Let’s tell the truth: we have been bamboozled before

It wasn’t that long ago that the United States fled evacuated Afghanistan, leaving it to the Taliban, and the Taliban promised that they’d be, if not all sweetness and light, more tolerant than they had been during their previous reign. I do not know whether then-President Donald Trump actually believed the Taliban’s claims as he negotiated the withdrawal, or was simply looking for a fig leaf of cover for the withdrawal — which wasn’t completed until President Joe Biden too office — as President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did during the peace talks in Paris, but the Taliban have been not-so-slowly returning to the restrictions on the public, especially on women, that they had imposed previously.

Syrian rebel leader’s victory speech holds a message for Iran – and for Trump and Israel too

Continue reading

San José State University’s mostly women’s volleyball team is beaten in conference finals

Brayden Fleming, photos by San José State University.

This site has previously reported on the forfeits that several colleges have accepted when their women’s volleyball teams refused to play against San José State University, which has Brayden Fleming, a male player pretending to be a female going by the pseudonym of “Blaire”. The credentialed media have been trying to ignore the story to death, but my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, reported on Saturday how the Grey Lady finally said something . . . and tried to make it seem as though men males claiming to be women playing on women’s sports teams was no big deal.

How a Women’s College Volleyball Team Became the Center of the Transgender Athlete Debate

Not since the swimmer Lia Thomas has a college athlete or team put the fiercely contested issue of transgender rights in sports under such a bright spotlight.

by Juliet Macur | Thursday, November 28, 2024

On the court, they seem like any other college women’s volleyball team. At a recent game, the players moved around the court in staccato rhythm, setting and spiking the ball, springing into the air like pogo sticks to block attacking shots, all in their blue and gold uniforms of the San Jose State University Spartans.

Off the court, though, the team is trying its best not to crumble during an unexpected season of tension and tears, confusion and anger. The players are at the center of a drama playing out over one of the most explosive issues in American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team. Continue reading

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! The legacy media rarely lie outright, but their biases can be seen in their editorial choices of what to cover, and what to ignore

One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.

But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it. Continue reading

The truth shall set you free, but some people want to hide the truth

One of the things that I do at The First Street Journal is to use primarily — though certainly not exclusively — liberal sites as sources, because it stifles complaints that I’m using only evil reich wing sources, which our good friends on the left will not trust. Thus, when I use LGBTQ Nation, no one can throw a hissy fit that the source is opposed to homosexuals and the ‘transgendered.

Volleyball players sue their coach for accepting a trans teammate

The player hasn’t caused any unfair advantage or injuries, but the lawsuit claims she has stifled women’s “free speech.”

Continue reading

The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of President Nixon and Watergate, bringing down a Republican president, chose to protect a Democrat.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, huh?

The Washington Post added that tagline to its masthead in February of 2017, claiming that it wasn’t an attack on newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, deciding “to come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee,” though nobody in particular believed that. I question the timing, as Robert Stacy McCain would say.

The paper’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, used the phrase in an interview with The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at a tech forum at The Post last May. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” he said at the time, speaking of his reasons for buying the paper.

I am glad that my favorite reporter, Heather Long, stepped back from the newspaper’s Editorial Board a couple of months ago, so that she can’t be blamed for this drivel.

Trying to protect Biden, Democrats sacrificed their credibility

Democrats’ coverup of the president’s decline hurt their claim of being the party of truth.

Continue reading

Once again, the left want opponents to just to just shut the heck up!

It all seems so familiar. We reported, in December of 2021, how the female members of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team were told to keep their mouths shut about Will ‘Lia’ Thomas, the mentally ill man male who claimed he was female on the team:

‘It’s bringing people to tears’: SECOND UPenn swimmer speaks out against trans Lia Thomas competing for the women’s team and says the crowd was silent when she won most recent meet

  • An second anonymous female swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania has spoken out to say she and her teammates are upset by transgender teammate
  • Lia Thomas, 22, smashed three US swimming records at an Akron, Ohio contest last weekend 
  • Thomas also gave an interview to SwimSwam touting the fairness of inclusive but controversial IOC guidelines allowing transgender athletes to compete 
  • Thomas previously competed for the school’s men’s team for three years before joining the women’s team with her last men’s competition in November 2019 

By James Gordon | Published: 18:29 EST, 10 December 2021 | Updated: 21:33 EST, 10 December 2021

A second female swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania has aired her frustrations and fury as her transgender teammate Lia Thomas continues to smash records.

The entire team has been ‘strongly advised’ not to speak to the media and the second swimmer has been granted anonymity.

Nevertheless, the teammate stepped forward to tell how UPenn swimmers are ‘angry’ over what has been perceived as a ‘lack of fairness’ as Thomas smashes record after record in the pool.

The officials at the University of Pennsylvania told the women basically to shut their mouths and swim. Another female team member said that “she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate,” a fear that the university’s officials pushed. In a letter that sixteen of Mr Thomas’ teammates anonymously released, they stated that they “have been told that if we spoke out against her inclusion into women’s competitions, that we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer.”

Well, it’s happening again, this time in Nevada: Continue reading

Real women have to sacrifice their games to protest men males trying to horn in on their sports If Brayden Fleming wasn't such an [insert slang term for the anus here], this wouldn't be necessary.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

There are two competing and unreconcilable positions when it comes to ‘transgender women,’ the word salad used to denote males who believe that they are female, and ‘identify’ as women. The left take the position that ‘transwomen’ real women, while sensible people understand that there are only two sexes, and they cannot be changed. If ‘transwomen’ were effectively keeping quiet about it, and not trying to compete athletically against real women, like Will Thomas did, no one would really care, because Mr Thomas calling himself “Lia” would not have trampled upon anyone else’s rights.

Alas! Mr Thomas did insist on competing on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team, and, as John Lohn, Editor-in-Chief of Swimming World, noted, Mr Thomas went from a mid-500 ranking as a male swimmer — he did compete on Penn’s men’s team before his ‘transition,’ to top ranks in women’s swimming. While he had been taking medication to get his testosterone levels down, he had already gone through puberty as a male.

The San José State University women’s volleyball team has a ‘transwoman’ playing. Apparently Brayden Fleming, who now goes by the name “Blaire”, hid the fact that he is male, well enough that he was able to compete on the girls’ volleyball team at John Champe High School in Virginia, and a year on the women’s volleyball team at Coastal Carolina University, before transferring to SJSU. Whether team members, or the athletics department, at SJSU knew that Mr Fleming is male has not been disclosed, yet if they were aware, it was kept hidden, but one team member, Brooke Slusser, has joined a lawsuit against the NCAA for allowing ‘transwomen’ to compete on women’s athletic teams.

This has come to a head, now that collegiate volleyball season has begun — Mr Fleming’s status as being ‘transgender’ was not made public until last spring, after volleyball season was over — several teams have decided to forfeit matches with SJSU rather than go along with the idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. So far, Southern Utah, Boise State, Wyoming, Utah State, and Nevada-Reno have refursed to compete, but now comes the kicker:

A volleyball team balked at playing against trans woman. The university wasn’t having it.

The players voted to forfeit because there’s allegedly a trans woman on San Jose State’s team

By Mira Lazine | Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Individual players with the University of Nevada’s women’s volleyball team will be allowed to opt out of their upcoming match against the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team.

Nevada’s team had initially voted to forfeit the October 26 match due to San Jose State University allegedly having a transgender woman, making Nevada’s university the fifth recent one to forfeit. However, the University of Nevada, citing the Nevada Constitution and state laws, said it will have its team compete as originally agreed.

Note that the article, from the very much transgender supporting LGBTQ Nation, states that the player is “allegedly” a male claiming to be a female. SJSU has not confirmed that Mr Fleming is ‘transgender,’ but the university has not denied it, either. While it could be considered a violation of privacy for the university to confirm that he’s male without his consent, if Brayden was actually Blaire, she would have said so publicly.

In a statement explaining its decision, the University of Nevada wrote that a majority of the women’s volleyball team voted on October 13 to forfeit the match.

“The players’ decision and statement were made independently, and without consultation with the University or the athletic department,” the statement said, adding that the players’ decision didn’t represent the position of the university.

“The University and its athletic programs are governed by the Nevada Constitution and Nevada law, which strictly protect equality of rights under the law, and that equality of rights shall not be denied or abridged by this state or any of its subdivisions on account of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin,” the statement continued. “The University is also governed by federal law as well as the rules and regulations of the NCAA and the Mountain West Conference, which include providing competition in an inclusive and supportive environment.”

“The University intends to move forward with the match as scheduled, and the players may choose not to participate in the match on the day of the contest,” the statement concluded. “No players will be subject to any team disciplinary action for their decision not to participate in the match.”

We have not been told how many of the 17 members of the UN-R team voted to forfeit the match, simply that a majority did, which means at least nine of the players. Volleyball matches are conducted with six players on the court, meaning that, if there were as few as 11 players choosing to forfeit, Nevada-Reno could still field the team. But if twelve voted for the BOYcott, and stick to their guns, Nevada-Reno would enter the match one player short, unless they recruited walk-ons.

I have mockingly suggested that the men’s volleyball players — and at UN-R, men’s volleyball is a club sport, not a varsity team — all claim that they identify as women for that night, and show up to play the match.

One thing is certain: the media will be there in force for the scheduled SJSU-UNR match, and if the players hold strong to their positions — and I will bet euros against eclairs[1]My version of dollars against doughnuts. I suppose pounds vs pretzels would also work. I had to buy a $2.50 item a couple of days ago, and it had a discount for cash, but all I had in my wallet were … Continue reading that the UN-R administration are lobbying the players hard to play the game — it will make great television.

It’s a shame that real women have to sacrifice their games to protest men males trying to horn in on their sports, but that’s apparently what it takes. If so many of the ‘transgendered’ weren’t just absolute [insert plural slang term for the anus here] about things, this wouldn’t be necessary, and Brayden Fleming is an [insert slang term for the anus here].

References

References
1 My version of dollars against doughnuts. I suppose pounds vs pretzels would also work.

I had to buy a $2.50 item a couple of days ago, and it had a discount for cash, but all I had in my wallet were two 5€ notes.

That this has led to fraud is no surprise at all!

My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, has an article this Friday morning on the Biden Administration prosecuting a major ‘carbon offset’ sales company for fraud:

C-Quest Capital LLC Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Newcombe, who stepped down as CEO in February, was indicted Wednesday in New York on wire fraud and commodities fraud charges. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the most serious charges.

C-Quest develops emission-reduction projects to earn carbon credits that can then be sold to companies or other entities that wish to offset their own emissions. Newcombe, a onetime Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managing director and World Bank official, founded C-Quest in 2008.

You can read the rest on Mr Teach’s fine site.

But this one speaks to me, due to my experience. It was 2003, and carbon offset salesmen came and made a presentation to the concrete company at which I worked. Ready-mixed concrete producers use pozzolans, materials which are not cementitious alone but when mixed with Portland cement during the production of concrete utilize the excess calcium hydroxide liberated to become cementitious. We use them because they are less expensive than cement. The two most frequently used are flyash, which is harvested from the ignition byproducts of burning coal in power plants, and ground granulated blast furnace slag, the material left over from the smelting of iron ore.

The manufacture of Portland cement is a major carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter, so by the partial substitution of flyash, ready-mix companies reduce their carbon footprint. The salesmen told us that we could gain carbon credits every time we used flyash instead of cement, and that we could sell those carbon credits to other companies, to make it look like they were doing something to help fight global warming climate change, but, since it wouldn’t have changed how we did business since we were already using flyash — other than requiring some bookkeeping — it wouldn’t have reduced CO2 emissions at all! It was simply a way to take money, taking it from one CO2 emitter and giving it to a company which emitted less CO2; virtue signaling for the first, without having to actually spend significantly more money to reduce their emissions, and extra money for us, for doing what was already in our own economic interest.

Is anyone really surprised that fraud would be involved? When it comes to global warming climate change, the scammers and fraudsters will always be buzzing around.

John Kerry lets us know that the Democrats have not given up on the idea of regulating speech

My daily diary informed me that September 30th is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and my immediate thought was: whose truth?

John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, Secretary of State during the last half of the Obama Administration, and recently President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, said:

“But, look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said.

“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change,” he added, while acknowledging that different people have other visions for change.

It was 2004, and CBS News, certainly one of our traditional media sources, tried to torpedo the younger President Bush’s re-election campaign, and if it weren’t for two blogs, Powerline and Little Green Footballs — the latter of which has gone off the deep end whacko — spotting that the documents used to buttress the story were forged, and were able to publish that on the internet, it is at least possible that Mr Bush would have lost the election.

Thus, you can see why Mr Kerry doesn’t really like Freedom of Speech, at least not the kind of speech which doesn’t support Democrats.

It’s not just the 80-year-old Mr Kerry. President Biden wanted to set up a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, to be run by the highly partisan Nina Jankowicz, but that effort was first paused and then dropped due to the fiery reaction it received. Naturally, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz waxed wroth!

Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.

Those familiar with the board’s inner workings, including DHS employees and Capitol Hill staffers, along with experts on disinformation, say Jankowicz was set up to fail by an administration that was unsure of its messaging and unprepared to counteract a coordinated online campaign against her.

The lovely Miss Lorenz told us everything we needed to know about how Miss Jankowicz was expected to run her Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board: she expected it to block “far-right influencers” and “the “right-wing Internet apparatus.” The left were aghast when the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter — sorry, I absolutely refuse to call it 𝕏 — because Mr Musk wants it to be a free speech site, not one which censors some — mostly conservative — arguments.

Mr Kerry’s comments at the World Economic Forum, that private jet set gathering of the hoitiest and the toitiest in Davos, Switzerland to talk about Other People not being able to use fossil fuels, tell us one thing: today’s Democrats have not given up on the idea that they can somehow circumvent the First Amendment and regulate people’s speech. They are so invested in telling people what they want them to hear, and not wanting them to hear anything else, that they actually do thing that regulation of speech, to control ‘disinformation,’ of course, is actually the freedom of speech. And if Kamala Harris Emhoff wins in November, we’ll simply see further efforts to regulate speech.