William,

With all the censorship by big tech and all the craziness by Dem politicians and all the calls for eliminating Trump supporters from society, are you enjoying the coming of the socialist utopia in the USA.

Use your eyes. And try to take the core-story glasses off.

If you can manage that, even for as moment, that's what the start of socialist and communist utopias look like.

However, this is America. They did their surprise attack. Now lets see if they can sustain it. btw - Did I mention it? This is America. They probably forgot what that means.

Enjoy this show.

Michael

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William,

With all the censorship by big tech and all the craziness by Dem politicians and all the calls for eliminating Trump supporters from society, are you enjoying the coming of the socialist utopia in the USA.

In the industry, that is known as a "Loaded Question."

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Use your eyes. And try to take the core-story glasses off.

I detect a 'core-story' side track.  "Trump can do no wrong" is a helluva drug.

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If you can manage that, even for as moment, that's what the start of socialist and communist utopias look like.

I live in British Columbia.  The "start of the socialist and communist utopia" began here in 1972.  A few hiccups along the way.

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However, this is America. They did their surprise attack. Now lets see if they can sustain it. btw - Did I mention it? This is America. They probably forgot what that means.

"They" did their surprise attack. Trump can do no wrong. Ever. He is Dear Leader. Dissent is punished.

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Enjoy this show.

Michael

It's a horrifying "show" ... all the folks I know here are shocked and saddened by what happened on January 6 2021.

Defend the President to the end. It gives life meaning.

Quoting William: "Trump can do no wrong. Ever. He is Dear Leader. Dissent is punished."

William,

That's what I thought--with sadness. You can't take the bias glasses off and just look. The judgment (or prejudice) is set in stone (the core story) along with the presumption that thinking like this is all others do.

From your response, you don't understand what I am talking about.

So no biggie.

Forget I asked.

I had to ask, though.

Michael

From NPR ... a report that President Trump's Twitter account has been suspended.

I got a final snapshot of President Trump's account. 

I wonder if the several existing Trump Twitter archives will have been able to copy the three tweets before they were flagged, before the plug was pulled. 

I have a niggle of a doubt that public records will have been retained of each Trump account tweet at the White House (one can download one's own Twitter existence, albeit in a huge database file).

In any case, the President can use the "official" account of the Presidency until the iffy day comes when he can't.

He is in charge.

False flag? Guns are drawn in the chamber:

The NTD stream is now useless; they are playing recorded interviews from within the Capitol and from the earlier rally. Not one mention of the fucking shit show in Congress.

One of the NTD commentators suggested that the people who forced their way into the Capitold may be Antifa, "We just don't know at this moment."

Bullshit.

William,

I had a feeling someone would do something like that and I also had a feeling it would be you.

There's another reason for President Trump doing that than being a mediocre bureaucrat in a fiction work.

The left has been on a constant campaign to sever the current generation from the American heroes of the past, then replace that with an invented history and, ultimately, obedience to a collectivist state. They do similar with family, too. In human nature, pride in a country's heroes and love of family are cornerstones of social order that resist a takeover by a new social system. 

The Founding Fathers of the US were great admirers of classic architecture in homage to the Roman and Greek social system models they studied and incorporated in the US Constitution. Classic architecture for government buildings is a subconscious link to the Founding Fathers in the minds of Americans. So I think it is 100% correct for President Trump to do what he did.

In today's statue-toppling idiocy, if the left were ever permitted to choose styles of architecture for government buildings, I can just see it making buildings in the shape of tribal huts, Indian Teepees, raised fists, and pussy hats.   The sickle and hammer of communism would definitely become commonplace. This even happened in Brazil in the way Oscar Niemeyer did in his Memorial JK (monument to Juscelino Kubitschek, the Brazilian president who led the building of Brasilia project). The statue looks like an abstract version of a sickle and hammer. (Niemeyer was a lifelong communist and this statue used to cause the military dictators indigestion.)

So I say good on President Trump for keeping the American hero ancestors narrative alive by protecting the connection of modern life with the Founding Fathers through the visual form of government buildings.

Michael

A page at the National Archives gives some further background on the Action Day of December 23, 2020. This is the fourth Wednesday in December this year. I've abridged on section and the highlights and emphasis is mind.  National Archive page: Presidential Elections & Vacancies | National Archives

More moves.

Links at DonaldJTrump.com

[added, from the page link above:]

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“Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., President Trump’s campaign committee, today filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the US. Supreme Court to reverse a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases which illegally changed Pennsylvania’s mail balloting law immediately before and after the 2020 presidential election in violation of Article II of the United States Constitution and Bush v. Gore. 

[...]

“The petition seeks all appropriate remedies, including vacating the appointment of electors committed to Joseph Biden and allowing the Pennsylvania General Assembly to select their replacements. The Campaign also moved for expedited consideration, asking the Supreme Court to order responses by December 23 and a reply by December 24 to allow the U.S. Supreme Court to rule before Congress meets on January 6 to consider the votes of the electoral college.”

- Rudy Giuliani, attorney for President Trump

Click here to read the Campaign's Petition.
Click here to read the Campaign's Motion.

I cannot vouch for any of the part that screams in yellow. Caveat lector.

All-access pass!

The Biden Town Hall snoozefest is subject to a searing critique via FoxNews:

This is Joe Biden on drugs.  

OL LINKS: Online Users | Inbox | Blogs | WSS | MSK | Ellen | Jules | Korben | Deanna | Merlin | Tony | Peter

I blew the video up and now I can see she is on skates. Skate boards, skis, and skates are now beyond my abilities, I think.

Too bad that you couldn't explain one sentence of this fear porn in your own words, Billy. Not one sentence, not if your life depended on it.

Re-upping and bolding a line from the intro of the article I linked to at Science:

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What follows is a snapshot of the fast-evolving understanding of how the virus attacks cells around the body, especially in the roughly 5% of patients who become critically ill.

I think everyone struggles at least a bit to comprehend the novel coronavirus and its impacts on the human body. The article at Science is a brief reading for OL readers who want to know how close medical sciences are to answers for the questions posed in the article. The questions are almost all ''How?"

Understanding the way the virus works is key to disrupting its work, I think. I thought this article would serve as a reasonably a-political piece to share with OLers. We all seek understanding. The more knowledge, the less fear. I am hopeful that the humans will beat this thing into the ground, if not tomorrow.

I found the most interesting questions were posed on the subject of cytokine storm versus blood system as cause for certain symptoms. Enormous resources are being put in play by the humans to get safe and effective treatments out the door ...

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Some clinicians suspect the driving force in many gravely ill patients’ downhill trajectories is a disastrous overreaction of the immune system known as a “cytokine storm,” which other viral infections are known to trigger. Cytokines are chemical signaling molecules that guide a healthy immune response; but in a cytokine storm, levels of certain cytokines soar far beyond what’s needed, and immune cells start to attack healthy tissues. Blood vessels leak, blood pressure drops, clots form, and catastrophic organ failure can ensue.

Some studies have shown elevated levels of these inflammation-inducing cytokines in the blood of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. “The real morbidity and mortality of this disease is probably driven by this out of proportion inflammatory response to the virus,” says Jamie Garfield, a pulmonologist who cares for COVID-19 patients at Temple University Hospital.

But others aren’t convinced. “There seems to have been a quick move to associate COVID-19 with these hyperinflammatory states. I haven’t really seen convincing data that that is the case,” says Joseph Levitt, a pulmonary critical care physician at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

He’s also worried that efforts to dampen a cytokine response could backfire. Several drugs targeting specific cytokines are in clinical trials in COVID-19 patients. But Levitt fears those drugs may suppress the immune response that the body needs to fight off the virus. “There’s a real risk that we allow more viral replication,” Levitt says.

Meanwhile, other scientists are zeroing in on an entirely different organ system that they say is driving some patients’ rapid deterioration: the heart and blood vessels.

One part Science magazine to nine-parts Infowars is a reasonable trade for me ... it's a mean 'flu' that is still in its top killing phase in many of our states and provinces. "Excess deaths" as the actuaries might plot it.

I hope everyone is financially secure and staying safe. Our household has two essential service workers who head out every day and one eighty-year old who is the focus of our 'do not bring it home' efforts. Our governments up here, like yours, are feeding empty wallets with future billions. Canadians are in general much more pacified-by-authority than Americans, and so are doing what public health authorities tell them to do without significant protest.

We have our own gruesome gallows humour on the subject of nursing homes, of course, and the debate on how, where, when and under what criteria we relax the strictures on commerce and recreation.  On the other hand, we don't have the ordeal of a presidential election year to get through at the same time.

The biggest losers are the high-cost energy producers. The "demand shock" to the global energy markets is going to be felt for a good while in the Oil Patch, by my estimation.

I will head back to the shallows until I find something as neutrally interesting to share.

Symphony of Science by Carl Sagan.
As the ancient mythmakers knew
We're children equally of the earth and the sky
In our tenure on this planet, we've accumulated
Dangerous evolutionary baggage

We've also acquired compassion for others,
Love for our children,
And a great soaring passionate intelligence
The clear tools for our continued survival

We've begun at last
To wonder about our origins
Star stuff contemplating the stars
Tracing that long path

Our obligation to survive and flourish
Is owed not just to ourselves
But also to that cosmos
Ancient and vast, from which we spring.