Posts for: dtucker300
Sep 11, 2023 23:11:02 #
https://dailypassport.com/states-almost-named-something-else/
Did You Know These U.S. States Were Almost Named Something Else?
By Daily Passport Team
Read time: 8 minutes
Can you recite all 50 United States by memory? What if we told you that more than a few of those states were nearly given completely different names than the ones we know today? A bit mind-blowing but true. Here are eight states that almost had entirely different names — and the fascinating stories behind them. Nevada
Mountainous desert landscape of Nevada
Credit: joel protasio/ Unsplash
Anyone who has traveled around the West has probably come across the name Humboldt. It appears in county names, street signs, rivers, and mountain ranges — and if history had gone a little differently, the state of Nevada would bear this name, too. The Humboldt name found its way across the region because of the exploits of an explorer and naturalist named Alexander von Humboldt. Born in 1769, he helped popularize scientific exploration with his book Kosmos. Humboldt had a fascination with geology, and he ended up traveling approximately 6,000 miles across Central and South America, exploring the oceans and landscapes. On his travels, he became the first person to figure out that altitude sickness was caused by lack of oxygen. However, Humboldt never actually set foot in the western U.S. It was fellow explorer John C. Fremont who chose to name many locations after him in honor of his scientific contributions. When Nevada became a state in 1864, Humboldt was seriously considered as a name — but ultimately, the government chose Nevada, the Spanish word for “snow-covered,” instead.
Utah
Utah valley dusted in snow and filled with rock spires, seen from above
Credit: Matthias Mullie/ Unsplash
The origins of Utah are closely tied to the history of the Mormons, who initially wanted to name this state Deseret after a name in the Book of Mormon. While the Mormon church began in New York, its members struggled to acclimate. This forced church members to hit the road as they searched for a place to settle. Leader Brigham Young decided to move the Mormons west to the Salt Lake basin. As they began to settle, Young petitioned Congress to create a new state for them. The initial suggested boundaries of Utah were enormous, spreading across what is now Nevada and stretching all the way to the coastline of Southern California. Young’s petition was initially declined, at least in part due to the prevailing anti-Mormon bias in American society at the time. However, after the Mormons publicly abandoned polygamy several decades later, they were finally granted statehood in 1896. The resulting state was much smaller than they had hoped, and they didn’t get to name it Deseret. Instead, the government chose the name Utah, after the Ute tribe that lived there.
Maine
Lighthouse and home on cliff along coast of Maine
Credit: Tim Sostre/ Unsplash
New Somerset, Yorkshire, Columbus, and Lygonia were all potential names for Maine, but, of course, none of them stuck. In fact, King Charles reportedly h**ed the name New Somerset so much that he responded adamantly that the region should be known as “the County of Mayne and not by any other name or names whatsoever.” The name Mayne first appeared in writing as early as 1622, but to this day, no one is quite sure how it morphed into Maine instead — and where the name ultimately came from. The most prevalent belief is that the region was named after the nautical term “main land” to distinguish it from the many islands located in the sea around the coast of Maine. An alternate theory is that it was named after an English village or a French province of the same name. However it came to be, King Charles can rest easy knowing that the name New Somerset never stuck (though Somerset is the name of a county in Maine).
Kentucky
Rolling fields of Kentucky at sunset
Credit: alexeys/ iStock
We’re all familiar with Kentucky bourbon and the Kentucky Derby, but if history had gone another way, we could have been drinking T***sylvania bourbon while watching the T***sylvania Derby. The name has nothing to do with Dracula, although T-shirts for Lexington’s T***sylvania University are always a popular tourist souvenir. In 1750, physician and explorer Thomas Walker came across a long-rumored path through the Appalachian Mountains, which he named the Cumberland Gap in honor of the Duke of Cumberland. Nearly 20 years later, explorer Daniel Boone crossed the Gap; Fort Boonesborough was established in 1775. Around the same time, businessman Richard Henderson set up the Louisa Company to negotiate the purchase of some land in what is now Kentucky. The company soon changed its name to the T***sylvania Company, and in 1775, Henderson signed the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals with the Cherokee tribe, granting him a large tract of land. It became known as the colony of T***sylvania. The Latin root “sylvania” refers to a wooded area, and “t***s” means “across” (as in, across the Appalachians). Unfortunately, Henderson’s treaty was quickly struck down since Virginia had already laid claim to the land and declared ownership of all rights. Hopes for T***sylvania faded, and in 1792, this part of Virginia’s land broke away to become the state of Kentucky. However, no one can quite agree on the origin of the name. Possible t***slations include “prairie,” “land of tomorrow,” and “river of blood.”
Oklahoma
Sole car on hilly two-lane highway in Oklahoma at sunset
Credit: John Elk/ Getty Images
Fifty-five Native American tribes live in Oklahoma, and at one time, it was proposed that Oklahoma would be named after one of their most renowned figures — Sequoyah, who introduced reading and writing to the Cherokee language. In 1890, the Oklahoma Organic Act passed in Congress, with the intention of creating a new state. At the time, the land included in the proposal covered two territories: the Oklahoma Territory in the west and the Indian Territory in the east, where multiple tribes had been forcibly moved as a result of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations united in a proposal to seek statehood, which would allow them to maintain control over the lands originally granted to them during the previous treaties and resettlements. The state would be run in accordance with tribal governments, with each tribe having its own county. In 1905, several bills were filed in Congress to request the state of Sequoyah. However, politicians in D.C. refused to even consider the possibility of a Native American-led state. Instead, President Theodore Roosevelt suggested that the two territories be joined, and in 1906 he signed the law that created the state of Oklahoma, a name that comes from the Choctaw language and means “honorable nation.”
West Virginia
Aerial view of West Virginia town
Credit: Kevin Ku/ Unsplash
In 1863, West Virginia was formed after taking the unusual step of seceding from the state of Virginia. The move protested Virginia’s secession from the Union in support of the Confederacy. The original proposed name for the new state was Kanawha, although some were worried that this might be confused with the existing county of the same name. Eventually, Kanawha gave way to simply West Virginia. This wasn’t the region’s first attempt to form a separate state. Benjamin Franklin proposed the State of Vandalia in the 1770s. (The name was in honor of George III’s wife Charlotte, reputedly a descendant of the Vandal people.) The state would have encompassed what is now West Virginia, as well as parts of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. However, the Revolutionary War superseded those plans. In 1775, locals petitioned the Continental Congress to create Westsylvania, comprising roughly the same area as the proposed Vandalia. Both that petition and another in 1783 went ignored. Historians suspect that the Continental Congress did not want to rile up Virginia or Pennsylvania at a time when they needed to show a united front.
Wyoming
Looking up at Devils Tower rock formation in Wyoming
Credit: Dan Smith / 500px/ Getty Images
Wyoming’s name is derived from the Delaware Native American word mecheweamiing, which means “large plains.” But the original Wyoming wasn’t out west — it was the name of a valley in Pennsylvania. In 1865, when a new territory was being considered in what is now Wyoming, James Ashley, a U.S. representative for Ohio, suggested the name Wyoming. Born in Pennsylvania, he was familiar with the Wyoming Valley and believed that the name would reflect the verdant valleys of the newly expanding American West. But this was before he’d actually visited the region — after doing so, he expressed regret about the name choice, deeming the land not fertile enough to produce crops or sustain a population. However, by this time, the name had already caught on. When Wyoming finally achieved statehood in 1890, alternatives more fitting to the area’s peoples and history were considered. Potential names included Cheyenne, Yellowstone, Big Horn, Sweetwater, and others. But Wyoming was how most people referred to the land, and so the state retained its historical link with Pennsylvania.
Colorado
Dirt path through mountainous landscape of Colorado
Credit: Clicked by Avik Chakraborty/ Getty Images
Before Idaho achieved statehood in 1890, its name was almost used for another state: Colorado (which joined the Union in 1876). While some claim that the name Idaho came from a Kiowa word for “enemy,” historians say that there is no trace of the word before it was mentioned in Congress in 1860. When much of the West was opening up to mining, lobbyist George M. Willing proposed the name for what is now Colorado, claiming it was a Shoshone word. Although this was disputed, few people paid attention at the time. Later, though, an amateur historian who had originally joined Willing in the proposal did a little more research and came to the conclusion that the word was made up. He asked the Senate to change the name, and Colorado (Spanish for “red-colored”) was chosen instead. Despite the misconceptions, the Idaho name stuck around in popular consciousness. When Congress later decided to create another mining territory further north, the name was chosen for the territory and eventual 43rd state.
Did You Know These U.S. States Were Almost Named Something Else?
By Daily Passport Team
Read time: 8 minutes
Can you recite all 50 United States by memory? What if we told you that more than a few of those states were nearly given completely different names than the ones we know today? A bit mind-blowing but true. Here are eight states that almost had entirely different names — and the fascinating stories behind them. Nevada
Mountainous desert landscape of Nevada
Credit: joel protasio/ Unsplash
Anyone who has traveled around the West has probably come across the name Humboldt. It appears in county names, street signs, rivers, and mountain ranges — and if history had gone a little differently, the state of Nevada would bear this name, too. The Humboldt name found its way across the region because of the exploits of an explorer and naturalist named Alexander von Humboldt. Born in 1769, he helped popularize scientific exploration with his book Kosmos. Humboldt had a fascination with geology, and he ended up traveling approximately 6,000 miles across Central and South America, exploring the oceans and landscapes. On his travels, he became the first person to figure out that altitude sickness was caused by lack of oxygen. However, Humboldt never actually set foot in the western U.S. It was fellow explorer John C. Fremont who chose to name many locations after him in honor of his scientific contributions. When Nevada became a state in 1864, Humboldt was seriously considered as a name — but ultimately, the government chose Nevada, the Spanish word for “snow-covered,” instead.
Utah
Utah valley dusted in snow and filled with rock spires, seen from above
Credit: Matthias Mullie/ Unsplash
The origins of Utah are closely tied to the history of the Mormons, who initially wanted to name this state Deseret after a name in the Book of Mormon. While the Mormon church began in New York, its members struggled to acclimate. This forced church members to hit the road as they searched for a place to settle. Leader Brigham Young decided to move the Mormons west to the Salt Lake basin. As they began to settle, Young petitioned Congress to create a new state for them. The initial suggested boundaries of Utah were enormous, spreading across what is now Nevada and stretching all the way to the coastline of Southern California. Young’s petition was initially declined, at least in part due to the prevailing anti-Mormon bias in American society at the time. However, after the Mormons publicly abandoned polygamy several decades later, they were finally granted statehood in 1896. The resulting state was much smaller than they had hoped, and they didn’t get to name it Deseret. Instead, the government chose the name Utah, after the Ute tribe that lived there.
Maine
Lighthouse and home on cliff along coast of Maine
Credit: Tim Sostre/ Unsplash
New Somerset, Yorkshire, Columbus, and Lygonia were all potential names for Maine, but, of course, none of them stuck. In fact, King Charles reportedly h**ed the name New Somerset so much that he responded adamantly that the region should be known as “the County of Mayne and not by any other name or names whatsoever.” The name Mayne first appeared in writing as early as 1622, but to this day, no one is quite sure how it morphed into Maine instead — and where the name ultimately came from. The most prevalent belief is that the region was named after the nautical term “main land” to distinguish it from the many islands located in the sea around the coast of Maine. An alternate theory is that it was named after an English village or a French province of the same name. However it came to be, King Charles can rest easy knowing that the name New Somerset never stuck (though Somerset is the name of a county in Maine).
Kentucky
Rolling fields of Kentucky at sunset
Credit: alexeys/ iStock
We’re all familiar with Kentucky bourbon and the Kentucky Derby, but if history had gone another way, we could have been drinking T***sylvania bourbon while watching the T***sylvania Derby. The name has nothing to do with Dracula, although T-shirts for Lexington’s T***sylvania University are always a popular tourist souvenir. In 1750, physician and explorer Thomas Walker came across a long-rumored path through the Appalachian Mountains, which he named the Cumberland Gap in honor of the Duke of Cumberland. Nearly 20 years later, explorer Daniel Boone crossed the Gap; Fort Boonesborough was established in 1775. Around the same time, businessman Richard Henderson set up the Louisa Company to negotiate the purchase of some land in what is now Kentucky. The company soon changed its name to the T***sylvania Company, and in 1775, Henderson signed the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals with the Cherokee tribe, granting him a large tract of land. It became known as the colony of T***sylvania. The Latin root “sylvania” refers to a wooded area, and “t***s” means “across” (as in, across the Appalachians). Unfortunately, Henderson’s treaty was quickly struck down since Virginia had already laid claim to the land and declared ownership of all rights. Hopes for T***sylvania faded, and in 1792, this part of Virginia’s land broke away to become the state of Kentucky. However, no one can quite agree on the origin of the name. Possible t***slations include “prairie,” “land of tomorrow,” and “river of blood.”
Oklahoma
Sole car on hilly two-lane highway in Oklahoma at sunset
Credit: John Elk/ Getty Images
Fifty-five Native American tribes live in Oklahoma, and at one time, it was proposed that Oklahoma would be named after one of their most renowned figures — Sequoyah, who introduced reading and writing to the Cherokee language. In 1890, the Oklahoma Organic Act passed in Congress, with the intention of creating a new state. At the time, the land included in the proposal covered two territories: the Oklahoma Territory in the west and the Indian Territory in the east, where multiple tribes had been forcibly moved as a result of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations united in a proposal to seek statehood, which would allow them to maintain control over the lands originally granted to them during the previous treaties and resettlements. The state would be run in accordance with tribal governments, with each tribe having its own county. In 1905, several bills were filed in Congress to request the state of Sequoyah. However, politicians in D.C. refused to even consider the possibility of a Native American-led state. Instead, President Theodore Roosevelt suggested that the two territories be joined, and in 1906 he signed the law that created the state of Oklahoma, a name that comes from the Choctaw language and means “honorable nation.”
West Virginia
Aerial view of West Virginia town
Credit: Kevin Ku/ Unsplash
In 1863, West Virginia was formed after taking the unusual step of seceding from the state of Virginia. The move protested Virginia’s secession from the Union in support of the Confederacy. The original proposed name for the new state was Kanawha, although some were worried that this might be confused with the existing county of the same name. Eventually, Kanawha gave way to simply West Virginia. This wasn’t the region’s first attempt to form a separate state. Benjamin Franklin proposed the State of Vandalia in the 1770s. (The name was in honor of George III’s wife Charlotte, reputedly a descendant of the Vandal people.) The state would have encompassed what is now West Virginia, as well as parts of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. However, the Revolutionary War superseded those plans. In 1775, locals petitioned the Continental Congress to create Westsylvania, comprising roughly the same area as the proposed Vandalia. Both that petition and another in 1783 went ignored. Historians suspect that the Continental Congress did not want to rile up Virginia or Pennsylvania at a time when they needed to show a united front.
Wyoming
Looking up at Devils Tower rock formation in Wyoming
Credit: Dan Smith / 500px/ Getty Images
Wyoming’s name is derived from the Delaware Native American word mecheweamiing, which means “large plains.” But the original Wyoming wasn’t out west — it was the name of a valley in Pennsylvania. In 1865, when a new territory was being considered in what is now Wyoming, James Ashley, a U.S. representative for Ohio, suggested the name Wyoming. Born in Pennsylvania, he was familiar with the Wyoming Valley and believed that the name would reflect the verdant valleys of the newly expanding American West. But this was before he’d actually visited the region — after doing so, he expressed regret about the name choice, deeming the land not fertile enough to produce crops or sustain a population. However, by this time, the name had already caught on. When Wyoming finally achieved statehood in 1890, alternatives more fitting to the area’s peoples and history were considered. Potential names included Cheyenne, Yellowstone, Big Horn, Sweetwater, and others. But Wyoming was how most people referred to the land, and so the state retained its historical link with Pennsylvania.
Colorado
Dirt path through mountainous landscape of Colorado
Credit: Clicked by Avik Chakraborty/ Getty Images
Before Idaho achieved statehood in 1890, its name was almost used for another state: Colorado (which joined the Union in 1876). While some claim that the name Idaho came from a Kiowa word for “enemy,” historians say that there is no trace of the word before it was mentioned in Congress in 1860. When much of the West was opening up to mining, lobbyist George M. Willing proposed the name for what is now Colorado, claiming it was a Shoshone word. Although this was disputed, few people paid attention at the time. Later, though, an amateur historian who had originally joined Willing in the proposal did a little more research and came to the conclusion that the word was made up. He asked the Senate to change the name, and Colorado (Spanish for “red-colored”) was chosen instead. Despite the misconceptions, the Idaho name stuck around in popular consciousness. When Congress later decided to create another mining territory further north, the name was chosen for the territory and eventual 43rd state.
Sep 11, 2023 22:01:52 #
(Main)
https://digg.com/data-viz/link/america-s-most-cult-like-colleges-mapped-E3zl2wrFma?utm_source=recommendedreads.com
Many American colleges encourage and foster a strong sense of community and loyalty to the institution — but on some campuses, this can verge on the cult-like. BrokeScholar ranked 198 colleges, based on community loyalty, social prestige, school spirit and academic excellence, to find out which US colleges are the "cultiest" of them all.
Key Findings:
According to the study, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is the cultiest college in the country. In second is University of Virginia, followed by University of Florida, Texas A&M and UCLA.
Of the 25 most cult-like schools, 14 are found in the South.
When it comes to social prestige, Wake Forest University in North Carolina scores highest overall, ranking first for women's sorority participation.
The University of Chicago comes out on top for academic excellence, with excellent SAT and ACT scores in all subjects, and a 90 percent four-year graduation rate.
Many American colleges encourage and foster a strong sense of community and loyalty to the institution — but on some campuses, this can verge on the cult-like. BrokeScholar ranked 198 colleges, based on community loyalty, social prestige, school spirit and academic excellence, to find out which US colleges are the "cultiest" of them all.
Key Findings:
According to the study, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is the cultiest college in the country. In second is University of Virginia, followed by University of Florida, Texas A&M and UCLA.
Of the 25 most cult-like schools, 14 are found in the South.
When it comes to social prestige, Wake Forest University in North Carolina scores highest overall, ranking first for women's sorority participation.
The University of Chicago comes out on top for academic excellence, with excellent SAT and ACT scores in all subjects, and a 90 percent four-year graduation rate.
Sep 8, 2023 00:48:48 #
(Main)
and the beginning of total destruction of the USA. B.O is phonier than a 3-dollar bill.
Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
Ep. 22 Larry Sinclair says he had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama, and that Obama came back for more the next day. Assess for yourself. Here’s our interview.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1699543001473900670
Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
Ep. 22 Larry Sinclair says he had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama, and that Obama came back for more the next day. Assess for yourself. Here’s our interview.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1699543001473900670
Sep 8, 2023 00:32:03 #
Sep 8, 2023 00:26:15 #
Sep 8, 2023 00:22:26 #
Sep 8, 2023 00:19:23 #
Sep 7, 2023 13:48:26 #
(Main)
September 7, 2023
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
What shameless act or felonious activity was not evidenced on H****r B***n’s laptop? R****t attitudes toward Asians? Soliciting prostitution? Felonious use of drugs? Photographed nudity and perverse sex? Admissions to illicit foreign shakedowns?
H****r all but accused his own father President Joe Biden of also being on the foreign take: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family… Unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
H****r’s alleged felonies range from bribery to tax evasion. That he has not yet been prosecuted for anything is scandalous. His exemption is attributable only to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s likely weaponized directives to federal prosecutors to downgrade or forget altogether felony charges against H****r.
So given such wild behavior, why would not H****r tone it down, stop the global grifting, cease the reckless behavior—and quit redirecting attention to the likely illegal acts of his father, the President?
Why did not H****r early on just settle the child support suit filed by his paramour Lundeen Roberts? Why haggle over money for his own daughter?
H****r instead outrageously claimed near poverty. That excuse was hilarious given he flies on private jets and pays nearly $16,000 a month to rent a house in tony, celebrity-ridden Malibu.
Why did H****r ever get involved with a performance stripper in the first place after his past widely publicized liaisons with prostitutes? Why also with his own widowed sister-in-law?
Given H****r has little or no experience or training in high-stakes international finance and investment—and thus has no market value as an investor or broker. But he was infamous for t***slating that nothingness into millions in lucre due solely to his ability to monetize the influence of then Vice President Joe Biden.
So why now when under 24/7 scrutiny, would H****r dare recreate himself as an “artist,” by blowing through straws in his mouth?
His amateurish canvasses somehow have sold for up to $500,000 a pop. Both Biden donors and gamers saw their buys of such mediocre art as gambits either to meet with or profit from his father, Joe Biden.
But would not his painting grift only bring greater prosecutorial scrutiny, greater embarrassment to the president?
H****r B***n’s attorneys sought to leverage federal prosecutors into agreeing to drop their charges—by threatening to call in as a pro-H****r witness President Joe Biden himself and thereby likely invoke a constitutional crisis!
In such a scenario, the President under oath would be forced to lie again that he had no knowledge of or involvement in H****r’s illegal behavior. Or if he admitted the t***h that he did, he would thus contradict years of his adamant denials.
Why would H****r put his father and president in such a publicity circus?
H****r has lost an incriminating laptop by abandoning it at a repair shop. He has forgotten his crack pipe in a rental car. His illegally registered handgun turned up in a trash dumpster near a school.
So would not the carefree H****r insist that all the Bidens in the spotlight remain extra careful never to abandon incriminating drugs—especially in the White House.
Yet in a West Wing first, recently cocaine was found lost in an entrance vestibule. Various media outlets claimed it belonged to someone in the “Biden family orbit.”
One of two things explain the continuous reckless behavior of wayward son H****r B***n:
One, he is either still on drugs or so suffers from past addiction that he has lost all common sense and judgment, and simply cannot control his behavior.
Or, two, H****r is an embittered, angry son. As the Biden bagman for foreign shakedown cash, he did the dirty work and most risked the legal exposure that made all the Bidens rich.
Yet, instead of familial praise—or so the broke H****r seems to whine on his laptop—H****r gets no respect from those he enriched.
And now he, not they, might first go to jail.
As a result, does his continuous recklessness send a not so-subtle reminder to all the Bidens—his father the “Big Guy” especially?
That is, H****r is not going to take the fall. He will not end up in prison for decades while the other exempt Bidens continue to enjoy their ill-gotten riches, due to H****r’s imaginative cons.
No wonder the first family for months moved H****r into the White House and put him on Airforce One.
Is it now, “Keep H****r close and self-important—or else”?
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
What shameless act or felonious activity was not evidenced on H****r B***n’s laptop? R****t attitudes toward Asians? Soliciting prostitution? Felonious use of drugs? Photographed nudity and perverse sex? Admissions to illicit foreign shakedowns?
H****r all but accused his own father President Joe Biden of also being on the foreign take: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family… Unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
H****r’s alleged felonies range from bribery to tax evasion. That he has not yet been prosecuted for anything is scandalous. His exemption is attributable only to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s likely weaponized directives to federal prosecutors to downgrade or forget altogether felony charges against H****r.
So given such wild behavior, why would not H****r tone it down, stop the global grifting, cease the reckless behavior—and quit redirecting attention to the likely illegal acts of his father, the President?
Why did not H****r early on just settle the child support suit filed by his paramour Lundeen Roberts? Why haggle over money for his own daughter?
H****r instead outrageously claimed near poverty. That excuse was hilarious given he flies on private jets and pays nearly $16,000 a month to rent a house in tony, celebrity-ridden Malibu.
Why did H****r ever get involved with a performance stripper in the first place after his past widely publicized liaisons with prostitutes? Why also with his own widowed sister-in-law?
Given H****r has little or no experience or training in high-stakes international finance and investment—and thus has no market value as an investor or broker. But he was infamous for t***slating that nothingness into millions in lucre due solely to his ability to monetize the influence of then Vice President Joe Biden.
So why now when under 24/7 scrutiny, would H****r dare recreate himself as an “artist,” by blowing through straws in his mouth?
His amateurish canvasses somehow have sold for up to $500,000 a pop. Both Biden donors and gamers saw their buys of such mediocre art as gambits either to meet with or profit from his father, Joe Biden.
But would not his painting grift only bring greater prosecutorial scrutiny, greater embarrassment to the president?
H****r B***n’s attorneys sought to leverage federal prosecutors into agreeing to drop their charges—by threatening to call in as a pro-H****r witness President Joe Biden himself and thereby likely invoke a constitutional crisis!
In such a scenario, the President under oath would be forced to lie again that he had no knowledge of or involvement in H****r’s illegal behavior. Or if he admitted the t***h that he did, he would thus contradict years of his adamant denials.
Why would H****r put his father and president in such a publicity circus?
H****r has lost an incriminating laptop by abandoning it at a repair shop. He has forgotten his crack pipe in a rental car. His illegally registered handgun turned up in a trash dumpster near a school.
So would not the carefree H****r insist that all the Bidens in the spotlight remain extra careful never to abandon incriminating drugs—especially in the White House.
Yet in a West Wing first, recently cocaine was found lost in an entrance vestibule. Various media outlets claimed it belonged to someone in the “Biden family orbit.”
One of two things explain the continuous reckless behavior of wayward son H****r B***n:
One, he is either still on drugs or so suffers from past addiction that he has lost all common sense and judgment, and simply cannot control his behavior.
Or, two, H****r is an embittered, angry son. As the Biden bagman for foreign shakedown cash, he did the dirty work and most risked the legal exposure that made all the Bidens rich.
Yet, instead of familial praise—or so the broke H****r seems to whine on his laptop—H****r gets no respect from those he enriched.
And now he, not they, might first go to jail.
As a result, does his continuous recklessness send a not so-subtle reminder to all the Bidens—his father the “Big Guy” especially?
That is, H****r is not going to take the fall. He will not end up in prison for decades while the other exempt Bidens continue to enjoy their ill-gotten riches, due to H****r’s imaginative cons.
No wonder the first family for months moved H****r into the White House and put him on Airforce One.
Is it now, “Keep H****r close and self-important—or else”?
Sep 5, 2023 07:01:41 #
(Main)
My desperate battle with ‘Below the Belt’ Journalism
By Chuck Woodbury
In men’s professional boxing the competitors must play by the rules. Perhaps the most consequential is “do not hit below the belt.” Guys know the paralyzing pain of such a blow. If a boxer breaks that rule, that is, if he plays dirty, a referee is there to pause the action and penalize the offender.
What if there were no referee? The guy who played dirty would win. Not fair, right?
I’m talking about c***ting.
HOW ABOUT THIS? Do you, or someone you know, sneak into a second movie at a multiplex theater without paying a second admission? “Oh, they make enough money. It’s no big deal if I only pay once,” the opportunist will rationalize. In most theaters, the c***ter knows, nobody will be standing outside each individual theater checking tickets. So c***ting is easy. But what if a theater employee stood at the door and did check?
In the boxing match and at the theater, a responsible person — the referee or a ticket checker — makes sure the rules are followed.
Which leads me to my point
And that is what a free press does. It’s a referee between corruption and honesty. It’s a referee between business, politics and honesty. It makes sure laws and regulations are followed, not just brushed under the rug to benefit corrupt businessmen, politicians or special interests.
If a “referee” is dishonest or not even present, then c***ting will abound. And that terrifies those who study the news media, who see that happening today at a blinding speed.
I wish I could share a cup of coffee, tea or root beer with each reader of this newsletter to explain how important it is we respect the legitimate news media that still survives. Heaven knows, the free press has never been perfect. But without it, 99 percent of us will be s***es to the rich and powerful in short order. Maybe it’s time for us to revisit George Orwell’s novel “1984”.
In my little corner of the world, writing to RVers, I have very little influence to help people understand this or at least think about it. But I will keep trying, for I am terrified of where we are heading. I want my daughter to grow up in a free society, not one ruled by the selfish, greedy and corrupt. Do you know what happens without a free press? Two words: North Korea.
By Chuck Woodbury
In men’s professional boxing the competitors must play by the rules. Perhaps the most consequential is “do not hit below the belt.” Guys know the paralyzing pain of such a blow. If a boxer breaks that rule, that is, if he plays dirty, a referee is there to pause the action and penalize the offender.
What if there were no referee? The guy who played dirty would win. Not fair, right?
I’m talking about c***ting.
HOW ABOUT THIS? Do you, or someone you know, sneak into a second movie at a multiplex theater without paying a second admission? “Oh, they make enough money. It’s no big deal if I only pay once,” the opportunist will rationalize. In most theaters, the c***ter knows, nobody will be standing outside each individual theater checking tickets. So c***ting is easy. But what if a theater employee stood at the door and did check?
In the boxing match and at the theater, a responsible person — the referee or a ticket checker — makes sure the rules are followed.
Which leads me to my point
And that is what a free press does. It’s a referee between corruption and honesty. It’s a referee between business, politics and honesty. It makes sure laws and regulations are followed, not just brushed under the rug to benefit corrupt businessmen, politicians or special interests.
If a “referee” is dishonest or not even present, then c***ting will abound. And that terrifies those who study the news media, who see that happening today at a blinding speed.
I wish I could share a cup of coffee, tea or root beer with each reader of this newsletter to explain how important it is we respect the legitimate news media that still survives. Heaven knows, the free press has never been perfect. But without it, 99 percent of us will be s***es to the rich and powerful in short order. Maybe it’s time for us to revisit George Orwell’s novel “1984”.
In my little corner of the world, writing to RVers, I have very little influence to help people understand this or at least think about it. But I will keep trying, for I am terrified of where we are heading. I want my daughter to grow up in a free society, not one ruled by the selfish, greedy and corrupt. Do you know what happens without a free press? Two words: North Korea.
Sep 4, 2023 23:39:29 #
(Main)
What the Left Did to Our Country
September 4, 2023
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.
With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to t***sform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.
The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.
After getting elected through temporarily piv****g to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.
To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were r****t. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist t***sformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and r****t nation.
The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.
Yet Obama’s unfulfilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary t***sformation of the Democratic Party and country.
It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans v**e and conduct their legal system.
Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.
How was all this possible?
C***d had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.
Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.
His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.
And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.
They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.
Under the pretense of C***d fears, b****ting went from 70 percent participation on e******n day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper b****ts often dived by a magnitude of ten.
Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the E*******l College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, E******n Day, and v**er IDs.
Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 e******n cycle.
Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of v******tions. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough f******l to k**l 100,000 Americans a year.
“Modern monetary theory,” the L*****t absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”
Biden warred on f****l f**ls, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.
When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term e******ns.
Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.
Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.
Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.
When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European k*****g ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and k*****g a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.
Suddenly, there are three g****rs, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men t***sitioning to women by assertion.
There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “h**e” speech and “disinformation.”
The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”
Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of r****t insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about w***e s*******y, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black e*****rate does not leave the new Democratic Party.
The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and g****r animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.
Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?
Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial r********ns. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab l**ting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.
In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “w***e s*******y” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of r****t demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.
This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?
What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass l**ting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.
The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.
Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.
In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the l*****t agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what b****ts cannot.
We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally t***sforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.
Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.
September 4, 2023
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.
With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to t***sform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.
The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.
After getting elected through temporarily piv****g to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.
To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were r****t. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist t***sformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and r****t nation.
The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.
Yet Obama’s unfulfilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary t***sformation of the Democratic Party and country.
It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans v**e and conduct their legal system.
Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.
How was all this possible?
C***d had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.
Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.
His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.
And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.
They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.
Under the pretense of C***d fears, b****ting went from 70 percent participation on e******n day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper b****ts often dived by a magnitude of ten.
Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the E*******l College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, E******n Day, and v**er IDs.
Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 e******n cycle.
Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of v******tions. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough f******l to k**l 100,000 Americans a year.
“Modern monetary theory,” the L*****t absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”
Biden warred on f****l f**ls, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.
When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term e******ns.
Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.
Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.
Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.
When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European k*****g ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and k*****g a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.
Suddenly, there are three g****rs, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men t***sitioning to women by assertion.
There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “h**e” speech and “disinformation.”
The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”
Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of r****t insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about w***e s*******y, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black e*****rate does not leave the new Democratic Party.
The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and g****r animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.
Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?
Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial r********ns. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab l**ting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.
In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “w***e s*******y” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of r****t demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.
This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?
What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass l**ting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.
The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.
Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.
In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the l*****t agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what b****ts cannot.
We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally t***sforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.
Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.
Sep 4, 2023 23:34:06 #
(Main)
son of witless wrote:
Pretty much my rankings.
Might be a 4-way tie.
Sep 4, 2023 15:44:02 #
(Main)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-recreated-a-pink-floyd-song-from-listeners-brain-waves-180982746/?utm_source=recommendedreads.com
Electrodes collected brain signals while people listened to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” then computers produced a garbled but recognizable track
Will Sullivan
Will Sullivan
Daily Correspondent
August 17, 2023
The band Pink Floyd plays on stage under an artistic rendering of a glowing moon
Pink Floyd performs c. 1972 in London, England. Researchers used a computer model to try recreate one of their songs using the brain signals of people listening to it. David Redfern / Redferns via Getty Images
A computer model has reconstructed a snippet of a Pink Floyd song by reading the brain activity of people listening to the tune.
In a new study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, participants with electrodes on their brains listened to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” from the rock band’s 1979 album, The Wall. Researchers then used the computer model to convert the electrode signals into audio.
The recreated bars sound garbled and hazy—a distorted echo of the original track. But unmistakable elements of the song’s rhythm, melody and harmony shine through.
“It’s a technical tour de force,” Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada who did not contribute to the findings, says of the research to the New York Times’ Hana Kiros.
“These exciting findings build on previous work to reconstruct plain speech from brain activity,” Shailee Jain, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research, tells Scientific American’s Lucy Tu. “Now, we’re able to really dig into the brain to unearth the sustenance of sound.”
Researchers have been working at decoding brain activity with artificial intelligence for years. They’ve tried reading brain scans to determine which words people are listening to, and they’ve even attempted to t***slate entire stories. Another study aimed to reproduce images that participants looked at.
Such technology could one day be used to help people who are unable to communicate with spoken words. Ludovic Bellier, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the new study, tells Science’s Phie Jacobs that he hopes the findings could eventually help people who have trouble speaking due to strokes, injuries or diseases, by making sense out of their brain activity.
For the new study, researchers played the Pink Floyd song to 29 participants with epilepsy. As treatment for their epilepsy, the participants already had electrodes implanted in their brains, per the Times. The song played in the operating room while the patients underwent surgery meant to prevent seizures, according to Fortune’s Erin Prater.
The researchers trained a computer model on the brain data from participants as they listened to about 90 percent of the Pink Floyd song. But the remaining 10 percent—a 15-second clip from the middle of the track—was left out of the training data, writes Science. Instead, the team asked the algorithm to recreate this section of the music from the brain activity based on patterns it had learned. The team trained 128 models, each operating at a different frequency, and together, they matched specific electrode signals to certain characteristics of music, per the Times.
SmithsonianMag · Original 15-second clip of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).”
SmithsonianMag · The Pink Floyd clip reconstructed with data from 29 participants.
Beyond creating a haunting piece of music, the study also provided insights into which specific parts of the brain are involved in music perception. It found that both hemispheres play a role, but the right hemisphere is engaged more than the left, which supported findings from other work, according to the study.
The superior temporal gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, seemed to be heavily involved in musical perception, with a particular subregion connected to rhythm. Previous research has connected different parts of the brain to perceiving specific aspects of music, including pitch, rhythm and the texture of the sound, called timbre, according to the study.
In the future, the researchers hope their insights could help devices t***slating brain signals into words to incorporate the more musical elements of speech. Language, like music, includes changes in pace, pitch and volume that are a vital part of communicating, per Scientific American.
“These elements, which we call prosody, carry meaning that we can’t communicate with words alone,” Bellier tells the publication.
The researchers chose the Pink Floyd song for this study, in part because it contains a mix of sung words and instrumental sections, according to the Times. But they had another reason, too: The participants “just love Pink Floyd,” Bellier tells Science.
Electrodes collected brain signals while people listened to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” then computers produced a garbled but recognizable track
Will Sullivan
Will Sullivan
Daily Correspondent
August 17, 2023
The band Pink Floyd plays on stage under an artistic rendering of a glowing moon
Pink Floyd performs c. 1972 in London, England. Researchers used a computer model to try recreate one of their songs using the brain signals of people listening to it. David Redfern / Redferns via Getty Images
A computer model has reconstructed a snippet of a Pink Floyd song by reading the brain activity of people listening to the tune.
In a new study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, participants with electrodes on their brains listened to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” from the rock band’s 1979 album, The Wall. Researchers then used the computer model to convert the electrode signals into audio.
The recreated bars sound garbled and hazy—a distorted echo of the original track. But unmistakable elements of the song’s rhythm, melody and harmony shine through.
“It’s a technical tour de force,” Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada who did not contribute to the findings, says of the research to the New York Times’ Hana Kiros.
“These exciting findings build on previous work to reconstruct plain speech from brain activity,” Shailee Jain, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research, tells Scientific American’s Lucy Tu. “Now, we’re able to really dig into the brain to unearth the sustenance of sound.”
Researchers have been working at decoding brain activity with artificial intelligence for years. They’ve tried reading brain scans to determine which words people are listening to, and they’ve even attempted to t***slate entire stories. Another study aimed to reproduce images that participants looked at.
Such technology could one day be used to help people who are unable to communicate with spoken words. Ludovic Bellier, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the new study, tells Science’s Phie Jacobs that he hopes the findings could eventually help people who have trouble speaking due to strokes, injuries or diseases, by making sense out of their brain activity.
For the new study, researchers played the Pink Floyd song to 29 participants with epilepsy. As treatment for their epilepsy, the participants already had electrodes implanted in their brains, per the Times. The song played in the operating room while the patients underwent surgery meant to prevent seizures, according to Fortune’s Erin Prater.
The researchers trained a computer model on the brain data from participants as they listened to about 90 percent of the Pink Floyd song. But the remaining 10 percent—a 15-second clip from the middle of the track—was left out of the training data, writes Science. Instead, the team asked the algorithm to recreate this section of the music from the brain activity based on patterns it had learned. The team trained 128 models, each operating at a different frequency, and together, they matched specific electrode signals to certain characteristics of music, per the Times.
SmithsonianMag · Original 15-second clip of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).”
SmithsonianMag · The Pink Floyd clip reconstructed with data from 29 participants.
Beyond creating a haunting piece of music, the study also provided insights into which specific parts of the brain are involved in music perception. It found that both hemispheres play a role, but the right hemisphere is engaged more than the left, which supported findings from other work, according to the study.
The superior temporal gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, seemed to be heavily involved in musical perception, with a particular subregion connected to rhythm. Previous research has connected different parts of the brain to perceiving specific aspects of music, including pitch, rhythm and the texture of the sound, called timbre, according to the study.
In the future, the researchers hope their insights could help devices t***slating brain signals into words to incorporate the more musical elements of speech. Language, like music, includes changes in pace, pitch and volume that are a vital part of communicating, per Scientific American.
“These elements, which we call prosody, carry meaning that we can’t communicate with words alone,” Bellier tells the publication.
The researchers chose the Pink Floyd song for this study, in part because it contains a mix of sung words and instrumental sections, according to the Times. But they had another reason, too: The participants “just love Pink Floyd,” Bellier tells Science.
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