Nobody knows or can ever know if Derek Chauvin intended to kill the criminal drug-addict George Floyd.

It is very unlikely that he intended to. Why would he?

Multitudes accuse him of the cruel intent. They don’t care if he did or didn’t want to do it, did or didn’t actually do it. They want Chauvin to have intentionally murdered Floyd. They want it as an excuse for anger. They enjoy the lovely feeling of righteous indignation, and who dare say it’s not righteous?

It’s terrifically enjoyable – they find – doing damage to property and harm to people, as an expression of righteous indignation, of ever-so-fully-justified anger.

Who can rebuke them when they are doing the damage and harm in the name of a victim cruelly murdered? The name of George Floyd – a martyr canonized as the patron saint of all black victims in the centuries-long victimhood of black people subjected to the authority of white people?

The cause is so great, it even justifies killing. What a joy! What thrilling nights spent in burning, looting, killing! Great sport! Bliss is it on these nights to be alive, and to be violent is very heaven!

Joy Pullman writes at The Federalist:

A Minnesota jury has found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. This means they claim to have concluded that they unanimously believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin caused Floyd’s death.

The judge in the case refused to sequester jurors from media coverage and outside influences during the trial, and the pressure conveyed to them was beyond intense. It was made perfectly clear to them that the nation would be engulfed in flames if they expressed a reasonable doubt over whether Floyd’s death was Chauvin’s fault.

The entire bloody year of 2020, in which unprecedented and murderous riots swept the nation, was premised on the incident that led to this trial. At least 30 people died amid waves of riots that widely used Floyd’s death as the pretext. The Floyd riots have caused the most high-dollar damage in U.S. history, an estimated $2 billion.

The rioters’ violence against police, and elected officials’ willful endorsement of the rioters and failure to back law and order in response, helped cause a historic surge in homicides. As measured across 34 sampled cities, homicides surged 30 percent in 2020, causing an additional 1,200 dead. That’s just in 34 cities.

So, thanks to the anti-police unrest employed in the wake of Floyd’s death, thousands more people are now dead, and a disproportionate number of them are black. The riots’ unchecked anti-police violence metastasized in deadly crime. Anyone who lives in or near a city like these jurors do, especially those in the Twin Cities epicenter, is fully aware of this.

That was all before the verdict. During the Chauvin trial itself, rioters smashed buildings and assaulted police nearby in the aftermath of another officer-involved shooting. Minneapolis police put up razor wire around their offices in preparation for the verdict announcement. So did police and cities across the nation.

National Guard troops were deployed in Minnesota and D.C. in anticipation of the verdict announcement.

The jurors knew that the media covering the trial and looking at their faces every day for three weeks knows who they are. An in-state newspaper even signaled to the jurors its willingness to expose them to the violent mobs roving Minnesota over the last year by publishing descriptions of the jurors in advance of the verdict. Those descriptions published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune contained age, race, location, profession, even immigration history.

The city government building where jurors heard the case was fortified like a military installation in an occupied country. Every day, they walked into this.

You think jurors would have been willing to have themselves and their families go into witness protection to venture a reasonable doubt about Chauvin’s potential contribution to Floyd’s death? You think they’d be willing to trade their lives plus nationwide violence for one stranger’s?

No. Which means that the rule of law cannot be maintained while this government is in power. Rule of law and Black Lives Matter anti-American revolutionary Leftism are incompatible.They are  antithetical concepts.

Officials from the local mayor all the way up to the president of the United States made it clear in widely reported news the jurors and all their family, friends, and neighbors could read and would have to live with for the rest of their lives that the only verdict they would accept was “guilty”. Democrat politicians openly called for violence if the jury did not decide as street thugs wished, and the Democrat Party — which controls all levels of the national government at present, as well as controlling the state in which these jurors live — backed them up.

Everyone, including these jurors, knew exactly what would happen to them at the hands of mobs like this if they expressed a reasonable doubt about whether a man who died while overdosing and with a serious heart condition was actually killed by a police officer kneeling on him after he had struggled with police repeatedly. …

America’s left purposefully made a fair trial impossible, all for political power. They deliberately perverted justice in favor of violent mob rule to strengthen their political hand.

They have done evil and called it justice.

And are guilty too of making the far from saintly, far from heroic Derek Chauvin into the only actual martyr.

If it is true, as many say, that the Supreme Court refused to hear cases against the validity of Joe Biden’s electoral “win” because they feared the packing of their court by angry vengeful Democrats, then they made a stupid decision. Obviously, they should have  done their utmost to keep the Democrats out and keep President Trump in. That would have been the certain way of protecting their numbers. It doesn’t make sense that they helped the party into power which would probably do what they fear – pack the court with judges likely to favor the Left.

THEY (not including the great and wise Justice Thomas) favored the Left. And now their court is very likely to be packed with Leftist judges.

Matt Margolis reports at PJ Media:

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Supreme Court of the United States, after showing that they didn’t have the courage to do what they should have done on the Great Presidential Election Fraud of 2020, was PACKED by the same people, the Radical Left Democrats (who they are so afraid of!), that they so pathetically defended in not hearing the Election Fraud case,” Trump asked.

“Now there is a very good chance they will be diluted (and moved throughout the court system so that they can see how the lower courts work), with many new Justices added to the Court, far more than has been reported,” Trump continued. “There is also a good chance that they will be term-limited.”

Trump then pointed out that there were 19 states with election challenges that were not heard by the Supreme Court. “Believe it or not, the President of the United States was not allowed to be heard based on ‘no standing,’ not based on the FACTS,” he said. “The Court wouldn’t rule on the merits of the great Election Fraud, including the fact that local politicians and judges, not State Legislatures, made major changes to the Election—which is in total violation of the United States Constitution.”

Just last month, a judge ruled that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, broke state law when she unilaterally changed election rules by loosening the signature verification requirement for absentee ballots in the 2020 election. This ruling legitimizes a key claim made by the Trump legal team in its challenges to the 2020 election. Michigan Court of Claims Chief Judge Christopher Murray ruled that this change violated Michigan’s Administrative Procedures Act.

“Our politically correct Supreme Court will get what they deserve,” said Trump. “An unconstitutionally elected group of Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country. If and when this happens, I hope the Justices remember the day they didn’t have courage to do what they should have done for America.”

So what the decisions amount to is an implicit statement to the Junta in power, “Don’t add more justices- no need – look, we are already left-biased”?

But if the court is already left-biased, why would they object to the addition of a few more Leftists?

No. None of it makes sense!

Clifford C. Nichols writes at American Thinker:

Rarely do the generation experiencing the actual events and decisions that lead to their nation’s demise fully appreciate the enormity of their oversight until sometime after their culture’s destruction has been rendered incurable.  Largely, it is not due so much to their negligence as it is to most of them being too preoccupied with simply living and making a living.

Perhaps that would explain why, in just the first four months of 2021, the Supreme Court issued four decisions — or, perhaps better viewed as non-decisions — that should have caused all legitimately patriotic Americans to be alarmed and called to action…but did not seem to.

Only a few weeks ago, without offering any substantive explanation, the Court summarily refused to even look at — much less seriously consider — any of the evidence of the 2020 election irregularities offered by attorney Sidney Powell and others.  Evidently, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was not interested in doing what it could — and should — to let America know decisively whether or not its presidential election had been shamelessly stolen by those now in power.

Why would they not do this?

Perhaps the answer is best revealed by the fact that, at the same time, the Court was also apparently too busy to halt a New York prosecutor from obtaining former president Trump’s tax returns.  The practical effect was for SCOTUS to give that prosecutor an assist with his unconstitutional effort to search for any crime that might make President Trump’s ouster from office permanent.

Clearly, these two SCOTUS decisions alone evidence the fact that the agenda of the justices has become politically driven.

It doesn’t end there.

Two weeks later, the Supreme Court — again without explanation — summarily refused to reverse the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ denial of Judicial Watch’s request that it be allowed to take the deposition of a member of this country’s ruling political elite — Hillary Rodham Clinton.  At the end of the day, Judicial Watch was only asking the Supreme Court to uphold the rule of law by finding that all Americans — including elites like Hillary Clinton — are to be treated equally under the law.  Instead, the Supreme Court unfortunately — and inexplicably — declined the opportunity to do even this.

Then this week, SCOTUS put the final nail in the coffin containing the GOP’s 2020 election disputes with its denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari in Bognet v. Dagraffenreid.  Again, it refused to rule on whether a state’s courts are qualified or not under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution to modify that state’s presidential election laws.  In short, whether Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution by usurping the state Legislature’s authority to extend the time allowed for counting mail-in ballots is apparently not an issue worthy of this SCOTUS’s time.

From such glaring displays of indefensible Supreme Court inaction, the following incontrovertible truths have been set out in plain view before the nation’s very eyes:

1. The Supreme Court today is thoroughly politicized…and thus corrupt.

2. In America, the rule of law is now dead.

3. Worse yet, by these decisions, America’s Supreme Court has put on open display its utter disregard — and absolute contempt — for whatever the American people may think about the future unavailability of equal justice in a nation that once promised that such justice would be available to all. …

An American government unleashed from the constraints set in place by the rule of law can be headed in only one direction: toward some form of centralized dictatorship limited only by the whims of those in power — i.e., a tyranny.

But will the half of America that does not want a Leftist tyranny now simply accept it?

Has the Supreme Court intentionally  – or unintentionally which would mean, in this case, stupidly – helped create a state of passionate division that nothing short of civil war can settle?

Has it sentenced America to civil war?

The Supreme Court had a moment in which it could have saved the Republic from tyranny. An opportunity for glory. But it shirked it. Shrank from it. Failed the nation, failed the Founders, lost its way. 

Why would the oligarchy collectively named “Biden” expend blood and treasure to save the country it now governs when that country, the United States of America, is a rotten thing, sick with the disease of racism?

“We are  an imperfect union and have been since the beginning,” moaned Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “Biden’s” ambassador to the United Nations, speaking at a National Action Network convention recently.

The “Biden” Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is too busy at present to be bothered with foreign affairs. He is dealing urgently with “right-wing extremism” – which is to say “racism” –  in the ranks of the US military, and “executing diversity and anti-extremism training” for every member of his department.

Will “Biden” see any need to take action if America’s two strongest enemies expand their power by making war on their neighbors?

We may soon learn the answer to that question.

Gordon Chang, writing at Gatestone, sees two wars coming:

War could break out on both ends of the Eurasian landmass at the same time.

Two large aggressors are threatening to break apart neighbors and absorb them.

Russian troops are massing on the Ukraine border.

Chinese vessels are swarming Whitsun Reef of the Philippines in the South China Sea, and China’s air force is flying almost daily through Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone.

Vladimir Putin in 2019 said that Russia reserved the right to protect ethnic Russians outside Russia. This month, Dmitry Kozak, deputy head of Russia’s presidential administration, said his country might intervene to “defend” its citizens. If it did, he suggested, Ukraine would not survive.

Russians perceive Biden as feeble. 

China’s leaders are saying they do not believe President Joe Biden would defend Taiwan.

The Dragon and the Bear appear to be coordinating moves, as they have for some time. At the very least, each is acting with an eye to what the other is doing. Once one of these aggressors makes a move, the other large state, taking advantage of the situation, will almost certainly follow.

All the elements for history’s next great conflict are now in place.

So “Biden” is surely preparing for it?

Seems not. Seems that as far as the “Biden administration” is concerned, history’s next great conflict will just have to wait, at least until the diversity training course has been completed by the Department of Defense.

Do not go gentle into that good night

       Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

                           – Dylan Thomas

Let’s “not go gentle” into this political night.

We select points from an article at American Greatness by Steve Baldwin:

With it’s support for open borders, the use of illegal Executive Orders, the undermining of our constitutional rights, the unprecedented demonization and harassment of conservatives based on phony racial narratives, the Biden agenda is a total assault on America’s founding principles, the rule of law, and our democratic institutions.

It is not known at this time whether America will survive this assault. To be sure, if Biden succeeds with packing the court, converting D.C. or Puerto Rico into new states, granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and institutionalizing the corruption of our electoral system, we may never recover the America of our fathers. Rather, we will witness the evolution of what one could call a “soft” police state, characterized by cronyism, socialism, globalism, and the complete censorship and ostracization of everyone and anyone not supportive of the revolution.

It is clearly the duty of traditional Americans to challenge this illegitimate regime and every grassroots group, PAC, think tank, and foundation on the Right needs to be solely focused on defeating this monster or our movement will cease to exist.

Groups that shy away from this challenge, need to go down, and if old-line conservative groups are not up to the fight, new groups yet to be formed need to take their place. A successful resistance needs big numbers.

The good news is that the MAGA movement inspired by Trump has created the largest grassroots political movement in modern political history.

And the “Biden” oligarchy is really sacred of it. They call it – absurdly -a “white supremacist” and “terrorist” movement.

In fact, the American Left, which cheated Joe Biden into power,  is increasingly a black supremacist  movement. It is using terrorist tactics – riot, arson, looting, blinding, beating, killing – and threatening more such violence if courts of law do not reach the decisions it demands.

Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of Advancing America Freedom to serve as a clearinghouse for the MAGA grassroots. We can hope that this is not just a group to promote Mike Pence but rather a real effort to harness the energy of the millions of MAGA volunteers and put them to work fighting cancel culture, recruiting candidates, and working to win back Congress in 2022. Right off the bat, I hope they kick off their efforts by hosting a series of massive MAGA rallies featuring Trump himself.

But the MAGA movement has also given birth to hundreds of smaller grassroots groups all over the country, many involving people fairly new to politics. Groups such as Moms for Liberty and 1776 Forever Free. Other groups are forming that focus on specific issues such as Stop Corporate Tyranny, which was recently formed to educate the grassroots about what corporations should be boycotted for selling out America.

Former Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller has formed a group called America First Legal to assist Republican attorneys with challenging executive branch abuses in addition to filing lawsuits of its own.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation recently forced Pennsylvania to remove 21,000 people from the state voter database.

Even the staid Republican National Committee has announced the creation of a committee to “work alongside state governments to push for election reforms including a voter ID requirement and having poll watchers count every vote”.

A nonpartisan fact-check group called Just the Facts has just released research showing that it’s very possible the illegal alien vote alone cost Trump the 2020 election.

The full article includes more organizations dedicated to resisting the growth of Leftist tyranny under the “Biden” administration and describes more ways of resisting. Read it all here.

RESIST!

Since we were “suspended for 60 days” by Facebook – ostensibly  for reproducing a photograph with a mildly funny but harmless caption – we have had a most welcome increase of visitors to this site.

We assume that at least some of the newcomers have migrated from our Facebook territory. But we  cannot be sure, because we have had no new commenters here. Daily we look for familiar names and pseudonyms but so far have not found them.

So if you are a new reader, whether formerly of our Facebook page or not, please:-

Click on the title of a post, or on the word “comments” underneath it, to get to the comment page.

Sign up for Disqus if asked to.

Comment freely. Difference of opinion is welcome (but not obscenities, ad hominem insults to us, advertisements, or sheer lunatic ravings).

16 months into the Covid-19 pandemic, about 3 million people across the world are said to have died of it. (Data from Johns Hopkins University.)

Approximate population of the world: 7.9 billion

More world wide statistics:

Approximate annual deaths from car accidents: 1.3 million

Approximate annual deaths from malaria: 1-3 million

Approximate annual deaths from heart disease: 8.8 million

Approximate annual deaths from starvation: 9 million

Approximate annual deaths from cancer: 10 million

Estimated deaths from Spanish flu post-WWI: 20-50 million

Approximate annual deaths of unborn babies by abortion: 56 million

Approximate deaths caused variously by World War Two: 75 million

Estimated deaths inflicted by Communist regimes: 60-150 million*

Approximate deaths in the name of Religion (all but one in the last millennium, and with underestimates and many omissions in the list): 195 million

For a list of deaths by religion that is interesting to read though inaccurate – as all such lists must be since the count of deaths and the certainty of their cause can never be verified – go here.

Note: Wars have been waged by regimes which were officially atheist – such as those waged by and in Soviet Russia – but no war has ever been fought (or massacre carried out) in the name of atheism, or in order to advance or impose atheism.

*From Wikipedia:

In 1985, John Lenczowski, director of European and Soviet Affairs at the United States National Security Council, wrote an article in The Christian Science Monitor in which he stated that the “number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship”.

The problem of the mass migration of Central Americans into the United States at “President” Biden’s invitation, is too big for him to handle.

President Donald Trump had put in place an array of disincentives to discourage would-be migrants from making the journey north. Biden removed Trump’s disincentives and suspended the construction of his border wall.

The Biden gang running this administration …

… has opened the door wide to illegal immigrants and encouraged mass migration to this country on the way to achieving their utopian vision of “No borders. No nations”.  In the process, they are destroying piece by piece the rule of law that undergirds America’s constitutional republic.

Now there is a crisis at the border of Biden’s making, and he has no idea how to deal with it.

So he’s handed it off to his chosen “Vice President”, Kamala Harris.

In an article at Front Page, Joseph Klein includes this information:

Vice President Kamala Harris is Biden’s choice to work on stemming the flow of migrants from Central America.

She has neither visited the U.S.-Mexico border nor gone down to the Central American countries to study for herself the situation on the ground.

But she has a solution for the problem:

Harris recommended focusing on –

“An important four-letter word, which I hope always inspires us to do the work we do, and that word is ‘hope’. And in this regard, in – in our focus on the Northern Triangle, looking at the fact that we have an opportunity — as the United States of America, with the resources and with the will that we have — to provide the people with some hope that if they stay at home, help is on the way and they can have some hope that the opportunities and the needs that they have will be met in some way.”

Then she giggled.

She would like to hand the problem off, in her turn, to “our allies” [?] through that just and effective organization, the UN. That would be “some way“. Perhaps.

Harris did suggest internationalizing the effort to encourage economic development. “That includes reaching out to our allies, through the U.N.,” she said [and giggled].

Joseph Klein points out:

The United Nations is the wrong organization to rely upon, given its own corruption problems and its encouragement of more open borders.

When Harris was asked if she was planning a visit to the southern border, she replied that her job was to “lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle”.

She was able to say which countries form “the Northern Triangle”! On that she had been briefed. She named them as Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

And she has a plan for them [she said, giggling].

Her plan is to give their people hope. Hope that they can survive in their homelands. Then they will not want to come to [what used to be] the United States.

Problem solved. Or will be. Perhaps. In some way.

Guffaw!

Breitbart reports:

China’s latest military exercise near Taiwan on Monday “could be a rehearsal of a reunification-by-force operation”, China’s state-run Global Times suggested Tuesday.

The state’s organ makes the suggestion for the government of China to test American reaction.

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted an exercise near the island of Taiwan on Monday with the largest number of warplanes ever recorded, which could be a rehearsal of a reunification-by-force operation,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece wrote on April 13.

China’s PLA deployed 25 aircraft to fly over Taiwan, breaching its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), on April 12, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) said in a statement.

The PLA’s exercise included “14 J-16 and four J-10 multirole fighters, four H-6K strategic bombers, two KQ-200 anti-submarine warfare (ASW)-capable aircraft, as well as one KJ-500 airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) platform,” the military website Janes reported Monday, citing the MND’s statement.

The air sortie was the PLA’s largest near Taiwan since the sovereign nation began publicly reporting PLA aircraft movements over the island in September 2020.

“The number of PLA warplanes featured in the [April 12] exercise was a record since Taiwan’s defense authorities began to release information about PLA aircraft activities in the region on September 17, 2020, surpassing the previous record of 20 on March 26. The number of J-16s, a powerful fighter jet, was also the biggest of all exercises,” the Global Times boasted on Tuesday.

“The exercise could be a rehearsal of its [the PLA’s] combat plan over the Taiwan island, and it could feature air superiority seizure, and attack on land and maritime targets, including warships of interfering foreign countries,” Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the newspaper.

The PLA’s record-breaking exercise near Taiwan on April 12 was a direct response to the U.S. issuing new guidelines meant to “deepen” its unofficial support of Taiwan nation two days earlier on April 10.

“The exercise conducted by the PLA served as a warning to Taiwan secessionists and the US after the two had made a series of provocative moves,” the Global Times wrote on Monday.

“On Saturday [April 10], the US Department of State announced new guidelines to encourage US government engagement with the island that reflects their ‘deepening unofficial relationship.’ Officials on the island recently also claimed that the island is drawing a line 30 nautical miles away from the island, attempting to deny PLA aircraft approaches,” the newspaper noted.

Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province and has vowed to reunify the island, located off China’s southeast coast, with mainland China by force if necessary.

What is the “Biden” administration most likely to do if China invades and annexes Taiwan (in addition to blaming Trump)?

Go to war with China?

Negotiate with China?

Nothing?

DebkaFile reports:

The attack on Iran’s nuclear center at Natanz on April 14 totally destroyed two of its three uranium enrichment halls operated by advanced centrifuges. Even the remaining third of centrifuges have been put out of action by the cutoff of a steady power flow.

The explosive material which caused the blast was planted there two years ago and awaited a remote signal to detonate. Contrary to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s claims on Monday that the attack caused only minor damage and just disrupted the old centrifuges, our sources disclose a different reality. Iran is now unable to move enrichment up to the 60pc grade as Tehran boasted because most of the advanced IR-6 centrifuges with that capability were wrecked in the blast.

This serious setback has caused a major rift in the Tehran regime, including the Revolutionary Guards leadership. Atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi, who is close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being bombarded with angry accusations. He is blamed for failing to seriously address the security aspects of the nuclear program’s key facility and abandoning it to hostile penetration. How did a large explosive charge come to be planted in the heart of the facility and, moreover, be allowed to repose there unnoticed for two years, he is asked. How could this happened just nine months after the first hit on Natanz wrecked the main centrifuge produce hall?

Have Joe Biden, John Kerry, Barack Obama sent their condolences?