It’s amazing how fast the government can “build the wall” when they want to.

Fear that American People might come to DC for Biden’s inauguration has led the government to bring in over 20,000 National Guard troops to guard the Capitol.

So, DC builds a wall to protect the elites from the people.

Question: If you need 20,000 Armed Soldiers to protect your inauguration from The People, is that indicative of something else?

It does seem a bit like political theater. They are literally salivating at the idea of “something happening” and are almost trying to meme it into existence.

This is a big deal. Seems like the most important time to show up and speak your mind with whomever you choose would be a presidential inauguration.

But in 2021 a Presidential Inauguration has to be done while basic constitutional rights are suspended?

The joint intelligence bulletin, obtained by the New York Times, said extremists ‘may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States’. 

The warning has been sent out to law enforcement agencies across the country. The FBI has already warned of armed protests being planned in Washington and all 50 state capitals in the run-up to the inauguration, including three separate plots to attack the Capitol.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congresswoman Elaine Luria voted to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection following the attack on the Capitol last week. Prior to this vote, Congresswoman Luria spoke on the House floor to urge her colleagues to join her in holding the President accountable.

“President Trump is responsible for the insurrection that occurred at our Capitol last week and our county can’t begin to heal until those who are responsible for the attack on our democracy are held accountable,” said Congresswoman Luria. “I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and today I fulfilled that solemn obligation. History will look back on this moment to see who stood strong in support of American democracy.”

Congresswoman Luria delivered the following remarks on the House floor during Congressional debate on this article on impeachment: “The perpetrators of this heinous attack on our nation’s democracy were Americans, encouraged and emboldened by President Trump— because he could not accept the outcome of our fair and free election. His actions are seditious, and the President has proven he is not fit to serve. History will look back on this moment to see who stood strong in support of American democracy. As my colleagues have said, we must come together, but our nation cannot begin to heal until there is accountability for the atrocity we witnessed last week.”

Special Opinion to the Mirror by Charles Landis

Those wo believe Biden was legitimately elected, choose to ignore the widespread violation of Article 2 Sec 1 of Constitution which mandates that state legislatures are the sole authority on election process. They simply say there was no fraud and ignore the indisputable Constitutional issue.

During the 2020 election process, Democrat attorney/operatives persuaded governors, state attorney generals, and election officials in Democrat controlled battle ground states to change election rules by pretext that, because of Covid pandemic, emergency changes were necessary.

First, in violation of Art. 2 Sec 1, massive numbers of ballots were mailed out based on dirty voter registration lists; deceased persons, non- residents, and many others that were not legitimate voters. Multiple ballots were mailed to same address of persons not resident. Ballots were harvested. In-person identification was fiercely challenged as voter suppressions. Signatures were not verified on return of mailed in ballots ; envelopes were separated from ballots thus making recounts meaningless.

Assertion that there is no evidence of voter fraud is false. The indisputable violations of Art. 2 Sec 1 is ipso facto proof. This is what Sen Cruz wanted to prove by audit but Democrats denied in House vote.

Until such time as there is an audit of ballots where there was violation of Art. 2 Sec 1, Biden must be considered to have been elected on basis of illegitimate ballots and a bastard president. As also with Comrade Kamala. Res Publica.

Reader submitted content from Patriot Medical Devices.

At the start of the pandemic, there were mixed messages on whether or not the public should be wearing face masks. This left many wondering if face masks work and why they should bother wearing one. The good news is, they do help protect us! While the guidelines for COVID-19 may be rapidly developing, and confusing us all, we can look to other well established healthcare guidelines to understand how face masks protect us from becoming infected and infecting others. So, what exactly do these masks do?

   1. They keep your respiratory droplets from spreading to others!

The CDC outlines three transmission-based precautions to help stop the spread of various pathogens: contact, droplet, and airborne. A pathogen is the agent that causes a disease, and different pathogens use different methods to spread. Surgical masks are a key protective measure in droplet precautions and airborne precautions. Surgical masks are routinely used in healthcare settings to prevent the spread of infections such as influenza, pneumonia, and meningitis. In what the CDC terms “source control”, they outline that the infected individual should wear a mask to help prevent transmission.

Many viruses and bacteria, such as the ones previously listed, are spread through respiratory droplets. These respiratory droplets are generated when a person is coughing, sneezing, or talking. That’s right, even just by talking! If you are infected, the pathogen can travel through your respiratory droplets and be transmitted to people around you, or they can contaminate surfaces. So, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, you may be an unaware vector of the disease and wearing a mask helps you keep your droplets to yourself when interacting with others.

   2. They protect you from infected individuals!

In regards to the same CDC transmission-based precautions, specific personal protective equipment can be used to decrease your chances of contracting various pathogens. When viruses and bacteria spread by respiratory droplets, those droplets infect you by traveling into your mouth, nose, and eyes. Wearing a mask properly helps block infectious particles from finding a home in your mouth and nose. COVID-19, in most cases, is believed to be spread by respiratory droplets. Thus, wearing a mask can help reduce your risk of contracting the disease.

Now that we know how face masks protect us, it is important to note that different masks can offer different levels of protection. The American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) is an international standards organization that develops technical standards for many different fields-including healthcare. They put face masks through a series of five tests to determine what standards they meet. These tests are: Bacterial filtration, particle filtration, synthetic blood splatter, flammability, and breathability. Based on specific criteria, the masks are sorted into one of three levels after they are tested. Level 1 offers the lowest level of protection, while level 3 offers the highest. Patriot Medical Devices offers masks that have been tested and proven to function at the ASTM 3 standard. Patriot masks offer the highest level of protection against particles and fluids, while also being comfortable to wear!

References

Transmission Based Precautions.
https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/basics/transmission-based-precautions.html

Modes of transmission of virus causing COVID-19: implications for IPC precaution recommendations.
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/modes-of-transmission-of-virus-causing-covid-19-implications-for-ipc-precaution-recommendations

NOAA – Scientists use data from buoys and satellites to track water temperature and salinity levels in the Chesapeake Bay. Changes in water temperature and salinity affect the fish, crabs, and other species that live in the Chesapeake Bay. Scientists analyze the data to determine whether those levels were below, near, or above average. Then, using information about the biology and life cycles of some Chesapeake species, we can explore how 2020 water conditions may have affected the Bay’s fish and crabs. 

Buoys in NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System (CBIBS) showed that the Chesapeake Bay experienced a warmer-than-average winter and a cooler-than-average spring in 2020. Satellites in NOAA’s CoastWatch Program also saw these trends. Water temperatures returned to average during the summer.

The warm winter may have affected some Chesapeake fish at a critical time in their life cycle. The Maryland Department of Natural Resource’s 2020 juvenile striped bass survey showed there were roughly five times fewer juvenile striped bass than average. This may be because there was not enough food for them at a very important time in their life to survive. 

Juvenile striped bass eat plankton. Warm winters typically trigger an earlier-than-usual plankton bloom. But when they bloom early, this plankton often dies out before the young striped bass need to eat them. As a result, fewer of these fish survive. 

But the warmer winter temperatures may have helped the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crabs in both Virginia and Maryland. Scientists survey the blue crab population each winter. They can do this more effectively at that time because blue crabs burrow into the mud to keep safe from cold water. The 2020 Winter Dredge Survey found the lowest overwintering mortality since the survey started almost 30 years ago. The average percent of dead crabs found in the survey from 1996 through 2020 was 4.53%. In 2020, it was only 0.36%.

Observations from the NOAA CBIBS buoys indicated higher-than-average salinity throughout 2020, particularly in the upper Chesapeake Bay at Gooses Reef. This is likely because this part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed had less rain and snow than usual. The U.S. Geological Survey’s measurements of winter freshwater flow rates at a site on Maryland’s upper Eastern Shore were lower than the previous decade’s average.

Salinity and freshwater input levels are important for species including striped bass and oysters. For striped bass, when water flow is high, the plankton they would like to eat get pushed downstream where striped bass larvae eat them. But in low-flow years like 2020, it is less likely that the plankton get pushed to where the larvae need them.

For oysters, higher salinity usually leads to more juvenile oysters. The 2020 Maryland Department of Natural Resources fall oyster survey did indeed find above-average amounts of juvenile oysters along the Eastern Shore. 

Living resources in the Chesapeake Bay need oxygen. Hypoxia happens when there is too little dissolved oxygen in the water for fish, crabs, and other living beings. It can happen after excess nutrients are pushed into the Chesapeake Bay by surface runoff. Those excess nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, can fuel algae blooms. When the algae dies, it decays. In the decay process, oxygen in the water is used. This can lead to hypoxia.

One computer model estimated that the overall severity and duration of hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay was lower and shorter in 2020 compared to most recent years. The lower freshwater flows in winter may have helped because they potentially brought less surface runoff and nutrient concentrations to the Bay. Having less time when any parts of the Bay are hypoxic is good for the Bay’s living resources. 

We will continue to monitor conditions in the Bay in 2021, and will track how they may affect the Chesapeake’s fish, crabs, and other critters.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP)- A dive team plans to use side-scan sonar to search for a Maryland man whose truck drove off the Chesapeake Bay Bride-Tunnel in Virginia.

The Charles County Dive Rescue team from Maryland will employ the technology on Friday and Saturday.

Erik Mezick, 47, of Fruitland, Md., was driving a truck owned by the Baltimore-based Cloverland Greenspring Dairy. The truck went off the Bridge-Tunnel late last month. Mezick’s body hasn’t been found despite an extensive search.

The sonar equipment sends out sound waves that echo off objects on the bottom of the bay and bounce back, creating an image of what’s down there.

The U.S. Coast Guard, the Virginia Beach Fire Department and various other responding organizations had coordinated efforts to find Mezick’s body. Witnesses to the crash had said they saw him get out the truck and drift west in the bay.

588 BC: Traditional start date for Nebuchadnezzar II’s siege of Jerusalem, which steadily tightens the noose around the Jewish capitol until it finally capitulates in July, 586 BC, sending the majority of Judah’s population into exile in Babylon. You can read what it was like to be on the receiving end of this period in the Biblical books of 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Jeremiah (chapters 4 & 52), and the early chapters of Daniel. 

630: Arab warlord and putative prophet Mohammad, leading an army of some 10,000 soldiers from his hometown of Medina, conquers nearby Mecca in a nearly bloodless assault that puts the city at the heart of Mohammad’s burgeoning new religion.

1493: From his anchorage off the Caribbean island of Hispanola, Christopher Columbus weighs anchor and sets his small fleet on a course back to Spain, bringing to a close the exploratory phase of his first voyage to the New World.

1559: Coronation of Elizabeth I as Queen of England.

1729: Birth of Edmund Burke (d.1797), Member of the British Parliament who nonetheless supported the cause of the American Revolution, based on his admiration of its dependence on the principles of classical liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment. His writing defined the “Old Whigs” of the 18^th Century. He was an unabashed critic of the excesses of the French Revolution, best known in this regard for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he correctly identified that a government unconstrained by external morality would descend into tyranny. Today, Burke is widely considered the father of modern Conservatism. Wikipedia highlights a typical Burkean quote, still worth considering to this day: “The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.” –from his book, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756).

1741: Birth of Benedict Arnold (d.1801)

1755: Birth of Alexander Hamilton (d.1804), on tiny Nevis Island in the St. Vincent and Grenadines chain in the Caribbean, British Crown territory. You remember, too, why this little fact played such a large part in the formation of the United States. 

1759: Opening day for the British Museum. On this side of the pond, we refer to our Smithsonian as “the nation’s attic.” The museum makes tangible the scope and breadth of Great Britain’s global empire, their trading relationships, and their insatiable curiosity about the world they eventually dominated. The priceless artifacts resident in museum are breathtaking to behold, preserving an international heritage that would likely have been lost without British stewardship and analysis of these cultural treasures.

1784: The new United States government ratifies the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain acknowledges our existence as an independent political entity.

1815: The frigate USS President, under the command of Commodore Stephen Decatur, is captured by a squadron of four British frigates as it tries to break out of its year-long blockade of New York harbor.

1863: The Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, under the command of Captain Raphael Semmes, attacks and sinks the USS Hatteras off the coast of Galveston, Texas. 

1866: Establishment of the Royal Aeronautical Society, in London. If you notice the date here, and you remember that the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk was in 1903, you’d be correct in realizing that the problem of manned flight- that is, the actual scientific physics and mechanics of it, not the dreaming- had been under study for decades before finally achieving success.

1875: Birth of Albert Schweitzer (d.1965), musician, theologian, and medical doctor whose work in easing the lives of African tribesmen in Gabon, and his deep intellectual response to the real problems of both colonialism and the de-colonizing movement earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.

1879: Opening moves of the Anglo-Zulu War, with the British crossing the Buffalo River to begin their invasion of Zululand.

1889: In Atlanta, incorporation of the Pennington Medicine Company, which became famous and wealthy from their premier retail product. The company eventually changed their name to match that product, which is Coca-Cola.

1893: Birth of German fighter ace of the Great War, Herman Goering (d.1946). 

1919: Death of Rosa Luxemburg (b.1871), a fiery Marxist absolutist who played a crucial role in agitating German workers during the 1918 revolution through her pamphleteering and communist agitation in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. With the functional dissolution of the German government, bands of vigilante enforcers known as the Freicorps roamed the cities and countryside, enforcing a harsh German nationalism against the untrammeled influences of outside forces. As a particularly blatant exemplar of those outside forces, Rosa Luxemburg found herself increasingly harassed by the Freicorps and finally on this day, she was arrested, tortured, and murdered- her corpse thrown into the Landwher Canal for good measure. Since her death, the international communist movement has worked to beatify her as a martyr for the Marxist-Socialist movement. She remains a darling of the intellectual Left; in their minds her brutal death is an exemplar of what happens if the communists are not in charge of everything.

1923: Birth of the ultimate car guy, Carol Shelby (d.2012) Yes, that’s his name attached to the Cobra and dozens of other spectacular racing and road cars.

1929: Birth of Civil Rights activist and Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr. (d.1968)

1932: Birth of drag racer Don “Big Daddy” Garlits.

1938: Norway formally annexes for itself a huge slice of Antarctica, naming the area Queen Maude Land. It remains the only du jure territorial occupation on the continent, although the rest of it is divided up between six other claimants and multiple non-claimants (including the U.S. and Russia) who maintain permanent scientific stations above and below the ice.

1943(a): After over 6 months of brutal combat and continuing losses to the U.S. Marines, the Japanese army completes Operation KE, the evacuation of Guadalcanal, which they consider a great success.

1943(b): First day of the Casablanca Conference between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill with representatives of the Free French forces. Joseph Stalin was invited but declined to attend because of the ongoing siege of Stalingrad. This conference was notable for publicly declaring unconditional surrender as the core Allied war aim against Germany. The decision was also made to not attempt to open a second European front via an immediate cross-channel invasion, but to continue the pressure on the southern flank by invading Sicily. As an aside, in order to get to the conference, Roosevelt became the first President to fly in an airplane while serving in office, taking a plane between Miami and Casablanca across the Atlantic Ocean.

1943 (c): Formal signing of a little-known, but far reaching agreement supporting the Allied effort during the Second World War. Under tremendous diplomatic pressure from the United States, Great Britain signs a treaty with the Republic of China to help ensure their continued combat participation against Japan. The high cost of this treaty was Britain’s eventual post-war position vis-a-vis their pre-war sphere of influence in Asia. The British-Chinese Agreement for the Relinquishment of Extra-Territorial Rights in China formally brought to an end the era of monopolistic trade concessions along with British (and U.S.) exemption from Chinese laws. The war not only fundamentally changed the relationship between China and the Western world (i.e. this treaty), but also among the Chinese themselves, as the Nationalists, with whom this treaty was made, found themselves increasingly at odds with the Communists as the war wound down. 

1943 (d): Opening day for The Pentagon, at the time and for decades afterward, the world’s largest office building. For all of the evil associated with it, the building remains a uniquely functional space. Despite its size, a normal person can walk from any office to any other in 12 minutes or less. Its hubs and spokes provide for a straightforward office numbering system (I worked in 2E977) and the courtyard in the middle provides a very nice respite from the cube-farm world inside. Here’s another fascinating fact: the hot dog stand in the middle of the courtyard has more nuclear weapons targeted on it than any other hot dog stand in the world.

1950: First flight of the prototype MiG-17 fighter plane, a workhorse of the communist bloc through the 1980s. You should see the size of the gunsight in that thing; it is so big and opaque that you can barely see forward through the windscreen. [See what I mean?] FYI- the Korean War display at the USAF museum in Dayton has a MiG-17 on display side-by-side with a North American F-86. The similarities are remarkable, and very much reflect the postwar competition between “our” captured German scientists and engineers and “their” captured German scientists and engineers. Let’s pause briefly for a little counter-factual moment: had the ground war in 1944-45 not moved as quickly as it did, this jet* (and by extension the F-86) could very well have been the undoing not only of the Allies strategic bombing campaign on the European continent, but also a devastating menace to the ground forces pounding their way toward the German heartland.

1951: Birth of radio impresario and commentator, Rush Limbaugh, brother of columnist David.

1976: Death of the great mystery writer Agatha Christie (b.1890). Her technique seems simplistic on the surface, but it works, every time. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly ever guess who done it, right up to the final group meeting where she lays it all out. My favorite film adaptation is the BBC Poirot series, starring David Suchet.

1991: The United States Congress authorizes the President to use military force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which they have occupied since August. I mentioned in DLH 1/9 that several of us on the Joint Staff helped craft Secretary Baker’s talking points, and we watched in great anticipation when Mr. Baker came out of the meeting with Tariq Aziz and spoke to the Press. He carefully outlined the U.S. and UN positions, including all the steps short of war that we were willing to accept. And then he said the word on which- in this case- the forces of history pivot: “Unfortunately…” His recitation of Iraqi intransigence led directly to the Congressional Resolution passed this week.