IT’S COME TO THIS: If plants are so intelligent, should we stop eating them?

HMM:

From the 2018 report:

It was a life-or-death call. The Chinese government had been systematically picking off American spies in China, dismantling a network that had taken the CIA years to build. A mole hunt was underway, and the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was the prime suspect.

The FBI could have arrested him on the spot for possessing classified information. But inside a secretive government task force, investigators argued against it, former U.S. officials recalled. If Lee were a turncoat, arresting him on an unrelated charge would tip off the Chinese and allow them to cover their tracks. If he was not the mole, and some argued strenuously that he was not, an arrest might allow the real traitor to escape.

So the FBI allowed Lee to return to Hong Kong, court papers show, where he hastily resettled with his family. The agents gambled that by watching patiently, they might piece together how China had decimated the United States’ spy network, and determine whether Lee had helped.

Nearly five years later, when Lee made a surprise return to the United States this week, the FBI made its move. He stepped off a Cathay Pacific flight at Kennedy International Airport on Monday. A waiting FBI agent, Kellie O’Brien, called out his name, according to court records. Lee answered, and was arrested.
His apprehension, on the same single charge that could have been brought years ago, is the latest development in one of the most damaging affairs in modern CIA history.

The kicker: “When the CIA noticed in late 2010 that its spies were disappearing, suspicion did not immediately turn to Lee, according to current and former officials. But as fears of a mole grew, the government set up a secret task force of CIA officers and FBI agents. A veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, Charles McGonigal, was assigned to run it, former U.S. law enforcement officials said.”

Now that McGonigal is alleged to have been in bed with the Russians, that sheds quite a light on his drawn-out investigation into Chinese spy Jerry Chun Shing Lee.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS REMOVES TWEET SHOWING OFF WEIRDO NAKED KID ART. You don’t need a pizza-related map to know that we need a total and complete shutdown of the elite fascination with creepy sexualized art (often involving kids) until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Wow, Russian Collusion Shows Up in the Weirdest Places. “It’s not surprising that a former FBI agent who reached his greatest heights in the Bureau thanks to James Comey is a scumbag, but his area of scumbaggery raises an eyebrow or two.”

NORMALIZING PEDOPHILIA: Next Step in the War on Kids.

Going by previous patterns, including the move to get people to say “Minor Attracted Person” or “MAP” instead of “pedophile,” (which most of the academic types and some ordinary, otherwise-sane people have started using on Twitter and other social media), it seems likely to me that this one isn’t far from a crucial point. This tipping point is the point where it’ll become widely known enough that, if not exactly “mainstream,” enough people will know what it means that it’ll amount, in practical terms, to the same thing.

The idea that people are seeing spread on social media and sending to me relates, in a parallel fashion, to the notion of “transage,” which, unlike “transrace,” has a real chance at succeeding. Trans-race is a struggling notion because race has such a sacred place in the leftist victim hierarchy, but the notion of age holds no such status. Thus, with no higher caste of victims on whose turf they would be stepping, there is a very real chance that this is going to work.

If it does work, the transformation will happen—as most leftist movements do—slowly, and then quite quickly. Out of nowhere, it’ll seemingly happen all at once.

This essay is my attempt to point it out in advance so that each of us can do what we can to stop it.

The first step is to never, never go along with the Left’s Orwellian language games.

YEAH, ONLY THE BELTWAY PARASITE CLASS SEEMS HORRIFIED WHEN THIS HAPPENS: Voters: Go ahead, shut down the government.

SPACE: SpaceX completes Starship wet dress rehearsal. “The fully stacked Starship vehicle, consisting of a Super Heavy booster designated Booster 7 and a Starship upper stage named Ship 24, was filled with liquid oxygen and methane propellants during the test at SpaceX’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The test, called a wet dress rehearsal, simulates a countdown without firing the vehicle’s engines.”

MARK JUDGE: Quiet Rehoboth Beach: An unlikely vortex of the Joe Biden document mess.

TRUE:

UGH: 7 Chinese Farm Workers Killed in Two Related Shootings in Northern California.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Raphael Warnock Buys Million-Dollar Townhouse As His Church’s Tenants Live In Squalor.

JEFFREY CARTER: Chart of the Day: 2022 Should Be An Outlier. Well, maybe. “2022 is the only year with negative bond and stock yields.”

The only year so far. Try saying that in the classic Homer Simpson voice for best results.

Plus: “All over I see the phrase, ‘if we go into recession’ all the time. The simple fact is, we are in a recession. We have been in a recession. Six consecutive months of negative GDP growth is the classic way to define a recession and we are there despite what you might hear. Last quarter wasn’t really any better.”

And: “But, the real cause of inflation is ever-increasing government spending. There is little the Fed can do about that.” Well, they can raise interest rates to the point where the economy tanks and the big-spending politicians get voted out.

JOHN NOLTE: Woke Nazis Want Aretha Franklin Hit ‘Natural Woman’ Censored.

THE LOCKDOWNS, MASKING, DISTANCING — IT WAS ALL A MISTAKE: Excess Deaths in Finland and Norway in 2022 Were Higher Than in Sweden in 2020.

Remember back in 2020 when Sweden was the bad boy of the Covid world? Placed firmly on the naughty step by the WHO, the EU and many national leaders, the Swedes bravely, or stubbornly, ploughed their own furrow. However, by the end of 2020, with the excess death rate in Sweden at 758 per million compared to the minuscule or negative rates in the ‘pin-up’ Nordic countries of Finland, Denmark and Norway (each of which followed WHO and EU orthodoxy) Sweden, and their Chief Epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, were firmly on the defensive.

How times change! Here we are in 2023, the pandemic rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. But what’s this? The excess date rate in 2022 in both Finland and Norway was higher than Sweden’s in 2020.

Much more at the link, including data on the efficacy of the vaccines.

THIS WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED IF THE JUSTICE SYSTEM HAD DONE ITS JOB: Chicago Man Shot by Concealed Carry Holder on Green Line Train Has 32 Arrests in Last 10 Years.

LIGHTENING DEAL: Winter Gloves for Men and Women. #CommissionEarned

THIS IS CNN: Atlanta Antifa terror suspect worked as a production assistant for CNN and is daughter of UK Foreign Office consultant and New Jersey-based Chinese pharma tycoon.

BLUE CITY BLUES: Seattle Is Running Out of Morgue Space Due to the Fentanyl Crisis.

BYRON YORK: The never-ending war on Brett Kavanaugh.

Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court more than four years ago, on Oct. 6, 2018. His oath followed perhaps the ugliest Supreme Court Senate confirmation process in history — and that, given the previous examples of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, is saying something. But when it was all over, Kavanaugh settled in to the court, where he has, by all accounts, performed admirably ever since.

But the people who tried to kill the Kavanaugh nomination never gave up. They never went away. They still want to end his time on the court. And now, they seem to be having a moment, thanks to a new documentary that recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. . . .

Viewed together, the stories of the three women added up to…nothing. Senate Republicans pressed forward with Kavanaugh’s confirmation. A later book, Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino’s Justice on Trial, debunked the challenges in detail. Books by Democratic defenders failed to corroborate the accusations. The world moved on.

But Kavanaugh’s attackers did not move on. And now, in the documentary Justice, they apparently suggest that there is important evidence against Kavanaugh that was never seen, more accusers who were never heard. But early word — the film has been shown in public exactly once, and except for a few, most people, including myself, have not seen it — is that the picture de-emphasizes the Ford accusations and focuses mostly on Ramirez. According to an article in the Washington Post, the film “gives Ramirez the public platform she never got in front of the Senate.”

Haha, Kavanaugh can laugh at these losers from his powerful, life-tenured position. Even Democrats don’t believe in #MeToo anymore, which anyway claimed more of them than the Republicans it was supposed to destroy. Another torpedo that circled around . . .

CAN THE NAVY LEARN SOMETHING FROM THE AIR FORCE? The B-21 Avoided the Tree Of Woe.

The Navy’s tale of woe in trying to force the acquisition system to actually produce something besides process is almost too painful to recall, especially on the surface side of the house.

We have the walking wounded of LCS, the squib DDG-1000, the gilded promise Ford CVN, and the never-was-has-been CG(X). We have hope that we can’t screw up the existing Franco-Italian FREMM in the upcoming modified to American requirements Constellation Class FFG, but we shall see if our optimism is well placed.

As we all wait with bated breath and gritted teeth on what may be with DDG(X), we should look around to see if there is a benchmark recently that did work.

On the surface side of the house, LPD-17 won’t quite make the cut as it was only made to work with a lot of additional money and Sailor sweat, though we can call it adequate, if a bit expensive and clunky in initial execution.

We can look over at the aviation side of the house, but that is quite spotty. F-35 is meeting our lowered expectations, but it is a Joint hobbled kludge. If you ignore the pile of pants that is maintenance, the sub side of the house seems to be doing quite well, but they’re a special case in a variety of ways. The Super Hornet program was a great success, but that was only because NAVAIR tricked everyone in to thinking that it was just an update to the Hornet…which it was absolutely not.

Hmmmm, a successful acquisition system from the 1990s that was a success by … bypassing the acquisition system. Did anyone learn a lesson there?

Well, it appears the USAF did in the B-21.

Fewer people checking the checkers.

“ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY” “RENEWABLE” ENERGY IS NEITHER:  Evidence says offshore wind development is killing lots of whales.

DEAR LORD, AT THIS POINT, THEY PROBABLY USED THEM AS EVERYTHING BUT COASTERS:  Did Hunter use classified documents as part of his Ukraine business dealings?

AND FOR THE THIRD TIME, THERE IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  The festering rot at the FBI seems bigger and deeper than we ever guessed.

STUPID BEYOND PERMISSION:  “Life” Not In Declaration of Independence – Kamala Harris.

WHEN IS IT IMPEACHMENT O’CLOCK?  ‘Blatant Obstruction’: GOP Lawmaker Blasts Biden for Withholding Information on Afghanistan Withdrawal.