Biden is the most corrupt, dishonest, incompetent human being to ever occupy the office of the presidency. Nothing he says should be taken seriously. He’s an embarrassment to the country.
Biden’s final pitch to the American people before the election is that a nudist communist illegal alien who attacked Paul Pelosi is basically the same thing as the Jan 6th “insurrection” and it’s all Trump’s fault
Biden is a moron and his party deserves its imminent humiliation
Biden: "The great irony of the 2020 election is that it's the most attacked election in our history, and yet there's no election in our history that we can be more certain of its results." pic.twitter.com/mEKjtArkrH
Can’t help but notice how @POTUS hasn’t even bothered to cite anything his administration has done as a reason to vote for Democrats. @JoeBiden doesn’t know much, but he knows he sucks.
Today, Left-wing activists took part in an insurrection inside the Supreme Court. Their actions interrupted official government proceedings. This is a dark day for America. I’m sure the FBI is already taking action to identify all the insurrectionists. https://t.co/lIOlcQjvwP
November 2nd, 2022 will forever be remembered for this dark and terrible day. America will never be able to recover from this attack on the highest courts in the free world. I’m shook.
MORE: Biden will say that election deniers up and down the ballot — who he alleges won't commit to accepting the results of their own races — lead the country on the "path to chaos."
Sure, because releasing the evidence to clear up the matter leads to conspiracy theories… 🙄
Clowns….
Does this theory apply to releasing all video, such as body cam footage in cases alleging police brutality, or just in cases where the video would contradict the official narrative?
When journalists actively campaign *against* transparency, you know they are worried about risk that the narrative they set within 12 hours of the incident will blow up.
Actually, if the video is consistent with the account by the FBI, it ends the conspiracy theory.
— Righteous Despicable (formerly Deplorable) Llama (@LlamaRighteous) November 2, 2022
I enjoy journalists who prefer not knowing what actually happened. For too long journalists have insisted on details, and primary sources, when really we should just uncritically take at face value whatever politicians say happened. Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, NSA mass surveillance…
– Said Debbie Wasserman Schultz worked in the senate – Forgot what FEMA stands for – Forgot the name of Hurricane Ian – Said "the war in Iraq" is to blame for inflation – Claimed he met the man who discovered insulin – Busted out the southern accent pic.twitter.com/gvq4uPj8Bp
NYT: "Mr. Biden, who at 79 is the oldest president in American history, has a long record of gaffes dating back to when he was a young man. But his misstatements have become more pronounced, and more noticed."https://t.co/A6BUSN4su5
“Supporting Mass Violations of Human Rights Isn’t Just an ‘Oops’
Anyone who had ever heard of the Nuremberg trials also should have known that forcing people into medical procedures is an absolute no-no. No exceptions, and no further data needed. Yet anyone who mentioned during Covid-tide this major cultural precedent to prevent future atrocities was socially ostracized and professionally punished. Google, YouTube, Facebook, and other controllers of public discourse still continue to punish people for saying this truth, in conjunction with federal agencies, even though that is wildly unconstitutional.
Oster has at times courageously taken stands unpopular among her Rhode Island community and Brown University colleagues, such as in her titrated support for opening schools in fall 2020, when the ruling class believed following that science wasn’t politically advantageous. As other people have noted online, however, Oster has also publicly advocated brutalizing policies including employer and school Covid vaccine mandates. She also supported unnecessary and unscientifically backed measures such as masking parents of unvaccinated kids indoors.”
—-
“Amnesty Requires Admitting What You Did Wrong
Amnesty requires a specific admission of guilt and a commitment to repairing the wrongs done. Instead, Oster is pretending to advocate for reconciliation in a way that insists no reconciliation is actually needed.
Accountability is essential to social order and advancement. A good society does not ignore gross harms people commit against others. It seeks to rectify them to the extent reasonably possible, for the sake of justice and to discourage future wrongs.
Getting the facts wrong may not be a moral failing, but smashing and grabbing fellow citizens’ natural rights because you were scared is indeed a major moral failing. That’s another reason the guilty must confess what they’ve done. Admitting “I was wrong about lockdowns and vaccine mandates” is the first step toward re-establishing the trust lockdown advocates have broken.”
=============
=============
“No Amnesty for Pandemic Tyranny
Forgive the people in your life, of course, but never forget what officials did to us.”
“The headline reads, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” It would be risible if it were not so galling.
We are to give a pardon to the officials who, over and over, proved themselves blustering little tyrants, and worse, incompetent? Absolutely not. We are to erase the record of those responsible for leaving sick children to waste away in hospitals all alone, for separating husband from wife, for stopping families from holding the hands of the dying or gathering for their funerals? No, no, and again, no. After mandates forced people out of jobs, and the vaccine-turned-therapeutic failed to stop transmission, are we really to stop asking about its potential side effects, or the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA? Are we really to let bygones be bygones for masking and lockdowns that will set students back for a decade, that shuttered businesses across the country, that multiplied deaths of despair?
Monday’s viral Atlantic piece—now subject to thousands of indignant tweets and TikToks and columns like this one—might be laughably outrageous, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand, for the Atlantic remains the mass middle-class, middlebrow magazine of choice in America; as a status symbol, it signals possession of a college degree, even suggesting a graduate school stint on top of it. It is Reader’s Digest for good liberals embarrassed by Reader’s Digest, a West Wing script on glossy paper. The people who do not deserve a pandemic amnesty read it.
Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University. She wrote her Atlantic essay to ask the other smart moms of the world permission to forgive herself for masking her kids. But the Atlantic published her little essay to obscure a critical point: experts should be held to a different standard than the rest of us. Some people are downstream from “the experts,” and during the Covid responses they did what they thought they were supposed to do, as best they could tell. Neurotic rule followers are annoying, but if there are any in your family you should forgive them; the relationship is more important than “I told you so,” and hopefully they can admit they were wrong, that they listened to the wrong sources.
Other people are “the experts” and, more importantly, “the authorities.” And when they are wrong they must admit it, and be held accountable. That is what makes them, in our modern democratic and scientific society, authoritative: accountability to the public record. The Atlantic’s amnesty essay blurs those two categories, for Oster is both a private citizen and a public expert admitting she got things wrong. But she can only represent, only speak for, the class of experts in general, not the public health experts who formulated our pandemic response or the authorities who implemented it. Her apology to herself, to her children, to her readers, is not theirs. In actually considering what the piece suggests, an amnesty for disaster, Oster and her personal record on the Covid response hardly matter.
The key paragraph seems reasonable enough, at first pass.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
Gloating and defensiveness are indeed natural human temptations. When indulged they do “gobble up a lot of social energy” and make discussions “heated” and “unpleasant.” But the conclusion does not follow from these premises. “Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others,” is not “preventing us from moving forward.” It is the only way we can move forward.
Again: experts and public authorities are people who make assessments, predictions, and decisions on behalf of ordinary people, and they are supposed to be judged by the accuracy and utility of those assessments, predictions, and decisions. It matters, a lot, if they get things wrong, and it matters, a lot, that they got things wrong.
Forgive your family. Even forgive authorities who say they are sorry and seek to make amends. But fire them, too. Throw them all out. “Getting something wrong” might not always be a moral failing, but it is a professional failing, in an expert or public official. They failed at their job. They should not be allowed to keep it. If they cannot be gotten rid of, stop up your ears to them. Whatever “hefty element of luck” went into getting things right, asking the right questions, before the consensus caught up, it is something we should all want more of. The score must be kept if we, the public, are to know who to trust, who to listen to.”
“It’s single-party control. Things are going downhill: inflation, crime, homelessness, addiction, overdoses. Here in Oregon, look outside—you see the homelessness, people dying in the streets from overdoses, people having psychotic breaks. It’s in shambles right now. It wasn’t always like this.””
“Linda Donewald moved to Oregon from Phoenix because her husband wanted to live on the river. Plus, Portland offered a vibrant atmosphere. Donewald now describes Portland as a “war zone.”
Oregon voters have homelessness as their top issue, especially in Portland.
The homeless encampments started years before the riots after George Floyd’s death in 2020. One homeboat community saw the city’s largest homeless encampment right across from them:
Until recently, the city’s biggest homeless encampment stood just across the street from the floating-homes community, in what’s called the Big Four Corners Natural Area. The camp was founded in 2018 by homeless activists on a protected wetlands site. They used to call it the Village of Hope.
By 2020, hundreds of people were living in the Village of Hope, and crime was rampant. Houseboat community residents started finding their car windows smashed in. Thieves stole their catalytic converters, and then their cars. On one occasion, a resident returned to his floating home to find someone in his bathroom taking a shower.
“We considered hiring a nightly foot patrol, but it was too expensive,” said Denise Olson, another floating home resident. “We felt terrorized.”
The community needed to do its own foot patrol because the authorities found it too dangerous for them to do anything.
Residents told Woodhouse they regularly hear gunfire. They “could smell the paint thinner-like odor of meth labs in the encampment, which burst into flames on several occasions.”
The homeless stole neighborhood dogs for ransom. A person admitted the camps have deceased residents “buried in the site’s marshy ground.”
Government agencies ignore the residents or suggest ludicrous ideas:
Residents said they got bounced from one unresponsive government agency to the next, until they finally got a meeting with an aide to their state representative, Democrat Zach Hudson, Olson told me.
The aide told the houseboat owners that their homeless neighbors “just need a hand-up.” She suggested they organize a barbecue for the homeless. A barbecue?! The houseboat owners were stunned.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” said Donewald, who, with Olson, created a neighborhood security committee. “There’s been a failure of leadership.”
Portland leaders started planning a ban on homeless campouts last month. But it’s probably too late. Mayor Ted Wheeler describes the issue as “public camping.” He wants to establish them in “large city-sanctioned camps.”
The voters also care about drugs and crime, which have connections to the homeless encampments:
The murder rate is surging in Portland, especially among those living on the street. In a recent survey of Portland residents, 84% of those polled said they felt unsafe downtown at night, and 61% felt the same way during the day. Eighty-two percent want more police in the city.
Drug addiction is as bad as ever. “There is no evidence that Measure 110 has reduced drug use, drug-related crime, or overdose in the state,” Keith Humphreys, a psychologist who specializes in addiction and served as a senior advisor in the Obama administration, told me, referring to a progressive 2020 initiative that decriminalized drug possession. Meanwhile, Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel is active in “every corner of the state”, as The Oregonian puts it. (Police in Eugene recently seized 18 pounds of fentanyl in a single traffic stop, enough to kill most of the state of Oregon.)
The floating home community is at its wit’s end, but you can also see the effects in population stats.
Portland’s population is shrinking “for the first time in over a decade.” Young people are fleeing the city:
And, for the first time in over a decade, Portland is shrinking, with young adults leaving in particularly large numbers: between 2020 and 2021, the county that includes Portland had a net loss of more than 4,000 residents between the ages of 25 and 29. Oregon as a whole has experienced one of the biggest slowdowns in population growth in the country.”
“Scandal-Ridden San Francisco FBI Field Office Involved in Pelosi Investigation
Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis.”
“Plenty of factors—a wholly dishonest news media, unsubstantiated claims the attacker was a foiled assassin who planned to kill the speaker of the House, and Mr. Pelosi’s recent legal troubles, to name a few—feed justified skepticism surrounding the alleged break-in and hammer attack that occurred in the wee hours of October 28. Details continue to change while leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton blame the incident, without evidence, on Republicans and Donald Trump.
This situation is yet another example of how the public’s complete lack of faith in major institutions is fueling doubt and suspicion. Unfortunately, that level of distrust extends to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a once-revered agency that has blown its reputation in service to the Democratic Party. And news that the San Francisco FBI field office is taking a lead role in the Pelosi investigation offers little comfort that the American people will ever find out the truth of the matter.
The San Francisco field office, like the bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and many other offices across the country, is mired in scandal. It’s particularly true as it relates to the FBI’s cozy ties to Big Tech—and the San Francisco FBI office is ground zero for that quid pro quo relationship. Rather than investigate the nearly 300 Big Tech companies within its Silicon Valley jurisdiction for various offenses such as election interference, the San Francisco FBI office appears instead to be in cahoots with these powerful corporate interests to do the Democratic Party’s dirty work.
Few people benefit more than Nancy Pelosi, who of course happens to live in San Francisco. Democratic candidates and lawmakers are flush with campaign donations from Big Tech; in 2020 alone, Facebook and Twitter—the latter located in Pelosi’s congressional district and the former located just outside its boundaries—donated at least $5.5 million to Democrats and only a paltry $435,000 to Republicans, a 12-1 ratio in favor of Pelosi’s party. Conversely, threats made by leading Democrats to break up Big Tech or hold congressional hearings into alleged malfeasance have been slow-walked since Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel.
Fortunately, a lawsuit recently filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt laid bare how this lucrative back-scratching operation works. Elvis Chan, a top cyber FBI agent working in the San Francisco office, was in routine communication with Big Tech giants prior to the 2020 election to warn companies of “foreign disinformation” spread on their platforms—and the discussions just happened to coincide with the release of explosive materials found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Chan is named as a co-defendant in Schmitt’s sweeping civil suit seeking to hold accountable government officials working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to censor information considered hostile to the regime.
“Defendant Elvis M. Chan is Supervisory Special Agent of Squad in the San Francisco Division of the FBI.” Schmitt wrote in a recent filing. “On information and belief, he has authority over cybersecurity issues for FBI in that geographical region, which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms, and he plays a critical role for FBI—in coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms. Meta [Facebook’s parent company] has identified Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Chan, for his part, publicly brags about his influence in Silicon Valley, boasting how he “was very involved in helping to protect the U.S. elections in 2020” by communicating “on a weekly basis” with Big Tech titans “That’s where the FBI and the U.S. government can actually help companies,” Chan said during a June 2022 podcast interview.
In other words, Chan is the power couple’s hand holder. (The Department of Justice is fighting a court order for Chan’s deposition on the grounds his involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop suppression effort was misrepresented.) And there is no indication the partnership will end anytime soon. Social media platforms continue to collaborate with the FBI to excavate incriminating evidence from the deleted accounts of January 6 defendants; Facebook is collecting private messages between users expressing “anti-government” or “anti-authority” sentiment—read: conservatives—and turning over those texts to the FBI without a subpoena.
The Intercept reported Monday that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security plan to accelerate its joint effort to censor “misinformation” spread online. Targeted topics include posts critical of COVID vaccines, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and support for Ukraine. FBI counterrorism agents are being “reassigned” from critical surveillance of potential threats overseas to spy on American citizens.
“They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking,” one anonymous FBI agents told The Intercept.
There are other problems at the San Francisco FBI office. In early October, a California jury convicted a former FBI special agent for accepting at least $150,000 in cash and gifts on behalf of a corrupt Armenian businessman with ties to organized crime. Babak Broumand was the head of national security investigations at the San Francisco FBI field office at the time of his arrest in 2018. According to the indictment, “Broumand accepted cash, checks, private jet flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, meals, and other items of value from an organized crime-linked lawyer.”
He was found guilty of four counts including bribery of a public official; Broumand will be sentenced in January and faces up to 45 years in prison.
Which could explain why FBI Director Christopher Wray quietly replaced the head of the San Francisco field office in September. Robert Tripp was just moved from the bureau’s inspection division (the FBI’s version of internal affairs) in Washington to take over the San Francisco operation.
Late Monday afternoon, Tripp and Justice Department officials announced federal charges against the alleged attacker, David DePape, including the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Pelosi—a confusing charge, considering Pelosi wasn’t home and DePape clearly had no physical or mental capacity to do so. It appears more than anything to be political narrative-building by Biden’s Justice Department to bolster the idea that Trump and Republicans inspired another “kidnapping” attempt. The complaint, signed by a special agent assigned to domestic terror investigations in the San Francisco FBI office, also offers a conflicting account as to what happened when officers arrived and an incomplete timeline of events.
Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis and conceal any damaging or contradictory facts about the confrontation.”
“I’ve written about this topic before but it’s not one that has gotten much national attention. Earlier this year, KOMO News reported that Seattle firefighters had responded to 450 homeless camp fires in a little over three months. That made for an average of five such fires a day.
This problem isn’t limited to Seattle. Today Willamette Week reports that roughly half of all fires in Portland begin in or near one of the city’s estimated 700 homeless camps. The captain of one Portland firehouse says the pace, now about six such fires a day, is not sustainable.
Nearly half of all fires in Portland now start in or near houseless camps—at least 2,048 last year, according to Portland Fire & Rescue data. It’s a remarkable number, given how five years ago, fires among unhoused Portlanders were hardly a blip.
Today, there are an average of six a day…
The blazes have killed at least nine unhoused people in the past four years, one-third of Portland’s fire fatalities. Homeless people have been injured and lost possessions and loved ones.
“We don’t mind going on dangerous calls—we’re here to do that,” says Capt. Mike McGowan of North Portland’s Station 8 firehouse, which stands among the city’s worst-hit areas. “But five or six houseless fires in the middle of the night is too much. It’s fatiguing to go on the same type of call over and over, with no end in sight. It’s not sustainable.”
Some of the fires are accidental, caused by homeless people using propane to cook food or to warm their tents. People who smoke drugs and then nod may not notice when their heater starts a fire. And then some of the fires are intentional, either to burn garbage or just because someone is mentally ill. Firefighters showing up at these fires have no idea what they are walking into.
Firefighters say they’ve stumbled onto booby traps, territorial people suffering from mental illness, and a semi-automatic rifle partly melted by a blaze.
“I never thought we’d need ballistics vests, but we do now,” McGowan says.”
——-
I love how they call them “unhoused” people. That doesn’t carry the same stigma as “homeless” I guess.
The Dems continue to peddle garbage, and the lie that Sicknick was killed by protesters and not his poor life/health choices. They’re using and exploiting his grieving mother.
This is the perfect response, the right combination of sympathy and fact-checking. And she’s a total pro at always pivoting back to her core message https://t.co/Ki8kTCf0LO
Wandering Views 
I see Mr. Unity is at it again.
What a fraud.
We all do.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Insurrection!!!!!!!!
Just playing by their rules….
Aren’t we all……?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Some election deniers are more equal than others…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sure, because releasing the evidence to clear up the matter leads to conspiracy theories… 🙄
Clowns….
Yeah…..
LikeLiked by 1 person
More clowns, the water carrying variety……
LikeLiked by 1 person
Here’s a couple more responses for French, Oster, and the rest of the NT hacks at The Atlantic.
“There Can Be No ‘Amnesty’ On Lockdowns Without A Reckoning”
https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/03/there-can-be-no-amnesty-on-lockdowns-without-a-reckoning/
“Supporting Mass Violations of Human Rights Isn’t Just an ‘Oops’
Anyone who had ever heard of the Nuremberg trials also should have known that forcing people into medical procedures is an absolute no-no. No exceptions, and no further data needed. Yet anyone who mentioned during Covid-tide this major cultural precedent to prevent future atrocities was socially ostracized and professionally punished. Google, YouTube, Facebook, and other controllers of public discourse still continue to punish people for saying this truth, in conjunction with federal agencies, even though that is wildly unconstitutional.
Oster has at times courageously taken stands unpopular among her Rhode Island community and Brown University colleagues, such as in her titrated support for opening schools in fall 2020, when the ruling class believed following that science wasn’t politically advantageous. As other people have noted online, however, Oster has also publicly advocated brutalizing policies including employer and school Covid vaccine mandates. She also supported unnecessary and unscientifically backed measures such as masking parents of unvaccinated kids indoors.”
—-
“Amnesty Requires Admitting What You Did Wrong
Amnesty requires a specific admission of guilt and a commitment to repairing the wrongs done. Instead, Oster is pretending to advocate for reconciliation in a way that insists no reconciliation is actually needed.
Accountability is essential to social order and advancement. A good society does not ignore gross harms people commit against others. It seeks to rectify them to the extent reasonably possible, for the sake of justice and to discourage future wrongs.
Getting the facts wrong may not be a moral failing, but smashing and grabbing fellow citizens’ natural rights because you were scared is indeed a major moral failing. That’s another reason the guilty must confess what they’ve done. Admitting “I was wrong about lockdowns and vaccine mandates” is the first step toward re-establishing the trust lockdown advocates have broken.”
=============
=============
“No Amnesty for Pandemic Tyranny
Forgive the people in your life, of course, but never forget what officials did to us.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/no-amnesty-for-pandemic-tyranny/
“The headline reads, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” It would be risible if it were not so galling.
We are to give a pardon to the officials who, over and over, proved themselves blustering little tyrants, and worse, incompetent? Absolutely not. We are to erase the record of those responsible for leaving sick children to waste away in hospitals all alone, for separating husband from wife, for stopping families from holding the hands of the dying or gathering for their funerals? No, no, and again, no. After mandates forced people out of jobs, and the vaccine-turned-therapeutic failed to stop transmission, are we really to stop asking about its potential side effects, or the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA? Are we really to let bygones be bygones for masking and lockdowns that will set students back for a decade, that shuttered businesses across the country, that multiplied deaths of despair?
Monday’s viral Atlantic piece—now subject to thousands of indignant tweets and TikToks and columns like this one—might be laughably outrageous, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand, for the Atlantic remains the mass middle-class, middlebrow magazine of choice in America; as a status symbol, it signals possession of a college degree, even suggesting a graduate school stint on top of it. It is Reader’s Digest for good liberals embarrassed by Reader’s Digest, a West Wing script on glossy paper. The people who do not deserve a pandemic amnesty read it.
Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University. She wrote her Atlantic essay to ask the other smart moms of the world permission to forgive herself for masking her kids. But the Atlantic published her little essay to obscure a critical point: experts should be held to a different standard than the rest of us. Some people are downstream from “the experts,” and during the Covid responses they did what they thought they were supposed to do, as best they could tell. Neurotic rule followers are annoying, but if there are any in your family you should forgive them; the relationship is more important than “I told you so,” and hopefully they can admit they were wrong, that they listened to the wrong sources.
Other people are “the experts” and, more importantly, “the authorities.” And when they are wrong they must admit it, and be held accountable. That is what makes them, in our modern democratic and scientific society, authoritative: accountability to the public record. The Atlantic’s amnesty essay blurs those two categories, for Oster is both a private citizen and a public expert admitting she got things wrong. But she can only represent, only speak for, the class of experts in general, not the public health experts who formulated our pandemic response or the authorities who implemented it. Her apology to herself, to her children, to her readers, is not theirs. In actually considering what the piece suggests, an amnesty for disaster, Oster and her personal record on the Covid response hardly matter.
The key paragraph seems reasonable enough, at first pass.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
Gloating and defensiveness are indeed natural human temptations. When indulged they do “gobble up a lot of social energy” and make discussions “heated” and “unpleasant.” But the conclusion does not follow from these premises. “Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others,” is not “preventing us from moving forward.” It is the only way we can move forward.
Again: experts and public authorities are people who make assessments, predictions, and decisions on behalf of ordinary people, and they are supposed to be judged by the accuracy and utility of those assessments, predictions, and decisions. It matters, a lot, if they get things wrong, and it matters, a lot, that they got things wrong.
Forgive your family. Even forgive authorities who say they are sorry and seek to make amends. But fire them, too. Throw them all out. “Getting something wrong” might not always be a moral failing, but it is a professional failing, in an expert or public official. They failed at their job. They should not be allowed to keep it. If they cannot be gotten rid of, stop up your ears to them. Whatever “hefty element of luck” went into getting things right, asking the right questions, before the consensus caught up, it is something we should all want more of. The score must be kept if we, the public, are to know who to trust, who to listen to.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Unfortunately, enemies of our country see our fumbling president and that is dangerous for all of us.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Huh.
“‘Failure of Leadership’: Oregon’s Lifelong Democrats Explain Why They’re Voting GOP
“It’s single-party control. Things are going downhill: inflation, crime, homelessness, addiction, overdoses. Here in Oregon, look outside—you see the homelessness, people dying in the streets from overdoses, people having psychotic breaks. It’s in shambles right now. It wasn’t always like this.””
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/11/failure-of-leadership-oregons-lifelong-democrats-explain-why-theyre-voting-gop/
“Linda Donewald moved to Oregon from Phoenix because her husband wanted to live on the river. Plus, Portland offered a vibrant atmosphere. Donewald now describes Portland as a “war zone.”
Oregon voters have homelessness as their top issue, especially in Portland.
The homeless encampments started years before the riots after George Floyd’s death in 2020. One homeboat community saw the city’s largest homeless encampment right across from them:
Until recently, the city’s biggest homeless encampment stood just across the street from the floating-homes community, in what’s called the Big Four Corners Natural Area. The camp was founded in 2018 by homeless activists on a protected wetlands site. They used to call it the Village of Hope.
By 2020, hundreds of people were living in the Village of Hope, and crime was rampant. Houseboat community residents started finding their car windows smashed in. Thieves stole their catalytic converters, and then their cars. On one occasion, a resident returned to his floating home to find someone in his bathroom taking a shower.
“We considered hiring a nightly foot patrol, but it was too expensive,” said Denise Olson, another floating home resident. “We felt terrorized.”
The community needed to do its own foot patrol because the authorities found it too dangerous for them to do anything.
Residents told Woodhouse they regularly hear gunfire. They “could smell the paint thinner-like odor of meth labs in the encampment, which burst into flames on several occasions.”
The homeless stole neighborhood dogs for ransom. A person admitted the camps have deceased residents “buried in the site’s marshy ground.”
Government agencies ignore the residents or suggest ludicrous ideas:
Residents said they got bounced from one unresponsive government agency to the next, until they finally got a meeting with an aide to their state representative, Democrat Zach Hudson, Olson told me.
The aide told the houseboat owners that their homeless neighbors “just need a hand-up.” She suggested they organize a barbecue for the homeless. A barbecue?! The houseboat owners were stunned.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” said Donewald, who, with Olson, created a neighborhood security committee. “There’s been a failure of leadership.”
Portland leaders started planning a ban on homeless campouts last month. But it’s probably too late. Mayor Ted Wheeler describes the issue as “public camping.” He wants to establish them in “large city-sanctioned camps.”
The voters also care about drugs and crime, which have connections to the homeless encampments:
The murder rate is surging in Portland, especially among those living on the street. In a recent survey of Portland residents, 84% of those polled said they felt unsafe downtown at night, and 61% felt the same way during the day. Eighty-two percent want more police in the city.
Drug addiction is as bad as ever. “There is no evidence that Measure 110 has reduced drug use, drug-related crime, or overdose in the state,” Keith Humphreys, a psychologist who specializes in addiction and served as a senior advisor in the Obama administration, told me, referring to a progressive 2020 initiative that decriminalized drug possession. Meanwhile, Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel is active in “every corner of the state”, as The Oregonian puts it. (Police in Eugene recently seized 18 pounds of fentanyl in a single traffic stop, enough to kill most of the state of Oregon.)
The floating home community is at its wit’s end, but you can also see the effects in population stats.
Portland’s population is shrinking “for the first time in over a decade.” Young people are fleeing the city:
And, for the first time in over a decade, Portland is shrinking, with young adults leaving in particularly large numbers: between 2020 and 2021, the county that includes Portland had a net loss of more than 4,000 residents between the ages of 25 and 29. Oregon as a whole has experienced one of the biggest slowdowns in population growth in the country.”
——-
The Dems Utopia is anything but.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The FBI is sending their best….
“Scandal-Ridden San Francisco FBI Field Office Involved in Pelosi Investigation
Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis.”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/31/scandal-ridden-san-francisco-fbi-field-office-involved-in-pelosi-investigation/
“Plenty of factors—a wholly dishonest news media, unsubstantiated claims the attacker was a foiled assassin who planned to kill the speaker of the House, and Mr. Pelosi’s recent legal troubles, to name a few—feed justified skepticism surrounding the alleged break-in and hammer attack that occurred in the wee hours of October 28. Details continue to change while leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton blame the incident, without evidence, on Republicans and Donald Trump.
This situation is yet another example of how the public’s complete lack of faith in major institutions is fueling doubt and suspicion. Unfortunately, that level of distrust extends to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a once-revered agency that has blown its reputation in service to the Democratic Party. And news that the San Francisco FBI field office is taking a lead role in the Pelosi investigation offers little comfort that the American people will ever find out the truth of the matter.
The San Francisco field office, like the bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and many other offices across the country, is mired in scandal. It’s particularly true as it relates to the FBI’s cozy ties to Big Tech—and the San Francisco FBI office is ground zero for that quid pro quo relationship. Rather than investigate the nearly 300 Big Tech companies within its Silicon Valley jurisdiction for various offenses such as election interference, the San Francisco FBI office appears instead to be in cahoots with these powerful corporate interests to do the Democratic Party’s dirty work.
Few people benefit more than Nancy Pelosi, who of course happens to live in San Francisco. Democratic candidates and lawmakers are flush with campaign donations from Big Tech; in 2020 alone, Facebook and Twitter—the latter located in Pelosi’s congressional district and the former located just outside its boundaries—donated at least $5.5 million to Democrats and only a paltry $435,000 to Republicans, a 12-1 ratio in favor of Pelosi’s party. Conversely, threats made by leading Democrats to break up Big Tech or hold congressional hearings into alleged malfeasance have been slow-walked since Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel.
Fortunately, a lawsuit recently filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt laid bare how this lucrative back-scratching operation works. Elvis Chan, a top cyber FBI agent working in the San Francisco office, was in routine communication with Big Tech giants prior to the 2020 election to warn companies of “foreign disinformation” spread on their platforms—and the discussions just happened to coincide with the release of explosive materials found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Chan is named as a co-defendant in Schmitt’s sweeping civil suit seeking to hold accountable government officials working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to censor information considered hostile to the regime.
“Defendant Elvis M. Chan is Supervisory Special Agent of Squad in the San Francisco Division of the FBI.” Schmitt wrote in a recent filing. “On information and belief, he has authority over cybersecurity issues for FBI in that geographical region, which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms, and he plays a critical role for FBI—in coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms. Meta [Facebook’s parent company] has identified Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Chan, for his part, publicly brags about his influence in Silicon Valley, boasting how he “was very involved in helping to protect the U.S. elections in 2020” by communicating “on a weekly basis” with Big Tech titans “That’s where the FBI and the U.S. government can actually help companies,” Chan said during a June 2022 podcast interview.
In other words, Chan is the power couple’s hand holder. (The Department of Justice is fighting a court order for Chan’s deposition on the grounds his involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop suppression effort was misrepresented.) And there is no indication the partnership will end anytime soon. Social media platforms continue to collaborate with the FBI to excavate incriminating evidence from the deleted accounts of January 6 defendants; Facebook is collecting private messages between users expressing “anti-government” or “anti-authority” sentiment—read: conservatives—and turning over those texts to the FBI without a subpoena.
The Intercept reported Monday that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security plan to accelerate its joint effort to censor “misinformation” spread online. Targeted topics include posts critical of COVID vaccines, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and support for Ukraine. FBI counterrorism agents are being “reassigned” from critical surveillance of potential threats overseas to spy on American citizens.
“They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking,” one anonymous FBI agents told The Intercept.
There are other problems at the San Francisco FBI office. In early October, a California jury convicted a former FBI special agent for accepting at least $150,000 in cash and gifts on behalf of a corrupt Armenian businessman with ties to organized crime. Babak Broumand was the head of national security investigations at the San Francisco FBI field office at the time of his arrest in 2018. According to the indictment, “Broumand accepted cash, checks, private jet flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, meals, and other items of value from an organized crime-linked lawyer.”
He was found guilty of four counts including bribery of a public official; Broumand will be sentenced in January and faces up to 45 years in prison.
Which could explain why FBI Director Christopher Wray quietly replaced the head of the San Francisco field office in September. Robert Tripp was just moved from the bureau’s inspection division (the FBI’s version of internal affairs) in Washington to take over the San Francisco operation.
Late Monday afternoon, Tripp and Justice Department officials announced federal charges against the alleged attacker, David DePape, including the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Pelosi—a confusing charge, considering Pelosi wasn’t home and DePape clearly had no physical or mental capacity to do so. It appears more than anything to be political narrative-building by Biden’s Justice Department to bolster the idea that Trump and Republicans inspired another “kidnapping” attempt. The complaint, signed by a special agent assigned to domestic terror investigations in the San Francisco FBI office, also offers a conflicting account as to what happened when officers arrived and an incomplete timeline of events.
Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis and conceal any damaging or contradictory facts about the confrontation.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Another Dem run top to bottom Utopia….
“Homeless camps now account for half of all fires in Portland: ‘It’s not sustainable'”
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/11/02/homeless-camps-now-account-for-half-of-all-fires-in-portland-its-not-sustainable-n507671
“I’ve written about this topic before but it’s not one that has gotten much national attention. Earlier this year, KOMO News reported that Seattle firefighters had responded to 450 homeless camp fires in a little over three months. That made for an average of five such fires a day.
This problem isn’t limited to Seattle. Today Willamette Week reports that roughly half of all fires in Portland begin in or near one of the city’s estimated 700 homeless camps. The captain of one Portland firehouse says the pace, now about six such fires a day, is not sustainable.
Nearly half of all fires in Portland now start in or near houseless camps—at least 2,048 last year, according to Portland Fire & Rescue data. It’s a remarkable number, given how five years ago, fires among unhoused Portlanders were hardly a blip.
Today, there are an average of six a day…
The blazes have killed at least nine unhoused people in the past four years, one-third of Portland’s fire fatalities. Homeless people have been injured and lost possessions and loved ones.
“We don’t mind going on dangerous calls—we’re here to do that,” says Capt. Mike McGowan of North Portland’s Station 8 firehouse, which stands among the city’s worst-hit areas. “But five or six houseless fires in the middle of the night is too much. It’s fatiguing to go on the same type of call over and over, with no end in sight. It’s not sustainable.”
Some of the fires are accidental, caused by homeless people using propane to cook food or to warm their tents. People who smoke drugs and then nod may not notice when their heater starts a fire. And then some of the fires are intentional, either to burn garbage or just because someone is mentally ill. Firefighters showing up at these fires have no idea what they are walking into.
Firefighters say they’ve stumbled onto booby traps, territorial people suffering from mental illness, and a semi-automatic rifle partly melted by a blaze.
“I never thought we’d need ballistics vests, but we do now,” McGowan says.”
——-
I love how they call them “unhoused” people. That doesn’t carry the same stigma as “homeless” I guess.
LikeLike
The Dems continue to peddle garbage, and the lie that Sicknick was killed by protesters and not his poor life/health choices. They’re using and exploiting his grieving mother.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re not supposed to question their narrative Brit.
LikeLike
Ewwww….
LikeLike
They’re desperately trying to hide the truth from the public.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clown Alert!!!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Notice a pattern?
When they’re lying, they hide the evidence.
LikeLiked by 1 person