Good Thing He Doesn’t Fly Planes for a Living

The forced vaccination of airline pilots hasn’t caused any crashes of passenger airliners yet, but on April 9th, an American Airlines plane flying into Dallas was just six minutes away from crashing when its vaccinated pilot had a heart attack:

“My name is Bob Snow. I am an American Airlines Captain and have been a Captain for a number of years. My total service with the company is over 31 years. On Nov. 7, I was mandated to receive a vaccine. Quite literally, I was told if I did not receive the vaccination, I would be fired. This order was from our director of flight. So, under duress, I received the vaccine.

“Now just a few days ago, after landing in Dallas, six minutes after we landed, I passed out. I coded. I required three shocks. I had to be intubated. I’m now in ICU in Dallas. This is what the vaccine has done for me. I will probably never fly again, based upon the criteria the FAA establishes for pilots. I was hoping to teach my daughter to fly; she wants to be a pilot. Now that will probably never happen, all courtesy of the vaccine. This is unacceptable, and I’m one of the victims.

“You can see that this is an actual result of the vaccine for some of us. Mandatory, no questions asked, get the shot, or you’re fired. This is not the American way.”

Perhaps the most tragic thing is that when Captain Snow sues American Airlines, he will probably be informed that it was his choice to be vaccinated and that no one actually forced him to submit to genetic therapy. Therefore, the consequences are all on him.

He was merely coerced, threatened, browbeaten, and ordered to submit to it.

Remember this – REMEMBER THIS – the next time someone is attempting to “force” you into something. Evil always seeks your deceived consent.

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NATO is at Proxy War

The Foreign Minister of Russia points out the obvious by stating that NATO is already at war with Russia in Ukraine and correctly warns the member states that supplying weapons to Ukraine makes them belligerent parties and legitimate military targets:

Russia’s top diplomat has warned that NATO is now fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and there is a ‘very serious’ risk the conflict could turn nuclear.

Sergei Lavrov, speaking on Russian state TV last night, accused western leaders of risking a third world war by supplying Ukraine with weapons with the goal of ‘wearing down the Russian army’ – an aim he described as an ‘illusion’.

Accusing NATO and its allies of attempting to bully Russia on the international stage, Lavrov warned that tensions between east and west are now worse than during the Cuban missile crisis at the height of the Cold War.

Unfortunately, the Western leaders and diplomats appear to believe that Russia’s warnings are as baseless and irrelevant as their own rhetorical posturing as they dutifully demonstrate their suicidal, and literally proverbial, stupidity.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin travelled to Kyiv on Sunday for a face-to-face meeting with President Zelensky to discuss supplies, before pledging another multi-million dollar shipment.

Austin will also chair a meeting of more than 40 defence ministers at Ramstein air base in Germany today, aimed at securing additional supplies and coordinating efforts between allies to ensure Ukraine has everything it needs.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Monday night that he regards Russia’s scaremongering as a sign of weakness.

Russia had lost its ‘last hope to scare the world off supporting Ukraine,’ Kuleba wrote on Twitter after Lavrov’s interview. ‘This only means Moscow senses defeat.’

British armed forces minister James Heappey agreed with that assessment today, saying he does not see an imminent threat of escalation in Ukraine and dismissing Lavrov’s comments as ‘bravado’.

‘Lavrov’s trademark over the course of 15 years or so that he has been the Russian foreign secretary has been that sort of bravado. I don’t think that right now there is an imminent threat of escalation,’ Heappey told BBC Television.

‘What the West is doing to support its allies in Ukraine is very well calibrated … Everything we do is calibrated to avoid direct confrontation with Russia.’

Thinking that playing cute and coy with your public statements is somehow going to permit you to simultaneously engage in clear acts of war while avoiding being targeted by a hypersonic missile barrage is the sort of thing that only fat, soft and very stupid people can believe. Unfortunately, the last two years of The War on Covid have proven that most people across the so-called Democratic West are fat, soft, and very, very stupid.

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Out With the Old Gatekeeper

And in with the new:

Elon Musk has seized control of Twitter for $44 billion as weeks of rollercoaster negotiations finally came to a close Monday afternoon.

The billionaire agreed to pay shareholders $54.20 in cash for each share of common stock before the bombshell deal was struck.

The move shifts control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.

Musk vowed to protect free speech on Twitter, ‘defeat the spam bots’ and ‘authenticate all humans’ as he welcomed the acquisition.

He also revealed he planned to ‘enhance the product with new features’ and ‘make the algorithms open source to increase trust’.

Elon Musk is not “the world’s richest person” because he’s a good guy or because he is dedicated to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Whatever god he serves is not God the Father of Jesus Christ. This is just the exchange of one set of gatekeepers for another.

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Those Who Live By the Party

May well see their political careers ended by the party. The British media is preparing the public for Boris Johnson’s long-overdue resignation:

Sue Gray’s long-awaited Partygate report will be so damning that Boris Johnson will have no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, a source has claimed.

A dossier of more than 300 images and 500 pages of information was handed to Scotland Yard by the senior civil servant, who led a Cabinet Office probe into the matter.

She was forced to delay the publication of her investigation into alleged parties held in Downing Street and Whitehall during England’s coronavirus lockdowns due to the Metropolitan Police commencing their own inquiry.

A total of 12 events are being investigated by the police, which include a ‘bring-your-own-booze’ garden party, a gathering in the Cabinet Office to mark Mr Johnson’s 56th birthday and a series of leaving dos.

In an interim report published in January, the Cabinet Office official said there had been ‘failures of leadership and judgment’ in No 10 over the so-called partygate saga.

The Times, citing an official it described as being familiar with the contents of the complete report, said Ms Gray’s full findings were even more personally critical of the Prime Minister and could end his premiership.

After leading the remnants of the British empire out of the European Union, Johnson could have been the Churchillian figure he dreamed of becoming. But unfortunately, he swallowed the Covid Kool-Aid, lurched from one media-driven crisis to the next, and arrogantly refused to follow the very rules he was imposing on the British people. His failure is entirely self-inflicted, and if Dominick Cummings is to be believed, was almost certainly inevitable due to his narcissistic character.

After being caught lying to Parliament; by centuries-old tradition, he should have resigned already.

The Funding Challenge

Karl Denninger reminds us that what appears to be a financial battle of rival capitalists is, in fact, absolutely nothing of the sort:

I do not believe for a second that, should Elon succeed, he will publish who decided what and on what basis; not algorithmically nor on a personal basis along with naming each and every person with a finger on the button. That data, by the way, I’m very certain Twitter has stored in their systems since every firm and organization that touches anything related to a customer always has an audit trail on it so you can fix errors — legitimate errors. In addition said audit trail is necessary for accountability because rogue employees do exist and its not at all uncommon to have to find out who did a given thing and take care of said person’s insolence.

Plenty of people point to Section 230 in this regard, but that’s not really the issue at all. Section 230 only addresses liability, not activity. I warned back when it was debated (and I was an Internet CEO at the time, thus knew damn well how this all intermeshed) that Section 230 was extraordinarily-poor in its crafting and would be abused for that reason. Bad laws are always abused. It was simply a matter of how, not what.

The real argument, as I pointed out back in the 1990s and have maintained (including in my filings to the FCC on net neutrality and in this column) is that there are multiple types of Internet services and they are not the same. We used to look at the character of services provided to determine if there was a common public interest in some sort of regulation. That all went down the toilet with the post-2000 craze of “social media”, along with the abuse of Section 230 which was in fact used to shield bad actors doing things that were blatantly illegal (such as promoting sex trafficking.)

The problem we have today is a function of the evolution of abuse enabled by that bad law. It is no longer possible to set up anything other than your own infrastructure to create a potential Twitter competitor, for example, because the existing firms control the infrastructure and will ban you. AWS and other “cloud” providers have proved this repeatedly.

Then, and this is the kicker, having spent money to build it you have to fund its operation somehow. Twitter, Facesucker, Google and similar do not set their policies in a vacuum; they set them based on how they fund their business. You can spend billions building infrastructure but if you can’t come up with a funding model that works you’re ultimately headed for bankruptcy. The real problem lies there and I’m reasonably certain Musk knows it.

I, too, am aware of this being the primary issue, which is why UATV, Castalia, and Arktoons are all built around a subscription model that relies upon their subscribers and prioritizes the interests of those subscribers over everything else. In a world that is fake, stupid, and gay, in which centralized financial giants propped up by governments and central banks determine the winners and the losers, going direct to the clients/customers/users and providing them with the goods and services they actually want is the only viable path for business anymore.

The contract economy is done. The advertising economy is done. The corpocracy cannot be trusted to live up to even the simplest and most basic of its obligations. Go local and/or go direct, or go under.

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This Could Not Be Verified

Not only is it impossible to verify Ukraine’s claims of Russian losses in the Special Military Operation, it is impossible to take them seriously on a statistical basis.

The scale of Russian troop losses in Ukraine has tipped 21,000 as Putin’s war rumbles into its third month today.

The latest statistics, published by the Ukrainian Land Forces this morning, suggest 21,800 Russian fighters have been killed amid bitter resistance from Ukraine’s armed forces and territorial defence units – though this figure could not be verified.

Meanwhile, the land forces claim to have dealt massive damage to Russia’s military equipment and machinery.

A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2238 armoured vehicles, 179 planes, 154 helicopters and 408 artillery systems.

According to the same article, “On February 24, Russia’s land army consisted of 280,000 full-time active soldiers compared with Ukraine’s 125,600.”

Now, the number of casualties in war is always a multiple of the number of fatalities. For example, the USA lost 407,316 KIA during WWII and 671,846 WIA out of 16.4 million troops, for a Cas/Fat ratio of 1.65. As medical science improved, this ratio increased over time, to 2.6 for Vietnam, 7.2 for Iraq, and 8.6 for Afghanistan.

So, if the most recent US war is a reasonable comparative, the Ukrainian claims would indicate an additional 180,600 wounded Russians for a total of 201,600 Russian casualties, which would mean that the Russian casualty rate of 72 percent exceeds that of the German, Japanese, and Soviet militaries during the entirety of World War II. And at 7.5 percent, the fatality rate is three times the US WWII fatality rate of 2.5 percent in just two months.

In other words, we can state with certainty that these reports are highly improbable, and logically conclude that they are false.

France Votes for Self-Extinction

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the people of France, as after five years of disastrous rule by Emmanuel Macron, the French re-elected him.

Mr Macron, the 44-year-old centrist, won with a 58.5% share of the vote – beating the far-Right Ms Le Pen, 53, on 41.5%, according to exit polls.

In an ambitious victory speech, Mr Macron said: ‘From now on I am no longer the candidate for a party. I’m everyone’s President!’

He conceded that France was ‘full of anger and division’, but pledged: ‘Nobody will be left by the wayside.’

Mr Macron arrived at a rally on the Champ de Mars, underneath the Eiffel Tower, an hour-and-a-half after the result was called.

To rapturous cheers and applause, he held hands with his wife, Brigitte Macron, as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – the European Union anthem – blasted out of speakers.

Making his way up to stage with giant screen behind it, he said: ‘Thankyou!

‘Thank you, dear friends, fellow citizens, here tonight in Paris, and everywhere in France and our overseas territories and abroad, before anything else let me say thank you.

‘After five years of difficult but happy transformation and exception challenged this date – 24 april 2024 – a majority amongst us chose me to pilot the Republic for the next five years.’

Wearing his trademark blue suit and tie, he continued: ‘Together we can make France more independent and Europe stronger. By freeing our creativity, we can make France a great, green nation.

‘I know a lot of people voted for me tonight, not because of my ideals, but to block the far-Right. I have been entrusted with their sense of duty for the next five years.’

Nobody will be left by the wayside. Except, of course, the native people of France, who are expected to suffer their ongoing invasion in humble silence.

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