Thursday, July 07, 2022



If January 6 was so bad, why do they have to keep lying about it?

Last week’s testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, the junior White House aide who made a number of dubious claims under oath, has been accepted as fact by most of the corporate news media and NeverTrump pundits including McCarthy, as I explained here. In response to leading questions by Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Hutchinson claimed both the president and chief of staff Mark Meadows knew by mid-morning that the crowd was filled with “armed” supporters but Trump nonetheless urged those alleged self-styled soldiers to head to Capitol Hill as the joint session of Congress was underway.

In a clip of her closed-door testimony to the committee—the loquacious aide met three times with committee investigators talking for roughly 20 hours relying at times on a thick folder of notes—Hutchinson ticked off a list of weapons allegedly confiscated by 10 a.m. as rally-goers passed through security screeners known as magnetometers. Reading from a page in her binder, Hutchinson recalled a conversation with deputy White House chief of staff Tony Ornato, who described the cache to Meadows and her. “I remember Tony mentioning knives, guns in the form of pistols and rifles, um, bear spray, body armor, spears, and flagpoles,” she said.

She further stated that Ornato informed the president about the seized weapons but Trump dismissed any concern and instead instructed his team to “take the effing mags away,” referring to the magnetometers, Hutchinson claimed.

Cheney added more flair to the dramatic scenario by playing radio transmissions she said were obtained from the D.C. Metro Police department. One dispatcher reported that “three men walking down the street in fatigues carrying AR-15 . . . at 14th and Independence.” Another recording indicated a man with a “rifle” was seen near the Ellipse.

Setting aside serious questions as to why these men weren’t found and arrested given their close proximity not only to the president but numerous government officials present at the rally that morning, if true, how is that Trump’s fault? Why did Cheney assume the alleged “armed” men were Trump supporters? She had no other identifying information like, say, an arrest record detailing the motive of the suspects. Who were they? Were their weapons even real? Loaded?

Further, the idea of armed marauders freely roaming downtown D.C. with impunity is absurd; the place was crawling with both undercover and uniformed agents from multiple law enforcement agencies.

The implausibility of Cheney’s story did not discourage the January 6 echo chamber rom running with it, full bore. “Trump knew, in the moments before he took to the podium to give his rambunctious Ellipse speech, that the mob was armed to the teeth, including with firearms,” McCarthy wrote in the New York Post on June 29. “He knew an armed mob would be headed to the Hill. Yet, he intentionally whipped them up with his speech. What’s more, he intended personally to lead the protest march. The patent purpose was to intimidate.”

The January 6 committee posted a tweet shortly after Hutchinson’s performance claiming “Trump wanted to go to the Capitol with the armed mob, despite warnings not to do so from his advisors.” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), always the victim, whined that lawmakers were “sitting ducks” on January 6. “The leader of the executive branch instructed an armed + dangerous mob to attack the legislative branch,” Swalwell tweeted. “We will not move on from this. We will not forget this. We will not forgive this.”

His colleague, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) demanded Trump be sent to jail for attempting an armed “coup.”

Of course, it only would have required the most cursory search to discover whether a mob of Trump supporters “armed to the teeth, including with firearms” actually existed; if a “conservative” influencer had any interest in being honest with his readers rather than acting as a reckless propaganda organ for Cheney and House Democrats, said influencer quickly would learn that a total of 13 people have been arrested for firearms violations related to the events of January 6; only six face firearms charges in the Justice Department’s Capitol breach probe.

Of the six, three men—Guy Reffitt, Mark Mazza, and Mark Ibrahim—are accused of being on Capitol grounds on January 6. None entered the building. Ibrahim was an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency and was off-duty at the time; neither Reffitt nor Mazza attempted to use their firearm on January 6. Both were arrested months after the protest.

Law enforcement found firearms in the truck of Lonnie Coffman, who parked his vehicle near Capitol Hill that morning after driving to D.C. from Alabama, on the evening of January 6. (It’s unclear whether Coffman attended Trump’s speech and there are no photographs of Coffman on Capitol grounds.) When police confronted Coffman, 70, they found two loaded pistols on his person. He has been sentenced to 46 months in prison after pleading guilty to two firearms violations.

Christopher Alberts was arrested around 7:30 p.m. on Capitol grounds after police discovered a 9 mm pistol in his pocket. Alberts’ charging documents do not mention his attendance at Trump’s speech or at the protest earlier in the day. Police also found guns and ammunition on January 7 in a vehicle belonging to Cleveland Meredith, Jr., but he was not accused of bringing any weapons to Trump’s speech or to the Capitol the day before. Meredith pleaded guilty to one count of interstate communications of threat.

So, just to restate for the willfully ignorant in the back row: Out of hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters in Washington, D.C. and a few thousand who then walked to the Capitol, only six have been charged for possessing firearms—and one left his guns in his vehicle. (That’s also assuming Alberts is a Trump supporter.)

And what about the so-called “militia groups” who breached the Capitol that day? Roughly three-dozen members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers face criminal charges, including the rare count of seditious conspiracy. Not a single member of the Oath Keepers has been charged with a weapons offense let alone a firearms violation. In fact, those who traveled to D.C. with guns were very careful, as court documents prove, to leave weapons at their hotel rooms in Virginia rather than take them to the capital on January 6.

One Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola, is accused of using a weapon to break a window—and he used a Capitol Police riot shield, not anything he brought with him to the Capitol. The ringleaders of the Proud Boys—Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, and Joseph Biggs—face no weapons or firearms charges related to January 6.

Worst militias ever.

As of last month, according to the Justice Department, about 80 Capitol protesters have been charged with possessing a “dangerous or deadly weapon.” Examples of those weapons include pepper spray, flags, walking sticks or batons, a helmet, a taser, and a fire extinguisher—hardly the kind of items that could be successfully used in overthrowing the government.

Without question, a handful of protesters brought some sort of weapon to cause trouble on January 6, however, several told me they brought things like pepper spray because they had been attacked, or heard of the attacks against Trump supporters, at Stop the Steal rallies in D.C. in late 2020.

But there was no such thing as an “armed mob” let alone one “armed to the teeth with firearms.” This is yet another in a long string of falsehoods fabricated by the regime and dutifully echoed in the news media and “conservative” opinion sites. As I’ve asked over and over, if January 6 was so bad, why do they have to keep lying about it?

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Red States Winning the Post-Pandemic Economy Over Blue States and It's Not Even Close

Turns out Republican run “red states” are leading the way in the post pandemic economy, gaining jobs since March of 2020 whereas Democrat run “blue states” are still 1.3 million jobs short.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

“By many measures, red states—those that lean Republican—have recovered faster economically than Democratic-leaning blue ones, with workers and employers moving from the coasts to the middle of the country and Florida.

Since February 2020, the month before the pandemic began, the share of all U.S. jobs located in red states has grown by more than half a percentage point, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Brookings Institution think tank. Red states have added 341,000 jobs over that time, while blue states were still short 1.3 million jobs as of May.

Several major companies have recently announced moves of their headquarters from blue to red states. Hedge-fund company Citadel said recently it would move its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, and Caterpillar Inc. plans to move from Illinois to Texas.”

Most red states are business friendly and gave residents more freedoms back earlier on while blue states make it hard for businesses to thrive and retained more covid related restrictions longer.

That is why so many people and businesses are relocating to red states.

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The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has issued recommendations against the use of two nutritional supplements to prevent cardiovascular disease and cancer

Cardiovascular diseases and cancer are leading causes of death in many countries, and inflammation and oxidative stress in the body have been shown to trigger these diseases. The perceived anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects of taking nutritional supplements are one of the reasons people buy them.

However, in an updated guideline published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the USPSTF states:

Vitamin E supplementation is not beneficial in the prevention of cardiovascular disease or cancer. Its excessive supplementation increases the risk of hemorrhagic stroke.

Beta-carotene supplementation can do more harm than good. Especially for smokers and workers exposed to asbestos, beta-carotene supplements increase the risk of cardiovascular disease mortality and lung cancer.

The combination of beta-carotene and vitamin A supplements also increases the risk of lung cancer.

Beta-Carotene-Foods Fight Cancer, Beta-Carotene Supplements Do the Opposite

Many studies have found that beta-carotene has strong antioxidant effects and that consumption of fruits and vegetables can help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, total cancer and all-cause mortality. Among others, foods containing carotenoids may have protective effects against lung, oral cavity, pharynx, and larynx cancers.

However, smokers who take beta-carotene supplements to prevent lung cancer are likely to experience the opposite effect.

Studies have found that taking high doses of beta-carotene supplements increases the risk of lung cancer, and the risk of cancer is highest among smokers. In as early as 1994, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that the total mortality rate of male smokers taking beta-carotene was 8 percent higher than that of non-smokers, and the causes of death were mostly lung cancer and ischemic heart disease.

So how much supplementation is considered “high dose”? A 2010 meta-analysis showed that people who were supplemented with 20 to 30 mg of beta-carotene daily had a significant 16 percent increase in lung and stomach cancers, with the highest risk among smokers and workers exposed to asbestos.

Moreover, independent of the tar and nicotine content of cigarettes, smokers who take beta-carotene supplements are at increased risk of lung cancer. If smokers consume alcohol on a regular basis, the combination of beta-carotene and ethanol can lead to hepatotoxicity.

Why do beta-carotene from food and beta-carotene supplements produce almost completely opposite results in the body? Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center suggests that dietary-acquired beta-carotene may interact with other phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables to have better effects on the body than supplements.

Other studies suggest that high doses of beta-carotene supplements may change from “antioxidants” to “pro-oxidants” and, in smokers, they may even cause DNA oxidative damage, making cells more susceptible to cancer.

A 2020 review published in Antioxidants pointed out that the interactions of carotenoids in humans, including beta-carotene, are complex, and they can become either antioxidants or pro-oxidants. In the latter case, carotenoids may even damage cells.

As for vitamin A supplements, although they are not as risky as beta-carotene, supplementation through diet is also recommended.

Two studies conducted in 2019 found that dietary intake of vitamin A, rather than supplements, reduces all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality, and that diets rich in carotenoids, which are converted to vitamin A in the body, are beneficial for cardiometabolic health.

Vitamin A is a fat-soluble nutrient, and the intake of a single supplement may cause it to accumulate in the body in excess. According to the USPSTF, too much vitamin A can reduce bone mineral density or produce hepatotoxic or teratogenic effects.

Are Supplements a Harmful Waste of Money?

The new guideline from the USPSTF also states that there is insufficient evidence to prove that supplementation with a single or multiple nutrients can prevent cardiovascular disease or cancer.

The guideline evaluated the benefits of single or combined vitamin supplements such as beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin D, calcium, vitamin C, folic acid, vitamin B12, vitamin B3, vitamin B6 and selenium for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer and for the reduction mortality. And it came to the aforementioned conclusions.

In an editorial accompanying the guideline, Jeffrey A. Linder, MD, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, along with his colleagues, stated that instead of spending money on and paying attention to supplements, low-risk, high-impact activities should be emphasized. Examples include a healthy diet, exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, and avoiding tobacco use.

It makes people wonder if buying health supplements is really a waste of money and harmful to their bodies. After all, not everyone can enjoy a well-balanced meal on a regular basis.

In this regard, Titan Lin, nutritionist and CEO of Learneating Co. Ltd, said that the intake of a single nutrient supplement often involves high doses; but supplementing a combination of vitamins is much safer.

On the other hand, a balanced diet can indeed reduce cancer and cardiovascular risks, and eating natural foods can supplement multiple nutrients at the same time.

However, some nutrients are more difficult to obtain in effective doses from food, such as fish oil, and can therefore be supplemented with supplements.

There are also a number of factors that make it necessary for people to obtain essential nutrients from supplements.

USPSTF recommends that pregnant women take a daily supplement of 0.4 to 0.8 mg (400 to 800 mcg) of folic acid to prevent congenital neural tube defects in infants.

Lack of vitamin B12 can affect memory, but vitamin B12 is mostly found in animal-based foods. And long-term vegetarians are prone to vitamin B12 deficiencies and need to take supplements.

In addition, the supplementation of astaxanthin, sesamin, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and other non-essential nutrients still brings some benefits.

If it is relatively difficult to obtain them from food, we can also choose supplements. For instance, people who are stressed and have poor sleep quality can supplement sesamin and GABA; and people who work too much and have sore eyes can supplement astaxanthin.

Lin pointed out that the advantage of vitamin and other nutrient supplements is that they can quickly supplement the needed effective doses, or when people really have difficulty improving their diet, they can get the nutrients they need from supplements.

However, he stressed that “you can’t think that you don’t have to have a balanced diet if you take supplements.”

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Australia: A landmark case is about to hit the Federal Court that will either confirm or challenge the ongoing attempt by the Australian government to erase ‘women, ‘female’, and ‘girl’ as sex-based categories

Tickle vs. Giggle could be the title of a tween pillow fight, but it is the culmination of years of the legal erasure in Australia of the link between Australian women as recognised legally and the vulnerabilities of the female body.

Sall Grover is a Gold Coast businesswoman who heads a social media company called Giggle. Giggle is an app for females. The intention of Giggle is to provide a safe digital space for women and girls, where they can find a flatmate, organise socially, date (if they are same-sex attracted), and chat in an environment free of males. You can read Sall’s story for yourself, which involves her recovery from the well-publicised systemic sexual abuse problems in the Californian film industry.

In the early days of the Giggle app, Sall was faced with the decision to make the app for women as a sex or women as a gender. After a sustained campaign of abuse and harassment by people calling themselves ‘transwomen’, Sall decided to make the app exclusively for females, including trans-identifying females or ‘transmen’. On Giggle, it would be the possession of female body, regardless of identity, that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd.

In January 2022, Sall Grover received a complaint from the Australian Human Rights Commission. The complaint was lodged by Roxy Tickle and referenced a tweet exchange between Sall and Roxy in January 2021 in regard to the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney. The complaint also referenced interaction on the Giggle app where Roxy allegedly gained access and was removed on the basis of sex.

In the Twitter exchange between Sall and Roxy (that is still up), Sall argued that the McIver Baths should be reserved for women. Roxy told Sall that trans women are ‘morally and legally women’. No one has been able to tell me what it is to be ‘morally’ a woman.

In another interaction between Sall and Roxy in February 2021, Sall pointed out that there were many lesbian dating apps that include trans-identified males and some that are exclusively for trans people. In fact, it seems that all lesbian dating apps except for Giggle include trans-identified males, with some users making no effort to hide beards, male pattern baldness, or other clear signs that they are male in every way but pronouns and a girly often ‘porn star’ name.

Roxy Tickle tweeted in response:

‘Most trans folk don’t want to interact only with other trans folk on social media and dating apps. Sounds boring to me.’

Internationally, the issue of women being forced to recognise males as females has spawned an army of feminists and ordinary women to organise and oppose gender identity in law where it overrides women’s sex-based rights. In Australia, this opposition seems to have come far too late.

The replacement of sex with gender began in Australia with Julia Gillard’s reworking of the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013. The amendment ordered to repeal definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ‘so that they are not interpreted so narrowly as to exclude, for example, a transgender woman from accessing protections from discrimination on the basis of other attributes contained in the SDA’.

Whether the Act intended to allow the sustained harassment of women and lesbians and vexatious litigation, we don’t know. I would like to see Julia Gillard’s opinion on the traumatic abuse that Sall Grover has sustained since deciding to keep her app single sex, some of this from blue tick media personalities and journalists. In Gillard’s defence, when the legislation was drafted, self ID was not enacted. ‘Self ID’ is considered best practice legislation by LGBTQ+ groups and allows a person to be legally recognised as the opposite sex with only the completion of a statutory declaration and is law in several Australian states.

Sall Grover received the initial AHRC complaint by Tickle not long after she announced her pregnancy on Twitter. The complaint remains unresolved because Sall refused to attend gender identity re-education and open her app to males. Even though Sall has blocked Tickle on Twitter, Tickle has attempted to interact with Grover on the Giggle app and even gained her personal mobile number, texting and calling her before Sall blocked the number.

Tickle has now filed for a hearing in the Federal Court against Giggle and Sall Grover personally. The filing has coincided with the end of Sall’s pregnancy and she will very shortly give birth to her daughter; a daughter who may be born into a country that affords no special legal protections or rights for the vulnerabilities of a female body. A country where some are determined that there is not one single space for women and girls to meet without males.

In some ways, Tickle is the person we have been waiting for – the person who is prepared to go to the Human Rights Commission to demand dating access to lesbians on the basis that ‘trans women are legally women’, and test if the law is in anyway able to protect women and girls from the kind of males who adopt the legal fiction that they are female, particularly in public spaces.

If a woman is only a legal and moral entity, bodies are irrelevant to rights and protections. Unfortunately, in the real world of being female, it is our bodies that make us vulnerable, weaker, and a target for rape, violence, and discrimination; if the law cannot see this sexed body, it has no capacity or obligation to protect it, and maybe that is the intention.

Over the years since the Gillard change of the Sex Discrimination Act, the word ‘sex’ has been slowly replaced in foundation legal protections and policy documents with ‘gender’. These words are not the same. The word ‘gender’ has changed over the years, but it can mean anything from the social meanings we give to sex to the internal feelings people have about themselves.

Many women in the UK have crowdfunded for legal cases like the one Sall Grover is facing and have seen some success. But there is no indication we will see the same success here. In the UK, sex is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act and thanks to the Australian Labor government this is not obviously the case in Australia.

The trans lobby will fight tooth and nail against women establishing sex as a protected characteristic. The conflict between gender-critical feminists and the trans lobby can be seen as a spectrum with gender self ID at one end and sex as a protected characteristic at the other; the two are mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, this is by no means a fair fight. Gender identity is a top-down movement, and the push for sex-based rights is bottom-up. Tickle will seek assistance from affiliates of billion-dollar law firms like Dentons, while Giggle and Grover will look to crown funding predominately from ordinary women.

The trans lobby will base their case on the faith belief that ‘trans women are women’ and are no danger to ‘cis women’. The new binary of ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ places ‘cis’ as an oppressor class over trans. ‘Cis’ privilege is an imaginary power that obliges women to give way to our ‘trans’ sisters in every single building, space, law, or platform that our mothers have fought for to protect our bodies.

‘Trans women’ we are told must be trusted without question by women, mothers, lesbians, and children in exactly that same way as biological women are, not because, as in days of old, that these males are physically or chemically castrated, but just because they have a special female essence or morality. Like it or not, women don’t always trust men who claim to have mystical powers that make them innocuous.

‘Trans’ is no longer what we used to understand as a transexual. ‘Trans’ has become the priest class of a state religion. Women are expected to submit to this religion or be punished in the way Sall Grover has been; marginalised, abused, served with government papers, and if the gender gods are with them, bankrupted.

If Tickle wins, it will establish that males have a legal right, not just to the female sex category, but all female spaces, to view the female naked body in those spaces and to expose his male body to women and girls in public female facilities. It will also compel women to submit to the state-mandated definition of a woman, which makes her not just a subset of her own sex class, but an underclass.

Reflecting this in a dystopian tweet in February last year, Tickle insisted that Sall Grover should not refer to herself as ‘female’. Tickle said, ‘You keep on using the word “female” but I think you mean cis female?… with an F on my birth certificate … I am legally female in Australia. All of my cis girlfriends treat me the same as them.’

Grover replied, ‘For me, being treated as female is getting death threats.’

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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