IT’S LIKE A CONVEYOR BELT: Watch SpaceX launch 55 Starlink satellites early Sunday morning.
Archive for 2023
February 11, 2023
SAME WITH PEOPLE: Just because an AI can hold a conversation does not make it smart.
I ALWAYS ENJOY STUDIES THAT ENDORSE THINGS I LIKE ANYWAY: Study shows eating strawberries may have heart health benefits.
REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Boston administration official on leave following prison money-laundering charges.
A Wu office official is on unpaid leave after she was charged with money laundering, authorities say.
Freda Brasfield, a longtime City Hall worker and local activist, is charged with one count each of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to a spokeswoman for Attorney General Andrea Campbell.
The case is out of Woburn, where the AG’s office secured an indictment in December, leading to Brasfield’s arraignment Friday. She entered a plea of not guilty, and says she’s been “wrongfully charged.”
Brasfield is the mayor’s director of administration and finance, a position with an annual salary of $130,222, according to city data. To be clear, that’s a different position than the head of the A&F Cabinet or the city’s chief financial officer; Brasfield’s job is to do administration-related tasks specifically for the mayor’s office, and not deal with bigger-picture issues like the budget, which is the purview of the CFO and that Cabinet. . . .
The city said that the allegations have nothing to do with anything she did at work.
Her case is related to an alleged multi-person conspiracy to smuggle synthetic drugs into prison, according to the TV station Boston 25, which first reported the news and had further details from the arraignment in Woburn Superior Court.
The TV station reported that multiple people including her nephew took part in the alleged scheme to get the drugs into MCI-Shirley.
I’m sure that her work at the Mayor’s office was squeaky clean.
FORMER TALIBAN FIGHTERS MISSING THE U.S.: “The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.”
For 25-year-old fighter Abdul Nafi, who fought in the Taliban’s insurgency for seven years, the boredom and bureaucracy of life as a civil servant makes him miss the war.
“I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had,” he said.
“In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.”
High crime rates in Kabul were also of concern to fighters like Mr Nafi.
“He’d grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.” Enjoy your victory, dudes.
81 MILLION VOTES! Joe Biden’s Lie-Filled SOTU Was Lowest Rated In Three Decades. Perhaps Americans Wanted To Watch A Non-Fiction Program Instead.
Related: Only 33% would vote to reelect Biden if presidential election was held today: poll.
More: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
GOOD: School Choice Rolls On.
FORMER SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS:
AMITY SHLAES: Shaming Americans. Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust distorts the historical record in service of a political message.
By 1925, a reality inconvenient to the narrative thrust of The U.S. and the Holocaust intruded. Americans of all backgrounds, including blacks, saw their lives improve, with electric appliances and automobiles changing even working-class life. The Harding-Coolidge wager that growth would reduce extremism was succeeding. Mid-decade, the Ku Klux Klan commenced a precipitous decline. Lynchings likewise dropped. Coolidge traveled to Omaha to challenge thousands of members of the mighty American Legion to reconsider any prejudices they might harbor: “We must all realize,” Coolidge told the crowd, “that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language.” In America, concluded Coolidge, “we are all now in the same boat.”
But it is Herbert Hoover whom the film wrongs most. Hoover had first won national popularity for the kind of grand humanitarian heroism that the filmmakers admire, getting past enemy lines in World War I to feed the starving citizens of German-occupied Belgium. Years later, Hoover had the bad luck to become president during the first year of the Great Depression. The scarcity of jobs—one in four Americans was unemployed by 1932—made many want to shut out foreign competitors. In the West, state and local governments began pressuring Mexicans, whether citizens or not, to return to Mexico. Many left voluntarily; others were forced out. At times, federal immigration officials were involved. In the Los Angeles raids, for example, federal authorities arrested 389 aliens, 269 of them Mexican. Other times, the drive to remove or send away legal immigrants was led by towns, counties, and states, and scant records of these events exist. Estimates of the number of Mexicans who left or were driven out range widely, from 200,000 to more than 1 million. Repatriation and deportation are not equivalent, as scholars Brian Gratton and Emily Merchant noted in 2013 in International Migration Review, and the evidence suggests that many Mexican-Americans left of their own accord. The departures went on for years, including at least some that occurred well into the mid- or later 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt, not Hoover, was in the Oval Office.
Rather than offer all this detail, the film weaponizes history to clobber Hoover: “Under the slogan ‘American jobs for real Americans,’ Hoover’s Labor Department approved raids by sheriffs, marshals, and vigilantes that rounded up some 1.8 million people of Mexican descent and deported them.” That “1.8 million,” outside the bounds of serious scholarship to date, is particularly ominous in a film about the 6 million—leaving an opening for authors of urban legend to present Hoover as operating in the big-number league of the Nazis. Adding insult to injury, the film chides Hoover for what it treats as an exceptional cruelty: enforcing a regulation already on the books requiring immigrants to demonstrate that they could care for themselves. Yet such measures were an American tradition dating back to a period that the documentary presents as Edenic: the 1882 Immigration Act empowered authorities to deny entry to “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” This is not much different from what our own bureaucracies do when they check with employer sponsors in evaluating green-card applications.
It is in the second episode that the filmmakers turn to Franklin Roosevelt, the only president forced to contend with the Third Reich while in office. Roosevelt himself was capable of bigotry. During his first election campaign, Roosevelt allowed himself a kind of casual but nasty xenophobia, as in a San Francisco speech in which he assailed the Chicago electricity magnate Samuel Insull, who was taking his employees down with him as his firm failed. Roosevelt spoke against “the Ishmael or Insull, whose hand is against every man’s,” a line so creepy one can only ask, “What does that mean?” In his March 1933 inaugural address, just weeks before Hitler opened his first concentration camp, Roosevelt channeled Henry Ford on international capital, claiming that “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed” and that “practices of the unscrupulous money changers”—code for Jewish Wall Street—“stand indicted.” Burns covers none of this.
Earlier: New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II. As the Holocaust raged, the American president secretly asked his government to study the possible resettlement of remaining European refugees in Africa and South America. His goal: for Jews to be ‘spread thin all over the world.’
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Report: Nothing Wrong With A Good Old-Fashioned Ham And Cheese Sandwich.
I like them heated, with mustard, mayo, and smoked cheddar.
BE PREPARED: Unger Professional 48″ Nifty Nabber Reacher Grabber Tool. #CommissionEarned
MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: Watching Ukraine, Japan and South Korea Consider Nuclear Weapons
…from Russia’s February 2014 attack on Crimea to this very minute’s nuclear weapons have been the Ukraine war’s deep global issue.
When Russia invaded Crimea, it violated a multilateral diplomatic agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The agreement traded Ukrainian nuclear weapons for mutual security guarantees. At the time Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, some 5,000 weapons.
The U.S. and Britain backed it. Bill Clinton signed it. The memorandum was part of a larger post-Cold War diplomatic framework forwarding disarmament, economic development, constructive cooperation and democratic development in former Iron Curtain countries.
The Clinton administration, Ukraine and Britain thought they had solved the problem of ex-Soviet nukes and Ukrainian territorial sovereignty.
Obviously, they didn’t. Now Ukraine confronts invasion and nuclear blackmail.
Trading nukes for paper security guarantees — the so called Western “anti-war” no nukes crowd of the Cold war era was all for it.
Related (From Ed): US Conducts Nuclear Missile Test Launch. “The U.S. launched an unarmed but nuclear-capable Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Thursday night in what the Pentagon characterized as a display of the U.S.’ effective nuclear deterrent against hostile foreign powers.”
(Updated and bumped.)
NOW THAT’S A NAME I’VE NOT HEARD FOR A LONG TIME. A LONG TIME: 94-year-old NFL groundskeeper George Toma, dubbed ‘The Sodfather’ has tended to every Super Bowl field in history but is preparing for his final big game at No. 57 as he calls time on a legendary career.
I THOUGHT IT CAME FROM SUV EXHAUST: Evidence that deep-sea black carbon comes from hydrothermal vents.
QUESTION ASKED: Why is Joe Biden afraid of Fox News Channel?
Biden refused to commit to doing an interview with an anchor from Fox News Channel, this year’s Super Bowl broadcast channel. Think Bret Baier. Nope. Apparently, Joe Biden is scared to face a political journalist on America’s most-watched cable news network. Instead of agreeing to an interview with FNC, Team Biden negotiated an interview on Fox Soul, a Fox streaming service. Ever heard of it? Me, neither.
Fox Soul is an ad-supported streaming service that launched in 2020 and targets its content to Black Americans.
Oh, ok. Now it makes sense. Biden is turning the Super Bowl interview into a racial thing. Typical Joe Biden. That is Joe’s normal. Karine Jean-Pierre, a political hire that hits the trifecta in the Biden administration – she’s an immigrant, black, and a lesbian – let the cat out of the bag. After two days of back and forth between Fox and the White House, Biden is going with Fox Soul, not the news division of FNC.
As the late Roger Ailes said in 2007:
“The candidates that can’t face Fox, can’t face Al Qaeda. And that’s what’s coming,” Ailes said.
Or the Taliban, as we saw in the summer and fall of 2021.
HELEN CAN ALWAYS SPOT A POP HIT ON FIRST HEARING: People can tell whether they like a song within seconds, study finds.
WHEN YOU BOTCH THE ADRENOCHROME DOSAGE: The Mess of an Address.
How could Biden explain the humiliation in Afghanistan? The draining of our arsenal of key weaponry? Or the inability to take down a Communist Chinese spy balloon when it first brazenly floated above America—photographing military bases and missile sites as it crossed the entire United States with impunity?
We know the answers to all these questions.
Biden simply did on Tuesday in his State of the Union address what he always does: Misinform, ignore, and attack!
Misinform. After sending inflation, energy, and interest rates to astronomical rates, and then seeing them momentarily taper off a bit, Biden declares that he “lowered” these indices that remain far higher than they were when he entered office.
He brags of a low unemployment rate. But Biden never discloses the better indicator of the labor participation rate that has declined under his tenure—or the fact he inherited a growing economy naturally rebounding on autopilot from a disastrous two-year COVID-19 lockdown.
Ignore. Consider what he will never mention. China just violated international law and U.S. airspace. How did Beijing assume rightly that it so easily could get away with it?
There is no southern border. Biden destroyed it. He greenlighted over 5 million illegal aliens to enter the United States without audit or legality—even as smuggled Mexican drugs kill 100,000 Americans each year.
It’s VDH, so read the whole thing.
HOWIE CARR: A rare salute to the Boston FBI for refusing Jan. 6 improper investigations on citizens.
The Boston office of the FBI finally got something right, and I salute them for doing so.
The above is a sentence I never dreamed I would be writing, but there’s a first time for everything, and this is it.
This unanticipated turn of events unfolded this week during a Congressional hearing under the new Republican majority.
A former FBI intelligence analyst from Boston testified that after the Jan. 6 disturbances, the Boston office adamantly refused to conduct improper investigations on American citizens whose only crime was (or might have been) being a supporter of Donald Trump.
George Hill is a 64-year-old whistleblower — 26-year military veteran, five years with the National Security Agency (NSA) and more than a decade with the FBI as an intelligence analyst.
What Hill told Congress wasn’t a complete surprise, given the recent breathtaking corruption of the FBI (there I go again!). But Hill’s story did lay out some local angles of the FBI/Democrat conspiracy against the Constitution in greater depth than was previously known.
And I repeat, the Boston FBI office refused to have anything to do with it. Fantastic news!
The FBI’s proposed targets for the Boston Field Office were seven New Englanders with Bank of America credit cards, as well as 140 people who took buses to Washington on Jan. 6 under the auspices of a woman from Natick who just got a 15-day prison sentence for her role in the “insurrection.”
Think about that. If you simply use the wrong bank’s credit card to purchase the wrong product, or even if you just hop on the wrong bus, the FBI may unleash the unlimited power of the federal government to destroy your life and throw you in prison.
Welcome to 1984, the Democrats’ dream, a free people’s nightmare.
I interviewed Hill on Friday night about his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
The showdown between the Boston and Washington FBI offices started when Bank of America decided to do a deep dive into its customers’ activities around Jan. 6. No subpoenas, it was just one cell of Democrat Deep State fellow travelers assisting their comrades at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
“We all know how many ‘intelligence’ officials are in Silicon Valley,” Hill said. “Now somebody needs to ask, why would BOA do this to their customers — without a subpoena? Did somebody high up in the FBI call up one of their former colleagues who’d gone to BOA and said, ‘Why don’t you do us a solid?’”
BOA’s sordid role facilitating the FBI’s descent into Stasi-status has been known for a while, but they’re saying nothing.
As for the FBI, I asked the Boston office Friday for a comment on the events Hill outlined under oath. They referred it to the Kremlin, I mean D.C., and the FBI National Press Office sent back this pap:
“The FBI conducts all our investigations in accordance with the law. Our agents work closely with federal prosecutors to bring charges when appropriate….”
Blah blah blah.
No more blah blah.
I SUSPECT THERE MIGHT BE ANOTHER MARKET FOR THIS DEVICE: Vibrating pill may bring relief from chronic constipation.
PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! Fetterman Might Have Permanent Brain Damage, Chief of Staff Admits.
On Friday, Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) chief of staff stated that campaigning last year may have caused the senator permanent brain damage. While many in conservative media raised concerns about Fetterman’s health and whether he was truly fit to serve in the U.S. Senate, the aide’s admission directly contradicts the note written by Fetterman’s doctor, a Democrat donor, who insisted that Fetterman was fit to serve.
“Overall, Lt. Governor Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices. He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” Dr. Clifford Chen wrote last year.
Prior to his hospitalization, Fetterman had been struggling to adjust to his responsibilities on Capitol Hill, reports the New York Times. According to the report, Fetterman is frustrated that he may have “set himself back permanently” by campaigning instead of resting after his stroke last May.
“[Fetterman] has had to come to terms with the fact that he may have set himself back permanently by not taking the recommended amount of rest during the campaign. And he continues to push himself in ways that people close to him worry are detrimental,” the report explained.
Flashback: How the Media Trains Journalists to Lie: “By ‘ratioing’ NBC’s Dasha Burns for questioning John Fetterman’s health, her fellow journalists hid the truth from the public but exposed how they manufacture consent.”
Exit question: “I wonder if Gisele Fetterman has started redecorating her senate office yet.“