Monthly Archives: January 2021

Newspeak In America

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…via the leftwing Forbes magazine. And it’s a disappointing position for the used-to-be Conservative Steve Forbes to take via his magazine.

Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes magazine, issued a warning to businesses this week that they should avoid hiring any press secretaries that served in the Trump White House, claiming that doing so will make their companies instantly untrustworthy and subject to heightened journalistic scrutiny.

Lane went on:

Let it be known to the business world: hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists…and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.

And the newspeak of Forbes through his magazine and his editor:

This isn’t cancel culture[.]

Some Poll Results

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The Washington Times has some McLaughlin Poll results.

  • When voters are told that Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20th, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants Congress to impeach and remove the President in his last week in office, 60% of all voters say that this is another waste of time and money
  • 77% of all voters think that Congress should make its priority this week dealing with Coronavirus
  • 74% of all voters agree that efforts by Pelosi and the Democrats to try to impeach the President after Joe Biden is sworn in would be politically motivated to prevent the President from running again, stripping his Secret Service protection, and preventing him from having a Presidential Library
  • 65% of all voters agree that by continuing to attack the President, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are making this worse and keeping the country divided
  • 74% agree that if Twitter, Facebook, and Google can censor and take away the President’s right to free speech they can take away the right to free speech for any American
  • 70% of all voters agree that Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple have too much power and need to be regulated to protect the freedoms and privacy of Americans

Especially these:

  • 48% of all voters are less likely to vote for a member of Congress who votes to impeach the President
  • The generic vote for Congress favors the Republicans over the Democrats 49% to 42%.

The survey can be seen here. McLaughlin conducted its survey at the start of this week, and they interviewed 800 voters reflective of the demographics in 17 battleground States of the November election. The 95% confidence interval is ±3.4%.

A Stolen Laptop

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Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Senate Appropriations committees, has reported that his laptop was stolen from his office, ostensibly by the rioters who assaulted the Capital Building last Wednesday afternoon. (Ostensibly: frankly, I have no reason to doubt the fact of the theft or which member(s) of which crowd did the theft. However, the deed as theft and who did it remain unproven at this early stage of the investigation.)

Merkley also said he’d left his office unlocked while he went to the Senate floor for the Electoral College vote counting and debates. The importance of that will become clear below.

He apparently isn’t alone in this:

The Justice Department (DOJ) said Thursday during a briefing that “national security equities” may have been among the records stolen during the looting and destruction that stalled the congressional proceedings….

What’s not being reported in the NLMSM is the utter contempt these folks—possibly from both parties—have for our nation’s secrets, our classified information: they won’t even take the slightest pains to protect them.

A laptop unsecured in an unlocked office? Not even in locked away in a safe when the Senator isn’t around? An open office is all the security a Senator—a Senator experienced in handling classified materials, if only by his membership on a foreign relations committee—deems necessary?

Classified “equities” left unsecured in other offices?

How does that work, exactly?

Where are DoJ’s and DIA’s investigations into this manifest mishandling of classified material?

American Energy

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…independence today. Tomorrow, American energy dependence.

Bloomberg is reporting that the US didn’t import any oil at all from Saudi Arabia last week, the first time in 35 years. That’s part of a longer term trend in declining Saudi oil imports over the last six years, especially. See the graph just below.

This trend is a result of the US technology advance of fracking which both drove down the cost of getting the oil (and natural gas) out of the ground and drastically increasing our own oil and gas production—virtually eliminating our dependence on foreign oil and gas and making us net exporters of both.

However.

Watch for American energy independence to (re)degrade into energy dependence on foreign nations under the Biden administration.

Watch that dependence made doubly vulnerable as the Biden administration reduces funding for our national defense, including particularly our Navy, so that we will be less able to defend the shipping lanes carrying that foreign energy to us.

The People’s Republic of China, beginning under the Obama régime, already is in a position to shut off the shipping lanes carrying trillions of dollars of goods, including crude, to us through the South China Sea, and they’re building/acquiring naval bases for the PLA on the west coast of Africa and creating “economic” ties with island nations on the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea, and on the north coast of South America. And Biden’s softness toward the PLC is well-known.

“Fight Like Hell”

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President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capital Building last Wednesday—or so say Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and the Left generally—with those words.

Here’s the definition of “fight,” per Merriam-Webster:

intransitive verb
1  a : to contend in battle or physical combat especially : to strive to overcome a person by blows or weapons
The soldiers fought bravely.
b : to engage in boxing
He will fight for the heavyweight title next month.
2 : to put forth a determined effort
They were fighting to stay awake.

transitive verb
1  a(1) : to contend against in or as if in battle or physical combat
fought the invaders of his homeland
was fighting a forest fire
(2) : to box against in the ring
fought several strong contenders
b(1) : to attempt to prevent the success or effectiveness of the company fought the takeover attempt
(2) : to oppose the passage or development of fight a bill in Congress
2 a : wage, carry on
fight a battle
   b : to take part in (a boxing match or similar contest)
3 : to struggle to endure or surmount
fight a cold
is fighting cancer
4 a : to gain by struggle
fights his way through
b : to resolve by struggle
fought out their differences in court
5 a : to manage (a ship) in a battle or storm
b : to cause to struggle or contend
c : to manage in an unnecessarily rough or awkward manner

Notice how many of these definitions have to do with physical combat and how many have to do with metaphorically and nonviolently carrying on the struggle.

Those Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and the Left generally are projecting their own propensity for physical violence as the means of getting their way.

And they’re doing it while having downplayed the violence and destruction of the Left’s riots in Minneapolis, New York City, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle over the summer.

Never mind that the importance of the invasion of the Capital Building flows from its status as a symbol—and it’s a hugely important symbol. The damage done the Capital Building, however, is debris in the streets after those summer riots, which burned whole neighborhoods, destroyed businesses, crushed Americans’ ability to earn their living. And that destruction was aimed at minorities in particular. And that destruction was repeatedly billed as largely peaceful, a pent-up frustration being released, as reparations.