraq and Syria, wrecking relations with Russia by encouraging Ukraine to make moves to join the EU and eventually NATO, looking the other way as the Chinese began imperial expansion, and throwing the Cuban and Venezuelan people under a bus. </p><p>Trump's push to reduce unemployment and emphasize US made was wise, as shown by the inability to respond to the pandemic properly because so much is imported from abroad. He made a mistake listening to WHO and Fauci wgen they said wearing masks didn't help the general population, but he has done very well accelerating the use of medicines and palliatives such as convalescent plasma. And the super fast vaccine development would never have been possible with a Clinton or a Biden in charge. </p><p>I dont like Trump's big mouth, he tweets too much BS, probably because he's an amateur and not a politician, and he has taken a lot of time to learn to pick decent secretaries and advisors, but he's settling down, and his team is gradually improving to a B+. </p><p>On the other hand his firm stance against riots and vandalism are a huge plus versus the Democrats, who in many cases are encouraging it. The Democrats' kneeling and the pro BLM song and dance at their convention are nauseating. I have photos of BLM leader and cofounder Opal Tometi with Maduro and wearing a Venezuelan government uniform vest and ID tag. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HYkb1aNcs3s/X1NkVEcgAlI/AAAAAAAAVwI/M6daEopBH-wf-NR1nOG4k5ScXQIuqIaZwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/7C622DF2-07EB-4903-9878-7E5139701B02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HYkb1aNcs3s/X1NkVEcgAlI/AAAAAAAAVwI/M6daEopBH-wf-NR1nOG4k5ScXQIuqIaZwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/7C622DF2-07EB-4903-9878-7E5139701B02.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>We know BLM are self declared Marxists, and their ideology is destructive if not downright evil. So my advice to family and friends is to vote GOP across the board, because a political party that encourages BLM is going to take the US into a very dark period. </p><p>I want to mention that to me some Democrats have gone over the line defending late term abortions, which I see as putting babies in a large blender and turning the ON button. And I despise their emerging worship of science, which they use to justify skipping over common sense, engineering and economics. </p><p>And that's all I have to say about this topic. </p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-50303270004531864222020-09-03T00:20:00.003-07:002020-09-03T01:57:28.755-07:00Wuhan virus convalescent patient plasma is a cure<p>This is the Google translation of an article in ABC, a Spanish newspaper. ABC has adopted a very focused anti Trump editorial line, therefore its articles always include a fuzzy or subtle attack against anything Trump may have done or said. ABC is read by a large Hispanic audience in the US, therefore the anti Trump slant is a clear attempt to influence US elections. </p><p>The bottom line of the article, if we strip away the bullshit, is that Wuhan hospitalized patients treated with the blood plasma from recovering or recovered patients don't die. The key is to give them the plasma during the first week after the onset of symptoms. </p><p>Article follows: </p><p>"It is not conclusive yet, but the plasma of those of the patients recovered from Covid could be a good ally to avoid deaths and admissions to ICUs. The first clinical trial, carried out in 20 hospitals and blood transfusion centers throughout Spain, reveals encouraging results for the treatment of the pandemic. Transfusing the blood with the antibodies of convalescent people who have overcome the virus could slow the cascading worsening of the sick, the researchers conclude.</p><p> The study, coordinated by the Puerta de Hierro Majadahonda Hospital in Madrid, offers a small but revealing sample of 81 patients during the first wave of the virus. At random, half were given plasma plus a standard treatment (remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, dexamethasone ...) and the rest (the control group) medication without plasma. All were treated with a single dose of plasma and received medical aids for respiratory support. Six of the 43 patients in the control group - who did not receive the transfusion with the antibodies - worsened, needed to be admitted to the intensive care unit and received assisted respiration. Fourteen percent died, but <b>none of the 38 patients treated with plasma lost their lives. The survival rate of these patients was one hundred percent.</b></p><p> Works in the early stage</p><p> “We believe that the therapy has worked because we treat our patients in an early stage of the disease, when they had just been hospitalized and it had only been 7-8 days since the onset of the first symptoms. At that time, there is a viral peak, but the disease has not yet triggered an inflammatory storm. The plasma provides new antibodies that reinforce the immune system and help the patient to fight against the infection ", explains Rafael Duarte, coordinator of the Spanish study together with the researcher Cristina Avendaño.</p><p> Duarte's analysis agrees with the results of two other studies conducted in China and the Netherlands, which included hospitalized patients with more severe forms of Covid-19, some admitted to ICUs. In both studies, the conclusion is different from the Spanish study. Plasma was not helpful, probably because the patients treated were more severe cases in which transfusions did not appear to be the best option.</p><p> Who benefits?</p><p>Who can benefit from transfusions, at what time, at what age or with what complication of Covid, are questions that still have no answer. Spanish research wants to answer them in a new phase of the study that will include more patients.</p><p> The results of the Spanish studies will be added to an international scientific initiative that aims to add several clinical trials, "like the pieces of a great puzzle," says Duarte. Only then can it be offered as a non-experimental treatment, he says, referring to the accelerated approval that the United States has already done. "Now the available scientific evidence does not advise it, although the United States Drug Administration may have information that is not in the public domain," he says. If it worked, there would be an apparently safe and inexpensive treatment that would not depend on the production of the pharmaceutical industry in the absence of other alternatives. And most importantly, capable of saving lives.</p><p>link <a href="https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-transfusiones-plasma-evitan-ingresos-y-muertes-202009030132_noticia.html" target="_blank">https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-transfusiones-plasma-evitan-ingresos-y-muertes-202009030132_noticia.html</a></p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-6278123182755653942020-08-27T01:36:00.000-07:002020-08-27T01:36:54.152-07:00Editorial from ABC: Spain's Socialist Government Sucks Big Time <p>This is a translation into English of today's editorial in ABC, a Spanish newspaper. The Spanish original is below. </p><p>The following is a short context: Spain has had the highest number of Wuhan virus deaths in the world per million inhabitants. </p><p>The main reason was the government decision to ignore the epidemic until AFTER the March 8 feminist March, which was supposed to coincide with a new Feminist Law introduced by the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero. Montero happens to be Pablo Iglesias' common law wife, with whom she has three children. Her previous labor experience was as supermarket cashier, and member of Parlament, a job she got thanks to her relationship with Iglesias. Montero's inexperience and incompetence led to the law being scuttled by opposition by other government ministers, who openly explained it was unconstitutional and had numerous errors. </p><p>So by March 8 the government had allowed the uncontrolled entry of travelers from China and Italy, including several thousand football fans who came from the Milan region, where the virus was already spreading and killing hundreds of Italians. The government also failed to stockpile medicines, masks, gloves, etc, and eventually the epidemic was overwhelming hospitals. The government response was a national state of alarm, and orders for the population to stay home. This was continued for over two months, reduced the infections and deaths. It also destroyed the economy, and today Spain has the highest unemployment in Europe, over 20%. </p><p>Here's the latest infections per million graph. It's important to understand the number of tests per million in Spain gas been very low, especially in March through June. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QRPG8W65OV8/X0dwK9pe5vI/AAAAAAAAViU/3VIg9ksz3lcFP4EC1hpA85j3MmwPz5RUQCPcBGAsYHg/s1641/IMG_4101.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="884" data-original-width="1641" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QRPG8W65OV8/X0dwK9pe5vI/AAAAAAAAViU/3VIg9ksz3lcFP4EC1hpA85j3MmwPz5RUQCPcBGAsYHg/s640/IMG_4101.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In late June, they opened with little controls, and the result has been another spike in infections. The President, Sanchez, decided to take his August vacations as the infections and deaths climbed. Last weekend he returned from vacation, and yesterday gave a speech declaring the central government wasn't going to take action, that it was up to each Autonomous Region (similar to a US state) to ask for a State of Alarm and decide what to do. The argument made by legal scholars is that such a response is irrational and it's better to use a Public Health Emergency law passed in 1986. So as of right now everything is up in the air.</p><p>The translated text follows. The Spanish original is below: </p><p>" The accumulation of trifles with which Pedro Sánchez presented himself to public opinion after his vacation, and only after a general climate of unfavorable public opinion due to his indolence and lack of leadership in the face of the pandemic, shows to what extent the inactivity of the Government it is intoxicating everything. At the gates of the classic restart of the political course, the Government is paralyzed and blocked. It only emits its well-known propaganda and demagoguery signals, and its capacity to unload responsibilities on others, in this case the autonomies, is scandalous. Spain has a passive and disappeared government, and only the lie motivates it to continue governing.</p><p><br /></p><p> Ministers as representative of "sanchismo" as Carmen Calvo or José Luis Ábalos are absent, and they only resurface from time to time to promote revenge political projects that are not a priority against the crisis that is devastating Spain. Margarita Robles emerges as the discordant minister, Irene Montero, as a star of the gossip magazines, and Alberto Garzón, unpublished in a Consumer portfolio that should never have ceased to be a mere general direction, only speaks to attack the constitutional system. The Minister of Justice, failed in any management, only competes with Fernando Grande-Marlaska, burned since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis for his sectarianism and inability to manage such a relevant department. In Universities, Manuel Castells does not seem to know yet that he is a minister and the rectors feel abandoned by him. "He is leaving us alone in the return to class", they affirm, and demand a protocol that updates the last one, communicated three months ago. Rutilating toll charges like Darias or González Laya are irrelevant for all intents and purposes. In Tourism, there is no minister in Europe as disoriented as Maroto, and in Finance or Economy, Montero and Calviño continue to manipulate the data to glimpse non-existent green shoots. In Science, Duque is a perfect stranger in an unsustainable situation, and in Labor, Díaz has made deception his day to day ... The evaluation of each portfolio is summarized in an absurdity that forces one to ask what the Prime Minister needs more for. of a score of ministers in full recession.</p><p> Sánchez knowingly lies, and despite this, society does not seem capable of reacting. The fear of a new tragic phase of the pandemic is becoming noticeable. Regarding the economic collapse, words are unnecessary and it is enough for each Spaniard to feel his pocket. But in this climate, Sánchez still smiles with the arrogance of those who continue to boast of leading a long legislature instead of assuming that Spain is dying under his command."</p><p>Original text: </p><p>"<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #555555; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.023em;">El cúmulo de naderías con las que Pedro Sánchez se presentó a la opinión pública después de sus vacaciones, y solo tras un clima general de opinión pública desfavorable por su indolencia y falta de liderazgo frente a la pandemia, demuestra hasta qué punto la inactividad del Gobierno está intoxicándolo todo. A las puertas del clásico reinicio del curso político, el Gobierno está paralizado y bloqueado. Solo emite sus conocidas señales de propaganda y demagogia, y resulta escandalosa su capacidad para descargar responsabilidades en otros, en este caso las autonomías. España tiene un Gobierno pasivo y desaparecido, y solo la mentira le motiva para seguir gobernando.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-position: 0px 0px; border: 0px; color: #555555; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.023em; line-height: 1.48; margin: 0px 0px 25px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ministros tan representativos del «sanchismo» como Carmen Calvo o José Luis Ábalos están ausentes, y solo resurgen de vez en vez para promover proyectos políticos revanchistas que no son una prioridad contra la crisis que está asolando a España. Margarita Robles emerge como la ministra discordante, Irene Montero, como estrella de las revistas del corazón, y Alberto Garzón, inédito en una cartera de Consumo que jamás debió de dejar de ser una mera dirección general, solo habla para arremeter contra el sistema constitucional. El ministro de Justicia, fallido en cualquier gestión, solo compite con Fernando Grande-Marlaska, quemado desde el inicio de la crisis del coronavirus por su sectarismo e incapacidad para gestionar un departamento tan relevante. En Universidades, Manuel Castells no parece saber aún que es ministro y los rectores se siente por él abandonados. «Nos está dejando solos en la vuelta a clase», afirman, y reclaman un protocolo que actualice el último, comunicado hace tres meses. Rutilantes cargos de cuota como Darias o González Laya son irrelevantes a todos los efectos. En Turismo, no hay en Europa una ministra tan desorientada como Maroto, y en Hacienda o Economía, Montero y Calviño siguen manipulando los datos para atisbar brotes verdes inexistentes. En Ciencia, Duque es un perfecto desconocido en situación insostenible, y en Trabajo, Díaz ha hecho del engaño su día a día... La evaluación de cada cartera se resume en un despropósito que obliga a preguntarse para qué necesita el presidente del Gobierno más de una veintena de ministros en plena recesión. </p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-position: 0px 0px; border: 0px; color: #555555; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.023em; line-height: 1.48; margin: 0px 0px 25px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sánchez miente a sabiendas, y pese a ello la sociedad no parece capaz de reaccionar. El miedo a una nueva fase trágica de la pandemia empieza a ser notable. Respecto al desplome económico, sobran las palabras y basta con que cada español se palpe el bolsillo. Pero en este clima, Sánchez aún sonríe con la prepotencia de quien sigue presumiendo de liderar una legislatura larga en lugar de asumir que España agoniza bajo su mando."</p>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-61884801658307180852020-07-09T14:52:00.001-07:002020-07-09T14:52:42.595-07:00Insult and Intimidation <div style="text-align: justify;">
A while ago I heard from Diaz Villanueva something about the use of intimidation and insult, and I thought that in the roll of climate change things have already reached that level. And that of course is an extension of the left's hold on institutions of modern society that it should never have had. And why am I writing this? Because the record on the left in the last 100 years has been awful..</div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">And where am I going? The fact is that insult and intimidation are our daily bread, and that of course will not allow a reasonable debate to find answers that make sense. For my part, I have realized that I am old, and that it is not really worth fighting in this area, although I know that what they are proposing will go very wrong.</span><br />
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So I leave them to continue living and, in a few decades, when they understand why they live in such miserable conditions, and if it is possible to speak freely (something that I doubt, because this has gone to hell and civilization is going towards a 1984 more horrible than Orwell imagined) ... then try to teach young people that they must free themselves and never repeat the stupid things we did in the first decades of the 21st century.</div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-19947665358497072622020-06-17T05:06:00.002-07:002020-06-17T05:06:48.618-07:00A Scientist needs your help <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="galileo-ap-layout-editor" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; color: black; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleTallBody; font-size: 21px; min-width: 100%; table-layout: fixed; width: 100%px;"><tbody>
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<span style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 22px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">A Scientist Needs Your Help (from Quillette.com)</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a Soviet geneticist, botanist and agronomist, and collector of one of the world's largest seed banks, who was sentenced to death in July 1941 for defending scientific truths about genetics. While he escaped his death sentence, he lived the last twenty years of his life in a Soviet labour camp, disgraced and ostracised. His crime was to have criticised </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">Lamarckian inheritance--</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">the notion that changes to an organism in its lifetime can be passed on to offspring via genetics. Because Lamarckian inheritance emphasised the importance of the </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">environment </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">it was the favoured evolutionary theory among the socialists and communists of the time, and thanks to the advocacy of Trofim Lysenko, scientists who departed from this orthodoxy were shunned, persecuted, and in the case of Vavilov, sent to a gulag. When the siege of Leningrad occurred, Vavilov and a group of botanists who were holed up in a secret vault, famously chose to starve themselves before consuming their seeds, which they were preserving for the sake of humanity. While Vavilov died in obscurity, he is now recognised as one of the greatest Russian scientists of all time.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Thankfully in 2020, geneticists are not forced to conform to pseudoscientific orthodoxies, no communist dictatorship exists in the West, and nobody is at risk of being sent to a labour camp to spend decades of their life in obscurity. Lysenkoism does not prevail, and scientists accept the reality of Mendelian genetics, most of the time. Nevertheless, ideas of environmental determinism do remain surprisingly persistent. Pseudoscientific ideas that deny biological or evolutionary truths are discussed in </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">Quillette</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;"> on a weekly basis. If you are reading this now, you will be familiar with them. The most recent example we have highlighted was the “controversy” surrounding </span><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001d_V100ZcHcPKfnCq4CY2fiezKbu2Blp1RmugudBVg3HproCwPTcL_B7m5Ds3DxNKQ2fMpSHaE3ZULUq6f095JYp6dBI9MzGwy9ZI3H8DJpN8vtTIsq5wlMNXsjYjdQZt4Mu0w4mzRVDTPeaeSi9wEKaBkfbSBrJydCbotINNqJ-2pEam4kmNTfp7qbTtksWx0zUSpiPsT7dIPhXQ_t-U4qAv-SvpORppAlCzDEmvD9A-IfvR8w3q8A==&c=NfsSGeFOg_9KNItbUzMHHqoDOTr3GfhScuwG_3h200Fe8LqVrI1JAw==&ch=Dj8izjDXPiXOaZP6XWVaMqQvnk5C-2dRnTo3Zq-Cd1rKJn-imc35_g==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">JK Rowling for emphasising the reality of biological sex.</a></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Today, another scientist is being persecuted for discussing scientific truths. His name is Stephen Hsu, and he does not work in Russia, or China, but in the United States of America, at Michigan State University. He is being targeted by a Twitter mob and group of post-graduate students for his research and writing, and is being misrepresented and slandered as a “racist” and “sexist” despite condemning racism and sexism repeatedly in his public blog posts and interviews.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">You can read the case against Professor Hsu </span><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001d_V100ZcHcPKfnCq4CY2fiezKbu2Blp1RmugudBVg3HproCwPTcL_M0W4KEFyrmng2aKirGvFVrs1tuuGlYoTC5onlXHg6AGwL7eKZ8kbGggSFLiRFMrmunazehfX50SEBdwvPjuvvnjfWOAKRUF7n0vjucIxbHF&c=NfsSGeFOg_9KNItbUzMHHqoDOTr3GfhScuwG_3h200Fe8LqVrI1JAw==&ch=Dj8izjDXPiXOaZP6XWVaMqQvnk5C-2dRnTo3Zq-Cd1rKJn-imc35_g==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">here</a> <span style="color: #191919; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">(keep in mind that many of these allegations are misrepresentations and exaggerations of his work)</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;"> and Stephen's reply to the charges </span><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001d_V100ZcHcPKfnCq4CY2fiezKbu2Blp1RmugudBVg3HproCwPTcL_M0W4KEFyrmnA57QcKoVq3cAbPHCnBPvH4nNcEep1pAlGKgcf1GkzJHvrhA97WiWisrbzH5iYKkuYBVeaDWJ4EFIUV_VqwGdV_wO4Otzjvyh_g47sx21qr0XTQywBwOZjwzUvFE000xU8J7YIRTA0BxLktr-NXJk8g==&c=NfsSGeFOg_9KNItbUzMHHqoDOTr3GfhScuwG_3h200Fe8LqVrI1JAw==&ch=Dj8izjDXPiXOaZP6XWVaMqQvnk5C-2dRnTo3Zq-Cd1rKJn-imc35_g==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;"> I have been informed that Professor Hsu’s job is at risk, and that he may lose his livelihood as early as </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold;"><a dir="ltr" href="x-apple-data-detectors://2" style="font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; font-weight: inherit !important; line-height: inherit !important; text-decoration-color: rgba(128, 128, 128, 0.38);" x-apple-data-detectors-result="2" x-apple-data-detectors-type="calendar-event" x-apple-data-detectors="true">this Friday</a></span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">The mob demanding Hsu's defenestration is being led by a student named Kevin Bird, through his capacity as the President of Michigan State University’s Graduate Employee’s Union. Bird has said that he is targeting Hsu because he holds an administrative position as the Head of Research and Graduate Studies, </span><span style="color: #1d1c1d; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">yet no evidence of any bias in Hsu’s professional activities, let alone sexual or racial discrimination, has been presented, as far as I am aware. On the contrary, many women and people of colour who’ve worked with him have testified to his professional integrity.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Bird describes himself as a "democratic socialist” and can be seen on social media celebrating arson and vandalism:</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Several esteemed academics including Richard Haier and Robert Plomin have signed a counter-petition in defense of Stephen Hsu </span><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001d_V100ZcHcPKfnCq4CY2fiezKbu2Blp1RmugudBVg3HproCwPTcL_M0W4KEFyrmnD1pYv5kl6y3H370HXx-zsKt8u9ihR3raLfBabNbv_DnGbtBKlIxt7HbZx7sU4UJS3MxalqwbOB5lLs7VUJyC5NQ0hGV_dU1DsqBNBMGQksqCkOJQDgdhE5y3NLRzMjITx-0siAp4JKVZqtZekN1gc0B0POrOunbLDnWhw_OhwLQ=&c=NfsSGeFOg_9KNItbUzMHHqoDOTr3GfhScuwG_3h200Fe8LqVrI1JAw==&ch=Dj8izjDXPiXOaZP6XWVaMqQvnk5C-2dRnTo3Zq-Cd1rKJn-imc35_g==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">I am writing to you today, to ask that if </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">you </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">are an academic,</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"> </span><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001d_V100ZcHcPKfnCq4CY2fiezKbu2Blp1RmugudBVg3HproCwPTcL_M0W4KEFyrmnD1pYv5kl6y3H370HXx-zsKt8u9ihR3raLfBabNbv_DnGbtBKlIxt7HbZx7sU4UJS3MxalqwbOB5lLs7VUJyC5NQ0hGV_dU1DsqBNBMGQksqCkOJQDgdhE5y3NLRzMjITx-0siAp4JKVZqtZekN1gc0B0POrOunbLDnWhw_OhwLQ=&c=NfsSGeFOg_9KNItbUzMHHqoDOTr3GfhScuwG_3h200Fe8LqVrI1JAw==&ch=Dj8izjDXPiXOaZP6XWVaMqQvnk5C-2dRnTo3Zq-Cd1rKJn-imc35_g==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #008887; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">could you please add your name to the counter-petition</a><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">, to protect Stephen, but to also defend academic freedom and open inquiry, </span><span style="color: #1d1c1d; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">the foundational principles on which all scientific progress rests.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">--Claire Lehmann</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">Editor-in-Chief</span></div>
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Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-46985241590504241272020-06-13T02:44:00.002-07:002020-06-13T02:44:25.919-07:00Letter from a black history professor <div class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleTallBody; font-size: 21.5px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span class="s1">G. Floyd's murder is execrable but he is an example of non-discrimination. He had a scholarship to the University. He left his studies at the second year and embarked on a criminal path. He did not take advantage of the opportunities that the system provided.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Here's a letter from a black history professor, who wrote it anonymously. The letter is being posted in several sites, but soon thereafter it's erased. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Dear profs X, Y, Z</span></div>
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<span class="s1">"I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity</span></div>
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<span class="s1">of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority myth is white supremacist".</span></div>
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<span class="s1">"Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I personally don't dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn't led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices - as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you. The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called 'race hustlers': hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party's uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I condemn the manner of George Floyd's death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free. /end"</span></div>
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Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-20387536643003847312020-01-18T00:35:00.001-08:002020-01-18T00:35:14.351-08:00Comment on Climate Change and Politics <br />
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<span class="s1" style="font-style: italic;">Your comment is awaiting moderation.</span><span class="s2"> </span></div>
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<span class="s2">HAS, I researched how the IPCC named RCP8.5 their “Business as Usual” (BAU) case. As you point out, they didn’t use the term in AR5, instead they began to use the term during press conferences and presentation of AR5 contents in late 2013 and early 2014. The BAU term became the standard they used in interviews and discussions, this was picked up by the media, and almost immediately we began to see papers referring to RCP8.5 as BAU.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">This extended to training material used in universities, and to position statements written by scientific organizations in numerous countries. By 2015 almost all climate change papers referred to RCP8.5 as BAU, and this was also picked up by US government agencies during the Obama administration.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">The period 2013 to 2018 saw a significant number of comments, articles and papers explaining RCP8.5 wasn’t BAU. I myself saturated the comments sections in newspapers and blogs with repetitive remarks about this error. In my case I came to conclude RCP8.5 wasn't BAU because of tendencies we observed: fossil fuel resources were increasingly more difficult to extract, competing technology prices were dropping, and the assumptions in RCP8.5 didn’t make sense (I’m not going to get into it here, but do remember the RCPs were scenarios prepared to meet an arbitrary IPCC request: they wanted four cases with four forcings, and the team preparing RCP8.5 had to include absurd system behavior to reach the 8.5 watts per m2).</span></div>
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<span class="s2">We can’t blame the RCP8.5 authors because they were asked to deliver the target forcing. But I think a case can be made to accuse IPCC principals of scientific fraud for: 1. using the BAU term for RCP8.5 on a consistent basis, and 2. Failing to inform the scientific community and decision makers that RCP8.5 wasn’t really BAU.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">I think we can also consider the ongoing (but increasingly feeble) defense of RCP8.5 as BAU without a corresponding correction by the IPCC as a sign that it can be considered a political organization with clear political goals, no regard for the quality of its products or their adequate use by the scientific community, and lacking in ethics to such an extent that it deserves to be shut down and replaced by a new organization outside of the UN structure.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">The problems we see with the RCP8.5 use are a symptom of a very serious disease which has pervaded this field for decades, a disease which is now entering the realm of criminal behavior, because fake science is used to justify trillions of dollars in spending which are going to bring hefty profits to certain actors, and give geopolitical advantages to nations such as China and Russia (because they aren’t about to commit economic suicide cutting CO2 emissions to zero).</span></div>
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<span class="s2">Criminal behavior can also be seen in the use of exaggerated alarmism to scare children, and put teenagers on the street asking for political changes (which conveniently demand the end of capitalism and parrot Neomarxist lines about climate justice, the white patriarchate, and etc). </span></div>
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<span class="s2">Scaring and traumatizing children using false information is a criminal act, and such abuse ought to stop. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But we already know that radical political movements will stop at nothing, and unfortunately the climate change problem is now a weapon used by Neomarxist radicals as a means to take over.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">And when we combine the economic harm they will cause with their repressive and social engineering methods, we may be about to see the West fall in the hands of a political faction which may eventually rival Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Chavez when it comes to its innate evil nature.</span></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-8352330559171636512019-08-28T01:42:00.001-07:002019-08-28T01:42:11.888-07:00Brazil Fires email by Hugo Fernando Maia Milan<div class="western" style="text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: small;">I just wrote a post about it (</span><a href="https://inobio-manera.fcav.unesp.br/index.php/2019/08/28/looking-at-the-data-of-the-amazon-rainforest-burning/" style="color: #005699; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" title="https://inobio-manera.fcav.unesp.br/index.php/2019/08/28/looking-at-the-data-of-the-amazon-rainforest-burning/">inobio-manera.fcav.unesp.br/index.php/2019/08/28/...</a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: small;">). I am including it here with more details. Hope it helps!</span></div>
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I am originally from the Amazon rainforest region (I grew up in the state of Rondônia). Brazilians strongly believe we should preserve the forest but, at the same time, bring economic development.</div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;"><b>Before I dive-in into this discussion, I would like to clarify some common misconceptions:</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">a) I agree with Dallas Weaver, most of the O2 produced by the Amazon rainforest is consumed by the forest itself, as demonstrated </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">by</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;"> previous research (</span></span><span color="#000080" style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/35002062" style="color: #005699;" title="https://www.nature.com/articles/35002062"><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">https://www.nature.com/articles/35002062</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">, </span></span><span color="#000080" style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12957" style="color: #005699;" title="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12957"><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12957</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">). </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">The liquid amount of O2 production from the Amazon </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">rainforest</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">is almost zero. We should revise the common misconception that the Amazon is the lung of the world. </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">The main source of global </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">liquid </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">O2 are the blue algae in the ocean, </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">which might be strongly affected by the radioactive waste (mostly from Nuclear Power Plants) dumped in the oceans by developed countries in the period from 1946 to 1993 (</span></span><a href="http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-a2/" style="color: #005699;" title="http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-a2/"><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-a2/</span></span></a><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">).</span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">b) I agree with Olger Linares. Most developed countries, which had almost completely deforested their territory, focus on slowing down developing countries. Instead of taking more impactful initiatives, such as </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">reforesting their territory or </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">fostering sustainable development, they invest on promoting farming in their countries and on fighting against any development of the developing countries. For instance, see the campaign "Farms here, forest there" (</span></span><span color="#000080" style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://assets.usw.org/our-union/pulp-paper-forestry/farms-here-forests-there-report-5-26-10.pdf" style="color: #005699;" title="http://assets.usw.org/our-union/pulp-paper-forestry/farms-here-forests-there-report-5-26-10.pdf"><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">http://assets.usw.org/our-union/pulp-paper-forestry/farms-here-forests-there-report-5-26-10.pdf</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">) supported by the American National Farmers Union.</span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">c) As I discuss below, the Federal Government has strict laws regarding the protection of the ALL Brazilian forests. Burning is illegal in Brazil since 1998 (law<span color="#222222" style="color: #222222;"> 9.605/1998</span><span color="#222222" style="color: #222222;">)</span>. In addition, President Jair Bolsonaro is doing everything under his power to protect the forest, even sending military forces to fight against illegal burning of the forest and to fight wildfires. This is the first year of his term and he is the ONLY president who demonstrated attitude towards sustainable developing the Amazon region and in protecting the forest. One curious fact is that several NGOs are seen in the Amazon rainforest region. In this region, people live sustainable with a strong connection with the forest. Curious enough is why we see so much NGOs in such an region with so much natural richness and not in the poorest Northeastern parts of Brazil. The Northeastern is marked by strong droughts but with rich underground water vessels. The potential impact of the NGOs on reducing inequality and improving life quality in the Northeastern is huge.</span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">d) </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">What we see are wildfires or small illegal fires. In total, the burning was estimated to be around 200 km2 (a 0.0036% of the total 5,500,000 km2 of Amazon rainforest region; </span></span><a href="https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/08/23/politica/1566513349_716543.html" style="color: #005699;" title="https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/08/23/politica/1566513349_716543.html">brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/08/23/politica/...</a>, <span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest" style="color: #005699;" title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest</a>). </span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">The huge increase in fire we see in the media is on the number of fires, not in the burned area. In comparison, in 2018, the wildfire in California (which accounted for 21% of all territory burned in the United States; <a href="https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-california-fires-record-report-20190309-story.html" style="color: #005699;" title="https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-california-fires-record-report-20190309-story.html">www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...</a>) was ~40 times bigger (7664 km2; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_wildfires" style="color: #005699;" title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_wildfires">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_wildfires</a>) and burned 5.74% of the California </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">Forest </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">(133,546 km2, roughly 2.4% of the size of the Amazon rainforest region; <a href="https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/" style="color: #005699;" title="https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/">ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests</a>). </span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">Proportionally, the wildfires in California were 1,594 bigger than what we see now in the Amazon rainforest region. Comparatively, President Bolsonaro is sending an addition 43 thousand military people to protect the Amazon </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">(<a href="https://www.poder360.com.br/brasil/forcas-armadas-enviam-avioes-e-43-mil-militares-para-a-amazonia/" style="color: #005699;" title="https://www.poder360.com.br/brasil/forcas-armadas-enviam-avioes-e-43-mil-militares-para-a-amazonia/">www.poder360.com.br/brasil/...</a>)</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">. The numbers never lie.</span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">e) Not only President Bolsonaro wants to develop the Amazon, Brazilians want it as well. Differently from what we see in the news, Brazilians are and want to continue developing the region sustainably (something that would not sell as many news papers as saying that the President wants the forest down).</span></span></div>
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<span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">f) Mart Malakoff wrote a very biased comment, and I felt extremely offended by it. Brazilians (as everyone) deserve to be respected. First, he/she should revise his/her data on Brazilian scientific production-we do more than only Theoretical Physics (which is an important research field) and it was not one or another foreigner who were the most prominent Brazilian Scientist (among the list of prominent Brazilian Scientists, we find important Brazilian scientists in all fields of science, such as Carlos Chagas, Cesar Lattes, José Bassani, Baccari Jr., Santos Dumont, Roberto da Silva Gomes, Marcelo Gleiser, and Oswaldo Cruz). </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">In addition, accordingly to Scimago Journal & Country Rank, Brazil ranks top 15th in the production of scientific papers (</span></span><a href="https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?order=it&ord=desc" style="color: #005699;" title="https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?order=it&ord=desc"><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?order=it&ord=desc</span></span></a><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">)</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">. Second, Brazil is raceless. In Brazil, neighborhoods are not distinguished by black, white, or latino neighborhoods, as happen in </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">other</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;"> countries. Third, soybean growth </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">for biofuel (or oil) </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">is not significant in the Amazon rainforest region but in other parts of the country. Please, revise your data on where our oil independence comes from. Forth, when the rate of homicide per year is calculate per 100,00</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">0</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;"> inhabitants, you will find out that Brazil is not at the top. You will find countries such as El Salvador and South Africa </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate" style="color: #005699;" title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...</a>)</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">. Brazil is, however, working towards reducing its homicide rate </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">and, since President Bolsonaro inauguration, homicide rate was observed to decreased by 25-60% </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">(<a href="https://g1.globo.com/monitor-da-violencia/noticia/2019/04/18/brasil-registra-queda-de-25percent-nos-assassinatos-nos-dois-primeiros-meses-do-ano.ghtml" style="color: #005699;" title="https://g1.globo.com/monitor-da-violencia/noticia/2019/04/18/brasil-registra-queda-de-25percent-nos-assassinatos-nos-dois-primeiros-meses-do-ano.ghtml">g1.globo.com/monitor-da-violencia/noticia/2019/04/18/...</a>)</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">! It is worth mentioning that our high homicide rate are found in big cities and related to drug dealers. Brazil is a huge country, with an immense 16.885 km of border with 10 countries (including Venezuela; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_Brazil" style="color: #005699;" title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_Brazil">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_Brazil</a>). Some of the countries we make border with are known by their drug production. Even though we constantly fight to protect our borders, drug smugglers end up finding their ways to the Consuming countries through Brazil, leading to a high violence index </span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">(paraphrasing the butterfly effect of the chaos theory: the use of an illegal substance overseas kills thousands over here)</span></span><span face="Times New Roman, serif" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span size="3" style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-78457255588774667622019-08-27T09:38:00.000-07:002019-08-27T09:38:20.232-07:00Referendum on the creation of a Police Force <div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #454545; font-family: ".SFUIText";">Yesterday I wrote a "Proposal: Conduct a referendum of Venezuelans abroad to indicate whether they support the creation of a police force and call for international assistance invoking the TIAR." Then sent it to a few friends to see if they liked it. The first answer I received is copied below: </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">Fernando,</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">Proposing the referendum to see if Venezuelan exiles want to support creating a police force is a good initiative, but… <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Venezuelans want high level jobs ... <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>that cause is lost, because the politicians and citizens want jobs. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">Look, between January and May I was working full on the country's recovery program and more than half of the time was spent listening to how the "experts" created arguments to justify being given the X or Y position. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">Some shamelessly told me to put them in a position such that they could create a service company and from that position give them contracts and then leave. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>These were not chavistas, they were fuck ex-PDVSA employees! </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">Also when I raised the need to create an armed force in exile and prepare us to recover the country, no one responded, all of them want Trump to send troops, pay with US dead, free the country, and give them to them so that they can share all the important jobs. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They tell me that they are non-military and that they are more valuable thinking about the recovery… </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">Anyway, in my opinion, based on the stupidities I see, Venezuela is going to reach a point of co-habitation where the Chavistas continue <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>to hold power and the opposition will have one or another position. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";">And US sanctions are going to stay there, because the USA wants to neutralize a competitor in the commodities market. I personally thank you for your concern for Venezuela, but that country has people who are comfortable in this terrible conditions and will not react!</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-family: ".SFUIText";"> A hug!</span></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-80977094449254263632019-06-07T08:19:00.001-07:002019-06-07T08:19:49.213-07:00Spanish socialist teacher suggests castrating boys<div style="text-align: justify;">
A socialist party leader who belongs to the City Council of Puerto del Rosario (Fuerteventura), Aurelia Vera Rodriguez, said in one of her classes - she is a language teacher at the middle school Santiago de Alcalá in that town - that "children have to be castrated at birth". The students of 4th of ESO were stunned by the postulates of their teacher.</div>
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During one of her classes to children between 14 and 15 years old, Vera, who just won re-election om May 26th, addresses the boys in her class, telling them that "they cut you the penis and nothing happens to you", that we have to "make men stop governing, so that they give power to us. Will they voluntarily do it? No. We have to resort to selective castration. "</div>
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This teacher has been denounced of teaching abusive feminist doctrine during her classes. Fortunately one of the students recorded her, and this recording has been presented as proof. The official complaint has been filed by Francisco de Asís Serrano Castro, deputy and president of the Vox parliamentary group in Andalusia.</div>
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Translated and summarized from </div>
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<a href="https://okdiario.com/espana/concejal-del-psoe-canarias-sus-alumnos-eso-ninos-hay-que-castrarlos-nacer-4211669">https://okdiario.com/espana/concejal-del-psoe-canarias-sus-alumnos-eso-ninos-hay-que-castrarlos-nacer-4211669</a></div>
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The recording was played in Antena 3 here </div>
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<a href="https://www.antena3.com/noticias/espana/profesora-concejal-psoe-alumnos-ninos-castrarlos-video_201906065cf9169c0cf2414740a30e4c.html">https://www.antena3.com/noticias/espana/profesora-concejal-psoe-alumnos-ninos-castrarlos-video_201906065cf9169c0cf2414740a30e4c.html</a></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-91400163771392594982019-03-30T04:34:00.000-07:002019-03-30T04:34:10.280-07:00The IPCC 1.5 degree report summary authors <div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The IPCC released a report which included a "Summary for Policy Makers" titled "Global warming of 1.5 C". This report was prepared to justify the Paris Meeting "aspiration" to limit the world's average temperature increase to 1.5degrees C. This aspiration seems to have been pulled out of the hat during the meeting, but now it seems to be the politically correct target. A target that's impossible to achieve. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I should point out I consider the IPCC approach, to consolidate the content of numerous papers into one report, without doing much original work to support their conclusions and prescriptions, to be seriously flawed. The IPCC and the politicians behind it intend its content to be used to justify policies which would cost $ trillions (10^12), are impractical, have no sound engineering, project feasibility or schedule, or economics analysis to back them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In other words, they intend to use a nearly religious worship of "wise scientists" who have absolutely no idea of what it costs to get things done, nor know how to choose the best alternatives, to drive the developed world (excluding China and Russia who aren't about to participate in these lemmings jump over the cliff policies) into adopting what's evidently mad hatter policies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was curious to see who was responsible for the Summary for Policy Makers, so I took a few hours to research their backgrounds. Summarizing, they are all climate scientists, some with a lot of experience, with a staff of very young recent graduates. The most powerful positions are held by Europeans, men from China, India, and Africa, and a South African (Debra Roberts) whose career has been hard to descipher, listed as "local government practitioner-scientist". </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The only one exposed to economics modeling is the Indian fellow, who has experience in dynamic models which ought to include economics modules. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The summary of the "Summary for Policy Makers" most relevant participants follows: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Valerie Masson-Delmotte</span> is a French climate scientists and Research Director at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Her doctoral thesis was "Climate simulation of the Holocene means using general circulation models of the atmosphere; Impacts of parameterization”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After her PhD, Masson-Delmotte began working as a researcher at the the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences. She became head of a paleoclimate group in 2010, head of a research group in 1998, and completed her habilitation in 2004. Since 2008, she has been the Research Director/Senior Scientist at CEA. Her research includes water vapour monitoring and combines past climate variability (ice cores, tree rings) with simulations, to address current climate models.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Panmao Zhai</span> has in B. S. degree in Climatology, Nanjing University, and M. S. degree in Physical climatology, Nanjing University. He is a Research professor in the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, the largest multi-disciplinary and comprehensive research institution on atmospheric sciences in China. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He has more than 30-years working experience in climate change and variability studies. He has published more than 100 papers in Chinese and English. Leads a group of meteorologists, studying the formation mechanism and prediction method for persistent extreme events in China.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hans-Otto Pörtner</span> is a German ecologist and climate researcher. He heads the Department of Integrative Ecophysiology at the Alfred Wegener Institute. He received his doctorate in 1983 at the Westphalian Wilhelms University and the Heinrich Heine University in Zoology. Since 2005, Pörtner has been a professor at the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Bremen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His work includes the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and hypoxia on marine animals and ecosystems, with a focus on the links between ecological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms that limit tolerance and shape biogeography and ecosystem functions. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debra Roberts</span>. PhD in Urban Biogeography at the (then) University of Natal, South Africa, Debra Roberts initially pursued a career as a researcher. Currently Head of the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit in eThekwini Municipality in South Africa. She is described as "A local government practitioner-scientist with over 30 years experience in addressing and documenting urban climate change adaptation and biodiversity planning and management in Durban, South Africa."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">James Skea</span> is a Scottish academic, PhD in Physics at Cavendish Laboratory in 1979. Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London's Centre for Environmental Policy, and a member of the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the British government's Committee on Climate Change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Priyadarshi Shukla</span>, Distinguished Professor, Amrut Mody School of Management and Chair, Global Centre for Environment and Energy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">PhD (Stanford University). Area of study: Management Science and Engineering. Areas of interest: Energy Efficiency, Energy-Environment Modelling, Renewable Technologies, Decentralized Planning, Integrated Assessment Modelling and Climate Change Policy Analysis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Anna Pirani</span> ICPO Executive Deputy Director (?) at Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). Coordinates development of ocean computer models. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Wilfran Moufouma-Okia</span> PhD in Mechanics of geophysical</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">environments, Polytechnic national institute (INP), Grenoble, France. He worked a decade for the UK Met Office Hadley Centre as “Senior regional climate modelling scientist” – leading the development, configuration, evaluation and dissemination worldwide of spatially detailed weather and climate prediction systems. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sarah Connors</span> PhD Atmospheric Chemistry University of Cambridge, Centre for Atmospheric Science. Graduated in 2015. Thesis title: "Development of a method for estimating methane emissions at high resolution". </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sarah has been a Science Officer at the WGI TSU since January 2017, working on both the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and the Special Report on Climate Change and Land, as well as the main WGI report. Her main activities include coordination of the Frequently Asked Questions (link to SR1.5°C FAQs?) and the Chapter Scientists for SR1.5°C and the forthcoming IPCC AR6 report.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tom Maycock</span> holds a Bachelor’s Degree with a double major in Physics and English Literature from Northwestern University. He earned a Master of Liberal Arts and Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in December 2018.</span></div>
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Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-81316842594427437472019-03-27T04:35:00.001-07:002019-03-27T04:35:15.475-07:00Modern Socialism, Communism and Fascism.<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="direction: ltr; font-size: 12pt; unicode-bidi: embed;">It's simple: a rich person becomes rich because he or she has something others want. Oprah Winfrey and Leonardo di Caprio provide entertainment, Elon Musk provides rocketry, and Bezos delivers Chinese products at home.</span></div>
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<span style="direction: ltr; font-size: 12pt; unicode-bidi: embed;">On the other hand Socialists, Fascists, Communists build systems with centralized controls which stifle ingenuity and abuse human rights. It should be noted that many neomarxists who call themselves "socialists" are closer to fascism, because they only seek partial government ownership of the means of production, use government regulation and industrial policy to direct a command economy. </span></div>
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<span style="direction: ltr; font-size: 12pt; unicode-bidi: embed;">China is an example of an evolving fascist regime, which combines some Marxist ideology with a capitalist system with clear fascist characteristics. </span></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-6919216420472766142019-03-22T03:04:00.000-07:002019-03-22T03:04:27.073-07:00March 2019: Venezuela no longer exports oil to the US <div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Garamond, Baskerville, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; opacity: 1; text-align: justify; transition: opacity 1s, max-height 0s;">
Venezuela exports to the US dropped to zero. The oil is being purchased by Indians and Chinese, and some Russian traders. Production dropped a lot during the mega black out. </div>
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Maduro keeps trying to incite Trump to intervene without international backing, but this is known to be Castro’s plan to interfere in US elections by getting Trump into an occupation where Cuban agents can use terrorism to cause US casualties. Castro’s idea is to get a radical Democrat like Sanders elected, this in turn would lead to US withdrawal, and of course all sorts of concessions or even economic aid to the Castro dictatorship. </div>
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Unfortunately the Venezuelan people are caught in this struggle between US marxists aided by Castro and US Republicans. Thus Trump has to use diplomacy to get Maduro isolated even more, first at the OAS, then at the UN. And meanwhile the level of savagery by the Maduro regime climbs as it seeks to goad the US into an attack. </div>
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Unfortunately I’m not getting much traction with my suggestion to create a 20 thousand strong Venezuelan police force recruited from the 4 million in the Diaspora, who can take a small port and airport with other nations’ naval and air support, and create the conditions for massive defections from the military, who would eliminate the Cubans embedded in their units, move to the liberated area, reorganize, and gradually expand the territory controlled by Guaidó. This is the best option for the Venezuelan people to free themselves, and cut off the Cuban tentacle.</div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-35580456453466424142019-03-22T01:08:00.000-07:002019-03-22T01:08:51.862-07:00How to discriminate against students of a certain race<div style="text-align: justify;">
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So you seem to argue that it's "unfair" when the university population doesn't mimic the "racial distribution" of the general population, and as a good democrat you wish to introduce a remedy. This makes me think you could set up some sort of color palette, measure the skin tone of the candidates, and award points as a function of color? This could be supplemented by a measure of hair curliness and some sort of bone structure measurement with calipers. </div>
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The equation would then look like this X=f (s,c,b) ....you can fill in the details. </div>
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This could yield a number, say 69, you can add to SAT scores. To create an even more level playing field you could argue that people with lower IQs aren't properly represented, and thus an addional correction can be applied to deduct points, proportional to IQ over 110. Thus a teenager with a 150 IQ would get 80 points deducted from the SAT score. That should get rid of a portion of the smart Chinese. </div>
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I have all sorts of bright ideas to equalize society and turn it into a properly designed communist hive. For example, we can also equalize basketball players by making the ones with better aim play with fuzzy glasses, and get the taller ones to play with lead weights on their legs to reduce their jumping ability. Musicians will also require attention, we can hobble the fingers of the more talented ones with rubber bands when they try out for Juilliard. And gifted politicians with a silver tongue can be forced to speak with a potato in their mouths. </div>
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The possibilities are endless. This will help us avoid a solution like the Marxist Pol Pot used in Cambodia, who killed 1 million Cambodians because they were smart, educated, and/or belonged to the Middle Class.</div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-4959309964314335692019-03-14T01:13:00.002-07:002019-03-14T01:13:19.168-07:00Democratic Socialism is communism <div style="text-align: justify;">
Hickory, the term "Democratic Socialist" was coined by German communists after East Germany collapsed. They knew communism wouldn't sell, so they changed their label. </div>
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Let's recall that Marxist-Leninism, as taught in the Soviet empire (where I was a slave in my youth), taught us (brainwashed most of us) that a) capitalism was evil, b) socialism involved state ownership of the means of production and commerce, and c) society would evolve towards communism, where there would be no private property at all, and everybody would give as much as they could, and receive what they needed (the detail they left out was the fact that the communist party leaders decided who "needed" what). </div>
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Socialism, therefore, is integral to Marxism, and it involves increasing the government's share of the economy, by creating industrial and service structures run by government bureaucrats. </div>
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Socialism has an interesting side branch: national socialism as conceived by Adolf Hitler, which instead of putting everything under government ownership, would create a government command system to dictate to private enterprise every detail of how they were to function. </div>
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Both nazism (a member of the fascist family), and socialism, involve the elimination of individual choice and freedom, censorship, and the use of violence, including torture, concentration camps and genocide, to achieve their ends. So we see that both extremes, fascism and socialism, are similar in practice, the differences being mostly cosmetic as far as a regular joe working in a factory is concerned. </div>
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I use the term communists for what you call socialist because communists do explain socialism is a way station to their utopia, which of course isn't possible to achieve. In the US you have a hard core of communists who are selling themselves as "Democratic Socialists" (call them DSA) copying the East German nomenclature and strategy, which takes them to sell neomarxism. These DSA communists use the European neomarxist recipe, which has four pillars: 1. Identitarian ideology, whereby they define homosexuals, minorities they define as such, women, and inmigrants as "aggrieved and underprivileged classes". 2. Encouraging illegal inmigration to swell the "minority underclass", 3. Encouraging radical feminism which claims the "white capitalist patriarchate" abuses women. 4. Using measures to control climate change as a Trojan Horse to introduce "climate justice" and the type of legislation they know will turn countries into giant gulags. </div>
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I study these modern communists closely, because they are the enemy. Fortunately they are fairly open about their aims. For example Ocasio mentions "capitalism must end" or similar words in several interviews, and I have minutes of DSA meetings written by their leaders where they discuss the need to hide their real aims from those attending their meetings "because they are not ready". I also saw a document where the DSA author wrote they had to increase recruiting activity in sectors such as the electricity generation and distribution industry, so they could eventually induce large strikes and cause governments to collapse and yield to them. </div>
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These guys are easy to identify because they come out jumping in defense of the two ugliest dictatorships ever seen in the Western Hemisphere: Castro's and Chavez's. When we drill down and research those who come out defending them, we see they are communists (or what you call socialists or sometimes progressives, a name I consider a backwards designation for retrogrades who want to take humanity back 100 years to the early years of the Soviet empire). </div>
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I realize what I explain doesn't sit well with a community taught to think of itself as morally superior dogooders, when in reality they are like a zombie army snapping their jaws, on their way to destroy civilization. What we see in Venezuela isn't an accident, it's what these zombies do. We have seen them defend that monster for many years, and so now here we are, millions of Venezuelans in a desperate diaspora, hundreds of thousands dead who didn't have to die, and 30 million living in a socialist dystopia, drinking sewage and roaming streets looking for food scraps. </div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-34671201046703794132019-03-07T23:39:00.003-08:002019-03-07T23:43:36.417-08:00Socialism, fascism, and the New Green Deal 12 years ago a Venezuelan friend explained to me that the left (let's call it the Komintern, because it is evident that they are an international network) knew that Marxism was an obsolete and ill-thought idea, but that they liked the almost religious ideology, its use of Messianic caudillos and above all their concentration of power in a powerful state that would make society conform to what they thought.<br />
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But that Marxism has an additional ingredient: it uses capitalism, but with iron rules (like those of Nehru's India or China that Deng Xiao Ping wanted to develop). The use of industrial policy designed by wise people in a ministry of truth that can not be discussed because it crushes you with a supposed 97% of scientists who have no idea what things cost then brings us to what my friend called the new fascism of the 21st century.<br />
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So we see that Ocasio is a product of a group of very dedicated Marxists, many of them millionaires who sell you social justice, as long as they can live in mansions, have guards and escorts, be famous and live well. They are people like Fidel Castro who even had his private island, but they also smell a lot of Franco and Mussolini.<br />
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The difference being that, nominally and for now, they work in an international network, and they help each other and spend money with amazing ease. And I'm not talking about Soros, nor about the money that chavismo gave to European parties. It is a much more subtle, and more dangerous issue. And in this drama that New Green Deal is partly what your friend says:<br />
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"Of course, the least charitable interpretation is that the GND represents a vast socialist land grab, intended to effectively nationalize the U.S.'s energy and transport sectors by declaring the current assets obsolete and funding an entirely new set from the public purse"<br />
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What he does not say is that the neo-Marxist caste is not exactly socialist, they go to something different, similar to today's China, or Raul Castro's totalitarian Cuba, with its drowned freelancers, foreign investors in joint ventures that use rented slaves, and a repressive apparatus that does not bother to imprison the few who protest, because that is resolved by breaking the jaw and teeth.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Hace 12 años un amigo venezolano me explicó que la izquierda (llamémoslo el Komintern, porque es evidente que son una red ínternacional) sabia que el marxismo era una idea obsoleta y mal pensada, pero que les gustaba la ideología casi religiosa, su uso de caudillos mesiánicos y sobre todo su concentración de poder en un estado poderoso que haría a la sociedad amoldarse a lo que ellos pensaban. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Pero ese marxismo tiene un ingrediente adicional: utiliza el capitalismo, pero con unos reglamentos férreos (como los de la India de Nehru o la China que quería desarrollar Deng Xiao Ping). El uso de política industrial diseñada por sabelotodos en un ministerio de la verdad que no se puede discutir porque te aplasta con un supuesto 97% de científicos que no tienen ni idea de lo que cuestan las cosas entonces nos lleva a lo que mi amigo llamó el nuevo fascismo del siglo 21. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Así vemos que Ocasio es un producto de un grupo de marxistas muy dedicados, muchos de ellos millonarios que te venden la justicia social, siempre y cuando ellos puedan vivir en caserones, tener guardias y escoltas, ser famosos y vivir bien. Son gente como Fidel Castro que hasta tenía su isla privada, pero también huelen mucho a Franco y Mussolini. La diferencia siendo que, nominalmente y por ahora, ellos trabajan en una red internacional, y se ayudan y pasan plata con una facilidad asombrosa. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Y no estoy hablando de Soros, ni del dinero que le pasaba el chavismo a partidos europeos. Es un asunto mucho más sutil, y más peligroso. Y en este drama ese New Green Deal es en parte lo que dice tu amigo: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Of course, the least charitable interpretation is that the GND represents a vast socialist land grab, intended to effectively nationalize the U.S.’s energy and transport sectors by declaring the current assets obsolete and funding an entirely new set from the public purse"</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Lo que el no dice es que está casta neomarxista no es exactamente socialista, ellos van a algo diferente, parecido a la China de hoy, o la Cuba totalitaria de Raul Castro, con sus autónomos ahogados, inversores en empresas mixtas que usan esclavos alquilados, y un aparato represivo que ni se molesta en encarcelar a los pocos que protestan, porque eso lo resuelven rompiéndole la quijada y los dientes.</span></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-56939179398049725812019-02-26T04:46:00.002-08:002019-02-26T04:46:59.014-08:00Another comment about the Venezuelan police force <div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Garamond, Baskerville, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 1s, max-height 0s;">
The Venezuelan people believe Maduro is illegitimate, a tyrant backed by gangsters and communist fanatics. Over 60 nations agree with this position, which is backed by the National Assembly, the State Prosecutor (now in exile), and the judges of the Supreme Court forced to flee in 2017 because they weren’t about to follow Maduro’s orders. </div>
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On February 23 we saw Maduro and his wife Cilia dancing salsa as his repression forces were shooting up Santa Elena de Uairen, a town inhabited by Pemones who had rebelled against the local National Guard unit keeping away the humanitarian aid convoy coming from Brazil. The next day his Vice President, Delci Rodriguez, a psychopath who stated publicly that the suffering of the Venezuelan people was her payback for the death of her father about 40 years ago, got on TV wearing a Hamas scarf, saying “they haven’t seen but a tiny fraction of what we are capable of doing”. </div>
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Yesterday the Supreme Court justices in exile issued a decision supporting the use of force by other nations to provide humanitarian aid and protect the people from the mobster hiding in Miraflores. So the question now for Venezuelans is how to proceed. I realize many communists who write here aren’t about to be swayed by rational arguments, so I’m writing this for decent readers who have common sense: </div>
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I have proposed to Venezuelan leaders that a Police Force must be recruited from the Venezuelan exile community, numbering about 20 thousand men and women, which can include military personnel who have fled in recent years (the Colombian government reported yesterday that 160 military had crossed over the border on or since Feb 23, and I’m aware that several hundred Venezuelans are young and fit US Army and Marines veterans). The emphasis is on POLICE, because this force would be heavily armed but its mission would be to escort humanitarian aid and establish law and order over rural sectors of the country where the population is suffering horribly, like Santa Elena de Uairen, San Cristobal, and other areas where almost 100% of the population is against Maduro’s rule and has suffered collective punishment. </div>
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Guaidó has the ability to pay $200 million to outfit this force, and additional funds which can be drawn from Venezuela’s state accounts and CITGO dividends. But he doesn’t have the ability to make them into a cohesive force, transport them, or give them priceless air support. </div>
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This would have to be provided by others, and the best source would be a US carrier air wing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. The logistics support, consisting of the delivery of tons of food, medicine, fuel, water plants, and other consumables can best be delivered to a Venezuelan port controlled by Venezuelans loyal to the Constitution and the National Assembly (Guaidó is Interim President only because he was elected National Assembly President in January 5 2019, and his power derives from this Parliament, which is free to remove him and vote for a different president). </div>
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Evidently we want to avoid US boots on the ground, therefore the initial activity to manage the first port taken by the Police would have to be manned by Colombian civilians. It would also be useful to have the Colombian military to provide two battalions of well armed troops to maintain the peace and protect the ports from saboteurs and terrorists. But that’s a bilateral issue between Venezuela and Colombia, the same way any arrangements to stage Venezuelan police forces at Boa Vista before they rescue Santa Elena and the native Pemon who rebelled against Maduro will be a bilateral issue between the two countries. </div>
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As the Venezuelan police force begins to free these small sectors of the country we would also need an IMF loan to keep buying large quantities of food, medicine, hospital equipment, camps to house medical personnel near hospitals in well protected settings, seed, agricultural equipment, live cattle, and other items needed to start rebuilding. You wouldn’t understand how much has been destroyed, looted, eaten, trampled or burned by the communists as they tried to implement their “21st Century Socialism”. </div>
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So as you can see, I believe the best option is to keep foreigners out of Venezuela as much as possible, for two reasons: I don’t think it’s a good idea for foreigners to die or get hurt when Venezuelan forces can do the job and also because this will water down the propaganda that’s already pouring heavy from the leftist community. But this will work much much better with that US Air wing providing support from a carrier, plus Predators and four AC130’s based in Colombia and at a location I can’t name.</div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-51427422929027531862019-02-25T07:02:00.001-08:002019-02-25T07:08:53.959-08:00A police Force is the answer <span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">Daniel, the optimum solution is for Guaidó to request assistance to create a 100% Venezuelan police force, with a core made up of military personnel who fled and will flee. I believe it can start with about 5000 but has to grow to at least 20000. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">A sound intervention strategy has to aim to preserve the armed forces structure and as much personnel as possible, therefore what is needed is a group of well armed police (using the term police is important even though they can be armed with full military gear). The regime is relying on convicts, colectivos, and small contingents of PNB and GNB to do the heavy lifting. Therefore a ground force focused on taking control of a small part of national territory, BACKED with air, naval, and logistical support provided by other nations, can have success. Rule of thumb tells us that 5000 "police", backed by an air carrier air wing can control an area with 100,000 inhabitants quite easily. Thus the initial target has to be a small city, or a rural area with small towns.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">Let's observe what was regime response to events on the 23rd: in Ureña they used small GNB contingents which numbered about 50 at each bridge, and the presence of Iris Varela tells me the "security forces" must have been, or included, convicts. The response to the Pemon rebellion in Santa Elena de Uairen was a convoy of school buses loaded with colectivos, milicianos, and some PNB and GNB which proceeded to shoot up the town. </span><br />
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<br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;" /></div>
<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">Therefore I deduce the regime lacks a rapid response force, it's made up of lightly armed irregulars, and can't use the Armed Forces AS LONG AS THE ENTRY IS BY ARMED VENEZUELANS BRINGING FOOD, MEDICINE, AND SECURITY. </span><br />
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<br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;" /></div>
<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">Using the same rule of thumb I explained, with a 20000 strong force it's possible to control an area with 1 million inhabitants. The premise is that close air support will be available. And that logistics are set up to provide food medicine water, gas bottles and power. </span><br />
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<br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;" /></div>
<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">Once this expeditionary force has one million within its control, it should start receiving a flux of volunteers to allow creation of a militia. Whole military units may shift allegiance, and thus the main issue will be figuring out how to sort out spies and saboteurs. I have used a boilerplate ratio precisely because I'm afraid the regime will be infiltrating their guys. </span><br />
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<br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;" /></div>
<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">So what's the Cuban reaction going to be? They can't send bus convoys loaded with colectivos because they would be cut off by air power, they are unlikely to send army units, the navy and Air Force will be useless, and they will see that, once a significant force has punched through that cellophane they use to keep 30 million Venezuelans hostage, all they can do is caused a bunch of dead and risk the capture of Cubans who will reveal their role in Venezuela. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: arial, tahoma, helvetica, freesans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I'm describing this to you openly because I think that once they know this is coming down the road, they'll start figuring out how to fold and get out while the getting is good.</span></div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-43147876197616038532019-01-28T01:28:00.003-08:002019-01-28T01:28:53.212-08:00President Guaidó<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Garamond, Baskerville, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; opacity: 1; text-align: justify; transition: opacity 1s, max-height 0s;">
By now 98% of Venezuelans heard of Guaidó. </div>
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How do you “know Guaidó is the right man”? You don’t. What you need to know is that Guaidó was elected president of the National Assembly by a large majority of its deputies on January 10, 2019. The Venezuelan constitution requires the Assembly meet and vote one president, two vicepresidents and two secretaries, therefore the vote was required. </div>
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Guaidó got the Assembly to vote for him because the four largest democratic political parties made an agreement in 2015 which led to a deputy from Voluntad Popular being proposed, and voted almost unanimously (54 socialist deputies backing Maduro walked out, one socialist deputy is abroad and actively opposing Maduro).<br />
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President Juan Guaidó </div>
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Maduro’s presidential term expired Jan 10, he’s the expresident. He claims the right to continue with another term because he organized rigged elections on May 20 last year (his popularity was dropping so fast he had the election held months ahead of time in a futile attempt to get more backing). These pseudoelecciones were boycotted by the large democratic parties, so he propped up two fake opposition candidates which of course “lost”. </div>
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These elections were denounced as illegitimate by the EU and the OAS, so in a sense they marked Maduro as a tyrant who was executing a self coup. </div>
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Most nations don’t really care when a government goes rogue like this, but Maduro also caused a huge humanitarian crisis driving millions of Venezuelans to leave, and they are straining resources in neighboring countries. Plus the human rights abuses are gross. So over the last six months a consensus evolved in countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Brasil that Maduro had to go, he was causing them problems and the current flood of refugees wasn’t slowing down. </div>
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The USA has been very careful to follow behind these nations, and didn’t take a more proactive stance until it was told they would back USA moves. </div>
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The Europeans are more like the US left, taking the low moral ground and doing what they can to help Maduro survive. But I don’t think they count for much at this point. </div>
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So you see, Maduro isn’t “retiring”, he’s an expresident who has evolved into a tyrant, and will probably be forced out of office by brute force if he doesn’t flee to Cuba. I am pressing to have this resolved as quickly and peacefully as possible, but I wrote that Guaidó should get backing to create a new police force with 20 thousand volunteers, a move which will put a lot of pressure on Raul Castro to remove his military from Venezuela because it would be a diplomatic disaster for him if we start capturing Cuban prisoners and putting them on YouTube</div>
Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-7087264496856274642018-12-17T03:37:00.000-08:002018-12-17T03:37:12.538-08:00Is there a brave people? <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">Maduro risks having ambassadors removed because he isnt recognized, which is a bit different from breaking relations. I believe it's legal for say the US to state it doesn't recognize Maduro, and ALSO to refuse abandoning its embassy, because Maduro isn't recognized, and therefore he lacks the authority to break relations and order that embassies be vacated. Should he take action against the embassy it would be considered an act of war, and the US president isn't Jimmy Carter. </span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KzcJw1wItpw/U5H5QwzMy8I/AAAAAAAABDs/ee3fZqc1ZGAXFmt3bCvHs_WzUgj2vii5gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Bulaba%2BJones%2BProtestas%2Bla%2Bprimera.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KzcJw1wItpw/U5H5QwzMy8I/AAAAAAAABDs/ee3fZqc1ZGAXFmt3bCvHs_WzUgj2vii5gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Bulaba%2BJones%2BProtestas%2Bla%2Bprimera.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;"><br /></span>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">What Latinamerican nations other than Colombia and Brazil do is irrelevant. Those cockroaches have been kissing Castroite butt for six decades, so I expect the same spinelessness and cowardice they have always exhibited. The question in my mind is whether the "Bravo Pueblo" has the testicles needed to create a government in exile which takes over Citgo and bank accounts, arm a few thousand men and take Zulia. I'm afraid Castro chose well, because Venezuela is both rich and its population is as tame as any I've ever seen. </span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;"><br /></span>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: #fafafe; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: justify;">So after january 10 we'll see if from 30 million venezuelans, and 3 million in exile, there's leadership and a few thousand volunteers ready to do what has to be done.</span>Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5371501691722959642.post-75167388859823100762018-12-16T13:32:00.001-08:002018-12-16T13:32:55.142-08:00Human nature<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleTallBody; font-size: 17px;">The key is to remember that homo sapiens evolved as hunter gatherer which adopted herding and agriculture about 9000 years ago. It's also important to understand we descend from the winners of thousands of years of fighting, genocide and murder. This means we have behavior that's wired in, and can't really be modified. At best it can be lacquered over and perfumed. But in the end we are what we are.</span><br />
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Fernando Leanmehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16085680730729620836noreply@blogger.com0