An F-22 Raptor assigned to the 525th Fighter Squadron from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, flies away after refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker assigned to the 909th Air Refueling Squadron from Kadena Air Base, Japan, during exercise Northern Edge, May 16, 2019, over Alaska.

Austin Bay:

“…On June 4, 1989, the PLA slaughtered over 2,000 peaceful protestors. Now Beijing forbids discussing the massacre and seeks to erase it from history.

The government has tried to erase photo evidence of the massacre, or at least prevent mainland China’s people from seeing images on the internet. Arguably the most iconic photo was snapped June 5, the day after the slaughter: In Tiananmen Square, a lone Chinese man stands before a PLA main battle tank. The man carries two shopping bags. There is video of the incident. After the tank stopped, the courageous fellow climbed aboard and spoke with the soldiers. He was eventually dragged into the crowd, and … then he disappeared. The government still claims it has never found the man and doesn’t know his name. Realists believe he is in a secret jail or an unmarked grave…”

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Satire, but is it really?

New trend of progressive protest against racial injustice is taking the internet by storm.

“…If there’s one thing that liberals and progressives know best, it’s how to protest effectively and efficiently. Whether it be marching in the street, marching on the freeway, drinking soy milk or pouring water on themselves, discrimination and oppression is often fought in ways that would make our forefathers proud.

Trump’s racist immigration policies have had so many negative effects ranging from the separation of families to locking children in cages to the suppression of voting from undocumented migrants. That’s why liberals across the nation are taking it upon themselves to protest Trump’s immigration policies by putting their heads in freezers…”

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Even if the quest to destroy Trump eclipses all else, it seems not to matter to these modern Ahabs.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

“…One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, and Stormy Daniels. Relentless progressives have needed a new Get Trump fix about every two months.

More practically, their fixation also substitutes for a collective poverty of ideas. The Democratic party has no plan to secure the borders other than to be against whatever Trump is for. They would not build a wall, deport illegal entrants, end sanctuary cities, fine employers, or do much of anything but allow almost anyone to enter the U.S…”

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Left-wing activists aren’t going to stop with social-media networks, or with nibbling at the soft right-wing fringe of discourse.

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

“…Silicon Valley’s behemoth companies are incapable of steering through the cross-pressures pushing them to censor more. These pressures come from social activists working on them through threatened boycotts, it comes from activists among their own employees and on their boards. These pressures come from centrist and liberal-leaning governments, which increasingly blame social media companies for their electoral failures. And surely these pressures also come from corporations who want to buy advertising on these massive platforms.

Several stories from the last week highlight the sheer variety of these pressures. The health-and-exercise movement Crossfit has recently seen one of its diet-discussion groups suppressed on Facebook. And the group subsequently urged the withdrawal of its members from the platform in stark terms, effectively alleging that Facebook is part of a larger corruptive force in social life:

Facebook is acting in the service of food and beverage industry interests by deleting the accounts of communities that have identified the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease. In this, it follows the practices of Wikipedia and other private platforms that host public content but retain the ability to remove or silence — without the opportunity for real debate or appeal — information and perspectives outside a narrow scope of belief or thought.

Last week YouTube also took down a new documentary, Borderless, produced by right-wing activist Lauren Southern. The documentary features interviews with human traffickers, and undercover recordings of workers for non-governmental organizations who are assisting migrants. Southern is one of the many “alt-light”-style YouTube stars who have emerged there. YouTube’s decision to take down her video is renewing an argument on the right that access to digital platforms should be a right. This argument is being made vociferously in the renewed Human Events, by Will Chamberlain:

Southern has over 700,000 subscribers on YouTube. Those subscribers belong to her, not the company. She should be able to count on those subscribers seeing a film that violated none of the YouTube terms of service. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Southern would have embarked on this project had she not assumed she could show the end product to her audience.

Southern didn’t simply rely on her platform to justify all the time and energy spent making Borderless; she relied on YouTube’s previous commitments to content neutrality to justify building up her platform in the first place. And yet YouTube is utterly flippant about deleting her content.

It’s not just a matter of being careless over its own commitments, of course. YouTubers could make an argument that not only the near-monopoly position of YouTube in social video but the fact that digital platforms like it were, because of their viewpoint neutrality, privileged over traditional media companies in the law, has allowed it to capture and profit so much of the public square, and so government has a compelling democratic interest in guaranteeing greater freedom of expression on these platforms.

Finally, Canada seems to be giving Silicon Valley a warning ahead of its upcoming elections. The current government, under Justin Trudeau, announced that it had come to “an agreement” with Microsoft and Facebook to “boost security.” It also happens to be the case that the government is currently underwater in the polls.

Canada’s government claims that bad actors, including Russia, could try to interfere with their election. Though this is something that is rumored or feared in all big elections. You may recall that ahead of the last presidential election in France, there were wild reports of Russian interference on behalf of populist nationalists; Russia had hacked Emmanuel Macron’s email. News reports flew out with the heavy implication that one would be carrying out the Russian interest to vote for the nationalist Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Oddly, the defense against election hacking took on an international character. America’s National Security Agency announced that indeed it had evidencethat the Russians had hacked France’s democracy. Months later it was admitted that there was no evidence to suggest that Russia had hacked Emmanuel Macron’s email. In other words, by suggesting falsely, that foreign actors were interfering in French elections, security agencies had in reality tarred domestic political enemies as dupes and patsies…”

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 NCAA: The Best Woman Athlete is a Man.

The biased, corrupt press fail to notice.

“…The actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.

That is, until the NOAA’s statisticians “adjust” the data. Using complex statistical models, they change the data to reflect not reality, but their underlying theories of global warming. That’s clear from a simple fact of statistics: Data generate random errors, which cancel out over time. So by averaging data, the errors mostly disappear.

That’s not what NOAA does.

According to the NOAA, the errors aren’t random. They’re systematic. As we noted, all of their temperature adjustments lean cooler in the distant past, and warmer in the more recent past. But they’re very fuzzy about why this should be.

Far from legitimately “adjusting” anything, it appears they are cooking the data to show a politically correct trend toward global warming. Not by coincidence, that has been part and parcel of the government’s underlying policies for the better part of two decades.

What NOAA does aren’t niggling little changes, either…”

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Jerry Lambe:

“…In his first public comments in over two years, Special counsel Robert Mueller only repeated in public what he’d already said in his publicly available report. Nonetheless, his statement was enough to cause a frequent Trump defender in Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz to pen a critical response. Dershowitz essentially called Mueller a partisan hack.

First, Dershowitz took issue with Mueller stating that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said that,” which he claimed was “worse than the statement made by then FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign,” where Comey declared she had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified emails. Comey also said “no reasonable prosecutor” would have charged Clinton.

Dershowitz said that Mueller’s statements went “beyond the conclusion of his report… implying that President Trump might have committed obstruction of justice.” Dershowitz did not point out what Mueller said that wasn’t explicitly stated in his report, which included the passage “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Dershowitz then claimed that he’s never before referred to Mueller as partisan, though he appears to have walked the line.

“Until today, I have defended Mueller against the accusations that he is a partisan. I did not believe that he personally favored either the Democrats or the Republicans, or had a point of view on whether President Trump should be impeached,” he said. “But I have now changed my mind. By putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment based on obstruction of justice, Mueller has revealed his partisan bias.”

Finally, Dershowitz channeled Comey, writing the words “no responsible prosecutor” to describe what Mueller has done.

Mueller’s comments “distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system” because “no responsible prosecutor should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict,” Dershowitz said…”

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If you do not understand that the Justice Department is a filthy cesspool of corrupt garbage bureaucrats, you should understand now. Before I get into the Mueller circus yesterday, I want to point out that Mueller and his ilk are running the criminal justice system in this country. Currently, they are going after high profile targets like Trump and the Trump operation so there is public interest and press coverage, but imagine what kinds of things they do sotto voce to regular Joes and Janes. I just read Sidney Powell’s book, Licensed to Lie about the corruption at the DoJ and it is horrifying. I highly recommend reading it because you will see that the Trump treatment was just business as usual.

Here’s the real story with Mueller’s press conference: Mueller doesn’t want to be called by Nadler to testify before the House Judiciary because he doesn’t want to answer tough questions under oath. Nadler doesn’t want to call Mueller because he doesn’t want Mueller answering questions that undermine the Democrat’s plan to keep a cloud of suspicion floating over Trump until 2020. Mueller and Nadler are communicating because Nadler was pretending to negotiate a Mueller appearance before his committee. Basically Nadler was like “I need you to give me something if you don’t want to be called to testify.” And of course Mueller was more than happy to hold a press conference where he could recapture his rightful status on all those prayer candles after failing to seal the deal against Trump with his report. I should mention that the Senate Republicans can call Mueller to testify, but I have little faith they will do that because they are sad, weak little men.

A compromise had to be made because the Democrat’s planned narrative was derailed with Barr’s cut-to-the-chase press conference. But this time, Mueller delivered for the Democrats by insinuating that his team could not charge Trump because of DoJ’s regulations not to bring charges against a sitting president…but would have if not for the regulation.

AG Barr testified under oath otherwise about the DoJ regulation. Barr said that Mueller told him three times it was not the case that the OLC regulation prevented him from bringing charges. I believe Barr, who made this assertion under oath, over Mueller who does not want to make any statements under oath. There were also witnesses to this conversation, I wonder what they have to say.

1. Mueller would turn over the completed report to Barr
2. Barr would release the summaries that Mueller wanted released
3. The complete report’s release would be held up making redactions because the Mueller team would not remove 6e (grand jury) material as Barr requested
4. Mueller’s biased summaries would marinate in the press for weeks, building the preferred narrative
5. Barr would get all the 6e material out and release the actual report after the narrative had been set by the Democrats and media based on Mueller’s chosen summaries. Few people are going to read the actual report, which is why Barr’s straight shooting letter was so upsetting to the left.

But it didn’t go down that way so yesterday was damage control time.

If you noticed, Mueller completely inverted the foundation of the American judicial system, that citizens are innocent until proven guilty. Instead Mueller changed the principle from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until exonerated. Do you see how dangerous this man, former director of the FBI, is? How many other people have been persecuted and abused by these malefactors at the DoJ? Anyone who watches the lawyer shows on TV knows that prosecutors do not “exonerate” people, they either bring charges or not and Mueller did not bring charges. And concerning Mueller shrouding himself in the OLC regulation, there’s also a regulation that prohibits prosecutors from smearing people who are not charged with a crime. What about that regulation Bob?

And finally, I bet you are glad to read that if you have made it this far, Mueller didn’t “hand this over to Congress” or “provide a roadmap” or “refer this to Congress” for impeachment. Mueller answers to Barr, not Congress.

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 Fake Beto Staffer Arrested for Popsicle Theft

Beto: ‘I Know I Was a Giant A**hole’

I, Comey

For the love of G-d, can someone please take the computer away from Twitter personality and fired government bureaucrat James Comey? He’s written another op-ed. It’s titled: “No ‘treason.’ No coup. Just lies — and dumb lies at that.”

Click at your own risk. It reads like an emo 14-year-old’s poetry after listening to Fields of The Nephilim’s “Last Exit for the Lost” on repeat for 24 hours.

Why won’t Comey go away? He’s obviously nervous now that AG Barr has appointed a serious person to determine how the FBI had enough information to vacuum up all the comms from at least one, probably four in total, Trump campaign associates and yet the $35m Mueller report with 19 prosecutors and 40 FBI agents found no evidence at all that Trump folk were “colluding” with the RUSSIANS. He should be nervous because that’s a hell of a misfire. Assuming it was a misfire and not a direct hit, of course.

“There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup,” Comey wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.”

You don’t get to be the judge of that, sport. You were fired.

“We didn’t know what was true,” he wrote. “Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate.”

OH MY G-D, THIS IS UNBEARABLE. I get the sense that Comey walks around with a movie narrator’s voice in his head, announcing all his actions: “In a world where a soul-eating bad orange man sought to rule the universe, only one human had the strength of character, the virtue to fight for truth, justice and the American way.” Oh, just shut up you freak.

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Transgender athlete easily wins NCAA women’s track championship

Joe Schoffstall:

“…Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.) is set to bartend again for a day to advocate for policies that led to one of her former employers shutting down its business. . . .

Charles Milite, co-founder of the Coffee Shop, where Ocasio-Cortez previously worked, said that the increased minimum wage to $15 per hour for businesses with more than 11 employees led him and his partners to reevaluate their business and shut it down.

“I know it doesn’t sound like much—$2 an hour,” Milite told Crains New York Business in April. “But when you multiply it by 40 hours, by 130 people, it becomes a big number. It was going to increase our monthly payroll $46,000.”

Ocasio-Cortez mourned the loss of the Coffee Shop and stopped in before it closed its doors. “The restaurant I used to work at is closing its doors,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted last August. “I swung by today to say hi one last time, and kid around with friends like old times.” The freshman congresswoman, however, never acknowledged the policies that led to its demise.

After being in business for 28 years and attracting big names, 130 employees ultimately lost their jobs when the company was driven out of business…”

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James Vincent:

“…If you need to know one thing about rare earth metals, it’s that they’re crucial to modern technology, helping power everything from MRI machines and satellites to headphones and nuclear reactors. If you need to know two things, it’s that despite their name, they’re not at all rare.

This second fact is important when putting recent headlines about these 17 oddly named elements in proper context. Last week, many publications covered the news that a Japanese team of scientists had found a huge trove of rare earth elements off the coast of the country’s Minamitori Island. Some 16 million tons were estimated to be lurking in the deep-sea mud, enough to meet global demand on a “semi-infinite basis,” said the researchers.

This news was presented as having great geopolitical significance. China currently produces more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth materials (the exact figure tends to fluctuate year-by-year), and in the event of a conflict, said reports, it could jack up prices for the West and its allies, or even shut them out altogether. In this eventuality, the Minamitori hoard would be a lifeline. “It is important to secure our own source of resources, given how China controls the prices,” Professor Yutaro Takaya Waseda, who led the Japanese research team, told The Wall Street Journal.

But experts say this narrative is wrong. Despite appearances, the Minamitori find is not as significant as headlines have implied. And although China seems to wield great power over this critical global supply chain, the truth is that the country can’t just bring the West to its knees by limiting exports of rare earth elements. We know this pretty conclusively because it tried this in 2010, and it didn’t work out. In both cases, the overlooked factor is just how difficult it is to produce rare earth elements, compared to how easy it is to find them…”

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Mark Tapscott:

“…It’s a commonplace argument from advocates on the Left and in the Mainstream Media, especially among those seeking to force everybody to pay for benefits awarded to a few on the basis of group identity.

Consider Chad Felix Greene’s description in The Federalist today of a recent claim by LBGT advocates concerning a Catholic hospital refusal to perform a certain procedure:

“It is preposterous to jump from a surgeon working in a Catholic hospital refusing to perform an elective hysterectomy on a perfectly healthy female body to arguing that an emergency room worker would deny life-saving care to a transgender person in a car accident. But LGBT people and media constantly conflate the two.”

The occasion for Greene’s analysis is the Trump administration’s proposed rule recognizing sex biologically rather than the Obama administration’s previous “gender identity.” Greene’s point has application across virtually the entire social issue horizon…”

Paul Bedard:

“…More Americans believe that President Trump has the personality and leadership qualities to be president than two years ago, and he topped former President Barack Obama’s rating for working on issues most important to them, according to a new survey.

Gallup found that 47% agree with Trump on the issues, edging Obama at the two year mark of his presidency. In April 2007, 45% agreed with Obama on issues, said Gallup.

And Trump was graded more in line with the political ideology of Americans than Obama and former President George W. Bush. Asked about Trump’s ideology, 38% said it was “about right.” Some 35% said the same thing about Obama, and 36% for Bush.

“Like his ratings on presidential character, Trump’s issue ratings are better than the last time Gallup asked the question. The 47% of Americans expressing agreement with Trump on issues is up from 39% in July 2017,” said the analysis…”

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Eric Eggers:

“…With ballot-harvesting, paper votes are collected by intermediaries who deliver them to polling officials, presumably increasing voter turnout but also creating opportunities for mischief.

In California, by contrast, Democrats exulted as they credited a quietly passed 2016 law legalizing ballot-harvesting with their recent sweep of House seats in the former Republican stronghold of Orange County, thereby helping them win control of the House. In that case, it was Republican eyebrows that were arched. House Speaker Paul Ryan said what happened in California “defies logic.”

In Orange County, an estimated 250,000 harvested ballots were reportedly dropped off on Election Day alone. County Republican Chairman Fred Whitaker claimed the 2016 law “directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later”…”

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