Another mandate injunction, Democrats continue their popularity freefall, China seals more dirty deals, and Turkey melts down. It’s another Friday LinkSwarm!
A federal judge in Texas has issued a preliminary injunction, stopping a new rule from the Biden administration requiring healthcare workers to receive the COVID vaccine as the case moves through the courts.
The injunction came from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo. The case was filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of the State of Texas against Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary.
The injunction was sought against a federal rule that would have required employers that receive Medicaid and Medicare funds—namely hospitals and other healthcare providers—to require their employees to receive a COVID vaccine as a condition of employment.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered that the federal government provide notice to all Medicaid and Medicare providers in Texas that the mandate “will not be implemented or enforced.”
“Healthcare facilities covered by the [Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services] Mandate have a tremendous reliance interest in Medicare and Medicaid funds. Therefore, Defendants unconstitutionally use Congress’s spending powers to ‘commandeer a State’s . . . administrative apparatus for federal purposes’ by conditioning Medicare and Medicaid funds on state surveyor compliance with the mandate,” wrote Kacsmaryk. “As a result, not only would the CMS Mandate prohibit Plaintiffs from enforcing its duly enacted COVID-19 vaccination regulations, but it would likely force Plaintiffs to administer a federal mandate that has a dubious statutory basis.”
“It is a ‘gun to the head’ and an unconstitutional use of Congress’s spending powers to compel Plaintiffs through ‘financial inducement’ to forgo exercising their police powers to enforce a federal statute.”
Democrat support from independent voters has fallen near the crucial 40% line, while almost half of all independent voters tell Gallup that they’re leaning Republican.
“If you’re a Democrat and you’re not terrified,” says The Dispatch’s Avi Woolf, “you should be.”
Well, I’m neither a Democrat nor terrified, but I am conservative and — at least for now — quite giddy.
Gallup recently updated its long-term party affiliation poll, which asks American voters one or two simple questions:
In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?
(If they ID as independents) As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?
Currently, 31% say they’re Republicans, up slightly from the usual mid-20s to 30%. 41% told Gallup that they’re independent voters, in line with the average swing. Only 27% self-ID as Democrats, which is down from the more typical 29-32%.
As recently as May, Democrats were at 32% and the GOP at a dismal 25%.
But that’s before Presidentish Joe Biden had had a chance to do much other than send out FREE! MONEY! (handouts that helped cause our present inflation) and smile for the glowing press coverage. Since then, important parts of his agenda have taken hold and the malign incompetence of his cabinet has been fully revealed.
Apparently, Americans don’t think much of either.
But it’s the second question that should have Washington Democrats changing their shorts.
Indies, asked whether they lean towards the Democrats or the GOP, broke for the GOP 47% to 41%.
At this time in Barack Obama’s first term, the breakdown was a much more Dem-friendly 25R/41I/32D. And the Indy swing was exactly reversed, 41R/47D.
Yet the Democrats still lost a whopping 63 seats in the House and seven more in the Senate in the following midterm election.
Obama enjoyed immensely more personal popularity than Biden does — I know, I don’t get it, either — but couldn’t stop a GOP tsunami when his agenda proved unpopular.
Biden has both an unpopular agenda and a high unfavorable rating draped around his neck like a lead life preserver. And now voters are leaving his party in droves.
The woke are coming for all that sweet, sweet Medicare money.
Buried in the Department of Health and Human Services’s fiscal planning for next year is a proposal to establish bonuses for physicians who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.”
“The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” the HHS writes . “The plan should also identify ways in which issues and gaps identified in the review can be addressed and should include target goals and milestones for addressing prioritized issues and gaps. This may also include an assessment and drafting of an organization’s plan to prevent and address racism and/or improve language access and accessibility to ensure services are accessible and understandable for those seeking care.”
I’m sure this will go over great with Medicare patients. “Mam, I can’t check on your osteoporosis until you check your privilege!” (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)
After Democrats abandoned trying to pass Biden’s giant leftwing “Build Back Better” porkfest this year, is the bill actually dead forever? South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham thinks so.
The South Carolina Republican said that the Congressional Budget Office score, which found the $1.75 trillion bill would add $3 trillion to the deficit, is what led to its demise.
‘I think Build Back Better is dead forever and let me tell you why: Because Joe Manchin has said he’s not going to vote for a bill that will add to the deficit,’ he said on Fox News’ Hannity Wednesday night.
‘Well, if you do away with the budget gimmicks, Build Back Better, according to the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] adds $3 trillion to the deficit.’
‘This is b******t. You’re b******t,’ the West Virginia senator yelled at Arthur Delaney, a reporter for HuffPost Politics, who asked him about reports that the child tax credit has become a major sticking point in his talks with the White House.
‘I’m done, I’m done,’ Manchin fumed as the questions continued.
‘Guys, I’m not negotiating with any of you all. You can ask all the questions you want. Guys, let me go,’ he told the press as he walked through the basement of the Capitol, muttering ‘God almighty’ as he walked away.
What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams, and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and former President Donald Trump “coups.”
To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.
They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.
They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.
They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.
They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.
They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.
They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama Administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.
They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”
They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64% of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.
Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.
And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.
What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?
It is quite simple. The left expects to lose power over the next two years—both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.
After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency – with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment and professional sports – the left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.
The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.
Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.
All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.
Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.
President Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50% and 57%—in Trump’s own former underwater territory.
Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.
In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.
After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the left gains power and administers it.
Hey, remember all the way back to two weeks ago when I said that Turkey’s collapsing currency was something we should keep an eye on? Well, guess what? “Turkey Halts All Stock Trading As Currency Disintegrates, Central Bank Powerless To Halt Collapse.” ZeroHedge suggests that the collapse is engineered to disguise how much graft Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cronies have stolen from the country.
The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear.
A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.
Citing both interviews and direct access to internal Apple documents about repeated visits by Cook to China in the mid-2010s, the report describes a $275 billion deal whereby Apple committed to investing heavily in technology infrastructure and training in the country.
The non-binding five-year deal was signed by Cook during a 2016 visit, and it was made partially to mitigate or prevent regulatory action by the Chinese government that would have had significant negative effects on Apple’s operations and business in the country.
The Information details the nature of the Chinese government priorities included in the 1,250-word deal:
They included a pledge to help Chinese manufacturers develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and “support the training of high-quality Chinese talents.”
In addition, Apple promised to use more components from Chinese suppliers in its devices, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate on technology with Chinese universities and directly invest in Chinese tech companies… Apple promised to invest “many billions of dollars more” than what the company was already spending annually in China. Some of that money would go toward building new retail stores, research and development centers and renewable energy projects, the agreement said.
“Disgrace: Biden abandoned over 60,000 Afghan interpreters, support personnel — along with 14,000 Americans.”
“Trump’s Social Media Platform Gets $1 Billion Investment Boost, Dems Get Nervous.” It will be interesting to see how quickly TRUTH Social can get off the ground.
In yesterday’s post, I forgot to link to these Log4J memes. Enjoy!
Why New York City lags the rest of the nation in unemployment. Thank lockdowns, shutdowns, and insane government. “The economy is not a light switch. The supply chain is not a light switch.” The money quote “New York City is just not that amazing!”
Popular Mexican singer Vincente Fernandez died, and the woke couldn’t wait to crap on his grave:
If you had to tell the story of why Hispanics are abandoning the Democrats in droves using a single image, it would look something like this.
Did you know that an Israeli airstrike hit a Syrian port last week? Did you see anything about that in the news? Seems like the sort of thing the media would cover before they decided that a bunch of lunatics shouting at J.K. Rowling is more important.
Texas House Speaker Dade Phalen attends fundraiser for quorum-busting Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley (including State Reps. Terry Canales, Sergio Munoz Jr., Oscar Longoria, Armando Martinez, and Bobby Guerra, and State Sen. Chuy Hinojosa) while skipping a Republican event a mile away. Remind me again why Phalen is speaker?
“Pasadena Mechanic Sues City Over Parking Space Regulation Prohibiting His Business from Operating.”
There’s nothing this Austin City Council can’t seem to ruin, including the Trail of Lights.
Speaking of science experiments: What happens when you hit a gong with a baseball traveling at Mach 1.5? And you know there’s super-slow motion involved…
Whoa:
A Hutchinson, KS business just West of the Airport destroyed during 80+ mph gusts around 4:30pm.#kswxpic.twitter.com/Yd6ul9EeBo
If you work outside of a tech company, chances are you’ve spent this week primarily concerned with getting ready for Christmas. If you work inside a tech company, there’s a significant chance your company spent much of this week patching a critical vulnerability in an open source Java logging library called Log4J.
It’s a vulnerability that was discovered in a piece of free, open source software called log4j. This software is used by thousands of websites and applications, to perform mundane functions most people don’t think about, such as logging information for use by that website’s developers, for debugging and other purposes.
Every web application needs functionality like this, and as a result, the use of log4j is ubiquitous worldwide. Unfortunately, it turns out log4j has a previously undiscovered security vulnerability where data sent to it through that website — if it contains a special sequence of characters — results in log4j automatically fetching additional software from an external website and running it. If a cyberattacker exploits this, they can make the server that is running log4j run any software they want — including software that can completely take over that server. This is known as a Remote Code Execution (RCE) attack.
To use a technical phrase, this is Really Bad.
The net result is that, left unaddressed, cyberattackers right now can completely take over thousands of websites and online applications, allowing them to steal money, data, and access. The security community has been completely focused on this vulnerability for the past two days, and updating servers running log4j as quickly as possible to protect against this vulnerability.
The good news is that mitigations are relatively easy to implement. The bad news is that left unmitigated, the vulnerability is extremely easy to exploit. iCloud, Minecraft, Baidu, and many other sites have been confirmed to be vulnerable so far, and you’ll likely hear more about many other sites being vulnerable in the coming days.
And those companies are just the tip of the iceberg. LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) are used as the technological underpinnings for a wide variety of web applications of all sizes. (It’s not universal, as NGINX has taken over as a market leader from Apache, and there are still a few all-Microsoft houses that use IIS, and neither of them have the vulnerability.)
Open Source has been a revolutionary invention because it provides rapid development by armies of distributed developers, and Linus’s Law states that “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” But there are tens of thousands of Open Source components out there running critical infrastructure that haven’t had nearly as many eyes on the code as the Linux kernel. It’s simply the nature of the beast. XKCD had a cartoon for this occasion:
Internet applications gain usefulness from widespread adoption and the number of other components they tie into and support. You know what creates new vulnerabilities? A larger user base and the number of other components they tie into and support, which creates more attack surfaces for malicious actors to exploit.
The flaw isn’t the fault of Random Guy in Nebraska, the fault is the company adopting software that they can’t possibly test for all the use-cases they’re going to use it for. Surprise! Just about every high tech company in the world is in the same boat. Pretty much everyone uses a wide panoply of open source tools for their Internet applications, and no one can test all the permutations of how each component might be put to use.
You can’t eliminate the risk, you can only minimize and mitigate it. You can use containerization strategies (Docker, Kubernetes, Container D, etc.) to minimize attack surfaces and limit contagion. You can run all your code through security scanning tools on your CI/CD platform of choice. You can do constant testing and keep rolling backups of everything to limit risk and speed recovery. (You can also train your employees not to click on random email links without verifying the sender is who they say they are, and not to give any any account information or passwords over the phone, and train them enough so that the lessons stick, even though phising and human engineering weren’t factors in the Log4J vulnerability.)
But there still a good chance that the platform you’re using today is different than the platform you’ll be using ten years from now, and you’ll have to go through the same learning lessons discovering new vulnerabilities for the new platform all over again.
Castles made of sand all fall into the sea eventually…
Few political falls have been so swift and complete as that of former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. In 2020, Cuomo was being talked up as an emergency replacement for Sundown Joe Biden on the presidential ticket despite having forced Flu Manchu patients into nursing homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and signed a $5.1 million book deal to talk up the awesomeness of all his lockdowns and granny killing.
Here at the burnt-end of 2021, Andrew Cuomo is not only disgraced and out of office over sexual abuse allegations, his brother Fredo has been purged from CNN, ostensibly over his own sex abuse scandal. Now ex-Governor Cuomo has been ordered to turn that sweet $5.1 million over to New York State.
Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been ordered by the state’s ethics board to forfeit $5.1 million in profits next month from the memoir he published over the pandemic.
In a near unanimous decision, a twelve to one vote, the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics passed a resolution demanding that Cuomo return his earnings from the book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This comes a month after the panel rescinded its prior approval giving the now disgraced governor permission to keep the book side hustle while he was still serving as governor of New York, confronting multiple scandals simultaneously.
Over the summer and into the fall, the New York attorney general’s office launched a probe into Cuomo’s alleged abuse of state resources, including staff members, to draft and promote his book. During that criminal investigation, Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed the ethics panel for information related to the book deal. The JCOPE then reversed its approval for Cuomo’s to collect income from the book deal, paving the road for fines to be potentially imposed or profits to be recalled.
According to the resolution, created by Republican commissioner David McNamara, the former governor “lacked the legal authority to engage in outside activity and receive compensation in regard to the book” since the panel rescinded its approval.
While I had no intention of making this Louis Rossmann Week, he has such a wonderful plate of profane schadenfreude over this turn of evens that I’m embedding it here.
How unpopular is Cuomo? Even former Gambino Family underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano said Cuomo’s granny-killing was beyond the pale. “I don’t give a f— who tells me to do that, whether it’s [former President] Trump, the president, the vice president, you, him, I would never do it…And I’m a badass. I’d never do it.”
How bad do you have to suck to have a guy involved in 19 murders to think you’re scum?
Speaking of organized crime figures, Cuomo has clearly pissed off somebody deep in the Democratic Party power structure. I am very far indeed from the center of the New York Democratic Party, but there’s obviously something weird going on there. Having Letitia James take out Cuomo, only to drop out of the race to be his successor suggests someone beyond the public players made that call. Add that to the perfect table-run required to get Biden the nomination in 2020, the continued screwing of the Bernie Brigades, and the inexplicable rise of Pete Buttigieg, and it becomes very obvious that people very far indeed from the public figureheads of the Democratic Party are calling the shots from the shadows.
Not that Cuomo didn’t have it coming. He did. He’s a scummy asshole. But he was just as big a scummy asshole in 2020, and the Democratic Machine pulled out all the stops propping him up as some sort of messianic paragon of COVID-fighting virtue. Now the same people have done a 180° and plunged the knives into him.
I left a good bit of these as a comment on a Louis Rossmann video, and then decided not to let a good rant go to waste. The topic was whether inflation would continue to rise, and whether the economy would get better or not and why.
The economy won’t get better in the near term because the people at the top of the Biden Administration don’t seem care if the economy gets better.
The thing the Biden Administration is most concerned with is Social Justice garbage that the rest of America is actively hostile to.
$5 a gallon gas? They don’t care. If they cared, they wouldn’t have killed Keystone. They want oil prices high so they can force conversion to the Green New Deal schemes that they seem to have numerous investments in (see, for example, John Kerry’s investment in Hillhouse China Value Fund).
Milk increase by 40% or 50%? They don’t care. Few of them have children, and an additional $20, $50, or $100 a week for basic necessities has no effect on their lifestyle.
The thing the Biden Administration seems to deeply care about is graft, fraud, social justice, transexualism, pronouns, and protecting the inroads Critical Race Theory has made into America’s educational system. Victimhood Identity Politics, AKA wokeism, AKA Critical Race Theory, AKA “Sex as Social Construct” are all part and parcel of the “Successor Ideology” that is the new religion of America’s leftwing elites. They regard fighting American parents who oppose CRT as much bigger political priority than opposing Communist China.
That, and letting in millions of illegal aliens to provide new Democratic Party voters via amnesty down the line, and imposing vaccine mandates on an already reeling economy.
Trump wasn’t perfect. He didn’t restrain government spending and took too long to wake up to the threats posed by CRT etc. to the republic. But he did care deeply about America having robust and growing economy with low unemployment, and set about implementing polices (selective deregulation, renegotiating trade agreements, controlling illegal immigration to increase American wages) to help grow the economy, despite being hampered by getting “jammed at the line” by the Russiagate hoax.
His successors in the White House seem to want to undo every Trump policy that helped grow the economy simply because they were Trump policies. They’ve made everything worse.
Yes, oil prices were always going to rebound from the 2020’s misguided lockdowns. But the Democratic Party’s active hostile to American oil production (cancelling Keystone, forbidding drilling) has made things worse.
Yes, the Fed printing money is a huge problem. But it’s a much bigger problem now that Democrats have weakened the country by undoing Trump reforms and we’re no longer importing deflation from China. We should audit the Fed (at the very least). But clearly that will not be done under the current Administration.
How do we get out of the current jam? We could balance the budget, stop spending money we don’t have, and audit spending programs to see exactly where that money went. (Remember how Bill De Blasio’ wife just happened to “lose” $850 million of taxpayer money?) None of that is going to happen under a Biden Administration.
And the inflation is not just a Fed problem, it’s a global problem, with just about every Western nation running budget deficits and encouraging “quantitative easing” by their respective central banking authorities.
This is turning into a long rant with many topics that require a great deal of explanation and research to unpack. But the upshot is that one big reason that our economy is lousy is that current Administration doesn’t care that our economy is lousy, because they’re focused on other goals (mostly antithetical to the interests of average working Americans), and because actually fixing the economy offers them no opportunities to get their beaks wet.
And they won’t address the real causes of of current supply chain issues (union featherbedding rules at California ports) because that would mean forcing some Democrats to stop getting their beaks wet.
And we can’t have that.
Trump was not perfect, and criticize his flaws all you want. But I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I would gladly put up with an endless stream of mean tweets if it means we could have the late 2019 Trump economy back.
Paul Krugman, May 7: “[Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen and I believe that the Fed can contain any inflationary risks.”
Paul Krugman, June 21: “For those paying closer attention to the flow of new information, inflation panic is, you know, so last week.”
Paul Krugman, July 23: “Overheating is still possible, and the Fed should keep its eye on that possibility. But the big numbers aren’t as scary as they seem.”
Paul Krugman, August 12: “Anxiety about the inflationary impact of public investment just doesn’t make sense if you work through the numbers.”
Paul Krugman, September 10: “Companies aren’t acting as if they expect lots of future inflation, where they can hike wages without losing competitive advantage. They’re acting, instead, as if they see current inflation as a blip.”
Paul Krugman, November 11: “So yes, that was an ugly inflation report, and we hope that future reports will look better. But people making knee-jerk comparisons with the 1970s and screaming about stagflation are looking at the wrong history. When you look at the right history, it tells you not to panic.”
The New York Times, this morning:
Inflation jumped to the highest level in nearly 40 years, fresh data released on Friday showed, as supply chain disruptions, rapid consumer demand and rising housing costs combined to fuel the strongest inflationary burst in a generation (emphasis added).
The rising costs spell trouble for officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House, who are trying to calibrate policy at a moment when the labor market has yet to completely heal from the pandemic, but the risk that price increases could become more lasting is increasing.
The Consumer Price Index climbed by 6.8 percent in the year through November, the data showed, the fastest pace since 1982.
One of the reasons inflation is such a serious problem right now is that we have an administration, a Fed, and a lot of ideologically or politically aligned economic elites who are wedded to the belief that inflation is not a serious problem.
Proving that some of the most basic facts of economic life for ordinary people elude some Nobel-prize winning economists, Krugman dismisses the idea that inflation hurts the poor worse than the rich.
Inflation redistributes from creditors to debtors — not exactly a burden on the bottom half of the income distribution 2/
Hey, Mr. Super-Genius: A family of four just getting by on $1,500 is hurt a lot more when the price of milk rises by 80 cents a gallon and gasoline rises a dollar a gallon.
Here Louis Rossmann (who does something like two videos a day) expounds upon that theme:
Some of his complaints are more acute for New York City than the rest of the country, but he’s far more in touch with reality than Krugman seems to be.
So what does the Biden Administration plan to do about inflation? Easy. They’re going to redefine it away by removing commodity prices from the CPI.
Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. show led Fox’s lineup with a dominant 3,667,000 total average viewers and 651,000 average viewers in the key 25-54 demographic. Fox News noted in the release that Tucker’s Kyle Rittenhouse interview drew big ratings, helping to propel the program to the number one spot for November.
After a strong October, Fox’s The Five scored second place in the cable news ratings averaging a total of 3.51 million viewers in the month of November and 557,000 average viewers in the key 25-54 age demographic.
Sean Hannity placed third for November, averaging 3.23 million total viewers, with 541,000 average viewers in the demo.
Fox beat CNN by 294% in primetime viewers and 184% in the demo during prime time. Fox also topped MSNBC by 136% in primetime total viewers and 200% within the demo during prime time.
How many advertisers will continue ponying up ad money for less than a million viewers? (Insert your own “Depends” joke here.)
(Aside: One company that sponsors a lot of CNN and other news shows: Pfizer.)
Given how many CNN hosts slandered Kyle Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist” without proof, I would expect Rittenhouse to file (and win) a very costly slander and defamation lawsuit against them. Also, Alan Dershowitz thinks that Chris Cuomo (speaking of scumbags) could very well win his lawsuit over the remainder of his $18 million contract after his firing.
Liberal CNN needs “actual journalists,” billionaire media mogul John Malone told CNBC in an interview in which he explained there is a place for the news channel in the proposed $43 billion combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery into a new entity Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” said Malone, who is longtime chairman of Liberty Media, which is a major shareholder in Discovery and will be the controlling partner of the new media combination.
Which makes it all the more puzzling that Chris Wallace is leaving Fox to go to CNN+. Nothing says “success” quite like shedding 75% of your audience size. Granted, the move probably improves both Fox and CNN, but still amounts to shuffling deck chairs on the Lusitania.
No, retreads aren’t the answer. This situation calls for a clean sweep.
I’m not saying fire everyone.
Maybe you can keep the technical staff.
On-air talent? Gone.
Producers? Gone.
HR? Gone.
Writers? Gone.
Managers? Gone.
Executives? Gone.
Hell, the current taint on CNN is so bad that maybe you standup an entirely new studio with new talent at a different location and go on from there.
But being a modern, civilized man, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that razing the current CNN building and sowing the earth with salt should be optional…
The redpilling of Joe Rogan continues apace, and here are three video clips from his interview with independent journalist Matt Taibbi about things that just don’t add up.
First up: The obvious Fed false flag “Patriot Font” march.
One correction to Rogan and Taibbi. The bias itself isn’t new. You could start to see the outlines of media bias against Republicans in the 1980s. However, Trump Derangement Syndrome made them drop even the pretense of objectivity.
If it looks like I’ve been absent from Twitter, it’s because I received a seven day timeout merely for posting one of Twitter’s pre-loaded gifs, probably this one:
(If it’s not animated, it says “Die in a fire” at the end.)
Josh Rogin delivers an unnerving scoop in the Washington Post:
Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.
“To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”
In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
“It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”
Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office.
Snip.
Month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.
Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.
Snip.
Elsewhere, Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”
As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.
The rumors started circulating in July: Vice President Harris’s staff was wilting in a dysfunctional and frustrated office, burned out just a few months after her historic swearing-in and pondering exit strategies. A few days later, Harris hosted an all-staff party at her official residence, where most of her office bit into hamburgers and posted pictures of smiling, congenial co-workers on Twitter, pixelated counterpoints to the narrative of an office in shambles.
“Let me tell you about these burgers at the VP’s residence!!” chief Harris spokesperson Symone Sanders gushed in a tweet. “The food was good and the people were amazing.” Her official defense against reports of staff unrest was more searing. She called people who lobbed criticism behind nameless quotes “cowards” and stressed that working for a groundbreaking vice president was a difficult job, but not a dehumanizing one. “We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day,” she told one outlet. “What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club.’ ”
Five months later, Sanders is leaving the vice president’s office, the highest-profile member of an end-of-year exodus that includes communications chief Ashley Etienne and two other staffers who help shape the vice president’s public image. Sanders told The Washington Post her departure is not due to any unhappiness or dysfunction, but rather because she is ready for a break after three years of the relentless pressure that came with speaking for and advising Biden and Harris while navigating a global pandemic.
But the quartet of soon-to-be-empty desks reignited questions about why Harris churns through top-level Democratic staff, an issue that has colored her nearly 18 years in public service, including her historic but uneven first year as vice president. Now, those questions about her management extend to whether it will hamper her ability to seek and manage the presidency.
“Historic” because she checks social justice warrior diversity boxes, “uneven” because the Post will never be allowed to call it “horrible” for the same reason.
Critics scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions. People used to putting aside missteps, sacrificing sleep and enduring the occasional tirade from an irate boss say doing so under Harris can be particularly difficult, as she has struggled to make progress on her vice-presidential portfolio or measure up to the potential that has many pegging her as the future of the Democratic Party.
“One of the things we’ve said in our little text groups among each other is what is the common denominator through all this and it’s her,” said Gil Duran, a former Democratic strategist and aide to Harris who quit after five months working for her in 2013. In a recent column, he said she’s repeating “the same old destructive patterns.”
“Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have (them) pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons,” he told The Post.
The Washington Post spoke with 18 people connected to Harris for this story, including former and current staffers, West Wing officials and other supporters and critics. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid about a sensitive topic. The vice president’s office declined to address questions about Harris’s leadership style.
Her defenders say the criticism against her is often steeped in the same racism and sexism that have followed a woman who has been a first in every job she’s done over the past two decades.
“Shut up, because social justice!”
Her selection as President Biden’s vice president, they say, makes her a bigger target because many see her as the heir apparent to the oldest president in the nation’s history.
“Shut up, because social justice!”
They also say Harris faces the brunt of a double standard for women who are ambitious, powerful or simply unafraid to appear strong in public.
“Shut up, because social justice!”
Some pro-forma Harris defense snipped.
Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
For both critics and supporters, the question is not simply where Harris falls on the line between demanding and demeaning. Many worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.
Why should we remotely worry about her future ambitions when she’s obviously not even up to her current job?
Biden’s plans to relieve port crowding at LA/Long Beach haven’t worked.
Looking all the way back to Nov. 2, five weeks ago, the total number of excess dwell containers in Long Beach was down 22% as of Wednesday (the decrease is even higher, at 32%, when comparing to Oct. 28). Yet the numbers in Long Beach have plateaued more recently. Furthermore, the number of total import containers at Long Beach terminals has not decreased — it has actually slightly increased. There were 57,042 import containers at Long Beach terminals on Nov. 1 and 57,970 on Tuesday.
I embraced my people, and my people embraced me. They gave me everything I had always imagined I wanted: a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university; a professorship at NYU, complete with a roomy office overlooking Washington Square Park; book deals; columns in smart little publications; invitations to the sort of soirees where you could find yourself seated next to Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag or any number of the men and women you grew up reading and admiring. The list goes on. Life was good. I was grateful.
And then came The Turn. If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that The Turn doesn’t happen overnight, that it isn’t easily distilled into one dramatic breakdown moment, that it happens hazily and over time—first a twitch, then a few more, stretching into a gnawing discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.
You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about.
You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.
Snip.
You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.
When “the left” becomes the party of wealthy elites and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens and for the U.S. Constitution, and telling people what to do and think at every turn, then that’s the side you are on, if you are “on the left”—those are the policies and beliefs you stand for and have to defend. It doesn’t matter what good people “on the left” believed and did 60 or 70 years ago. Those people are dead now, mostly. They don’t define “the left” anymore than Abraham Lincoln defines the modern-day Republican Party or Jimi Hendrix defines Nickelback.
“The defaults of Evergrande and Kaisa move us to the second step of this China Property downturn, with systemic risk being gradually replaced by idiosyncratic risk,” said Robin Usson, credit analyst at Federated Hermes. He is of course referring to the much bigger risk that is the downturn in China’s residential – and in general property – sector, which as Goldman recently showed is the world’s largest asset and arguably the most important pillar propping up China’s entire economy. Should China’s housing market crash, all bets are off.
Smoke and mirrors all the way down…
Study: “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” (Hat tip: TPPF.)
The rising star on the right is Eric Zemmour, who, writes The New York Times, “became one of France’s best-selling authors in the past decade by writing books on the nation’s decline — fueled, he said, by the loss of traditional French and Christian values, the immigration of Muslim Africans bent on a reverse colonization of France, the rise of feminism and the loss of virility, and a ‘great replacement’ of white people.”
Zemmour is being called “the Donald Trump of France.” And he and Le Pen are now running third and second behind Macron in the polling to become the next president of France, which suggests the power of the issue on which they agree: uninvited and unwelcome Third-World migration.
“You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” said Zemmour in his announcement speech Tuesday, declaiming, “We will not be replaced.”
Neighboring Spain is gripped by the same concern. Refugees and migrants from the global south use Morocco as a base from which to breach the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.
Spain has taken to pushing the intruders back into Morocco.
Madrid has accused Rabat of using the migrants as a diplomatic weapon to extort changes in Spanish policy.
Italy, whose native-born ethnic population has been in a steady decline, patrols the Mediterranean Sea to prevent migrants from Libya from reaching its shores.
Drowning deaths are not uncommon. The Channel and the Mediterranean Sea are more formidable and unforgiving waters to cross than the Rio Grande.
Greece is attempting to keep Turkey from moving refugees and migrants from Middle East wars onto the Greek islands off Turkey’s coast.
Half a decade ago, Turkey was bought off with billions of euros to prevent the millions of Arab and Muslim refugees within its borders from crossing over into the EU.
In the recent clash between Poland and Belarus, the weapon of choice for Alexander Lukashenko was — migrants.
Brought into Belarus from the Mideast, they were moved to the Polish border, forcing Warsaw to deploy troops to keep thousands out of Poland. Lukashenko was exploiting the migrants to punish Poland and the EU for supporting sanctions on his regime.
After Europe united against him, Lukashenko moved the migrants away from the border and sent many back to Syria and countries whence they came.
In the hierarchy of European fears, the perceived threat to national identities that comes with mass migrations from the failed and failing states of the Third World appears to rank as a greater concern than the prospect of a Russian army driving toward the Rhine.
LA crime has gotten so bad that even Hollywood liberals are getting strapped. “‘Even hardcore leftist Democrats who said to me in the past, ‘I’ll never own a gun’ are calling me asking about firearms,’ said Joel Glucksman, a private security executive. “I’d say there has been an increase of 80 percent in the number of requests I’m getting this year.'” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
Judge blocks de Blasio’s private employer mandate for New York City and Louis Rossmann goes on an epic rant, including how it would disproportionately fall on minorities. “You are coming up with a policy because de Blasio is such a stupid cuntrag that it actually turns the clock back 40 or 50 years.” Also: “I don’t know who the fuck would sign up to do this job. I’d expect to disappear if I were doing this job…I would expect to end up on the bottom of the East River.”
Facebook admits that it’s “fact checks” are merely opinion.
If you parcel out your business It needs to multiple companies, but all of them rely on AWS (which had an outage Tuesday), you haven’t necessarily reduced your risk.
The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.
The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.
Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit. Irate device users tweeted their frustrations to Ring’s official account, with many complaining that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out on Twitter that there was a general Amazon Web Services outage. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down.
Others said they weren’t able to turn on their Christmas lights.
Let’s Go Brandon boat wins boat parade, until award is cancelled due to liberal tears.
Boom:
Is this a master class on avoiding Wisconsin, peddling collusion hoaxes and paying Russians to meddle in our elections, deleting e-mails, or being a sore loser? https://t.co/w96auaVbzv
At least 12 major US cities have already set historical murder records in 2021, even as three weeks remain in the year.
Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth largest city, recorded 523 murders as of Dec. 7, surpassing its formal grim milestone of 500 murders, which was set in 1990, police data showed.
The City of Brotherly Love had recorded significantly more murders in 2021 than New York City’s 443, despite having approximately six times fewer residents.
“It’s terrible to every morning get up and have to go look at the numbers and then look at the news and see the stories. It’s just crazy. It’s just crazy and this needs to stop,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, reportedly said after his city broke its own infamous benchmark.
Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; St Paul, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; Toledo, Ohio; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; Rochester, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico also had their deadliest years on record, according to ABC News.
Five of those cities topped notorious benchmarks that were set in 2020, the article said. All of them were led by Democratic mayors, as are the vast majority of US cities.
Funny how that happens.
Lots of those cities (including Philadelphia) have George Soros-backed DAs who seem intent on putting violent felons back on the street to continue terrorizing law-abiding citizens.
To the surprise of no one on the conservative side of the political aisle, the Dem-controlled cities that are run by BLM/Antifa fans have been experiencing…struggles with crime since they were gripped by the “defund the police” frenzy in 2020.
Many of these cities hurried to hit the reset button and re-fund their police forces in an effort to combat crime. Cops haven’t exactly been willing to rush back in droves to municipalities that were gleefully giving them the finger in the name of wokeness just a year ago, but at least the people in charge are admitting there’s a problem.
That stands in sharp contrast to the approach recently taken by prominent Democrats in a couple of America’s biggest crime-riddled hellholes: Chicago and Philadelphia.
Kevin has a story about Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “thinking outside the box” solution to her city’s infestation of thieves. She’s opted for victim shaming:
I’m disappointed that they’re not doing more to take safety and make it a priority. For example, we still have retailers that won’t institute plans like having security officers in their stores, making sure that they’ve got cameras that are actually operational, locking up their merchandise at night, chaining high-end bags. These purses can be something that is attracting a lot of organized retail theft units,”
“If only she hadn’t worn that dress…”
Stupid stores with your wares that attract the eyes of lawless scum! Why can’t you hire some aging, overweight security guards and stop making your mayor look bad? Ingrates!
By the way, Chicago is having its worst murder year since 1994 while Mayor Mouthfoot is playing make-believe.
Let us move on to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Thugs. Rick writes about the city’s district attorney, who wants the public to know that EVERYTHING IS FINE:
Larry Krasner, the Soros-backed District Attorney in Philadelphia, wants everyone in the city to know that he’s got things under control. Sure, there’s been a record spike in homicides, but besides that, everything in Philly is just peachy.
“We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence,” the district attorney told reporters at a Monday press conference. “It’s important that we don’t let this become mushy and bleed into the notion that there is some kind of big spike in crime. There isn’t. There is not a big spike in crime. … There is not a big spike in violent crime. Neither one of these things is true.”
Rick goes on to explain that Krasner is engaging in some political sleight of hand here. Krasner is able to say that crime isn’t spiking because he simply isn’t prosecuting criminals who would have been prosecuted in the past. Progressive DAs are almost always pro-criminal.
Oh, wait…Philly is also in the midst of a frightening increase in homicides. The city has suffered its highest body count since 1960.
So, there is no real problem as long as you ignore the dead guy on your lawn.
Crime rates will continue to spiral until Democrats become more concerned with protecting law-abiding citizens from violent felons than earning social justice brownie points, or until the citizens of blue cities finally reach their breaking points and are willing to throw the bums out.
A few weeks ago there was Texas gubernatorial poll showing Beto O’Rourke running neck and neck with Greg Abbott. I took a deeper look to see how skewed the crosstabs were, but they don’t appear to have an actual numerical breakdown of Republican vs. Democratic voters. (The MSM loves oversampling Democrats for polls.)
Start at the top: The chairman is former Republican State Rep. Jason Villalba, who for a long time was a strong contender for “Least Conservative Republican in the House.” You may remember him from such hits as I Hate Photographers and Lawful Gun Owners and Lisa Luby Ryan Retired My Ass.
Regina Montoya was chairman of the board of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF), a hard left Social justice group waging lawfare.
None of these people fill me with confidence. Some of those involved (former Rick Perry-appointed Secretary of State Hope Andrade, and Greg Abbott-appointed Secretary of State Carlos Cascos) appear to be more ostensibly Republican, but their personal political views are unclear.
Gates believes that climate change is a major threat to humanity, and has focused major Foundation attention and money to the issue. He wrote a book which is set for publication in 2021 about climate change. He supports Common Core education standards and opposed the Trump administration’s Mexico City Policy, which prohibits federal funds from supporting organizations that advocate for abortions.
Snip.
Gates also criticized the Trump administration’s withdrawal of money from the World Health Organization after the international organization used misleading Chinese government data about the COVID-19 pandemic. He and Melinda wrote in 2018 that they support same-sex relationships and self-described gender definitions. Gates has held meetings with President Donald Trump, including one in 2018 to urge the president to support greater U.S. foreign aid. He also discussed vaccines, innovation, education, and other issues with Trump in another meeting.
Gates is also supportive of the idea that Earth is overpopulated. He and Melinda responded in 2018 to the idea that by saving children’s lives in poor nations they are contributing to overpopulation. Gates’ father led a chapter of Planned Parenthood, and he has spoken well of the abortion group in addition to providing contraceptive and abortifacient funds to abortion groups internationally.
In February 2021, during an interview on “60 Minutes,” Gates told Anderson Cooper that the world should reduce its carbon emissions to zero, saying it would be “the most amazing thing mankind has ever done.” Just a month earlier, Gates joined a bidding war to buy the world’s largest private jet company, despite private jets being some of the world’s greatest carbon emitters.
More recently, Gates has been an outspoken Flu Manchu vaccine advocate. And, what do you know, two of THPF’s most recent press releases deal with vaccine policy polling.
Restoration and protection of plant and wildlife habitats
Public support for protecting environmental resources
Engagement of underrepresented populations in experiencing and protecting natural resources
Clean water and sound management strategies
Current and future climate change mitigation
In other words: Global warming, environmentalism and social justice. If I had to guess, the entire point of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation is using polling metrics to find better ways to sell Texas Hispanics on the sort of anti-conservative priorities favored by the Gates and Meadows foundations.
While the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation claims to be “nonpartisan,” the funding behind it, and the people involved, don’t inspire a lot of confidence along those lines…
