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Roundup — 60 Comments

1. Inside-the-Beltway Andy providing a bit of defensive cover for the DOJ here. The FBI knew that Danchenko was lying early on. Maybe the objective was to continue the investigation anyway, using false premises to hopefully discover impeachable evidence – but in any case, harassing Trump with Lawmageddon for his entire term.

   But sooner or later, the Inspector General comes to call, and other interested governmental audit functions. The best way to hide the dirty laundry is to make it a Confidential Human Source, which allowed them to hide the witness in the closet, away from scrutiny, away from questioning and the potential for embarrassing answers.

   Durham has uncovered this, but he is the cleanup man, not the avenging angel of justice. There will be no appetite for the next step : institutional housecleaning. McCarthy is a cleanup man too – I think one can tell from his reluctance to form the damning conclusions and his overall lack of outrage.

2. Maybe not quite an oopsie– but Brandon and “Doctor” Jill had to wait to be seated at the Queen’s funeral because they were late in arriving: JoJo “may be the world’s most powerful man, but it didn’t ensure him a front-row seat at Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in London on Monday. The president and first lady Jill Biden were seated 14 rows back during the service at Westminster Abbey. . . . Biden was seated behind Polish President Andrzej Duda and in front of the Czech Republic’s Prime Minister Petr Fiala, according to the seating plan released Monday. . . . Higher up the pecking order were the leaders of Commonwealth countries and those that still consider the UK monarch their head of state. Trudeau, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern were all given more prominent seats inside the abbey than Biden.”

   https://nypost.com/2022/09/19/joe-biden-sits-14-rows-back-at-queen-elizabeths-funeral/

   Seen elsewhere on the Net: the hypothesis that Biden was placed 14 rows back at the funeral so that no one would notice if he a) drooled; b) fell asleep; or c) peeked at his watch (a reference to his behavior when the bodies of the 13 soldiers killed in the Kabul terror attack were returned to Dover AFB in August 2021).

   I hope Trudeau was generous enough to wave to Brandon (/sarc).

3. The Johnson Powerline piece yields the usual condemnations…of the US.
   The Wannsee Conference–how do we kill Jews most efficiently–was in January of 42. For those interested in military minutia, the war was already underway and, among others, the US was straining every nerve not to lose.
   The camps in Germany were forced labor camps. The most famous, more than likely, was Dachau. Foul as it was, 85% of the prisoners survived the war. Similar numbers, maybe 65% for Mittelbau-Dora, were common.

   Meantime, the death camps, off the train and into the gas chambers, were in Poland. Auschwitz had a 15% survival rate, most likely Jews kept to do the dirty work and the last transport left unprocessed when the Red Army showed up.

   Thus, bombing the camps in Germany would have killed a huge number of people who, otherwise would have survived the war. Bombing the death camps would kill huge numbers of people who were going to be dead in a week and cost you the entire bomber force. See “combat radius” and no fighter cover past Berlin.

   The guy who put this quick piece up has done a lot of work on the subject. Got survivors to visit and give presentations, meet the the liberators. Longer films.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9hzpsOIJ10

   Unstated is the motivation. Someplace a corps commander needs tons of artillery ammo. No train for you. A field hospital would like to get a hundred guys back to the rear. No train for you. The Tiger tank factory is ready to ship a bunch but they need a component made elsewhere. No train for you.
   But they did find a train to schlep a bunch of Jews around Germany looking for a functioning death camp. When the original destination was about to be overrun, the order was to drive the train off a destroyed railroad bridge.
   Imagine telling these guys, “Hey, buddy. How about knocking this off for a bit and trying not to lose the war.? Nope. These guys were ON IT.
   So, after you hypothetically blew up the gas chambers in Poland…they going to quit? Nope. They were ON IT and they would find a way.

   Meantime we’re short five hundred bombers and five thousand guys who can’t do anything to help end the war and end the genocide.

   But it’s our fault…..

   See The Secret World of Varian Fry. An intellectual sent to Vichy France to get intellectuals out. Turns out his worst enemy was the State Department. Little has changed.

   But in reality…there was nothing we could do in the East but try to win the war as fast as possible.

   “warn” implies something could have been done. The use of the term with its implication is deliberate.

4. Richard Aubrey:

   You write: ” Bombing the death camps would kill huge numbers of people who were going to be dead in a week and cost you the entire bomber force.”

   Not that simple. See this. And see also this.

5. yes, as elaborated earlier, the allies had bombed mononitz buna as late as december of 1944, as I was reminded the oil fields of ploesti were bombed from libya,

   it was a subcamp, now other sites, like dachau were farther north, and more accessible to bombing, did american business interests in germany, have something to do with it,

   of course the deep stater most directly involved with immigration questions was breckenridge long, a wilson protege, who had been US ambassador to mussolini before his berth in the european section,

6. bombing the rail lines, would have at least slowed the intake (grim imaging) particularly coming from the Szalazi successor regime in Hungary,

   danchenko was a tool in this more modern update of the wurmold play in ‘our man in havana’ a game of telephone among dolan, galkina *et al

   *she was the assistant to a cyprus based oligarch, who was accused of hacking foreign competitors in the dossier,

7. 1) Clearly, FDR judged that the needs of the many outweighed the need of ‘the few’ to escape genocide.

   2) That became obvious when Newsome visited the W.H. while Bidet was out of town. Then confirmed, when Newsome challenged De Santis to a debate. Equally informative would be to learn where Harris was when Newsome so confidently and casually strolled into the W.H.

   3) Sussman’s slap on the finger revealed that the ‘fix’ is in…

   4) Bidet’s declaration that the scamdemic is over was a faux pas with no serious repercussions.

   His assertion that, if China attacks Taiwan, America’s military will defend it has had serious repercussions.

   The Chinese mindset will not allow them to dismiss Biden’s assertion. Instead circumstances will force them to assume that he had a Freudian Slip… with the W.H. denial, a clumsy attempt at covering up the administration’s actual intentions.

   The Chinese are well aware that our entire Big Tech industry and thus a huge amount of U.S. GDP relies upon Taiwan’s research and development of increasingly sophisticated computer chips.

   That knowledge lends support to the perception by the Chinese of the likelihood that Biden inadvertantly revealed the U.S.’s actual strategic intentions.

   Resulting in an increase in perception by the Chinese that military confrontation may well be inescapable.

   5) The Queen’s passing has revealed just how deep and wide the cracks are between King Charles and Prince Harry and Andrew.

   There are as yet unconfirmed rumors that, “King Charles is considering rewriting an 85-year-old law which would mean Prince Andrew and Prince Harry could lose their “stand-in status” as counsellors of state, according to reports.

   Under current rules, the two princes and Princess Beatrice could be called on as counsellors of state to temporarily deputise for King Charles if he is unable to carry out official duties due to illness or absence abroad.”

8. Neo. Railroads lead to railroads. If you’re going to bomb Jewish-specific railroads, you have to overfly a bunch of railroads which carry them plus war material. Why not bomb the latter? If you’re going to lose planes and people, may as well do both. Bomb the main lines and the transports with Jews can’t go anyplace. So that’s solved. Why waste men and aircraft to get to Jews-only railroads? You can stop them closer to Germany and with fewer losses.
   The P38 is mentioned. Its combat radius is about a hundred fifty miles short of Katowice Poland. “Combat radius” is not range. It’s how far an aircraft configured for combat can fly, complete its mission and return with minimal reserves. So, less than half the “range”:. And hanging a bomb on it would reduce that. The Mosquito carries its bombs internally. It would not have the combat radius, either. I picked San Marino, in the north of Italy, as a hypothetical air base, to get closer to Katowice, in southern Poland. I have no idea when Allied aircraft could be based that far north. So it’s a gimme. Actual distances would likely have been longer.

   Even if the heavies could be based close enough, there’s an additional problem besides losing them all. The Circle Error Probable was a quarter mile. That is the metric the heavies used for accuracy. It means half the bombs landed within a quarter mile of the aiming point–iow a circle half a mile across. The other half didn’t. Likely, most landed closer but some landed further.
   So, basically, you’re going to run a harrow a half mile across over, say, Auschwitz. Not going to pick the Officers Club and leave the hospital alone. And then the other half are elsewhere.

   Our Eighth Air Force, the heavies flying out of England, lost 26k dead and 47k wounded. The RAF Bomber Command lost 55,000. Due to the structure of their aircraft, they had proportionally many fewer wounded. But something like 40% of their aircrew escaped unhurt or not shot down and captured.
   Hard to see a lack of effort there.

   Railroad repair is a chore but the Germans had the facilities. Had to keep going back. It’s not a single raid, once and done. So, might as well slow down the rest of the war effort along with the transports of Jews in the same raid instead of separating the efforts, even if the latter could be done.

   And, as I say, bombing the forced labor camps in the Germany proper would have killed a lot of people who otherwise would have survived the war.

   A terrible issue but not manageable by the forces we had on hand.

   And, as I say, the term “warned” is used deliberately to imply that something could have been done effectively.

9. The Ace piece is too, too choice.

   But “President” Aviators always wants to sound like a tough guy, and also is a f***ing idiot who has lost most control of his faculties, so he decided to announce that the US had at the spur of the moment changed its Taiwan policy from “strategic ambiguity” to a formal promise to defend them:
   – – –
   As you can see, this then forced the White House to once again rush out a statement contradicting the president it supposedly serves, announcing that whatever the Figurehead Puddingbrain claims on TV when he wants to sound like Magnum, P.I., he spoke without authorization and his words are null and void.

10. Richard Aubrey:

    My point was that it was not just the railroads, but the infrastructure of the death camps themselves, which you had ignored in the quote of yours I used in my previous comment to you. Plenty of people with expertise about the planes and the tactics/strategy involved feel that it (bombing the rails and/or camps) could and should have been done, and plenty feel it couldn’t and shouldn’t have been done. It’s an argument that IMO has not been settled and probably can’t be settled.

    My points were also about the death camps and not the forced labor camps.

11. Richard Aubrey,

    Bombing the camps would have been the equivalent of shutting the stable door after the horses got out.

    As soon as FDR learned of the Nazi’s genocidal actions, which may have occured well before Karski, since news of what was happening would naturally have spread soon after the slaughter started… the humane thing for FDR to do was to publicize the Nazi plan and to simultaneously announce that America’s doors were now open to any Jew who wished to emigrate to America.

    That FDR deflected Karski’s eye witness testimony with a pathetic “Tell your nation that we shall win the war” is proof positive that FDR cavalierly dismissed the genocidal mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

    It’s my understanding, that many Jews tried but were unable to get out of Europe and only after their attempts had failed, did they end up in the camps. How many could have been saved had FDR done the right thing?

12. The late Queen, as her last service to her nation, gave them a deeply Christian and traditional burial service, broadcast to the nation and around the commonwealth and the world. Well done, Ma’am.

    I have no sympathy for Prince Andrew, whose loss of status is due to his own behavior. As to Harry, he made his bed and now needs to lie in it and stop whining.

13. Neo. Infrastructure, whether a matter or organization or table charts or…..what? Until you get to the camps themselves, it’s indistinguishable from all the other wartime infrastructure.
    GB. The genocidal efforts didn’t get organized until January of 42.
    Concentration camps like Dachau were forced labor camps, in this case, opened in 1933 where any number of types were imprisoned; not just Jews. And the point was to get some useful labor done. Hence the survival rate.

    The slaughter hadn’t started until after the war made intervention impossible.
    Throwing our doors open to any Jew who wanted to immigrate would have left…all the Jews at risk out because…why would the Germans let them out? Where are they going to go? Germany was surrounded by combat. Jews in, say, Argentina might have wanted to come here but that’s not the point, is it?
    It wasn’t FDR’s guys checking papers of immigrants at the border. Would a Jew want to show his papers to the officials if he were fleeing the officials?

    FDR was a jerk in a number of ways but the lack of a practical method of stopping something after it started and was surrounded by hundreds of miles of combat was not his fault. One might even try to make the case that he approved of the Holocaust–saying this as exaggeration for effect–but there was nothing he could have done to help it along, either, unless you want to make the case that spending even one soldier fighting in the Pacific reduced our ability to make Germany First happen sooner.

    As I say, the Train Near Magdeburg tells us about the insane, implacable motivation.
    As the camps were threatened, the guards were ordered to take the inmates on death marches toward camps which might still be functioning. My father’s unit was one of many immediately after VE Day set to exploring paths and back roads looking for the people killed in the process. The idea was to put them into mattress covers and make a note on a map for the Graves Registration guys coming along later. “We used up every mattress cover in the Third Army,” he once said, and had to leave later finds by the side of the road. Some of his guys couldn’t take it.
    Point is the insane motivation by the Germans including the local guards to kill and kill and kill. And to obey the orders of the commanders so determined. When the war was, for all intents, over for them. Should have dropped their rifles and started walking home. Nope. Kill and kill.
    So destroying a particular mechanism of death would require a different mechanism of death. There were plenty of options.

14. About the pandemic: the collation of data at Worldometers suggest it is not over, but it is much alleviated in various parts of the world. For a period of just shy of two years, the seven-day moving average of daily deaths was never below 4,800 or above 14,700. There was a sine-curve like variations, but those were the upper and lower bounds. Note, the seasonal variations we are familiar with are inverted in the Southern Hemisphere and follow eccentric patterns in the tropics. On 24 March this year, the daily death toll plunged below 4,800 and reached a nadir of about 1,360 a day around 6 June. With the advent of a new omicron variant, it increased to about 2,560 around 12 August, then went into decline again. It had fallen below 1,900 per day by 7 September.

    In the United States, there have been 66,000 deaths recorded since the end of March; extrapolating, that might translate into 70,000 deaths by the end of this month. Heretofore, the death toll in season in the United States has exceeded that of the previous off-season by about 70%. If that ratio holds during the upcoming season, it is possible that we will record 190,000 deaths in the United States for the 12 months concluding 31 March 2023. That’s about 5.5x the mean death toll of the average flu season during the period 2013-19, but much better than the 500,000 deaths per year we logged during the first two years of the pandemic.

    Note that in India,the deaths logged since mid-March have amounted to 1.7% of the deaths logged from the beginning in 2020 to mid-March 2022. India is a tropical climate where rainfall varies a great deal and temperature much less so. It does not have the obtrusive seasonal pattern of infection and death you see in the temperate zones (more in Europe than the United States). If we’d had a similar toll, we’d have seen about 17,000 deaths since mid-March. If we’d then had the usual in-season / off-season ratio, we’d have logged about 42,000 deaths over the course of a calendar year. Tentatively, it looks as if in India it is now something of a severity comparable to seasonal flu.

    Brazil is another case to consider. The daily death toll peaked in April 2021 and has bumped downhill ever since. There have over 17 months been three reversals, trough to peak lasting from 2 to 6 weeks. Each successive mini-peak has had a lower daily death toll than the previous. The peak recorded in April 2021 was about 3,100 deaths per day; in June 2021, 65% of that; in February 2022 (omicron), 28% of that; in July 2022 (post-omicron), 8% of the original peak. The seven-day moving average of the daily death toll had fallen to 110 per day as of 7 September. We’re it to fall another 45%, it would hit a value roughly comparable to what you’d expect of seasonal flu.

    What we’re looking at domestically is an exhaustion of options in re public health measures. Nothing we’ve done thus far seems to have done more than shift cases from one time period to another. Not much more to do at this point but improve treatment regimens. In that sense, the pandemic is over in this country.

15. I have no sympathy for Prince Andrew, whose loss of status is due to his own behavior. As to Harry, he made his bed and now needs to lie in it and stop whining.

    Why no sympathy whatsoever?

16. Out of curiosity, I went and measured some of this stuff. The camp rail spur is only about 3000 feet long which even if obliterated could be rebuilt in a week or two. Measuring the standard 1000 ft CEP from what I believe is the crematorium looks like with a very accurate mission, a lot of bombs may land on the inmates and a bad mission could obliterate the camp or the Polish town. The railyard in the middle of the Polish town looks like an easier target, if you don’t mind killing Poles. There is also a rail junction outside of town.

17. Chases Eagles. Or the Germans could save themselves the effort and just make the Jews get out and walk. Of course, if they were getting supplies–food for the guards and so forth–by rail they might want to fix the thing. But perhaps a low priority, given the other railroad, marshalling yard bombings.
    Yeah, the call to “bomb the spurs” was….odd. Obviously useless and you’d have to fly over a lot of fatter targets, including main lines, to get there.

    I’ve been trying not to say it but…..probably accurate. Blaming the Germans at this point is like using a fire hose to fill a 55 gallon drum, which is full. No matter how much water you use, it doesn’t get any fuller. No satisfaction.
    But…displacement. Got to find somebody who isn’t all blamed up and has room for more.

18. Regarding Newsom. I maintain what I have said before: Slo Joe will almost certainly run for re-election and will almost certainly be renomimated with little opposition. If he becomes so incapacitated he cannot run, Harris will be the heavy, heavy favorite for the nomination.

    Newsom can strut and fluff his peacock feathers all he wants. But among the ultra woke, who compromise an increasing percentage of Democrat activists, leaders and donors, there is no way a straight white male will be chosen over a woman of color who holds the Vice Presidency. No way, no how. That this woman is utterly incompetent and unlikable matters little, if at all.

19. Ackler. Maybe it’s important that Harris be a complete loser. Easier to control.

20. Ackler:

    Reasonable enough. But I’ll weigh in that things are so fluid, almost anything can happen, such as Trump winning in 2016. Who saw that coming in 2014?

    We are in very weird territory.

21. I remember when everybody wanted to move to California. I think my uncle snuck off to go there. Now nobody wants to go there except illegals and derelicts and vagrants. I’d like to think that Californians had enough sense to chuck Newsom out, but I doubt it.

    I’m watching a lot of holocaust documentaries and I still don’t know what to say about that.

22. Ackler,

    If either Bidet or Harris is the 2024 nominee, it hands the Presidency to either Trump or De Santis. As in order for Bidet or Harris to ‘win’ will require such massive electoral fraud as to trigger another Civil War.

    I judge there to be little doubt that Newsom will be the nominee. The powers that be will shove him down the woke’s throat. It will be a fait accompli, vote for Newsom or hand the Presidency to Trump or De Santis.

23. Richard Aubrey,

    Does not your argument boil down to… there was nothing that could be done?

    Have you forgotten the ship full of Jewish refugees who were refused entry to America?

    FDR not only didn’t try… he callously turned them away.

    That event is emblematic of the world turning a blind eye to genocide.

    And nothing you can say erases that fact.

24. I remember when everybody wanted to move to California.

    That was me. When I moved to San Francisco in 1982, it felt Biblical. Here’s a Sophie B. Hawkins song which captures the feeling:
    _______________________

    California I’ll be there
    Let me fall into your hair
    I won’t be guilty for my New York City care
    My sister come along with me
    Our God is offering our share
    California I’ll be there

    –Sophie B. Hawkins – California Here I Come
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0lUeR4VdOI
    _______________________

    That’s so lovely the way she transposes the upbeat “California, Here I Come!” to a minor key and uses it as counterpoint to her Old Testament Out of Bondage lyrics plus a straight quote of the “Lord’s Prayer.”

    I know it sounds crazy to put it in such heightened terms, but that’s how it felt at the time. I felt I had come to the Promised Land.

    It wasn’t entirely a Happy Ending. My life was plenty complicated thereafter, but a dream had come true nonetheless.

25. Well considering that one of the last stops of the st louis was in havana and laredu bru the puppet of the roosevelt state department told them no

    Some people (not moi of course) that being saddled with fidel was karma for that act.

26. Enroute to my duty station at NAS North Island at San Diego in 1956, when we stopped at the California ag inspection station that was in place in those days. The inspector said there were 2500 new people moving into California every week. The great in migration continued for many years. An amazing place. Superb geography. Mediterranean climate. And it’s been rendered into a state where the middle class doesn’t want to live. And many businesses are pulling up stakes as well. There’s a lesson there, if people will just learn it.

27. What is striking about the holocausf or the devouring how one put it about the romani was its his mechanistic thoroughness the very thing that germany prided itself as civilizafion was turned to horror

    One might say that mein kampf gave the game away but wansee how it was planned out in schindlers list amon goeth was the standin for this beastbut he was a small cog in the machine i mentioned monowitz-buna that was thd labor camp that worked with ig farben (its alliances with inperial chemical and general aniline are all over graviry rainbow) they seemed respectable sort to those who dealt with them like the rockefellers morgans et al like the german bankers abs and schacht but that was the terrifying part of it like roy batty

28. Art Deco-
    Asking ’cause I don’t know.
    Do Worldometer and the other aggregators differentiate between dying of covid and dying with it?
    At our local hospital, anyone who is admitted and sneezes or coughs has some sort of covid antibody test. The patient may be admitted after a bad car wreck or a heart attack, and may live or die, but if he dies of the heart attack, does the covid diagnosis count? (If the covid is positive, the patient is treated with isolation procedures, no visitors, absolutely compounding his misery).
    As covid becomes more endemic, maybe 10% (totally wild guess) of people admitted may be afflicted with covid, with minimal symptoms and no independent effect on long term health.
    Is this another case where the people who know better have allowed the data to be so corrupted that meaningful conclusions are not possible? Have (some of) them done this on purpose?
    My working hypothesis is that the Worldometer data are good for trending, but using it to make public policy is at best futile, and likely serves people with ulterior motives.

29. GB. You can’t do anything about whatever it is which hasn’t happened and nobody knows is going to happen. I keep saying,, maybe more detail will help: The Wannsee Conference is when the Germans got together to plan the most efficient way of killing Jews in massive numbers. Organized transports, finding them, who got the contracts for the guards’ barracks, all the details. January of 42. Do you get that?
    Prior to that, it was forced labor taking all kinds of people and not running them into gas chambers. Hard time but not Holocaust.
    Later comes after earlier. The Germans were highballing into a collapsing Russian military. The French and Brits had been kicked off the Continent two years earlier. The US Pacific fleet was still smoldering, although, mercifully, any guys trapped in capsized ships were probably dead by then.
    A month later, Singapore, “Gibraltar” of the Pacific surrendered nearly a hundred thousand Commonwealth troops.
    Only then did the Holocaust commence. Strictly speaking, only after they got the actual stuff in place which would have been later.

    The ship you reference was turned back in May of 39.

    Germany had not even started the war–presuming you take the start date as that October. So Jews who were fleeing a bad situation were not being returned to the gas chambers. They were not being returned to a war. They were being turned away from the US, which some have a hard time admitting because that would mean the US was better than Nazi Germany. Did anyplace else welcome them?
    It’s hard to comprehend all the stuff going on in Europe at the time, and one more item of Hitler’s reign–he’d been chancellor for about three years–which was to be mean to Jews was…one more item.
    Kristallnacht was a year earlier and it would be considered a bad thing. A very bad thing. But nobody was rounded up and killed. And crap like that had been happening practically since 1918, if one could keep track of the fighting in the Baltics and any bleed over. Friekorps were…bad guys. Yup. But still, some say they rescued Germany from the Bolshies. Plus they helped the Nazis. It’s complicated and there are few agreements and in the context, messing up somebody’s shop windows was not a casus belli.
    But the question is…do you want to go to war over Kristallnacht?
    And if you’re not going to go to war, what are you going to do about it?

    I recall a documentary about a large shipment of Jews rescued in Italy and brought to Fort Drum in upstate New York as the Allies moved north into Italy. Everything was pretty copacetic. Local schools welcomed the kids….
    But then the documentarians scorched the US for leaving more Jews in Italy. Horrible. Anti Semitic. AYFKM?
    Such as were left, such as had been rescued, were in what we used to call pyramidal tents with oil stoves or coal stoves for heat. Bedding. Three meals. Medical care. Not like the guys who’d rescued them, living in the mud–see Ernie Pyle or Mauldin’s “Up Front”.–and getting killed and crippled on a regular basis.
    What was the point? The blame bucket was full and another was needed.

    But get your calendar out next time you want to make such arguments.

30. Correction

    At the time of the ship being turned away, Hitler had been in power for six years. I was thinking of the militarization of the Rhineland about which nobody had wanted to go to war.

31. My working hypothesis is that the Worldometer data are good for trending, but using it to make public policy is at best futile, and likely serves people with ulterior motives.

    What ulterior motives?

32. And in our latest episode of “Follow the Science(TM)”, we bring you this fascinating interview!
    “Iranian President Says The ‘Holocaust Probably Happened’ But Needs Proper ‘Investigation’ And Then Calls Israel ‘Malignant Cancerous Tumor’ During 60 Minutes Interview”—
    https://blazingcatfur.ca/2022/09/19/wtf-1090/

    Yes, Mr. President sir, you’ve done us PROUD! (And note that although your ally in the White House may not be able to say anything in public—surely, you know why—you must not allow yourself to be discouraged…)

    Your eminence should harbor no doubt that your aptly called-for “Proper Investigation” is imminent (we KNOW who stands in the way of THAT)…so that we can—yes, finally—get to the bottom of this frustrating conundrum…

    Once all doubt about this matter is cleared away, we can get to work on the pressing issue of oncology, more specifically national oncology.
    Fortunately, much work, it must be said, has already been done; and one might wish to cite the research painstakingly performed by the world-renowned expert in the field…of national chemotherapy:
    “Rep. Tlaib in TV interview: Israel has an apartheid system, two-state solution won’t work”—
    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/360084

    File under: But of course!

33. So allahpundit is nick catogio?

    https://mobile.twitter.com/mrddmia/status/1571971908362731520?cxt=HHwWgIDUreeH4tArAAAA

    Pompeo eats his own shoe

34. Turtle eats some crow

    https://mobile.twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1572058584023810049?cxt=HHwWgoC-rf-8idErAAAA

35. WestTX and Art Deco,

    If you remember I’ve been collecting covid data since the beginning. I have used WoM for national data, but at about 8-9 months in I realized their reporting at the state level was very flawed, so I switched all my state data to the actual state reporting. That was October 2020.

    Now, about 5 months ago, in a single day, WoM “lost” 15 million reported active cases for the US. The number of reported active cases just dropped by 15 million. Now after I realized the discrepancies between WoM reported state data and the states themselves reported numbers, I lost much faith that WoM was reporting real numbers, but trends seemed OK. But with that change 5 months ago, that’s even at question now.

    Almost every week I think I’m going to stop, but covid keeps popping up in the news so I keep going in my data collection. Looking at state level (CT, NC, FL, NH GA, CO) for daily covid deaths and then comparing to NIH reported natural causes deaths, the percentage ranges from 5-10% currently. FL and GA that percentage is declining while the other states are relatively flat but showing some very slow decline. We are still in the downswing from the last 2 omicron variants with the peak from the second occurring just a little over a month and half ago. The velocity of new active cases is now about -50k/day, and has an acceleration of -1.5cases/day^2 as the trend has been quite linear. Of course, it will probably level out in the usual exponential tail. Any new variant will most likely be even less fatal than the very latest omicron variants.

    If the new CDC guidelines to stop testing asymptomatic people finally kicks in, then the “case” numbers should also drop quickly. For me, the pandemic is over and this is really just another background virus. Here in FL, the only places that require masks are health facilities and that is starting to vary greatly. UFHealth is very strict on masking for everyone. My dermatologist is there and my recent visit showed the workers are somewhat lax in their actual office. My ophthalmologist has no requirement. My primary and urologist (Baptist Health) only “require” in exam rooms. In both facilities patients literally rip their masks off as they walk out the doors. Some were quite surprised it was required as they entered as it’s gone everywhere else, thank God.

36. Art Deco-
    What ulterior motives?

    Some people have an overpowering urge to control other people. In this specific case, use the inflated numbers to compel mask wearing, vaccines, or another lockdown. For some of them, just having that power is enough. Others want to take down our civilization so it can be rebuilt per their preferred specifications, but that’s another story.
    Other examples- HOA presidents, some LEOs, some HR directors, some school admins.
    Examples abound.

37. This is from an ig farben official interviewed in 1945

    The cost price of products during the inflation mattered very little] “because the production price was being paid in continuously inflating currency, whereas, for instance, the important dyestuff export yielded for the most part stable money in good foreign currency which when transferred to Germany represented mark accounts quite out of proportion to production costs, so that on paper big profits could be shown even with a much smaller dyestuff export volume than pre-war…”

38. From paul erflinger quoted in sasulys tome on ig farben

39. Physicsguy- thanks for that.
    Maybe I got lost in your explanation, but I still wonder about the distinction of # of people who die of covid and # of people who die with covid.
    Secondarily, of the people who die of covid, how many had such severe comorbidities that the next brisk wind would have resulted in their demise.
    Obv very difficult to get this number, but from my perspective necessary to justify widespread social oppression of the type that we had 2020-21, and some still pine for (Art D.- check any issue of Slate.com).

40. The data set is nearly useless and this is why john hopkins who was part of the wef wargame in 2019 made it that way

41. westtexas
    You categorize very well. But you left out those who burn to be made to do stupid stuff themselves, to be able to show others how compliant they are.

42. “…nearly useless…”

    …but useful enough—-most useful enough—to enable the Democrats to “fortify” the 2020 elections…which was the purpose of the whole shebang (along with making certain individuals scads of moola)…”let the chips fall where they may…”.

43. JJ
    re: people moving to California

    For US citizens, more have left than entered for nearly every year since 2000 IIRC.

    Cal has a population skew of haves and have nots that boggles the mind. Ten years ago over a third of USA welfare recipients were in Cal. I would think it’s gotten much higher since.

44. the humane thing for FDR to do was to publicize the Nazi plan and to simultaneously announce that America’s doors were now open to any Jew who wished to emigrate to America.

    That would have helped at a time of desperation. Initially, the Germans were willing to see Jews emigrate but the refusal of other countries may well have contributed to “the final solution.”

45. Here’s a brace…
    Compare and contrast:
    As already mentioned, “Biden says COVID pandemic is ‘over’ in the U.S.”—
    https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/biden-says-covid-pandemic-over-us
    Wow!! Hip hip hooray…
    …but hey you! HOLD YER HORSES!
    ‘Colleges mandate new boosters for students despite expert doubts about extent of testing;
    ‘ “Before you vaccinate millions of healthy 20 year olds, and give Pfizer billions, we usually run trials to ensure the benefit exists,” epidemiologist says, objecting to lack of evidence for bivalent booster mandates.’—
    https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/colleges-make-students-guinea-pigs-new-boosters-feds-admit-ignoring
    (Where does one even begin on that one…?
    Gotta pay the Pfizer piper, I guess….)

    And my, oh my…Dear Lord, just what DO we have here?!
    “Former EcoHealth Alliance VP says Fauci-funded group ‘developed’ COVID-19”—
    https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/former-ecohealth-alliance-vp-says-fauci-funded-group-developed-covid-19
    (For the “Heh” files, I guess…)

    Looks like we’ll have to “update” that “old Chinese curse” to…
    May you live in CONFUSING times…
    Right away.

    + (we’ll conclude with a rather “nice”) Bonus:
    “Federal appeals court reverses ruling on Jan. 6 subpoena to RNC, dismisses case;
    “Appellate judges went out of way to acknowledge RNC’s appeal raised important issues and also took a dig at Democrats for vacillating.”—
    https://justthenews.com/government/congress/federal-appeals-court-reverses-ruling-jan-6-subpoena-rnc-dismisses-case

46. jack a lantern just says things, ‘my hair is made of pudding’ hunter is the smartest person I know, it has little relation to reality,

47. Mike K.
    Karski warned in 42. Johnson says, “as early as 1943”. As it appears I have to keep saying, the war started, depending on your choice of dates, in the fall of 39 and Hitler declared war on us three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, which it appears I have to note came before 1942. Which, go figure, came before 1943.
    If anybody had believed one guy, considering the deceptions involved, and publicized the nazi plan, it couldn’t have been before Karski’s warning. And that was after the Holocaust started. Which, I have to keep saying, was after the war started.
    People had a hard time with supposed Japanese atrocities in China–prior to the Rape of Nanking which was documented–due to excessive propaganda proven bogus in WW I. Likely the “warning” would have looked like more of the same. Such as “WMD”.

    Look. Europe pulls this crap. We had 115k guys dead of all causes in WWI That’s ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN THOUSAND BEREAVED FAMILIES.. Had the Germans not quit in the fall of 1918, we’d have had a hell of a lot more dead. You want to feel disoriented? Try to follow the nonsense leading up to the war.
    I once tried to follow up the career of a French senior officer named Boulanger. Turned out he served in the Austro-Sardinian War. THE WHAT? Try to follow the start of that on wiki.
    This is what Europe does. It’s not our fault they made WW I so terrible.
    Look at a map. They’re the other side of the Atlantic OCEAN. And they’re the people our ancestors wanted to get away from.
    But it cost us over a hundred thousand dead guys to convince the Germans that 1919 was going to be really bad for them. And us.
    And so, Europe is doing Europe again. And things are tough. But the Holocaust was in the future. Our ecisions made about the Holocaust couldn’t very well have been made before it got started, which is to say, the Wannsee Conference.
    Going on fifty years ago, I had a history prof say there was a lot of old money “up0 t he Hudson” where even the Rockefellers might not be welcome. It was a place, it was a society, and it was attitudes. And it’s where the Gentlemen’s Agreement came from. I wouldn’t be surprised if State had a lot of Up The Hudson attitudes. But to blame them for not stopping the Holocaust is too far.

    The forced-labor camps did not do Holocaust. They looked like Europe doing Europe. Tough but not our business.

    Just some numbers. We had about 400,000 guys on active duty in 1939, all services combined. That was just short of our total KIA in WW II. IOW, WW II ate up our entire pre-war military establishment.

    As to letting Jews in, I wish we had. As to turning them back to the gas chambers….nobody had a clue. Because, and I wonder why I have to keep repeating this; the gas chambers weren’t even built until after we were already in the war and doing our best to “do something”.

    The German blame bucket has been full for so long it seems kind of unfair to keep it up. So…got to find somebody else. Be better if there were some logical connections.

48. Stan, can we call it a “Banan Republic?” Definition – “The societies of banana republics are typically highly stratified, consisting of a small ruling-class of business, political, and military leaders, and a larger impoverished working-class.”
    Yeah, I think so.

49. Examples abound.

    Did you even read what I wrote?

50. boulanger was a wannabe napoleon, a populist man on horseback who arose in the late part of the 19th century, really popular after the canal debacle, prefigured petain, and probably salan had similar ambitions,

51. I doubt that I could do a better job than Mr Aubrey at outlining why the Allied ‘failure’ to attack the death camps is a red herring. It should be relatively uncontroversial to recognize the fastest way to stop all Jews from being killed was to liberate Nazi captured territory, occupy Germany, and defeat Hitler. That also being in the best interest of all the Allies in WWII, I am reasonably certain the Allied leadership resolved to do it in the most expeditious way possible within their powers, allowing for the fact that the Nazis also got a vote in when the war ended and the inevitable misjudgments made in any human endeavor. To the degree that specific missions to eliminate death camps or hamper the execution machinery would have diverted resources from operations that ended the war sooner rather than later, they likely would have been futile in accomplishing their objective given the Nazi determination to keep the camps running. Conversely, many attacks directed at general German infrastructure would have had the effect of interdicting the operation of the camps so the distinction in the outcome of any particular attack is not a clear as people like to make it. Debating whether or not the Allies had the technical capability approaches the enumeration of celestial beings performing rhythmic motions on the tip of a sewing implement, and certainly does not even approach the kind of proof that should be required by any reasonable person to a claim that the decision by Allied leadership to forgo direct attacks on the camps or other Holocaust infrastructure was motivated by something other than determination to use all possible resources in direct confrontation with the Nazi war machine.

52. Mike K; Richard Aubrey:

    When and how the Allies learned about the Holocaust.

53. MBunge:

    No, the refusal of countries to take Jews had nothing to do with Hitler’s Final Solution decision. For one thing, the number of Jews in Germany was very very small by that time because there weren’t that many to begin with (less than 1% of the population) and 2/3 had already emigrated during the 1930s, before the Final Solution. Most of the Jews killed were in other European countries, with Poland leading the way. Hitler planned to kill all the Jews in the world, period. If all Jews had been allowed into the US it would have been fine because the Nazis never conquered the US, but most Jews DID take refuge in other European countries, thinking they were safe (Anne Frank’s family is a good example, they originally were from Germany). The Nazis took over each country quite quickly and the Jews were trapped in the European countries where they had taken refuge, in addition to the Jews who already had lived in those countries.

    Just to take one example, the French – many of whom collaborated with the Nazis – surrendered Jews who had taken refuge there from other countries first.

    See this:

    During the interwar period, France was one of the more liberal countries in welcoming Jewish immigrants, many of them from eastern Europe. After World War I, thousands of Jews viewed France as a European land of equality and opportunity and helped to make its capital, Paris, a thriving center of Jewish cultural life.

    In the 1930s, however, unnerved by a significant influx of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War, the leaders of the French Third Republic (1870-1940) began to reassess this “open-door” policy. By 1939 French authorities had imposed strict limitations on immigration and set up a number of internment and detention camps for refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, in southern France.

    When the Third Republic collapsed under German attack in the early summer of 1940, there were approximately 350,000 Jews in France. Less than half of them were French citizens. Many of these individuals were refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the Third Reich; Jews and other endangered persons fleeing oppression in German-occupied Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands soon joined them in the summer of 1940.

    Later, the collaborationist government helped the round ups, but:

    A significant percentage of these victims were foreign or stateless Jews, sacrificed by the Vichy government in a vain attempt to spare France’s indigenous Jewish population. The final destination of these deportees was Auschwitz, where the SS murdered the vast majority by means of poison gas shortly after their arrival.

54. Neo . I see that. You will note the war was fully on. So what, at that point , could be done besides trying not to lose the war?

55. To expand on a particular annoyance about the Allies and the Holocaust:

    Metaphor alert!!! If I am standing in the street, watching my house burn, hearing the fire engines coming and somebody comes up to me and says, “Hey, buddy. Your house is on fire.”

    He is not “warning” me. “warn” implies three items: 1. I didn’t already know it. 2. There’s something I might be able to do about it, or, 3, I might, given the warning, be able to get out of the way of whatever it is.

    IMO, the term “warn” is used in this context to dishonestly imply number two. Once the Allies learned about the Holocaust–which is to say were “warned”–there is, implicitly, something they should have done. That’s the purpose of using the verb, “to warn”. To dishonestly convince the unwary that the Allies deliberately avoided doing something–always unspecified or if specified, impossible–to end the Holocaust sooner than they did. For nefarious reasons, is left unsaid but deliberately implied.

    The discussion(s) above have covered the practical issues, like timing and military concerns. My concern here is the deliberate and dishonest use of the term “warn”.

56. Karski wasnt the only one
    https://www.pap.pl/en/news/news,289792,auschwitz-whistleblower-pilecki-escaping-camp-74-years-ago-now.html

57. Richard Aubrey:

    There is nothing dishonest about the term. The people who have used it specified what they wanted done and believed it was possible to do it.

    You may indeed disagree, but that has nothing to do with whether they lied or were dishonest.

58. Neo Why not “told about”? And, surely, at least one tactic which would likely have worked could be hypothesized. Just one.

59. Richard Aubrey:

    Some people say “warned,” some say “informed” or “described” or “gave details of” or any number of other phrases.

    And many people believe the tactics would have worked, although many do not. You are in the latter camp. It doesn’t mean you’re right, and as I said before we’ll never know for sure.

60. neo. From time to time, I forget to say, about a particular discussion, “I watched the hearings. Want to start over?” Not fair, I know. I should say so at the beginning.
    Point is, here, I’ve done my homework for every suggested tactic. Maybe somebody can suggest a tactic for something which, as a practical matter, might work. After which they can explain why the forces used for that were better used for that than for ending the war sooner.
    Sure, you could send maybe six hundred bombers toward the camps on the hope that a few might survive flying completely over the Reich and manage to drop their bombs in the vicinity of Auschwitz. But the whole force is gone and not available for further attacks on Germany. And the hope that a few might survive is nuts anyway. And no Jewish lives would be saved.
    Give me something that might work and spare me the dark insinuations that it was not done because the Allies hated Jews.
    There would be no meat to this discussion without the dark insinuation. And the insinuation fails without a practical means of carrying out the operation and without a judgment that there would, in actuality, be lives saved.
    After all, we didn’t send a division of paratroopers toward Berchtesgaden in 1943 because they’d all be dead, along with the transport aircraft, long before getting well into Germany. And no use for further efforts. Doesn’t mean FDR and Churchill wanted to extend the war.

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