Month: December 2020

After days ago a brief flare-up in fighting saw rockets exchanged between Gaza and the Israeli army, the Palestinian hardline Islamist group Hamas conducted what it called joint military exercises as a show of strength with competing militant factions.

Israeli media for its part said these unprecedented exercises ultimately had Iran’s hand behind them, as Reuters reported, “An array of Palestinian militant groups launched rockets into the Mediterranean Sea off the Gaza Strip on Tuesday at the start of what they called their first-ever joint exercise, which Israeli media described as a show of force organized by Iran.”

Video of rocket launches towards the sea a short while ago during the JOR drill in Gaza pic.twitter.com/uBmcUuLO11

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 29, 2020

Multiple live-fire drills were conducted throughout Tuesday, including infantry simulations, small drone flights, and provocatively the launching of rockets into the Mediterranean, which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) monitored closely.

The Palestinian factions further produced videos of the exercises, described as follows:

Eight rockets streaked through a cloudless sky in Gaza towards the Mediterranean after Abu Hamza, spokesman for Islamic Jihad, delivered a speech launching the drill. It will include land and coastal exercises described by the groups as a test of their preparedness for any future confrontation with Israel.

Some professional photos of the JOR press conference, rocket launches, and drone in Gaza earlier. pic.twitter.com/CHMP1y08Nt

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 29, 2020

Israel is highlighting the presence of a large portrait of slain Iranian IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani on a main coastal road in Gaza ahead of the exercises.

Israel says this and other displays are proof enough that Tehran is also exhibiting its long reach with the drills, some of which included sophisticated weaponry. 

One exercise was even staged using old non-functioning Israeli tanks left on the battlefield.

Elaborate military drills were also conducted along Gaza’s beachfront, for which Hamas had banned all fishing for the day.

Why ruin a perfectly nice beach day?

JOR drill in Gaza earlier: pic.twitter.com/qapWLpg26a

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 29, 2020

The rare exercise included Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and what’s called Popular Resistance Committees, as well as smaller factions. 

“The exercise comes as part of efforts to boost the joint action and cooperation between the military wings of the Palestinian factions,” Abu Hamza, an Islamic Jihad spokesman had announced. “This exercise aims to simulate expected threats by the Israeli enemy,” the armed group said in Gaza City.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Two hundred and forty-seven years ago this month, a group of American opponents of the Crown’s tax policy donned disguises and set about methodically destroying a shipment of tea imported into Boston by the East India Company. The vandals trespassed on privately owned ships in Boston Harbor and threw the tea into the ocean. These protesters were thorough. Not content with having destroyed most of the company’s imported tea that night, the activists later discovered another tea shipment which had been unloaded at a warehouse in Boston. The activists then broke into the warehouse and destroyed that tea, too. Total damages amounted to more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars. 

This was the work of the Sons of Liberty, a group led in part by Samuel Adams and which would become known for acts of resistance, arson, and violence committed against tax collectors and other agents of the Crown. Notably, however, as time went on, acts of resistance in America escalated, at first into widespread mob violence, and then into military action and guerrilla warfare. 

Why did many Americans either engage in this behavior or support it? The simplistic answer has long been that the colonists were angry that they were subjected to “taxation without representation.” This is the simplistic version of history often taught in grade school. The reality, of course, is that the conflict between the “patriots” and their former countrymen eventually became a deeply seated (and violent) culture war.

It Wasn’t Just about Taxes

The taxation-without-representation argument endures, of course, because it is useful for the regime and its backers. Advocates for the political status quo insist there is no need for anything like the Boston Tea Party today because modern Americans enjoy representation in Congress. We are told that taxation and the regulatory state are all necessarily moral and legitimate because the voters are “represented.” Even conservatives, who often claim to be for “small government,” often oppose radical opposition to the regime—such as secession—on the grounds that political resistance movements are only acceptable when there is no political “representation.” The implication is that since the United States holds elections every now and then, no political action outside of voting—and maybe a little sign waving—is allowed. 

It’s unlikely the Sons of Liberty would have bought this argument. The small number of millionaires who meet in Washington, DC, nowadays are hardly “representative” of the American public back home. The 1770s equivalent would have consisted of throwing the Americans a few bones in the form of a handful of votes in Parliament, with seats to be reliably held by a few wealthy colonists, far beyond the reach or influence of the average member of the Sons of Liberty.

But attempts to frame the revolution as a conflict over taxes largely misses the point. Political representation was not the real issue. We know this because when the 1778 Carlyle Peace Commission offered representation in Parliament to the Continental Congress as part of a negotiated conclusion to the war, the offer was rejected. 

The Revolution Was Partly a Culture War 

By the late 1770s, the fervor behind the revolution had already gone far beyond mere complaints about taxation. This was just one issue among many.

Rather, the revolution quickly became a culture war in which self-styled “Americans” were taking up arms against a foreign, immoral, and corrupt oppressor. Mere offers of “representation” were hardly sufficient at this point, and it’s unlikely any such offers were going to be enough after the events of 1775, when the British finally marched into Massachusetts and opened fire on American militiamen.

After that, the war had become, to use Rothbard’s term, a “war of national liberation.” 

This ideological and psychological divide perhaps explains the ferocity with which the American revolutionaries resisted British rule. 

The “Patriots” Initiated Real Violence—against Innocents

For example, when we consider the many other protest actions by the Sons of Liberty in the lead-up to the revolution, many of them could easily be described as acts of nondefensive violence, intimidation, and destruction. Many tax collectors resigned from their offices in fear. Others, including citizens merely suspected of supporting the British, were tarred and feathered (i.e., tortured) by the protestors.

Known loyalists were routinely threatened with physical harm to themselves, their families, and their property. Many loyalists fled the colonies in fear for their lives, and after the closure of Boston Harbor, many fled to inner Boston seeking protection from the mobs. Loyalist homes were burned, and theft committed by members of the Sons of Liberty was routine (hundreds of pounds were stolen from Governor Hutchinson’s private home after it was ransacked by a mob of poor and working-class Bostonians). Caught up in all of this, it should be remembered, were children and spouses of the guilty parties, who in many cases were just low-level bureaucrats.

In the southern theater of the war, for example, the British Army armed loyalist militias who engaged in a scorched earth campaign against the rebels. They burned private homes to the ground, cut up and murdered pregnant women, displayed the severed heads of their victims, and employed other tactics of terrorism.

The rebels responded in kind, attacking many who had no role in the attacks on patriot homes, including women, and torturing suspected Tories with beloved torture methods such as “spigoting” in which the victims are spun around and around on upward-pointing nails until they are well impaled.

This sort of thing cannot be explained by mere disagreement over taxation. Acts of violence like these represent a meaningful cultural and national divide.

How Big Is the Cultural Divide in America? 

For now, the cultural divide in the United States today has yet to reach the proportions experienced during the revolution—or, for that matter, during the 1850s in the lead-up to the American Civil War.

But if hostilities reach this point, there will be little use in discussions over the size of the tax burden, mask mandates, or the nuances of abortion policy. The disdain felt by each side for the other side will be far beyond mere compromises over arcane matters of policy. 

And just as discussions over “taxation without representation” miss the real currents underlying the American rebellion, any view of the current crisis that ignores the ongoing culture war will fail to identify the causes. 

Yet, the culture war has also likely progressed to the point where national unity is unlikely to be salvaged even by charismatic leaders and efforts at compromise. When it comes to culture, there is little room for compromise. It is increasingly apparent that the only peaceful solution lies in some form of radical decentralization, amounting to either secession or self-rule at the local level with only foreign policy as “national” policy. Had the British offered these terms in 1770, bloodshed would have likely been avoided. Americans must pursue similar solutions now before it is too late. 

As Antifa and other far-left activists have mounted a national campaign to “abolish the police” – going so far in places like Portland and Seattle as to literally fight the police while declaring so-called autonomous zones – the city that’s become ground zero for the anti-police movement has seen murder rates soar.

Fox News reports based on local crime statistics that murders are surging in Portland, Oregon. “As of Christmas Eve, this year’s shootings had surpassed last year’s by more than 116%, with 393 shootings reported in all of 2019.”

2020 numbers dwarf the prior year’s, having reached over 850 shootings. Among these are more single-year homicides than in any year over the prior nearly three decades. 

The city is so desperate that police chief Chuck Lovell is urging the public’s help in doing “everything we can together” to “break the cycle of violence.”

“Gun violence has plagued our city at twice the rate of last year,” he underscored in a public statement. “On average, someone is shot in Portland roughly every two days.”

And almost unbelievably (or actually perhaps very believable given it’s Portland), a frontline special police task force was earlier disbanded because activists claimed it was inherently racist. As homicides and shootings soared, here’s the “action” that far-left activists and woke city officials took, according to local media:

PPB’s [Portland Police Bureau] gun violence reduction team was disbanded in the summer following the criticism of advocates who said that the gun violence reduction team was stopping people of color disproportionately to others.

Chief Lovell talks about increased gun violence. pic.twitter.com/EQSCSd0IGp

— Chief Chuck Lovell (@ChiefCLovell) December 16, 2020

The dissolution of the 34-person police unit happened in July, and since then shootings across the city have skyrocketed. It was done also in the name of Portland’s “police reform efforts” in the wake of widespread George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests and unrest earlier in the summer.

A recent headline covering Sunday night violence, for example, has become typical of most weekends in Portland, which is beginning to resemble Chicago levels of violence. Police described “The number of bullets that must have been flying around our neighborhoods, city streets, sidewalks – it’s awful.” The recent headline reads, “Portland police respond to 4 overnight shootings, 2 injured” in which—

The Portland Police Bureau is investigating four different shootings after two victims walked into local hospitals with gunshot wounds overnight and two more reports were made about gunfire.

The shootings happened in different parts of the city on the east side… the third shooting of the night was reported just after 11 p.m. on SE 72nd Ave where officers found “at least nine bullet strikes to a residence and multiple casings.” According to police, bullets went through the living room of an occupied home and into multiple bedrooms. Luckily, no one inside the home was injured in the shooting.

Minutes after the third shooting was reported in Southeast Portland, a fourth was reported in Northeast Portland in the Cully neighborhood.

THREAD: @PortlandPolice have responded to over 1,200 shootings the last 2 years. Through Aug of this year, nearly a quarter were in 3 neighborhoods in East Portland. The director of Office of Gun Violence Prevention says gun violence needs to be viewed through public health lens. pic.twitter.com/Legr9hVAFd

— Wright Gazaway (@WrightKATU) December 23, 2020

Chief Lovell this week noted that though the city has taken appropriate extreme measures to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, “Violence is also a disease that kills and our community is suffering the consequences.”

The clearly corelated trend of disbanding police anti-crime units in various cities across the nation leading to spikes in violent crime should be obvious to most Americans, but it is apparently being lost on those city officials allowing themselves to be willing pawns of the woke mob.

Authored by Tyler O’Neil via PJMedia.com,

Long before Beto O’Rourke claimed the world only had 10 years left for humans to act against climate change, alarmists had spent decades predicting one doomsday scenario after another, each of which stubbornly failed to materialize. It seems climate armageddon has taken a permanent sabbatical.

Many of those doomsday predictions specifically mentioned the annus horribilus of 2020. Those predictions also failed, some rather spectacularly.

Steve Milloy, a former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member and founder of JunkScience.com, compiled ten climate predictions for 2020 that fell far off the mark.

1. Average global temperature up 3 degrees Celsius

Screenshot of the Oct 2, 1987 edition of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix

In 1987, the Star-Phoenix in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, quoted James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. His model predicted an average temperature increase of “between one-half and one degree Celsius by the end of the ’90s.”

“And within 15 to 20 years of this, the earth will be warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years,” Hansen said. According to the Star-Phoenix, his model predicted that “by the year 2020 we will experience an average temperature increase of around three degrees [Celsius], with even greater extremes.”

Milloy cited former NASA climatologist Roy Spencer, whose data suggest global temperatures have risen 0.64 degrees Celsius since 1987. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) shows an increase of about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 1987.

2. Global emissions

In 1978, The Vancouver Sun cited a paper in the journal Science. University of Washington researcher Minze Stuiver predicted that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will have doubled by 2020. “We learn that if present trends continue, with economics the only limit on the exploitation of fossil fuels, the CO2 concentration will have doubled by 2020. Forty to 80 years after fuel burning peaks — that will come mid-century — the CO2 concentration will be five to 10 times its present level.”

Yet the CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t come close to doubling since 1978. According to NOAA, in March 1978 when the Sun published this article, there were 335 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. In February 2020, NOAA reported 413 parts per million in the atmosphere. That represents an increase of 23 percent, a far cry from doubling the concentration (which would be 670 parts per million).

3. Emissions from India and China

In December 2009, The Springfield News-Leader reported that India and China had pledged to cut emissions by 2020. “The developing world, for the first time, is offering its own actions — not straight reductions, but clean-energy projects and other steps to slow the growth of their emissions.”

“China says it will, by 2020, reduce gases by 40 to 45 percent below ‘business as usual,’ that is, judged against 2005 figures, for energy used versus economic input. India offers a 20 to 25 percent slowdown in emissions growth.”

While these projections were more promises than predictions, they fell wide of the mark. India and China increased their carbon emissions since 2005. According to the World Bank, India emitted 1.2 million kilotons of CO2 in 2005 and 2.4 million kilotons of CO2 in 2018, the last year data is available, a 200 percent increase. China, meanwhile, emitted 5.9 million kilotons in 2005 and 9.9 million kilotons in 2016, a 168 percent increase.

4. No snow on Mount Kilimanjaro

Screenshot of The Vancouver Sun reporting on a scientist’s prediction that the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will disappear by 2020.

In 2001, The Vancouver Sun reported, “Snows of Kilimanjaro to vanish by 2020.”

“‘At this rate, all of the ice will be gone between 2010 and 2020,’ said Lonnie Thompson, a geologist at Ohio State University. ‘And that is probably a conservative estimate.”

Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth also predicted that there would be no snow on Kilimanjaro in 2020.

Yet in February 2020, The Times of London reported that the “Staying power of Kilimanjaro snow defies Al Gore’s gloomy forecast.”

“The snow has certainly got my clients talking,” Methley Swai, owner of the Just-Kilimanjaro trekking company, told The Times. “Many people have made Kilimanjaro a bucket list priority because of the Al Gore deadline but when they get here they are pleasantly surprised to find lots of snow.”

The Times screenshot

5. Rising sea levels in the Sunshine State

Miami Herald report predicting sea-level rise of 2 feet in Florida by 2020.

In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Jim Titus predicted that the sea level around Florida would rise two feet by 2020, The Miami Herald reported.

According to NOAA, the sea level at Virginia Key has risen by about 9 centimeters, which works out to 3.54 inches.

NOAA chart for sea level in Virginia Key, Florida.

6. People will become unfamiliar with snow

In March 2000, David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia in England, predicted that winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event,” The Independent reported.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” Viner said.

Heavy snow will return occasionally, Viner predicted, but the Brits would not be prepared for it when it does. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said.

About that. Snow is still very much a thing in the United Kingdom, and Scotland’s snowplows — called “gritters” — have been very much up to the task. Scotland had gotten about 10 centimeters of snow in some places by early December 2020, the Daily Record reported. “Traffic Scotland says that its current winter fleet consists of 213 vehicles that are available for ploughing and spreading salt.”

7. Pacific islands economies devastated

In October 2000, a Greenpeace report predicted that global warming “could cause a massive economic decline across at least 13 tiny Pacific nations in the next 20 years,” the Australian newspaper The Age reported. Global warming would devastate most of the Pacific’s coral reefs, devastating the tourism and fishing industries of tiny Pacific nations.

“Under the worst-case scenario examined, by 2020 some Melanesian nations would lose from 15 to 20 per cent of their gross domestic product, valued at about $1.9 billion [in American dollars] to $2.3 billion, while other mainly Polynesian nations are even more vulnerable and could lose between $4 billion and $5 billion due to climate change,” the report warned.

“The study shows that the most vulnerable Pacific nations are Tuvalu and Kiribati, the host of this year’s Pacific Islands Forum, followed by Cook Islands, Palau, Tonga and French Polynesia,” The Age reported.

Yet according to the government of Tuvalu’s Ministry of Finance, “Revenues collected from fisheries access increased from approximately $10 million [Australian dollars] in 2012 to $13.6 million in 2014 to the current situation in which annual revenue is more than $30 million.”

“The 2019 budget reports that Tuvalu has enjoyed an unprecedented six consecutive years of economic growth ‘on the back of increasing revenues from fishing licenses and back-to-back infrastructure projects that were-funded and administered by development partners,’” the ministry reported.

Kiribati has also enjoyed healthy GDP growth in the past five years. As with so many predictions of climate armageddon, the great demise of Pacific economies has failed to materialize.

8. Global conflict and nuclear war

In 2004, The Guardian reported on a Department of Defense report predicting that climate change could be America’s greatest national security threat. Among other things, the report predicted nuclear war, endemic conflict over resources, and European cities underwater by 2020.

The Pentagon report claimed that peace occurs when resources increase or when populations die off. “But such peaceful periods are short-lived because population quickly rises to once again push against carrying capacity, and warfare resumes.” In modern times, the casualties have decreased, but “all of that progressive behavior could collapse if carrying capacities everywhere were suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change.”

As endemic warfare resumes, it will escalate to nuclear war, the report predicted. “In this world of warring states, nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable.”

Not only has nuclear war failed to materialize, but the world has become more peaceful in the past 30 years. Mathematicians at the University of York created an algorithm to measure battlefield deaths and discovered an “abrupt shift towards a greater level of peace in the early 1990s.”

9. The end of Arctic ice

In April 2013, the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette reported that NOAA scientists predicted “ranges for an ice-free Arctic from 2020 to after 2040.”

“It is reasonable to conclude Arctic ice loss is very likely to occur in the first rather than the second half of the 21st century, with a possibility of loss within a decade or two,” the paper claimed.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder, there were 3.9 million square kilometers of sea ice in the Arctic Sea at its annual minimum in September 2020.

10. Glaciers gone at Glacier National Park

In March 2009, U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Daniel Fagre predicted that the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020.

“Fagre’s current research reveals that temperatures in Glacier National Park have risen higher than was predicted in 1992. The Montana glaciers are now expected to be gone by 2020,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

By 2010, Glacier National Park erected signs warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020. This year, the park rushed to change the signs as the glaciers still existed. In truth, the U.S. Geological Survey warned the park back in 2017 that the forecast model no longer predicted a glacier-less 2020, but a park spokeswoman told CNN that the park didn’t have enough money to change the signs.

The park altered the most prominent placards in 2019, but it was still waiting for budget authorization to update signs at two other locations.

The new signs will say, “When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.”

*  *  *

Climate alarmists have been forecasting doom for more than 50 years, and their predictions fail again and again. In 2018, the tiny Maldives Islands were scheduled to sink beneath the waves due to climate change — yet the islands have actually grown in recent years!

The truth of the matter is, climate is an extremely complicated science that remains far less than fully understood. While it stands to reason that carbon emissions may have an impact on the global climate, there is little concrete evidence to prove it — and nearly every prediction made on this hypothesis has proven false.

US Secretary of State Mike is demanding that China immediately release a citizen journalist jailed for her earlier social media reporting from Wuhan, the global coronavirus epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. The case has sent shockwaves across the globe given it’s such a blatant crackdown on mere speech and reporting in the Communist-run country.

Zhang Zhan, the 37-year old former lawyer who essentially live-blogged widely shared posts describing the chaotic and mismanaged efforts of Chinese authorities to get a handle of the virus during its early spread in Wuhan was on Monday sentenced to four years in prison by a Shanghai court for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

Pompeo said in his Tuesday statement: “We call on the PRC government to release her immediately and unconditionally.” He also charged Beijing with “lying” which he called a “feature” of China’s “authoritarian regime”. 

“The Chinese Communist Party has shown once again it will do whatever it takes to silence those who question the party’s official line, even regarding crucial public health information,” he said in the statement.

Zhan had initially been arrested in May, with her Monday court proceedings only taking three hours before the stiff sentence was handed down.

International reports noted the intentional timing of it by authorities who feared it would create an avalanche of international condemnation, which it has. CBS reported the following:

“The pronouncement of sentence in court was quite rare and unexpected,” said defense lawyer Zhang Keke. “It has something to do with the holiday timing in the West.”

China’s communist authorities have a history of putting dissidents on trial in opaque courts between Christmas and New Year’s to minimize Western scrutiny. 

The trial comes just weeks before an international team of World Health Organization experts is expected to arrive in China to investigate the origins of COVID-19. 

US calling for immediate and unconditional release of citizen journalist jailed in #China, according to a statement from @SecPompeo. pic.twitter.com/4UkiLdy85M

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) December 29, 2020

In his statement Pompeo further underscored Zhan’s trial was “hasty” and not in accord with international standards of justice.

“Her hasty trial, to which foreign observers were denied access, shows how fearful the CCP is of Chinese citizens who speak the truth,” Pompeo said.

An EU statement also condemned the proceedings, her sentence, and treatment while in custody. “Ms Zhang has been subject to torture and ill-treatment during her detention and her health condition has seriously deteriorated,” an EU external affairs spokesman said.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

There are moments that restore our faith in humanity, and there are also moments that destroy it.  We were created to love and to be loved, and in this article I will share a couple examples of incredible acts of love.  But there are many others that have become so twisted that they will engage in unspeakable acts of evil without even thinking twice about it.  Of course on Christmas Day we witnessed an unspeakable act of evil when Anthony Quinn Warner blew himself up in front of the AT&T building in downtown Nashville.  But even in the midst of such a great tragedy, incredible things happened that are making headlines all over the globe.  Light and darkness often coexist side by side, but sometimes things get so dark that we forget that the light is still there.

One story that encouraged me lately was the story of a 7-year-old boy named Eli that rushed into a burning home to save his 22-month-old sister…

It was a typical night at the Davidson household in New Tazewell, Tennessee, on December 8. Chris and Nicole Davidson fed their three children dinner, tucked them into bed and were asleep by 8:30 p.m.

Hours later, Nicole Davidson woke up to the smell of smoke. Within minutes, the family’s home was up in flames — and 22-month-old Erin Davidson was trapped in her room.

Sometimes being really small is a huge advantage, and Eli was able to use his small size to squeeze through a window and grab little Erin from her crib before it was too late…

“The smoke and fire was so thick there was no way I could get to her,” Chris Davidson told CNN. “We went outside to get to her from the window, but there was nothing for me to stand on to reach up there. So I picked up Eli, who went through the window and was able to grab her from her crib.”

Acts of great self-sacrifice are representative of the best of humanity, but we are also reminded of the worst of humanity on a daily basis.

For example, yesterday I came across a story about three men in Florida that I wish I could get out of my mind…

Three men, including the rapper Splash Zanotti, allegedly demanded $20,000 and sexually assaulted a woman after breaking into a South Florida home, police said.

Splash Zanotti, whose real name is Kejuan Campbell, along with Dionte Alexander-Wilcox and Antonio James allegedly broke into the Miramar, Florida home in October by pointing a gun at one of the homeowners, according to a federal affidavit. The men, all armed with firearms, proceeded to force both homeowners on the ground and assaulted them.

The specific details of what they did to the woman are too sickening for this article.

Men like this have no place in our society, and it is actually a tremendous indictment of our society that we keep producing incredibly sick and twisted people like this.

But not everyone turns out this way.  In New Jersey, a couple named Rebecca and Robert Kolas have brought six orphaned siblings into their home so that they would not be separated.

Needless to say, this has not been easy on their finances, and Rebecca says that they have mortgaged their home “as much as possible” in order to pay for it…

Rebecca, who is managing attorney of the Community Health Law Project which advocates for those with disabilities, and Robert, who works for the Tom River Public Works Department, have asked New Jersey’s Division of Child Protection and Permanency for help in making more space for the kids.

“My home is mortgaged as much as possible to pay for it,” Rebecca explained.

Why can’t our society produce more good hearts like that?

And why can’t we send people like Rebecca and Robert to Washington to represent us?

Instead, our system of government seems to greatly attract power-hungry control freaks that love to make life miserable for all the rest of us.

Things have gotten particularly oppressive during this pandemic.  The rules that our politicians have imposed upon all of us have resulted in some very crazy outcomes, and we are seeing things that I never thought we would see in this country.

For instance, just recently the manager of an AMC Theater in Jacksonville, North Carolina banned a disabled child from entering because she wasn’t wearing a mask…

Family members were masked up. However, the child, who was in a baby stroller and is non-verbal, was not wearing a mask.

She reportedly has a condition that precludes her from wearing either a mask or a face shield.

How cold-hearted do you have to be in order to do something like that?

When the family indicated that they didn’t want to leave, the manager of the movie theater actually summoned the police…

Police were summoned to the theater and escorted the outraged family outside.

Yes, this is actually happening in America in 2020.

Sadly, the people with the most money and the most power are often the most psychotic of them all.

By now, you have probably heard that in the name of “science” Bill Gates would actually like to partially block sunlight from reaching our planet…

A bizarre-sounding plan to save Earth funded by tech guru Bill Gates is “quietly” moving forward.

The plan — to dim the sun’s rays and their impact on the earth — is reportedly all in the name of helping to revitalize the environment and thus save the human race.

This is one of the most foolish plans that I have ever heard, but Bill Gates is very serious about this.

Without the light of the sun, life on Earth could not exist.  We can barely feed everyone on the planet right now during the best of years, and partially cutting off sunlight would make it much more difficult to grow food.

Why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing?

We live at a time when evil is out of control all over the planet, and it is only going to get worse in the years to come.

But whenever the wickedness seems too overwhelming, it will be important for us to remember that love is still changing hearts all over the globe.

All throughout human history we have witnessed a battle of good vs. evil, and that will definitely be true during this chapter of human history as well.

And even though hatred is rising all around us, we want to make sure that our hearts are always filled with love, because love will win in the end.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Chinese streaming giant Tencent halted live broadcasts of NBA games featuring Philadelphia 76ers and Houston Rockets because Daryl Morey, voiced his opinion on Twitter in 2019 about support for the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, according to The Japan Times.

At the time, Morey was the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted (now deleted) “Fight For Freedom Stand With Hong Kong.” 

That didn’t sit well with the communist government, and it was revealed late last year that the Chinese government insisted the league fire Morey, from the Houston Rockets. 

Morey has since become the president of the 76ers, as it seems the communist have not forgotten Morey’s political activism in his support of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. 

In an apparent protest to Morey, Tencent has stopped live broadcasts of games involving the 76ers and Rockets for the 2020-2021 season, only offering text updates on a play by play basis. 

AFP noted that “state broadcaster CCTV, which holds China’s exclusive TV rights for the NBA, has not aired any games since the season opened on December 22.” 

Tencent’s refusal to air 76ers and Rocket games and CCTV’s blackout of NBA games has cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars. NBA’s revenues could drop by 40% in the 2020-2021 season. 

The Times also noted that text updates via Tencent were available for the 76ers season opener against Washington Wizards on December 23. 

The 76ers played New York Knicks and Cleveland Cavaliers over the weekend, as Tencent only provided text updates. 

Morey recently told ESPN that his now-deleted tweet supporting Hong Kong activists almost ended his career with the league. 

He added that he has no regrets about what was tweeted though he didn’t expect immediate outrage from the communist. 

The essential lesson that should be taken from Morey’s tweet and China’s communist government’s action is that government involvement and regulatory oversight in private business is toxic.

Authored by Tyler O’Neil  via PJMedia.com,

On Monday, a panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-N.Y.) COVID-19 orders placing strict limits on houses of worship in hot spots.

The 2nd Circuit panel agreed with the Supreme Court that Cuomo’s order likely does not satisfy the high standard of strict scrutiny and therefore violates the First Amendment.

“No public interest is served by maintaining an unconstitutional policy when constitutional alternatives are available to achieve the same goal,” Judge Michael Park wrote in the opinion.

“The restrictions challenged here specially and disproportionately burden religious exercise, and thus ’strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.’ Such a direct and severe constitutional violation weighs heavily in favor of granting injunctive relief.”

In the 3-0 decision, the panel upheld the claims of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, the Orthodox Jewish group Agudath Israel of America, and two synagogues. The ruling enjoined Cuomo’s October 6 order capping attendance at “houses of worship.”

Cuomo capped attendance at either 10 people or 25 percent capacity, whichever is lesser, in “red” zones, and 25 people or 33 percent capacity in “orange” zones, even in buildings that seat hundreds.

While previous rulings had supported Cuomo’s order, the Supreme Court granted an injunction against the order by a 5-4 majority.

“In light of the Supreme Court’s decision, we hold that the Order’s regulation of ‘houses of worship’ is subject to strict scrutiny and that its fixed capacity limits are not narrowly tailored to stem the spread of COVID-19. Appellants have established irreparable harm caused by the fixed capacity limits, and the public interest favors granting injunctive relief,” the 2nd Circuit panel ruled.

In the opinion, Park noted that Cuomo “has not asserted that his categorization of businesses as ‘essential’ or ’non-essential’ was based on any assessment of COVID-19 transmission risk.”

He also argued that Cuomo did not use data or compare religious worship with “essential” activities.

Cuomo has claimed that the Supreme Court’s ruling had no practical effect because some restrictions were lifted as COVID-19 outbreaks eased.

Avi Schick, a lawyer for Agudath Israel, said Monday’s decision “will be felt way beyond the COVID context. It is a clear statement … that government can’t disfavor religious conduct merely because it sees no value in religious practice.”

Randy Mastro, the diocese’s lawyer, said the diocese was “gratified,” and will welcome parishioners to mass “under strict protocols” that keep them safe.