Illingworth believes people who want a free country must be willing to suffer to keep it free. That’s why the Air Force veteran is on the board despite the pressure that puts him under. There’s no benefit to having a Constitution if the people of our country don’t act to enforce its ideals, he said.

“Every time you point to something great and enduring, it’s because some person followed through on the courage of their convictions,” he said.

The emerging Red-Green alliance is poised to plunge the country into a spat of civic violence comparable to the summer of 2020, or worse.

How can coddled, “sensitive” minds so callously defend unthinkable cruelty and torture? How does a generation supposedly committed to tolerance and racial equality support mass genocide?

The answer is actually simple. While Gen Z-ers may have been coddled, they have also been trained to believe that the end justifies the means. This is the consequentialist approach to social action famously proclaimed by Malcolm X in 1965: “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary” //

“By any means necessary” thinking is blind to justice. It’s all about the end game — achieving the final goal, whatever it takes, no matter how much pain and misery is required.

And this, let us take note, is essentially the rationale for terrorism. //

If significant numbers of students at major U.S. colleges and universities are part of this movement, we have reason to fear for our future. And if, as Lincoln would say, we are not somehow touched by the better angels of our nature, this is not going to end well.

Demographers and pundits have been blaring alarm bells about declining birth rates for decades, and that future is finally here. //

What used to be fodder for ’80s comedies about clueless single men or frigid career women is now the lived experience of the few children who escape the infertility-spreading medical establishment. These kids face an uphill battle: life with fewer friends, fewer siblings, and fewer child-friendly spaces. And that’s just the half of it: If current birth rate trends hold up, they might be facing the end of civilization as we know it. //

There, in the first blessing God speaks to the first man and the first woman — “be fruitful and multiply” — lies the answer to Berenson’s question of why so many wealthy, privileged couples worldwide are refusing to have children. It is not that humanity is losing faith in itself. It’s that we have faith only in ourselves.

As Dennis Prager puts it in his invaluable commentary on Genesis, secularism is the most important explanation for the modern world’s low birth rates. The poem “Epithalamion,” Edmund Spenser’s famous ode to his bride, ends with a fervent prayer that the Heavens bless their marriage, “that we may raise a large posterity” and increase the count of the blessed saints. //

The future, Steyn likes to say, belongs to those who show up. I do not know who, if anyone, will end up living in the lands our society increasingly has no children of our own to bequeath to. But I bet they’ll know how to change diapers.

If Americans allow their firearms to be outlawed and then confiscated, would we, in fact, become like Australia or New Zealand? The answer is clear. //

In 1857, Mexico had a constitutional right to bear arms, then in 1917 the country excluded weapons that were reserved for military branches only and added additional restrictions, and today the right to have a firearm is restricted to your home. In 1968, in response to civil unrest, the Mexican government established a Federal Arms Registry that resulted in the following: handguns in .380 or smaller, and 12 gauge (or smaller) shotguns and rifles that use less than .30 caliber are legal. Citizens have to go to a military base to apply for a permit and if one is issued, guns can only be purchased at one store in Mexico City run by the Mexican military.

I bet there isn’t a cartel member in Mexico whose gun conforms to restrictions, let alone that he has a permit. In a country of more than 100 million people, only 4,300 permits have been issued. No surprise they are reserved for the wealthy, the politically connected, and the bodyguards who protect them.

Has the tradeoff in Mexico made the country safer and more law-abiding? Hardly. The murder rate per million people is 218.49; that’s five times higher than the United States. For a never-ending parade of statistics regarding gun violence in Mexico versus the United States, click here.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Mexico/United-States/Crime/Violent-crime //

Like Mexico, our rate of murders and violent incidents would rise, not fall, as a result of gun bans. The reason cartels flood the U.S. with people and fentanyl and not guns is because there is no money in smuggling weapons — until we ban them, and then Mexican cartels would become the unofficial supplier of firearms to America. Times change, human nature does not.

The $40,000 Joe ‘the Big Guy’ Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC. //

before Sara Biden transferred $50,000 into their personal checking account from which they paid Joe Biden $40,000, their balance was $46.88. And before Hunter Biden transferred the $150,000 into the Lion Hall Group bank account, that account showed a balance of $1,964.62.

So whether James and Sara Biden actually owed Joe Biden $40,000 is irrelevant because the money they used to repay the supposed loan came from the Chinese company that Hunter and James groomed to serve as the family cash cow during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.

Greg Price @greg_price11
·
Right now on the Senate floor: Sen. Lindsey Graham, Todd Young, Dan Sullivan, Joni Ernst, and Mitt Romney are trying to confirm by unanimous consent the military promotions that @TTuberville is blocking until the Pentagon stops funding the killing of unborn babies.

7:18 PM · Nov 1, 2023

What is worshipped is God’s conquering of death, which allows that bond to go on forever. The idea of a recognition of the community of the living and the dead, a spiritual community that exceeds the community we see in the material world of our present lives, is deeply consistent with Christianity.

The Christian underpinnings of the Day of the Dead are what make it of interest to those who are, for good reasons, uninterested in multiculturalism in its current relativist and divisive forms. For they reveal a ritual deeply consonant with the Christian view that death is not the end and that our loving bond to those who have gone before us is perhaps the most important social tie we have in this world.

A love for the past and for those who came before us is consistent with a holistic view of the human world. That world is made of three communities: those here now, those who have lived and died and await us, and those yet to come. Our unity is in the spiritual life that animates us all, and the truth of the Christian claims about life and death are not merely one more claim in Relativism Land. They are a truth that unites believers across cultures and time. Day of the Dead is a wonderful opportunity to recall this unity.

“The risks and costs of trial are so grotesquely one-sided as to frighten into capitulation almost any rational actor lacking exceptional fortitude,” the lawyers continued. “Such is the mechanism of tyrannical oppression inflicted by the purposeful design of the State. But it is all monstrously wrong and unconstitutional and should never be permitted in the USA, even if a substantial fraction of our population welcomes the tribal excess involved.”

The legal team demanded that the case against Clark be dismissed “because the Court lacks personal jurisdiction” over him and does not currently allow him to test the sufficiency of the “sprawling, spaghetti-on-the-wall, strained theory of conspiracy.”

“Our country was founded as a refuge from criminal enforcement of religious and political dogmas, but that patrimony now lies in tatters; its fiery destruction stoked by public officials who took oaths to uphold it—and by rabid mainstream media partners,” the filing concludes.

Decolonization is a polite, academic-sounding phrase for genocide. These people don't want you to talk smack about our big-D, high-T ancestors settling this land and celebrating "Indigenous People's Day." They want to kill you. And they want you to go along with it just like the machinery of the Holocaust couldn't have functioned without the kapos and sonderkommandos who bought themselves a precious few days by killing others.

Decolonization is a strategy of losers directed at winners. It is a means by which members of failed cultures want to replace successful ones.

We're learning some significant facts about the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (R-LA), and here is perhaps the most shocking piece of information uncovered to date:

He isn't rich.

Over the course of seven years, Johnson has never reported a checking or savings account in his name, nor in the name of his wife or any of his children, disclosures show. In fact, he doesn’t appear to have money stashed in any investments, with his latest filing—covering 2022—showing no assets whatsoever.

Of course, it’s unlikely Johnson doesn’t actually have a bank account. What’s more likely is Johnson lives paycheck to paycheck—so much so that he doesn’t have enough money in his bank account to trigger the checking account disclosure rules for members of Congress. //

Jordan Libowitz, communications director for watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, offered a more blunt assessment, saying that if Johnson truly doesn’t have any assets, it “raises questions about his personal financial wellbeing.”

The Lessons that should have been learned

The Two Lies are Lies

This should have been the big take away. Three Mile Island brazenly and unmistakably exposed the nuclear establishment's two big lies.

1. The Negligible Probability Lie. The probability of a significant release is not negligible. The probability of the next release is 1.00. It is inevitable. It is only a matter of when.

The usual way that the nuclear establishment tells the Negligible Probability Lie is they throw out a bogusly small frequency number, say 1 in 17000 reactor years, expecting the public to interpret this as a ``no need to worry about it" number. But in a fully decarbonized, all nuclear world we will need at least 25,000 large reactors. So even if the 1 in 17000 number were correct, we could expect a TMI-or-larger release about once a year. The actual performance to date is about 1 TMI+ release every 4000 reactor years, in which case we are talking about roughly 6 TMI+ releases a year.

2. The Intolerable Harm Lie. The radiation harm associated with a release is not intolerable. In this case, if there was any harm, it was far too small to be detected. If the TMI release had been more than 1000 times larger as it was at Windscale, there would have been no detectable harm. If the TMI release had been 300,000 times larger as it was at Fukushima, there would still have been no detectable public harm due to radiation.

At one point, the Rogovin Report appears to realize this:

Just as the regulators must change their attitudes to appreciate that this [the public's] perception of risk cannot be dealt with by trying to convince the public that it ``can't happen", so renewed efforts must be made to educate that the risks and benefits of nuclear power must be weighed against the very real health and environmental risks associated with other forms of power generation.\cite{rogovin-1980}[p 91]

But there is no follow up. Nor does this insight show up in any of their recommendations. The problem is, if the two lies are false, then there is no need for an NRC. And neither the Rogovin nor the Kemeny report is going to go there. //

The utility filed a four billion dollar suit against the NRC alleging the NRC's failure to tell MetEd about what happened at Davis Besse caused the loss. The way this works is MetEd first had to file a complaint with the NRC. The NRC Commission rejected the complaint on the grounds that it is not responsible for what happens at a nuclear power plant.

The commission does not, thereby, certify to the industry that the industry's designs and procedures are adequate to protect its equipment or operations,\cite{upi-1981}

This rejection allowed MetEd to go to the Courts. The court came up with a different out. It turns out the Davis Besse loss of feedwater was listed in a routine monthly Licensee Event Report that the NRC sends out to all the plants. According to the court, that's all it had to do.

When an agency determines the amount of information necessary to fulfill its regulatory mission, it is exercising the essence of its discretionary function.\cite{yorkdailyrecord-1984}

Let me get this straight. The NRC admits it is not responsible for nuclear plant safety. And the courts say the NRC has the discretionary power not to tell the plants that the training that the NRC has approved and required is both wrong and dangerously misleading. What does it have to do?

To survive, the NRC must spread fear and then sell a bogus solution to that bogus fear. To survive, the NRC must promulgate the Two Lies, even if events like Three Mile Island prove both are false. That's what it has to do and continued to do.
People who screw up must pay

Accountability shows up almost no where in the Kemeny and Rogovin reports. There is one exception. The TMI Reactor Operators lost their licenses and had their careers ruined, for doing what they had been trained to do. [3] And when that failed, they did a pretty good job of coping with the resulting mess. They were not culprits; they were scapegoats. //

[3] This was based on an NRC Office of Inspection and Enforcement Report which pinned the blame squarely on the operators.\cite{nrc-oie} The problem was their mindset.

There is considerable evidence of a ``mindset", that overfilling the reactor cooling system (making the system solid) was to be avoided at almost any cost. Undue attention by the TMI operators to avoiding a solid system led them to ignore other procedural instructions and indications that the core was not being properly cooled.\cite{nrc-oie}[p 2]

Nowhere in this 800 page exercise in unapologetic deflection is there any admission that this strange mindset was a product of NRC approved and required training, nor that the NRC had ample, multiple warnings that the training was dangerously wrong.

Rickover is the man most responsible for both the success and the failure of nuclear power. Thanks to Rickover, nuclear power became a reality as much as a decade earlier than it otherwise would have. But Rickover (along with Teller) was an originator of the Two Lies. He thought and taught that any sizable release was intolerable. My guess is that this doctrine was more a product of his concern for his program than his concern for humanity. But either way such a release must be prevented. He insisted this could be done if you followed Rickover's system of quality assurance religiously enough, cost be damned. The Intolerable Harm Lie and the Negligible Probability Lie put a crushing burden on nuclear power, which has prevented nuclear from realizing its promethean promise, and will continue to do so until they are renounced.

An instructive exception to Rickover's control of American nuclear effort was the Army's successful small reactor program in the very late 1950's. This included Camp Century. Camp Century was located at 77N in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, 6000 feet above sea level on the Greenland Ice Cap, 800 miles from the North Pole, Figure 1. //

from a nuclear power perspective, Camp Century showed what is possible when you combine

1) a non-standard nuclear manufacturer accustomed to building large components in a competitive market [American Locomotive Company],

2) a plant built entirely on an assembly line,

3) transported by ship in blocks to site,

4) an erection time measured in weeks,

5) disassembled by reversing the process,

with an attitude that nuclear power is just another way of making electricity with its own benefits and hazards. [2]

When Camp Century was abandoned, the reactor and its fuel were removed; but just about everything else, including 200 m3 of diesel fuel and reactor coolant water with an initial activity of 1.2 GBq of activity, was left buried in the ice. The ice flow at the site has been tracked by the Danes ever since, most recently by Colgan et al.\cite{colgan-2023}. The ice is moving southwest at about 3.7 meters per year. But this will speed up as the ice gets closer to the shore. Colgan et al estimate it will hit the shore at Melville Bay in about 7000 years, Figure 4.

This has been promoted as a looming radiological disaster. 1.2 GBq is about 1/800th of the activity of a nuclear powered pacemaker. The deal with the Danes required that the site surface be left with no higher than normal background radioactivity. This was checked and signed off on by Danish personnel.

The longest lived isotope in the coolant is our old friend tritium. Tritium emits a weak electron which for all practical purposes is harmless. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. If we conservatively assume all the ``initial" activity was tritium, by the time the Camp Century ice gets to the sea, the tritium will be reduced by more than a factor of 1.0e170. That's 10 followed by 169 zeros. //

Camp Century left us with a precious gift, Figure 6, a 1390 meter long ice core, all the way down to the ice base.3 This was the product of a multi-year effort to do what never had been done before. It was our first real record of the climate of the last 100,000 years. The single most important data is the ratio of heavy oxygen, Oxygen-18 to normal oxygen, O-16.. The lower this ratio, the colder the planet, since more of the heavy oxygen in the atmosphere condenses and precipitates out as it moves north before it gets to northern Greenland. //

CO2 measurements showed that atmospheric concentration of CO2 dipped to around 200 ppm about 20,000 years ago, barely above the level needed to support photosynthesis.\cite{neftel-1982}

There's more. The Army actually drilled about 3 meters into the sediment below the ice. Astonishingly, this portion of the core was pretty much forgotten, until it turned up in a freezer in Copenhagen in 2017. The sedimentary record spans pretty much the whole Pleistocene (roughly the last 3 million years). It contains plant material including well preserved twigs which showed that during that period the Camp Century location was ice-free, at least twice.\cite{christ-2021} The core is still producing papers.

Israel's Air Force carried out a strike on the Jabalia refugee camp Tuesday that resulted in the destruction of a Hamas command bunker and the death of one of the senior planners of the October 7 terror attack. The attack also killed an unknown number of Gazans. Those deaths have become the focal point of international outrage and threaten the legitimacy of Israel's punitive expedition against Hamas. //

There are three craters that mark the bomb strikes. The strikes are very close together, indicating they were precision-guided munitions. Those craters are surrounded by massive failure of terrain. //

Note the building at the left, adjacent to a bomb crater, is not knocked down, while other buildings nowhere near a visible crater have disappeared. This corroborates the structural collapse of buildings reported by survivors rather than indicating bomb damage. All of this points to the existence of an underground complex like those Hamas has showcased to its allies. //

Various sources claim that the IAF dropped six tons of munitions. This would be the approximate weight of three GBU-28/GBU-72 "bunker buster" bombs designed to penetrate hardened, below-ground targets. //

Hamas locating a bunker complex in a residential area without removing the civilian population is a war crime. If Hamas refused to allow civilians to evacuate the area, that would be a war crime. Plus, we know it is Hamas's public policy to ensure as many Gazan civilians are killed as possible; Hamas Leader Says They 'Need the Blood of Women, Children, and the Elderly' to Inspire Terrorist Attacks. Any innocent blood shed in Tuesday's attack is on Hamas's hands. ///

All blood shed since Oct 6 is on the hands of Hamas

FortCourage
2 hours ago edited
Speaker Johnson is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. One bill, one spending item. And he’s making sure we don’t increase deficit spending by doing it. That’s good, responsible conservative leadership. The D’s helped make this happen by joining Matt Gaetz in ousting Speaker McCarthy. They have no one to blame but themselves for getting Speaker Johnson. I’m loving every last minute of this.

BTW, McConnell’s opposition to this shows that he’s done as leader. He needs to go already. //

Prester John
3 hours ago edited
Voting on individual issues based on their merits rather than globbing everything together in quadrillion bazillion dollar bills would set a really dangerous precedent, wouldn't it?

We can't have that.

Bonchie @bonchieredstate
·
Hamas: "We will continue to kill Jews until Israel no longer exists."

Global Left: "So what you're really telling me is that you want a secular two-state solution where everyone lives in peace."
8:14 AM · Nov 1, 2023 //

Disclose.tv @disclosetv
·
NEW - Hamas official Ghazi Hamad says they will repeat October 7-like attacks until Israel is annihilated.

6:40 AM · Nov 1, 2023 //

Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 @MarinaMedvin
·
Hamas leader says October 7, the torture and slaughter of Israeli families and children, is ”justified” and there will be more such attacks on Israel because their goal is to annihilate Israel. The Palestinian nation is one of “martyrs,” he says, proud to die for their cause.
7:37 AM · Nov 1, 2023 //

This is why, despite the tragedy of lives lost, Israel is not going to stop until Hamas is destroyed. All the arguments about a two-state solution have been scuttled by Hamas, who has made it clear they do not want one. It's long past time for pampered Westerners to believe them. //

LW
4 hours ago
"The Palestinian nation is one of “martyrs,” he says, proud to die for their cause."

Show the world you're a man of conviction and honor.

You go first.

Ranked-choice voting ‘is a scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats,’ a new report found. //

Published by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), the new analysis unearths how Democrats use the complexities associated with RCV to diminish confidence in elections among U.S. voters. Under RCV, often dubbed “rigged-choice voting” by its critics, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate.

This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

https://thefga.org/research/ranked-choice-voting-partisan-plot-to-disrupt-elections

Hamas has commanded a network of tunnels and terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip since it took control in 2007. The Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist organization uses civilian areas, including hospitals, to store and launch rockets and spread propaganda. In violation of international law, Hamas also uses hospitals to hide command centers and shield operatives.

Ever since Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, the Iran-backed terrorists have been known for their barbarism, blood-thirsty attacks, and abysmal human rights record as the terrorist government prioritized the death of Israelis over the wellbeing of residents of Gaza. That includes, unsurprisingly, using hospitals as a key piece of their terrorist infrastructure along with a tunnel network and weapons production.

In Hamas' new bloody war against Israel, the use of hospitals has continued — if not increased — as they use the facilities that ought to be for care are instead used to kill. With an awful lot of Hamas disinformation being parroted by apparent terrorist sympathizers in the media, politics, and entertainment, it's worth setting the record straight.

The experts over at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) put together a quick list of "10 Things to Know About Hamas and Hospitals" that debunk anti-Semitic narratives about Israel's actions, lay bare the horror of Hamas terrorism, and make it clear that Hamas terrorists are war criminals, not some sort of liberating "freedom fighters" as some falsely and foolishly claim.

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/10/30/10-things-to-know-about-hamas-and-hospitals/

Airline passengers must submit to a security screening by TSA or else be denied entry into the airport’s secure area, under federal regulations. Passengers can be denied boarding for declining a security screening.

But passengers don’t surrender their Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches by police just because they’re at the airport, according to multiple legal analysts and court documents.

The DEA officially calls its stops and searches at airport gates “cold consent encounters.” Passengers are free to end the discussion and walk away, according to the DEA, even if they’re unaware of those rights.

A federal judge recently dismissed the lawsuit filed by André and English in part because he said they should have known their stops were consensual and not a detention. The men were free to go even if they felt trapped by police on the jet bridge. //

a passenger’s recording showed a DEA task force officer telling the man, “We’re no different than TSA.” The agent added, “People like to give us a little more hard time than they give TSA.”

That same video shows some of the leverage DEA task force officers can use to gain consent.

“You’re either going to sign a consent form saying that you’re allowing us to search [your bags],” the drug agent told the passenger. “Or I’m going to detain them, run my dog on it, and get a search warrant.”

The passenger immediately agreed to sign the consent form.