General

Central Park Five: Be Careful What You Sue For

/2 Comments/in /by

I’m not sure the Central Park Five really want a civil trial on what happened the night of April 19, 1989, but by suing Donald Trump for defamation, that’s what they’re going to get.

The alleged defamation was Trump’s typically garbled response to Kamala Harris’ lie at ABC’s presidential debate last month, about something that happened 35 years ago. She claimed that Trump had called for “the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent.”

Actually, Trump’s much-maligned ad in The New York Times never mentioned the Five, who weren’t remotely eligible for the death penalty, anyway. If everyone involved here weren’t a public figure, Harris’ accusation, as well as the Five’s legal filing, and every Times story for the past decade mentioning the ad, would all be defamatory, too.

But since they brought it up, let’s have a trial! Truth is an absolute defense to defamation, and one thing the public hasn’t gotten much of is the truth about the Central Park Five: Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Korey Wise.

Here’s some testimony we’d like to see:

How did the detectives get the boys’ parents to go along with videotaping their sons as they confessed — falsely, they now claim — to the rape of the jogger, in addition to vicious attacks on bicyclists, joggers and other park-goers?

Weren’t the detectives worried that if they bullied five innocent boys into making false confessions, the jogger might suddenly emerge from her coma and be able to identify her attackers? What if she woke up and blurted out, “My boyfriend did it!”? Boy, would their faces be red.

In any event, it will be great to see those videotapes again!

As long as the detectives were making up confessions anyway, why not have the youths forthrightly admit to raping the jogger? Instead, all five readily admitted to the other crimes, but each of them minimized their role in the rape, as is typical for suspects in sex crimes cases.  They confessed — to the police, to detectives and to their friends and acquaintances — only to fondling or restraining the jogger while others raped her.

Thus, for example, when Santana was picked up by the police, he blurted out, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s tits.” The police didn’t know about the jogger yet. How did Santana?

Melody Jackson, sister of a friend of Wise’s, volunteered to the police that Wise told her he didn’t rape the jogger, he “only held her legs down while Kevin [Richardson] f—ked her.”

(Maybe not strictly relevant to the case at hand, but how dumb does she feel now, thinking this admission would help Wise?)

How did Wise know that — as Detective August Jonza’s contemporaneous notes show — someone he thought was named “Rudy” had stolen the jogger’s Walkman? Police had no way of knowing about the Walkman until 13 years later, when serial rapist Matias Reyes said so.

If it wasn’t the Five — and I’m assured it was not — then who really bashed ex-Marine John Loughlin in the head with a lead pipe, kicked and beat him unconscious, putting him in the hospital for two nights? Why would Loughlin identify one of the Five as his attacker in a police lineup?

Subpoenas will also have to go out to the other 30 or so youths in the park that night because so many of them implicated members of the Five in both the beatdowns and the rape — such as overhearing a couple of them laughingly say they “made a woman bleed.”

It’s always been a mystery why Salaam (New York City Council member, honored speaker at the Democratic National Convention and namesake of a gate to Central Park) confessed to the attack immediately after Detective Thomas McKenna told him, “I don’t care what you say to me. We have fingerprints on the jogger’s pants.”

Upon hearing that, Salaam said, “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.”

But why, Yusef? Why confess if you knew your fingerprints couldn’t possibly be anywhere near the jogger, of whose rape you are entirely innocent? Maybe the videotape will jog your memory.

Salaam also told detectives that one of the wilding youths said, “Let’s get a white girl.” Who said that? If Salaam made it up, I’ll be very disappointed in him.

We’ll need to hear from Wise’s acquaintance Ronald Williams, who told police that the day after the wilding, Wise said, “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night. That was us!”

When the case was reopened in 2002, Williams stuck by his story.

Having had 35 years to think about it, does Richardson finally have an explanation for how the crotch of his underwear got smeared with semen, grass stains and dirt that night?

The last two crucial witnesses are confirmed rapist Reyes, whose DNA was on the jogger, and then-assistant district attorney Nancy Ryan, who pushed through the Five’s “exoneration,” despite their detailed, videotaped confessions and guilty verdicts from two majority-minority juries.

Questions for Reyes: When you confessed to raping the jogger, did you know you could not be punished for it? Did you know you would instead receive a favorable prison transfer? You were in the same prison as one of the Five, Wise. Are other inmates telling the truth when they say he was threatening you unless you signed an affidavit prepared by his lawyer, claiming you acted alone?

Is your former cellmate telling the truth when he says you did not, in fact, act alone, but heard the jogger’s screams and ran over to join the fun?

For ADA Ryan: Why did you prohibit the police from interviewing Reyes?

If DNA is the only acceptable evidence in a criminal trial, how were homicides proved before the 1990s, when DNA evidence first began to be used in criminal trials? Would “videotaped confessions” figure into your answer?

Is it true that your bitter office rival was Linda Fairstein, head of the sex crimes unit, who oversaw the original cases? How much did it burn you up that she caught the case instead of you?

I have many more witnesses I’d like to put on the stand, including the jogger’s doctors, who say they distinctly saw many different handprints on the jogger’s body, and that her injuries prove that Reyes could not possibly have acted alone.

This is a wonderful opportunity to prove the truth in a court of law! They asked for it.

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

Peter Bernegger on Dominion Voting Machines

/10 Comments/in /by

Peter Bernegger describes himself as “Independent Journalist, President of Election Watch, Inc.” He has a GiveSendGo appeal for support.

If true, this is an incredibly important story. I would need more corroboration to be confident. If it is true, why would Fox pay $750 million to Dominion to settle their lawsuit? Why wouldn’t Trump and other Republicans be up in arms and try to prevent the use of Dominion voting machines?

Shocking History of Dominion Voting – How Obama rigged the creation of Dominion Voting Co. 
Since 2009, Dominion Voting Systems operated from 215 Spadina Ave., Toronto, ON, M5T 2C7,Canada – an office space of the radical Tides Foundation. This building houses (or housed until a few months ago) a Toronto office of Tides Canada and a Tides’ incubation space for leftist groups. Dominion Voting Systems Corp. is the Canadian company behind the ballot switching software. Dominion was founded in 2003, with a mission to provide electronic voting systems friendly for progressives. Because of such partisanship, it languished with almost no customers for the next 5-6 years, until the Obama administration came to power. In 2010, the Obama administration confiscated electronic voting systems assets (software, intellectual property, manufacturing tools, customer base, etc.) from two established American companies, and gave them to Dominion.
At the same time, Dominion got some employees and assets from a foreign EVS company, tied to Hugo Chavez. Its software has been used by some 40% of the voters in this elections, mostly by Democrat-controlled states and election commissions. Apparently, no protections were put in place against ballot switching, deletion, or creation. According to Dominion’s own website, its software was used in “battleground” states and the largest Democrat states, including MI, GA, AZ, NV, NM, CO, AK, UT, NJ, CA, NY.
Dominion Early History
Dominion Voting System Corp., was founded in Canada in 2002-2003 with an openly progressive mission – to develop electronic voting software which would not just process ballots, but also “mobilize voters” – a popular slogan of the Left. It is not clear what products or services the company has developed. It found almost no buyers, until Obama was elected in 2008. In 2009, New York ordered a few dozens of systems from it. In 2010, Obama’s DOJ (Holder – Mueller) took the EVS unit, purchased from Diebold, away from the market leader ES&S, and gave it to Dominion. This gift included the installed base of about 30% of the US electronic voting systems (EVS) market. Within two weeks, Dominion also acquired Sequoia, which was formally spun from Smartmatic, but ties between these two companies remained. Smartmatic is a UK based EVS vendor, whose software was used by Chavez to “win” the Venezuelan referendum in 2004. Smartmatic’s unit Sequoia faced troubles in the US. Those troubles quickly ended when its assets were purchased by Dominion. Thus, the new Democratic party created a pocket pet corporation, gave it the lion share of the US electronic voting systems market. Dominion is ideologically aligned with the Democratic Party, owes it everything it has, dependent on it for most of its business, and needs it in power to avoid prosecution for corruption. Sounds like a conflict of interest.
Electronic Voting
Using electronic voting machines has always been controversial. The pros for electronic voting – saving working time of the ballot counters – are minuscule. The cons however are infinite. Because software is inherently complex, non-transparent, and volatile, there is always a risk of significant errors. There are also suspicions and doubts about election results. The complexity of software and hardware on which voting machines run has been continually increasing, aggravating these concerns. At the beginning of 2009, there were four major US EVS suppliers: ES&S, Premier (a unit of Nixdorf-Diebold), Sequoia (linked to Smartmatic), and Hart Intercivic. The market size was a few hundred million dollars a year and growing. EVS vendors competed among themselves and against traditional pen and paper voting. There were no barriers to entry for other competitors, other than government’s regulations. Electronic voting, which sounded like a good idea in the 1980s is so no more. Electronic voting machines and their vendors were under criticism for many years. In 2007-2008, this criticism materialized in the SEC, DOJ, and states lawsuits against the voting machines vendors. Diebold was catching flack for having a prominent Republican party supporter among their top executives. It spun its EVS unit as a separate company Premier, and was looking for a buyer. The existing vendors were burdened with liabilities, including DOJ investigations. This opened up an opportunity for the Obama administration.
Technical Vulnerabilities of EVS Systems
The voting software developers can easily insert code, changing numbers in favor of or against one candidate. No hacking is necessary. The malicious code can be designed to pass tests and to be triggered only at the time of a real election, automatically or manually. Both case are possible even if the machine is disconnected from the internet and has no ordinary I/O devices. The malicious code can be activated manually in real time by inserting a ballot or another paper with a pre-defined QR or image code. An audit of the source code is necessary, but not sufficient. Dominion software runs on Windows, and the malicious code can be hidden in any part of the operating system. Malicious code can be hidden in the firmware, too. If a state wants to take risks and to rely on testing and the source code audit, they should be conducted with the participation of technically competent representatives of both parties. If the system passes testing and auditing, the machine image must be securely stored. All supplied machines must have exactly the same hardware and the software as the audited system. As far as I know, thorough tests and source code audits are conducted very rarely, if at all. Further, the vendors are not required to use only the audited image, and are allowed to update the software almost at will. That means that election commissions are forced to blindly trust the vendors. Blind trust is always wrong and invites abuse. But even “trust but verify” is applicable only to trustworthy vendors. Dominion Voting is the opposite of trustworthy. The only real solution to the vulnerability of EVS is not to use them at all. Manual ballot counting has no software vulnerabilities, and is much cheaper. Virginia appears to be the only state that decided to use only manual ballots.
How Dominion went from nothing to everything in two weeks In September 2009, ES&S acquired Premier [8], without any objections from the DOJ. But in March 2010, the Obama’s DOJ (Eric Holder – Robert Mueller) forced ES&S to “sell” Premier’s assets to Dominion, but to keep its liabilities. In addition, ES&S was forced to license to Dominion some of its software, in perpetuity and free of charge. The pretext for the DOJ action was antitrust.
The “Sale”
This is how the assets transfer was structured, per DOJ [1] (March 8, 2010).
“WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice announced today that it will require Election Systems & Software (ES&S) to divest voting equipment systems assets it purchased in September 2009 from Premier Election Solutions Inc. in order to restore competition. The assets to be divested include the means to produce all versions of Premier’s hardware, software and firmware used to record, tabulate, transmit or report votes, including the Assure 1.2 system, and a license to better serve disabled voters. The department said that today’s settlement will restore competition in voting equipment systems in the United States… “
“In order to restore competition” sounds funny, because the same document also required ES&S to not compete against the buyer (with exceptions). “… the acquisition substantially reduced competition as it combined the two largest providers of systems used to tally votes in federal, state and local elections in the United States. ES&S’s acquisition of Premier made ES&S the provider of more than 70 percent of the voting equipment systems in the United States. The department said that because the cash value of the deal between ES&S and Premier was $5 million, far below the mandatory reporting threshold for mergers under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, the department’s investigation of the transaction did not begin until the companies had combined their assets and dismantled many of Premier’s operating divisions.” Sounds like a poor pretext.
The DOJ has been investigating these companies even before the merger, and was aware of it. Further, the DOJ does not allege that the merger has not been reported. Even so, why not simply demand unrolling the merger? The DOJ provides a poor excuse to demand divestiture rather than a normal unrolling. “Under the terms of the settlement, ES&S must divest all of the intellectual property associated with all versions –past, present and in development –of the Premier voting equipment systems to another company. ES&S also must divest all Premier tooling and fixed assets, as well as inventory of parts and components. In order to allow the divestiture buyer to better serve disabled voters, ES&S must also grant a fully paid-up, irrevocable, perpetual license to use the AutoMARK, ES&S’s ballot marking device for which Premier had a limited license prior to the acquisition. The buyer of the divestiture assets will have the right to modify and improve both Premier products and the AutoMARK.”
Thus, the Obama’s DOJ stripped ES&S not only acquired Premier assets, but also coerced it to license rights to its pre-merger product. “ES&S must sell the divestiture assets to a buyer approved by the department.” This is not selling. This is confiscation multiplied by corruption. “The settlement prohibits ES&S from bidding on new voting equipment system contracts using the Premier equipment. [transferred to Dominion]”
Wait, didn’t they say that the purpose was to increase the competition? “The department also required that ES&S grant the divestiture buyer an opportunity to compete to provide services to Premier customers currently under contract with ES&S, giving customers the option to switch to the divestiture buyer or to remain with ES&S … ES&S also must provide access to knowledgeable Premier employees and agree to offer a supply agreement to allow the divestiture buyer time to establish its own manufacturing of voting equipment systems.” The approved divestiture buyer, Dominion Voting, is not mentioned in this press release. But this quote shows that the DOJ has already determined the “approved buyer,” and knew that it had no manufacturing base.
After the “Sale” Dominion announced the acquisition of the Diebold products on May 19, 2010 [2] and the acquisition of Sequoia Voting assets on June 4, 2010 [3]. Dominion also hired much of its personnel, probably retaining ties to extremely sketchy Smartmatic. Sequoia/Smartmatic systems had been used in the Venezuela 2004 referendum, which Hugo Chavez “won”. Smartmatic is a British company with Hugo Chavez ties, headed by “Lord” Malloch-Brown (former UN Deputy Secretary-General, UNDP, UNHCR, VP of Soros’ Quantum Fund, and Vice Chair of Soros’ Open Society Foundation) [7], and linked to electoral scandals all over the world [5]. In August 2009 (corrected), the rough breakdown of the EVS market in the US was (per Brad Friedman):
40% ES&S,
30% Diebold/Premier, 20% Sequoia/Smartmatic,
10% Hart Intercivic
0% Dominion Voting.
Less than a year later, after the “antitrust” actions of Obama’s DOJ, it became:
50% Dominion
40% ES&S (restricted in competing against Dominion)
10% Hart Intercivic
Thus, the DOJ’s actions did the exact opposite of its words. An elections system vendor should be non-partisan, in a demonstrable way. Dominion is not just partisan, but hyper-partisan in favor of the Democrat party, or even its pocket vendor. Dominion has many more ties to the Democrat party and its prominent supporters in the US and abroad, which are not covered in this article. Software Development in Serbia Dominion develops much of its software in Belgrade, Serbia. Russia is a close friend to Serbia, if not its only one. If anybody sincerely thought that Putin wanted to hack American elections, their first location of interest would be the offices of Dominion Voting in Belgrade, rather than the Trump Tower in New York.
By the way, Serbian and Russian languages use the Cyrillic alphabet. Most letters have the same Unicode encoding in Serbian and Russian (the Basic Multilingual Plane, range 0410-04FF). If any election officials found Cyrillic text on a Dominion voting machine in 2016, it was probably left by its developers in Serbia. Remarks This is the Agreement between Michigan & Dominion, including specs of many Dominion products (PDF, 161 pages). Wi-Fi connection and even a dial up modem are offered as an option. Some of the companies referenced here as foreign-based or foreign-originating re-registered in the US.
Dominion Voting Systems Series Part I Part II (this) Part III [the above explains why Dominion is protected, in effect their are an arm of the federal government; John Populous, along with Obama The Foreigner, must be one of the first arrested and prosecuted]
Some References
[1] Justice Department Requires Key Divestiture in Election Systems & Software/Premier Election Solutions Merger, justice.gov, March 8, 2010
[2] Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. Acquires Premier Election Solutions Assets From ES&S, press release, May 19
[3] Dominion Voting Systems Corporation Acquires Assets of Sequoia Voting Systems, press release, June 4, 2010 [3b] On Heels of Diebold/Premier Purchase, Canadian Firm Also Acquires Sequoia, Lies About Chavez-Ties in Announcement – contemporary commentary
[4] Marcos warns of ‘another Smartmatic situation’ – Smartmatic was accused of election fraud in the 2016 elections in Philippines
[5] Smartmatic in Wikipedia, November 9, 2020 (not verified)
[6] Sequoia Voting Systems in Wikipedia, November 9, 2020 (not verified)
[7] “Lord” Malloch Brown in Wikipedia, November 8, 2010 (not verified)
[8] Diebold Sells U.S. Elections Systems Business to ES&S, press release, September 3, 2009
[9] Dominion Voting Systems Corp – discussion of Dominion’s ideology and highly partisan offers
[10] Dominion Voting Systems’ profile in Bloomberg

Image

74.2K

Views

From Emil Kirkegaard’s “Sometimes you should speak up with an unpopular view”

/1 Comment/in /by

“Sometimes you should speak up with an unpopular view”

…

It was therefore a pleasure when I remembered that I should read Hrishikesh Joshi’s 2021 book Why It’s OK to Speak Your Mind, because it is one of those short (196 pages) and to-the-point books that remind me why books are still the best for some topics. While one could write a 200 page blogpost, or split it up, a book can package everything you need to know into a single coherent whole.

The topic of the book appeals to me given the current situation with the Guardian/Spiegel/Hate not Hope spy that infiltrated my research institute. The Guardian has been triumphantly posting articles about this, as has their German counterparts (though the institute has nothing to do with Germany). The main lesson from this is that we were not sufficiently cautious against such evil people. Mainly, I think, because our small time operation was hardly of interest to many people. The lackluster attention that the Guardian’s articles have gathered so far seems to confirm this take. While the journalists thought this was super exciting, thinking of themselves as running a modern James Bond, the readers saw this as kinda meh. After all, the entire revelation was that: 10-15 nerds regularly meet to talk about science in private. Not much different from weekly lab meetings at a university.

However, on a personal level, this experience made it very clear to me that there are costs to speaking your mind on some topics. Yet, that is precisely what Joshi tries to convince the reader to do. Helpfully, he provides a synopsis in the introduction, but which is still too long, so I fed it into GPT4o, which gave me this:

The “epistemic commons” refers to the shared pool of knowledge and ideas within a community, which is vital for collective understanding. Social pressure, however, can distort this commons by suppressing certain evidence or perspectives, as seen in events like the Chernobyl disaster. In democracies as well, social pressure can create blind spots, leading to skewed perceptions. Individuals have a duty to resist such pressure and contribute to the epistemic commons by speaking their minds, especially when withholding evidence can harm collective understanding.

Speaking out also serves personal development, as reasoning is fundamentally social. Following thinkers like Aristotle and Socrates, the text argues that living a good life involves actively exercising reason and integrity by expressing one’s views. Philosophers like Mill and Nietzsche, who valued independence and nonconformity, remind us that such expression is crucial to resisting cultural pressures and fostering both individual and societal growth. Ultimately, contributing to the epistemic commons is not only about benefiting society but also about living a meaningful and independent life.

…

From this perspective, the way a society figures out what is true and what is false is by having many different actors play each other in a kind of epistemic game. Loosely speaking, you get points when you say things that are true and get vindicated. You lose points for the opposite. The efficiency of this truth-finding system depends upon certain features of it, including its members. One such property is whether people with uncommon or unpopular views will speak up or stay quiet. Sometimes an idea that is currently unpopular is actually true. Anyone who reads history will eventually learn that people in the past thought things that we now consider false and even crazy (e.g. bloodletting). Why then should anyone think our current collective worldview — the current most popular belief on each question — is entirely right? That’s the historical argument for epistemic humility. Are all of our currently common behaviors morally optimal? No one could believe this after reading a bit of history. The only way to figure out what things currently believed are in fact false is to tentatively challenge the popular opinion. That is to say, to speak up. So someone must speak up for the benefit of all of us. Joshi thinks we should do more of this.

However, speaking up has personal costs, so the situation is a kind of tragedy of the (epistemic) commons. By voicing an unpopular opinion, you might be merely considered eccentric, but other times you might be considered evil, or even punished by the state (UK and Germany are infamous for illiberally arresting and jailing people for saying trivial things on Facebook). Most free speech debates concern the state’s ability to punish people (“hate speech” laws, first amendment in USA), but Joshi points out that this is usually a minor part of the cost for a given person. The costs are mostly social. You might not get invited to the next family dinner, or your uncle will ask your mom questions about your beliefs.

…

When people justify censorship laws or practices, they almost always do this in terms of the social costs of people believing such things. The exact terms used fluctuate over time, but the idea is always the same: some speech is either directly harmful or leads to harms and should therefore be limited or prevented with fines or other harassment for those who dare say it. It’s a utilitarian argument for censorship. The main issue with these kinds of arguments is that the promoters almost never try to actually justify their claims of harm …

…

The arguments for censorship come up frequently regarding research into into genetics, intelligence, race, and especially their combination. What good can come out of this work? Eric Turkheimer famously wrote:

If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history.

But what evidence did Turkheimer supply for this claim? Nothing. Presumably, it was obvious to him. What evidence did people who said similar things about Arthur Jensen’s 1969 article present? Nothing. Steelmanning the position, the best evidence one can present is that occasionally, some crazy person with very racist views who referred to such research goes out shooting members of the race they don’t like (e.g. Breivik, Christchurch). By extrapolation, then, it is presumed that if such research was more popular or more widely disseminated, many more such shootings would occur. Maybe there would be another ethnic cleansing or genocide, holocaust being the go-to example of course (many of the censorship advocates are Jews who often have some ancestor who was killed by the Nazis). I don’t think the historical record bears this out. People have been killing each other for all sorts of reasons since before history began. Genocides and population replacement is common in history and clearly did not need scientific justification. The contribution of a few lone wolf shooters is tiny compared to ordinary citizens killing each other for mundane reasons (money, love/jealousy, offense etc.). But even if one accepts some increased deaths due to lunatics, there may be other outcomes that are even worse if one tries to build a society based on lies. Jensen himself wrote presciently on this in the 1970s, and I won’t go into detail again here. …

It’s Not Your Father’s Pot Anymore

/18 Comments/in /by

It’s Not Your Father’s Pot Anymore

Remember all those great ideas George Soros had about crime and open borders? Guess what the spawn of Satan, whose every idea is designed to increase human misery, is pushing now? Legal weed.

Switching out Americans for third worlders and releasing violent predators from prison gave him kicks for a while. But way too many Americans had not yet become McDonald’s-fattened, glassy-eyed deadbeats who spend most of their time sprawled across a filthy couch ordering DoorDash pizza, playing video games and not looking for work.

Legalizing marijuana is the last step, the silver bullet to the heart of what’s left of our country. Tantalize the public with a drug that will turn them into low-IQ losers, crashing cars, committing suicide and rushing to emergency rooms with their cannabis-induced scromiting (uncontrollable screaming and vomiting at the same time — one of the many charming side-effects of widely available pot).

That’s not even the best part. The cherry on top is that a very, very, very small number of corporate magnates with absolutely no conscience stand to make billions. Big Pot will make Big Tobacco and Big Pharma look like your family doctor.

With that kind of money at stake, the pot-legalizers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pot initiatives this year in Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota so they can start profiting off ruined lives in six more states. According to Open Secrets, the group pushing the Florida pot initiative, “Smart & Safe Florida” — or, more accurately: “Lose 8 Points of Your IQ & Murder Your Wife Florida” — had raised more money than for any other ballot initiative this year, on any issue, in the entire country.

(About my alternative name: One of the first legal pot consumers in America was Colorado’s Richard Kirk, who ate a marijuana edible, started hallucinating, held a gun to his wife’s head and shot her dead.)

That kind of spending could persuade voters to support cannibalism. Which, come to think of it, they might be: Remember Rudy Eugene, the Miami face-eater believed to be high on bath salts? The toxicology report identified only one drug in his system: marijuana.

Soros has so much money sloshing around that he got Newt Gingrich to campaign for Prop. 47, the initiative that put thousands of violent criminals on California streets — also promoted by the renowned tough-on-crime attorney general Kamala Harris.

This column will attempt to provide an eyedropper of truth about pot, against the tidal wave of lies — even, no doubt, from people like Gingrich.

Today’s marijuana is nothing like what it was 20 years ago. Although polls seem to show that younger voters are the most in favor of pot legalization, my experience is the opposite: Older voters who have absolutely no idea what’s in today’s pot are the most susceptible to legalization pitches.

The oldsters think marijuana is still about 2% to 3% THC. Maybe when they were listening to the Beatles’ “White Album” in their dorm rooms, but currently, pot averages about 15% to 25% THC and can be 99.9% pure. That’s a completely different drug.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that about 30% of cannabis users will become addicted, especially those who start before the age of 18. Brain scans of regular users are consistent with the brain circuitry of an addict.

The corporate interests behind legalization are pushing a fairy tale about how legalization will swell a state’s tax coffers. Marijuana’s been legalized in 24 states (and another 17 for “medicinal purposes” — a total fraud). Are they rolling in tax revenue?

Quite the opposite. For every dollar in marijuana taxes a state collects, it spends about $10 on increased hospital admissions, police to clean up after all the car crashes and psychosis-induced crimes, and mental health therapists to deal with suicide ideation, depression and anxiety caused by increased cannabis use.

In Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana, crime soared to 11 times the national average. Not only did marijuana-only DUIs increase, but 40% of the stoned drivers were under the age of 18. Increased hospital admissions due to pot alone (and the always enjoyable “scromiting”) are estimated to cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The corporate interests pushing pot claim it works wonders on veterans with PTSD. Yes, if you consider suicide a cure. Two studies have shown that cannabis use by veterans was associated with “PTSD severity, depressive symptom severity, and suicidality.”

As one psychiatrist said, “You can’t trust the people who sell the drugs to be upfront with the risk.”

The main upshot of legalizing pot will be to accelerate our nation’s galloping descent into mass retardation, laziness and the inability to engage in a normal adult conversation.

It’s basically impossible to increase IQ permanently — as Charles Murray has been pointing out forever. But Soros has found a way to decrease IQ permanently.

The 2012 Dunedin Study compared the IQ of more than a thousand participants at age 13 and then again at age 38, with their pot usage assessed at ages 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38.

Result: The more pot they consumed, the more IQ points they lost. Heavy, frequent or longtime users lost an average of six points, and early-onset users lost an average of eight points. Mental impairment was evident across all four Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV components: working memory, processing speed, perceptual reasoning and verbal comprehension. The cognitive loss was even greater compared to non-users, whose IQ actually increased from childhood.

No other factors could explain it — the researchers controlled for alcohol, education level, other drugs or still being high. It was just the marijuana. And quitting didn’t reverse the decline, especially for users who started young. Once the IQ points are gone, they’re gone. You can’t Uber down to the IQ dispensary and buy some more.

Eight points isn’t a gigantic cognitive deficit. It’s only about the IQ difference between Connecticut and Mississippi, or the U.S. and Chile. But why would any country adopt policies that reduce the national IQ by even a few points?

I don’t know. A$k Newt why he campaigned to relea$e thou$and$ of violent criminal$ from pri$on.

     COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

James Howard Kunstler: Lawfare Is Jihad Against Our Country

/16 Comments/in /by

It’s happening again…

From Zerohedge

This time around, 2024, Mr. Elias has done everything possible to ensure that millions of illegal aliens stuffed into swing states will have their putative identities attached to harvested mail-in ballots from addresses such as Walmart parking lots and storage units, and has filed lawsuits wherever a state threatens to require proof of citizenship for voting….

“The lineup of the leading Lawfare attorneys are Jews: Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Weissmann, Michael Bromwich, Michael Sussmann, Lawrence Tribe, Daniel Goldman, Paul Rosenzweig, the exceptionally profligate serial liar Rep. Adam Schiff, and many others.Lawfare Is Jihad Against Our Country.”

Old Joke: what do you call a hundred thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?

Answer: A good start.

You think the bankers are up to no good? No band of scoundrels has brought more chaos and grief to the life of this republic than the claque that gathers darkly under the banner of “Lawfare.” Its public face is Lawfaremedia.org, run by Benjamin Wittes a Brookings senior fellow, but that gang functions only to lend a false-front of decorum to the operations of its Democratic Party activist lawyer-army led by Field Marshal Marc Elias, architect of the ballot fraud that has caused Americans to lose faith in their elections.

Marc Elias was the original expeditor of the RussiaGate hoax in 2016 from his perch at Perkins Coie, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign law firm, which laundered payments to Christopher Steele, front-man for Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political PR shop, which concocted the fraudulent “dossier,” and set in motion a train of DC intel blob legal shenanigans aimed at defenestrating Donald Trump from the White House — the Mueller Investigation, impeachment, etc.

While all that was going on through the Trump term, and with the Covid-19 Op providing cover, Mr. Elias engineered the 2020 changes in many states’ election laws and bylaws to permit large-scale mail-in voting, organized ballot-harvesting activities, and the use of drop-boxes for receiving bundled votes. He and his George Soros-financed staff lawyers sued states that attempted to require voter-identification, and provided legal protection for Mark Zuckerberg’s $419-million-dollar assault on election precinct staffing in swing states. When the 2020 election concluded suspiciously, Mr. Elias and his gang joined lawsuits in every case where the balloting was contested and got more than sixty of them dismissed on the basis of “standing,” without the merits of the cases being heard. This is Lawfare.

This time around, 2024, Mr. Elias has done everything possible to ensure that millions of illegal aliens stuffed into swing states will have their putative identities attached to harvested mail-in ballots from addresses such as Walmart parking lots and storage units, and has filed lawsuits wherever a state threatens to require proof of citizenship for voting. He has also filed sixty peremptory lawsuits to obstruct attempts to audit any election count after November 5 — as if it is an affront to democracy to even ask questions about official misconduct.

A parallel Lawfare scam underway is the Democratic Party-sponsored 65 Project that seeks to disbar Trump-adjacent lawyers who attempt to challenge any voting irregularities in this year’s election. It’s mission statement reads:

The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections.

Notice the term “Big Lie” to foreclose any inquiry at all into election fraud. That half the people in this country accept such an Orwellian con tells you the vital role played by the perversion of language in the Democratic Party’s war against the citizens of this land. Exactly who is to say, in advance of the event, that any objection to a vote count is fraudulent and malicious? Answer: the people who have maliciously committed fraud. The Democrats have been grooming the public for years with that phrase, the Big Lie, in exactly the same way that pedos groom innocent pubescents who accept the authority of any grown-up, no matter what debauchery they are subjected to.

It’s a tragic turn of fate for our country that the law, and language with it, have been turned into weapons for national suicide. The net result is a nation that can’t think straight anymore and cannot construct any coherent set of rules to live by. So we find ourselves in a society where stealing is no longer a crime, where border-jumping has been downgraded to a clerical error (“undocumented”), where little children are allowed to decide whether they are male or female, where speech that disagrees with the authorities agenda is “misinformation” subject to censorship and prosecution, where candidates for the highest office get selected “democratically” without any votes cast, and where you can be run-over and ruined financially in court by the bottomless legal resources of the Deep State for just speaking your mind.

Now I will tell you something that deeply troubles me and might trouble you. Forgive me if I throw the Overton Window wide open here.

Readers may know that I am an American Jew. We have entered a new era of antisemitism. Many might say it is due to the conduct of Israel warring against its enemies. I would say it is as much due to the adoption of Jihad politics by the Marxist-Woke campaign as an instrument to promote political and social chaos in America.

Lawfare is essentially jihad waged via the courts against our own disintegrating common culture and national interests.

The lineup of the leading Lawfare attorneys are Jews: Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Weissmann, Michael Bromwich, Michael Sussmann, Lawrence Tribe, Daniel Goldman, Paul Rosenzweig, the exceptionally profligate serial liar Rep. Adam Schiff, and many others. I can’t say I understand exactly what motivates them to engage these antics. (Possibly to defend their Deep State clients against many previous crimes committed since 2016, especially within the FBI and DOJ.) But it’s a really bad look on top of being a nefarious agenda.

They are disgracing the rest of us American Jews and putting us in danger. Shame on them.

They must be defeated, and their defeat must come within the arena of the very law they work so hard to pervert.

Dr. Ricardo Duchesne on an aspect of Faustian Man

/19 Comments/in /by

Bill Kristol: “My fellow White Americans are ‘the enemy'”

/9 Comments/in /by

Bill Kristol: My Fellow White Americans Are ‘The Enemy’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol labeled white Americans “the enemy” in a column on Friday because the majority support Donald Trump for president.

In a piece for The Bulwark, Kristol praised Barack Obama for his comments encouraging “the brothers” to support Kamala Harris for president before putting out a statement of his own echoing the former president’s remarks.


“If you believe it’s important to defeat Trump, it’s not Obama’s ‘brothers’ who are the problem. It’s my ‘brothers’ who are the problem: white voters,” Kristol wrote, self-identifying as a fellow white person.

Kristol continued:

You want to know why Trump has a decent chance to win the presidency again? Because most white Americans support him. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, Trump wins white voters by 52 percent to 44 percent.

[…] If Trump wins on November 5, it will be because of his support from a majority of white America. As a white American, and a white American man to boot, I’ve got to say, in the immortal words of Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Bill Kristol, a Jewish Zionist who helped push America into the war in Iraq, in 2017 called for the “lazy, spoiled” white working class to be replaced by “new Americans.”

“Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?” Kristol said. “Seriously, you can make the case — this is going on too long and this is too crazy, probably, and I hope this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse.”

Kristol continued: “You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you’re a free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever.”

“Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed and really want their kids to live better lives than them and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth. In that respect, I don’t know how this moment is that different from the early 20th century.”