[American Thinker] Patrick Byrne, Overstock's founder, has long suspected that Obama set up a police intelligence state that's been calling the shots in American politics since 2015. On Sunday, he pushed back against those of Trump's legal advisers demanding surrender. On Tuesday, he claimed that Obama had blackmailed Hillary Clinton to own her politically. If that's true, what Byrne is saying can upend the American political scene.
The New Yorker profiled Byrne early in December. Sheelah Kolhatkar, who wrote the profile, thinks Byrne is probably as crazy as John McAfee, with both given over to life-destroying conspiracy theories. Kolhatkar plays fair, though, and cannot deny his brilliance.
Former employees describe a memory trick he likes to perform, in which he studies a deck of cards for a few minutes and then recites back the order of the cards, one by one. "When he's on, he's smart, charming, complex, and brilliant," Marc Cohodes, who was once a critic of Overstock and is now an investor in the company, told me.
While Byrne may be eccentric, he's often right. He was the first to realize that investment firms and stock traders were colluding to drive stock prices down. He was accused of being paranoid, but the financial crisis proved he was correct. Additionally, while Byrne's tales about his adventures sound like fiction, that doesn't mean they are:
#1
...Brennan's "War Room" in 2016
...Bill Clinton's Loretta Lynch jawboning on the tarmac in the middle of summer 2016 in Arizona
... "Bleachbit"
...the BS "dossier," Halper, Milsud, Downer, Steele
...Obama to Comey in Jan. 2017: "Put your best people on it"
[Federalist] Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s fight against the latest pork-stuffed coronavirus relief package is emblematic of conservative populism’s strength.
"I think what the president is showing here is that he still is the president, that he’s more in line with that populist sentiment throughout the country than he is the swamp, and that he still has something to say," Hemingway said the day after Trump threatened a veto of the legislation he declared a "disgrace."
[TTAG] The ATF has just posted a notice that they have withdrawn their guidance and request for public comment on "Objective Factors for Classifying Weapons with ’Stabilizing Braces’" in the Federal Register. Here is the full announcement from the ATF:
ATF is announcing the withdrawal of a notice and request for comments entitled "Objective Factors for Classifying Weapons with ’Stabilizing Braces’," that was published on December 18, 2020.
ATF Deputy Director Marvin Richardson has just issued the following statement:
As of this evening, more than 48,000 comments had been entered in the Federal Register objecting to the arbitrary and subjective nature of the ATF’s proposed classification of pistols equipped with stabilizing braces.
Yesterday, 90 members of Congress sent a letter to ATF Interim Director Regina Lombardo noting that the ATF’s proposed guidance was anything but objective and could put law-abiding Americans in potential legal jeopardy.
But TTAG has learned that the final straw that persuaded the ATF to back down and withdraw the guidance was serious pressure applied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. A call took place over the weekend involving a number of firearms industry companies and McConnell’s office.
McConnell’s subsequent involvement in the matter, along with fast and furious (to coin a phrase) activism from the gun rights community in opposition to the ATF’s proposed move were what resulted in this evening’s win.
More details may be revealed over time, but this is an unqualified victory. One that many in the gun rights community likely weren’t expecting given recent news surrounding the ATF’s appetite for more firearms-related regulation in advance of a Biden inauguration.
This, however, is just one win in a larger battle to protect Americans’ Second Amendment rights. A battle that is never really won and will surely require more participation from gun owners in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned for more as it becomes available.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/24/2020 04:47 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11137 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
So-called 'Stabilization Braces' will not be an issue if Plugs levies a heavy tax and registration permit, or outlaws, via executive order, the weapons they stabilize.
I'm going with adding a heavy tax and gov't permit. At least as an initial step. Once the owners are identified, anything can happen.
[Townhall] After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones?
Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a crook when you can focus on his favorite flavor of milkshake or compliment him on his socks?
The old pre-election truth was that new vaccines take years to develop. The new postelection truth is that it's no big deal to bring out new vaccines in nine months.
Impeaching a first-term president after his first midterm election -- on a strictly partisan vote, for political reasons other than the Constitution's "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" -- is now a terrible idea.
Worse would be to appoint a special counsel to harass a president on unfounded charges of collusion with China. An even scarier notion would be a conservative dream team of partisan lawyers hounding President Joe Biden -- using a 22-month, $40 million blank check.
It would be unprofessional for university psychologists and physicians from a distance to diagnose, in pop fashion, the mental faculties of a President Biden.
Certainly, there would never be talk about Department of Justice officials contemplating wearing a wire as part of an entrapment scheme to remove a President Biden through the 25th Amendment. That would almost constitute a coup attempt.
#1
Just consider everything said to be bad by the "Animal Farm" media before Nov. 3 as now good. And remember that everything said to be good two months ago is now actually bad.
Posted by: Bobby ||
12/24/2020 8:10 Comments ||
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[Med Press] In a new study, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have shown how an enzyme can activate and engage a "trash and recycling system" in heart cells to help patients better recover from a heart attack. The researchers say in their study, published in Nature Communications, that they believe this system could be modified and used to clean up damaged and misfolded proteins that accumulate in heart cells and eventually become toxic.
The researchers found that the enzyme protein kinase G, which ramps up after a heart attack, influences CHIP (carboxyl terminus of Hsc70-interacting protein) to help move misfolded, damaged proteins to the proteasome, the "recycling plant" of the cell. Based on this finding, the researchers showed that CHIP—modified by protein kinase G or genetically changed to mimic this modification—has enhanced ability to clear the damaged proteins. Subsequently, they explain, this prevents progress to heart failure after an attack.
The discovery came when lead author, Mark Ranek, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, studied mice genetically engineered to block protein kinase G from being turned on after a heart attack. He noticed that CHIP protein levels were much lower than normal, and misfolded/damaged proteins accumulated in greater number in the mouse hearts. This meant that CHIP was a key factor in clearing the damaged proteins. Further supporting the connection was the fact that blocking protein kinase G weakened CHIP's function, while turning on the kinase or using mutations to mimic that it was protective.
"Because CHIP is so small and easy to work with, we think that it will be possible to develop its genetic mutation form into a gene therapy that could be used to treat not only heart disease, but also diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's that also result from the buildup of misfolded proteins, but in this case in the brain," says David Kass, M.D., the Abraham and Virginia Weiss Professor of Cardiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Kass and his team have applied for a patent related to the development of such a therapy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
