Not the State of the Union Address

 

They are not calling it the State of the Union address.  The by-invitation-only event is being referred to as the “Presidential Address to the Joint Session of Congress.”  It starts this evening, Weds. Apr-28 at 9pm.  The TV Guide lists it as concluding at 11pm.  Will our President make it through the full two hours?

No matter.  You don’t have to watch it, because Vodkapundit will be live DrunkBlogging the address;  click here.   

UPDATE at 8:48pm:  Direct link is now up; click here.

(Mr. Vodkapundit already gave us the heads up from yesterday’s Insanity Wrap blog:

Insanity Wrap will return in our VodkaPundit guise on Wednesday evening right here at PJ Media for a much-requested drunkblog of Presidentish Biden’s much-delayed State of the Union address.)

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Dr. Fauci’s agenda UnMasked

 

And the related headline at Liberty Daily:

Open Republican States Texas & Florida

Reporting Fewer Covid Cases

Than Closed Democrat-Led States New York & Michigan

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Starve the Big Tech Beast

 

Jim Daws has lots of DIY advice on switching from Big Tech services to alternatives offering more privacy and less bias.  His plan, posted at American Thinker, can be implemented incrementally, to make the transitions as painless as possible.

. . . Big Tech is wholly owned by the Left and they’re using that power -- unprecedented in human history -- to muzzle any effective opposition.

The sad part is that Big Tech’s control over the free flow information is almost entirely illusory and based wholly on our submission to it. Much in the same manner that consumers become zealously brand-conscious, we have come to accept that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have some innate value that makes them indispensable. We forget that Big Tech’s dominance has come about in just one generation and we can track a direct trajectory between the rise of Big Tech and the radical Left’s ascendancy. 

To have any chance of reversing this ruinous tide, traditional Americans must awake from their stupor and stop feeding the beast that’s devouring them. Thankfully, that’s much more easily done than say, defeating the British Empire, a bloody civil war to end slavery, or storming the beaches at Normandy. All it takes is a few afternoons at your desk to break the Big Tech habit and transition to emerging Alt-Tech options. But if we’re unwilling to do even that, we’ll prove unworthy of our legacy of freedom and prosperity and will get exactly what we deserve.

Here are some suggestions for escaping Big Tech’s death-grip. A quick disclaimer: while improved privacy and security is an excellent side effect of these suggestions, nothing on the internet is completely secure or private. My main goal here is to provide alternatives that will starve the Big Tech beast.

Ditch Windows and Mac operating systems in favor of Linux. This may seem the most difficult and disruptive action required of your Big Tech jailbreak but it’s far less so than you may think and absolutely essential. By allowing Microsoft and Apple control of your computing ecosystem you allow them to track your activities and collect private information. Once the government has labeled dissent as “domestic terrorism,” you can bet that the lefties in Redmond and Cupertino will be there to help monitor your political beliefs. 

Linux is a free, stable, secure, open-source operating system not controlled by Big Tech. . . .

On the web browser front, if you're using Google Chrome or Apple Safari, you should know that your online activity is being tracked, recorded, and sold to thousands of data brokers. Most of that data is used for marketing, but the sites you visit are a good indicator of your political leanings and activities and the collection of that data is ripe for abuse. 

A good alternative is the Brave browser. .  .

For the love of God, stop using Google search and Gmail. These two services provide the bulk of Google's ad and tracking revenue, which they then use to censor Google search results to block content their woke and H1B visa workforce find objectionable. Google search is the most powerful gatekeeper of information ever created and Google unapologetically uses algorithms to promote politicians and ideas they agree with and crush those they oppose.

Good alternatives are DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail . . .

If Jeff Zuckerberg’s and Jack Dorsey’s promotion and protection of leftist politicians and dogma during the 2020 election hasn’t convinced you to get off Facebook and Twitter, allow me to remind you that, among many outrages, Zuckerberg spent nearly a half-billion dollars subverting the 2020 election and both Zuckerberg and Dorsey censored stories of the Biden crime family’s blatant graft and corruption. Then, after the election, both banned the 45th President of the United States from their platforms for objecting.

More than any other tech service, users seem slavishly devoted to Facebook and Twitter and willing to sacrifice the nation and their freedoms to them. This effect is what empowered Zuckerberg and Dorsey to offend about half their customers… er, products, without fear of reprisal. 

. . .

Your transition need not be done all at once but make a list and begin your migration away from Big Tech. Choose tasks that are most easily accomplished and check it off. You will be surprised at how quick and painless the process is and how good responsible citizenship and freedom feels. 

Read the full article here.

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Roger L. Simon: The Big Snitch Is Here—America Goes Stasi

 

The other day. Roger L. Simon posted a piece at Epoch Times that should frighten any of us.  America is turning into – or has already turned into -- a police state:

Many, particularly those on the right, worry the United States is turning into China, but we are a Western nation coming out of a (mostly) Western tradition.

I believe we should be as much concerned, if not more, that we are beginning to resemble East Germany with its State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst), better known as the Stasi.

As Wikipedia reminds us:

“One of the Stasi’s main tasks was spying on the population, primarily through a vast network of citizens turned informants, and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including hidden psychological destruction of dissidents (“Zersetzung,” literally meaning “decomposition”). It arrested 250,000 people as political prisoners during its existence.”

I was reminded of this Zersetzung and its psychological destruction of dissidents—soon we may all be classified that way, if not already—by a photo I received this morning from a (necessarily anonymous) friend who works at the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, among the most prestigious hospitals in the country.

With his/her permission, I am sharing it with you.

This person photographed an announcement taped to a wall at the hospital that read: “Implicit Bias Anonymous Reporting System.”

Beneath these ominous words was the usual digital code symbol automatically connecting a cellphone to the “system,” as if the hospital were a restaurant during COVID providing a hands-free menu for your convenience.

In other words, it was a convenient posting for how to snitch on your friends and colleagues for their “implicit bias,” whatever that is. (I’m probably exhibiting some just by writing this.)

I asked my friend, who has known the hospital well for many years, whether this could be a joke, but was vehemently assured it wasn’t. Joke or not, it gives a clear idea of where the powers that be at that hospital—and many others, I would wager—stand.

My friend tells me that staff gets “constant political crap” from the chairwoman of the hospital for showing bias against “protected minorities,” whatever that means—although they observe the Hippocratic Oath and treat all patients the same anyway.

You could call this growing atmosphere Stasi Lite—maybe we should name a beer after it—not to mention a good way to keep potential dissidents in line.

. . .

We must be on watch if it happens to us. This Stasi-like existence is working on our minds, consciously or unconsciously.

We may be used to it already to some degree because of Big Tech, but this is more than one turn of the screw further. With Big Tech, although they know all, or most of all, about us, they’re only interested intermittently. Sometimes they ignore us, as long as we keep our digital heads down.

The State Security Service—be it Chinese, East German, or American—is always interested.

So be careful if you have, in your past, present, or future, any “implicit bias,” let alone “explicit bias,” because that could mean, as we know … just about anything.

Read the full article here.

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Last chance to save Earth

 

The editorial board at Issues and Insights published this earlier today:

John Kerry said earlier this month that we’ve reached “the last best opportunity we have to get real and serious” about global warming. What’s the difference between him and a loon walking down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue wearing one of those sandwich boards proclaiming the end of the world is nigh? We’re struggling to see any.

Kerry, the Biden administration’s special presidential envoy for climate – an office that amounts to much less than a bucket of warm spit – is part of a chorus of fearmongering that goes back more than three decades. 

“In 1989 the United Nations gave us 10 years to save the world,” science site Watts Up With That posted last year. 

Guess blogger Eric Worrall then went on to list more than a dozen “last chances” to stop global warming.

“If we do not heed this last chance, I’m sure there will be another last chance in the near future, just like all the previous last chances,” he said.

Dire, way-off-base predictions have been the hallmark of radical environmentalism for at least a half century. Reason’s Ronald Bailey took “a look back” in 2020 at the first Earth Day and the forecasters “who got the future wrong.” He notes that the world did not have to halve the planet’s population or stop economic growth completely “to prevent the imminent ecological cataclysm.”

Nor have we run out of natural resources, been forced to shut down automobile travel, ban luxury items, and wear gas masks in urban areas due to air pollution (though the doomsters among us are happy that we’ve been forced to mask up for a least a year for another reason).

Despite the unbroken string of erroneous predictions, we still get nonsense from the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, which says “time is fast running out” to keep global warming at bay, and drivel from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who insists “we are on the verge of the abyss.”

That these people, including the John Kerrys of the U.S., who are as useful as a broken leg, have not been driven from their positions of influence and authority is a near tragedy. To the extent that we need political leaders, our country and our world deserve serious, sober-minded people leading our institutions, not the pretenders, narrative-pimps, self-seekers, virtue-signalers, mindless agitators, think-they’re-still-in-high-school attention-seekers, power-hungry louts, and batty alarmists who currently dominate. It’s discouraging to think that maybe soon we’ll have our last chance to rid ourselves of these malign characters, because they have a way of settling in like a distant family member who makes a surprise visit and then won’t leave. We need to start kicking them out now.

Monica Showalter at American Thinker quotes John Kerry’s “Net zero is not enough. We need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere”, to which Ms. Showalter responds:

Too bad about the plants.

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Today is Earth Day - ahem

John R. Smith at Biz Pac Review explains:

You may have noticed that some folks “celebrate” Earth Day each April 22. Celebrants believe that the purpose of Earth Day, as quoted by a naïve liberal politician, is “to preserve the quality of our water and the air we breathe, and to protect all the natural wonders….”

It would be wonderful if that was all Earth Day was about.

But the political objective of the people who sponsor Earth Day globally is much more sinister than the preservation of our environment. Read on.

The global environmental crusade is the modern home of the socialist/communist movement. Earth Day is the creation of this movement. The purpose of the global environmental movement is to give governments control of land and resources at the expense of private ownership. They would gut private property rights. They work to create government authority over the West’s industrial production, through such mechanisms as the U.N.’s Paris Agreement and Kyoto Treaty, while exempting socialist countries like China and India. 

Their method? To blame humans and the corporate world’s industrial atmospheric emissions as the primary culprits behind global climate change. 

Their ultimate goal? To curb or crush free-enterprise capitalism.

Much more at the link here.

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Counties turning red?

 

The Republic Journal has an encouraging word:

America is turning red one county at a time.  Trumbull County, OH was always a major Democrat stronghold and was the reason Obama won OH all those years ago.  Then came Trump and his pro-worker message which flipped the county by a massive 30-point swing.  Now, other counties are moving to the red column and this bodes well for Republicans to pick up another Senate seat in 2024 when Sen. Brown is up for re-election.  To fully appreciate what’s occurring in America we have to look at the historical numbers.  500,000 voters have switched from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans in Oh.  However, that only tells have the story.  Democrats have also lost about 300,000 active voters who can’t cross that aisle but can’t pull the D lever again.  This is a massive shift in the rust belt states and should give all of us hope for our nation’s future.

I just hope he’s right.

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