A Rant on the Biden Economy

December 14th, 2021

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.

Inflation is running at the fastest pace on record, and Biden Administration cronies are busy trying to gaslight the American people by claiming it doesn’t exist or is “transitory” or not that bad for poor people.

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 Is Always Wrong: Inflation Edition

December 13th, 2021

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, one recurring theme is that Nobel-prize winning leftwing economist and pundit Paul Krugman is always wrong. Back in the day, Larry Kudlow made a career pointing out Krugman’s errors, and you may remember such Krugman howlers as “the Internet is no more important than a fax machine” and “markets will never recover from Trump.”

Lately he’s been in the news for dismissing the idea that inflation is a problem.

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.

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.

Yes, I’m sure that will fool people…

Why Does CNN Exist?

December 12th, 2021

In wake of the news that a CNN producer was arrested for raping children as young as nine years old, I have to ask: Why does CNN even exist in 2021?

They’ve been below the 1 million viewer threshold for some time. Fox News had 71 of the top 100 most viewed cable shows. CNN had zero.

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.

You know who else thinks CNN has big problems? New CNN owner John Malone.

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…

A Triple Shot of Joe Rogan

December 11th, 2021

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.

“This is so stupid it hurts my feelings.”

Next up: Just how much Bill Gates has spent on influencing media.

(Earlier this week.)

Finally, how Trump broke the media’s brain.

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.

LinkSwarm for December 10, 2021

December 10th, 2021

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.)

Now on to the LinkSwarm!

  • Inflation hits 39 year high. Unexpectedly!
  • The Biden Administration is functionally pro-China.

    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.

    Why, it’s almost like his son is on China’s payroll

  • Another day, another Washington Post hitpiece against Kamala Harris.

    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.

  • Another redpilled liberal abandons the Democratic Party.

    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.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Chinese real estate giant Evergrande has officially defaulted.

    “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.)
  • Liberal elites can deride “replacement theory” all the want, but it sure seems to be a major concern in European nations.

    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.

  • Speaking of refugees: Is “Kurdistan” in trouble? Lots of the refugees showing up on the Polish/Belarus border are Kurdish. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Don’t look now, but Twitter just suspended the account tracking the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
  • “Tesla Officially Moves Headquarters From California to Texas.”
  • 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.)
  • Actual Hispanics hate the social justice neologism “Latinx.”

    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.

  • Promoting FedStock, life imitates The Matrix.
  • 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.”
  • “Jussie Smollett Found Guilty of Staging Hoax Hate Crime.” Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end for the lucrative Hate Crime Hoax industry. (Previously.)
  • Heh:

  • 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.
  • More on that AWS outage.

    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.

    This is why I don’t run “smart anything” or IoT devices in my house. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Let’s Go Brandon boat wins boat parade, until award is cancelled due to liberal tears.
  • Boom:

  • Boom 2:

  • “Unemployment Rate Among Cuomo Brothers Rises To 100%.”
  • Those are some epic zoomies.

  • Faster, Blue Cities! Kill! Kill!

    December 9th, 2021

    Dwight sent over this New York Post piece on how a dozen blue-led cities have already set all-time murder records.

    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.

    I covered Austin’s record murder rate here.

    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.

    Stephen Kruiser has additional thoughts.

    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.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    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.

    Just Who Is Bankrolling The Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation?

    December 8th, 2021

    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.)

    But then I got interested in just who was behind the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation.

    The news isn’t encouraging.

    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.

    Next up: Former Democratic State Senator Leticia Van De Putte, who you may remember getting slaughtered as Wendy Davis’ running mate.

    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.

    Then there’s Dr. Mark Jones, Ph.D., the Rice academic who doesn’t appear to be Hispanic, but does appear to study “Latino electoral participation and representation in Texas.”

    But a bigger question: Who is underwriting the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation?

    But look here: They received $399,970 from none other than The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who are famous for supporting a grab-bag of leftwing globalist ideas:

    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.

    They also received a grant from the Meadows Foundation. Just what policies do they support?

  • Sustainable and efficient energy programs
  • 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…

    De Blasio Imposes New Vaccine Mandate And New Yorkers Scream “Enough!”

    December 7th, 2021

    On his way out the door, uniformly loathed New York City Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced one final kick in the balls to the city’s struggling small business owners by ordering them to enforce a vaccine mandate on private businesses.

    Effective December 27 and applying to 184,000 businesses, the mandate requires that all workers in private companies in the city present proof of vaccination as a condition of employment.

    “We’re going to announce a first-in-the-nation measure,” de Blasio said. “Our health commissioner will announce the vaccine mandate for private sector employers across the board. All private-sector employers in New York City will be covered by this vaccine mandate.”

    After imposing a vaccine mandate for those who patronize leisure businesses and certain indoor venues such as restaurants and movie theaters a few months ago, de Blasio expanded that order Monday to include children aged five to eleven, a demographic recently approved to receive the shot. That “Key to NYC” program, under which customers only had to verify that they had one dose, has been updated to a two-dose requirement.

    The mayor said additional guidance regarding enforcement and compliance will be issued on December 15.

    One wonders what constitutional authority de Blasio thinks makes him God-Emperor of New York City.

    Most businesses are already not complying with the existing mandates, and people are announcing they won’t comply with this one:

    Here’s Louis Rossmann announcing he won’t comply:

    He also said that one of his employees came down with a horrible case of myocarditis and a mild heart attack after the second dose of the vaccine. Maybe he just got terribly unlucky, or maybe myocarditis is a much more prevalent side effect than we’ve been led to believe.

    Back to Rossmann:

    “That employee is then going to tell me to gargle his balls. And when he says that, that’s not going to be sexual harassment, that’s just going to be the natural response to when somebody demands that you get a medical procedure in order to keep your job.”

    “The other reason I am against these mandates [is] because they create culture wars that are detrimental to actually getting people vaccinated and caring about public health.”

    Correct. This would suggest that vaccine mandates are no longer about public health (of they ever were).

    “This is going to create more anti-vaxxers than that would have ever existed otherwise.”

    Correct. Maybe that’s the intent. Or more likely, the intent is to impose compliance to government mandates for the sake of imposing compliance to government mandates. To better prepare the population for the next mandatory compliance measure coming down the pike that our elite ruling class will feel free to ignore.

    Every. Knee. Must. Bend.

    “It’s one of those things where I genuinely believe that it might just be the kick in the ass necessary to actually get people here to consider alternatives to being in New York City as a business.”

    Rossmann is the sort of moderate that’s being redpilled by Democratic politicians’ relentless drive for greater regulation. (To say nothing of their manifest incompetence and the baleful effects of their soft on crime policies.)

    With Biden’s federal vaccine mandate already permanently blocked by the the courts, it seems unlikely de Blasio’s mandate would pass constitutional muster either. And incoming mayor Eric Adams may immediately eliminate the mandate.

    But the continued drive among so many nations worldwide to impose lockdowns and mandates in the face of evidence that they seem to have no effect on the spread of Flu Manchu, and generate widespread opposition from their citizens, indicates that something other than reasonable health policies are at work here.

    Update: De Blasio’s mandate has already been blocked.

    Crime Is Rising In America Because George Soros Wants It To Rise

    December 6th, 2021

    We’ve covered George Soros’ baleful effect on American law and order many times before, and will no doubt again. But the Daily Mail has published this handy piece about how Soros-backed DAs have led to spiraling crime rates in deep blue cities:

    Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros has bankrolled District Attorneys in America’s most crime ravaged cities, where criminals are being allowed to walk out of jail on low cash bonds or aren’t even being charged.

    Soros, the most prolific Democratic donor, is most known for giving to Presidents Clinton and Obama but he has also been pumping money into a far-left effort to overhaul the criminal justice system by giving millions to a network of woke prosecutors in Democratic races.

    Among them is Kim Foxx, the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is at its highest in nearly 30 years.

    In 2020, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Foxx in her re-election campaign. She won the race and has since offered deferred prosecutions and softball deals to criminals.

    In 2021, there were more murders in Chicago than in any other year since 1994.

    There have been more than 1,000 murders in Cook County, Foxx’s district, this year.

    Soros bolstered her re-election campaign by donating to the Illinois Justice and Public Safety PAC.

    Attorney Buta Biberaj is refusing to recuse herself from the case to remove School Board Chair Brenda Sheridan, despite what district parents say is an apparent conflict of interest.

    Fight for Schools, the parent organization that filed to remove Sheridan, has now also filed a petition to remove Biberaj – who received a $861,039 contribution from the George Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC during her 2019 election – from the case.

    Ian Prior, executive director of the group, claimed Biberaj was ‘very involved in two of the very serious incidents’ that were catalysts for the push for Sheridan’s recall.

    He said Loudoun County residents need to know the case will be handled fairly and that Biberaj’s involvement makes that nearly impossible.

    ‘It is necessary to have faith that the prosecutor in this removal proceeding has no actual or perceived conflicts, that she will go where the evidence takes her, and litigate this case with appropriate prosecutorial zeal,’ Prior told Fox News.

    ‘In this case, Commonwealth Attorney Biberaj was very involved in two of the very serious incidents that gave rise to the recall. There is simply no way that the people of Loudoun County can be confident in a fair process for the removal of Brenda Sheridan unless Ms. Biberaj either recuses herself, or is disqualified based on her conflicts of interest, and an independent prosecutor is appointed by the Court.’

    The PAC spent over $500,000 on materials to damage one of her challengers. It’s a pattern that can be seen in other parts of the country.

    He has also donated to PACs that support Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who is being widely condemned for not cracking down on shoplifters and violent criminals.

    Soros has also donated to the campaign of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

    He donated $1.7 million to Krasner’s campaign, according to The New York Post.

    Soros also donated to Super PACS that prop up Democratic prosecutors and politicians across Republican states.

    Republican pundits say he has blood on his hands now for the deaths of innocent people like those killed at the Waukesha Christmas Parade by Darrell Brooks, a career criminal who had been bonded out of jail days earlier for other crimes.

    In 2016, Soros pumped $3million into seven local district-attorney campaigns including races in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas.

    That includes Austin’s Jose Garza.

    Larry Krasner, a 60-year-old longtime civil rights and defense attorney who sued the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times, won election in 2017 against a crowded field by billing himself as the outsider candidate capable of making radical change.

    Krasner’s campaign benefitted from the largesse of controversial Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who poured an eye-popping $1,7million into the race to support the Democratic candidate’s criminal justice reform agenda.

    Under Krasner, the future years of incarceration have been cut by half, and the length of parole in probation supervision have been slashed by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA.

    Krasner, who previously defended Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia protesters as a lawyer, has clashed with the city’s top cops over his reluctance to prosecute non-violent gun and drug possession crimes, despite a surge in gun violence and rising homicide rates in the City of Brotherly Love.

    As of November 21, 2021, there have been 491 homicide victims, a 14 per cent increase from last year’s number of 436, and 283 in 2019.

    The Philadelphia Police Department and Krasner have been at loggerheads over a steep drop in convictions related to gun offenses.

    This year, police in Philadelphia have made a record number of arrests for illegal gun possession, but the suspects’ chances of getting convicted have dropped from 63 per cent in 2017 down to 49 per cent in 2021, according to an analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer published in March.

    Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw was previously quoted as saying that Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a ‘revolving door’ for repeat gun offenders since Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.

    Krasner has blamed the decrease on police submitting weaker evidence in cases, or on witnesses failing to show up in court to testify.

    The progressive Democrat DA has contended that his main focus is on convicting people who use guns to kill or hurt others, not those who are caught being in possession of the weapons.

    Krasner’s office has argued that there is little evidence that suspects accused of being in possession of guns are responsible for the uptick in gun violence.

    Compared to the previous DA term, Krasner’s has imposed 24,000 fewer years of incarceration and 102,000 fewer years of supervised probation or parole since 2018.

    We covered some of Krasner’s follies here.

    Other Soros-backed DAs include:

  • Kim Ogg (Harris County)
  • Joe Gonzalez (Bexar County)
  • Chesa Boudin (San Francisco)
  • Kim Gardner (St. Louis County)
  • Mike Schmidt (Multnomah County (Portland))
  • Rachael Rollins (Suffolk County, MA)
  • There are probably several I’ve missed. (Feel free to add them in the comments below.)

    The question remains: How does Soros benefit from raising crime rates in Democratic Party-controlled cities? What is the endgame?

    I’ve seen various theories, but I want to throw it open to readers as well. Feel free to share your thoughts and theories in the comments below.

    Bob Dole, RIP

    December 5th, 2021

    Longtime Republican fixture and 1996 Presidential nominee Bob Dole has died at age 98:

    Dole was around so long that it many ways he came to represent both the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican Party establishment.

    He served honorably in the grueling Italian campaign of World War II where he was seriously wounded.

    In 1942, Dole joined the United States Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps to fight in World War II, becoming a second lieutenant in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. In April 1945, while engaged in combat near Castel d’Aiano in the Apennine mountains southwest of Bologna, Italy, Dole was seriously wounded by a German shell, being struck in his upper back and right arm, shattering his collarbone and part of his spine. “I lay face down in the dirt,” Dole said. “I could not see or move my arms. I thought they were missing.” As Lee Sandlin describes, when fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries, all they thought they could do was to “give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an ‘M’ for ‘morphine’ on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose.”

    Dole was paralyzed from the neck down and transported to a military hospital near Kansas, expected to die. Suffering blood clots, a life-threatening infection and a fever of almost 109 degrees…

    Holy crap! I didn’t know you could even survive a fever of 109°! 22-year-old Bob Dole must have been tough as nails.

    …after large doses of penicillin were not successful, he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin, which at the time was still an experimental drug. He remained despondent, “not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever”. He was encouraged to see Hampar Kelikian, an orthopedist in Chicago who had been working with veterans returning from war. Although during their first meeting Kelikian told Dole that he would never be able to recover fully, the encounter changed Dole’s outlook on life, who years later wrote of Kelikian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, “Kelikian inspired me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it, rather than complaining what had been lost.” Dr. K, as Dole later came to affectionately call him, operated on him seven times, free of charge, and had, in Dole’s words, “an impact on my life second only to my family”.

    Dole recovered from his wounds at the Percy Jones Army Hospital. This complex of federal buildings, no longer a hospital, is now named Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in honor of three patients who became United States Senators: Dole, Philip Hart and Daniel Inouye. Dole was decorated three times, receiving two Purple Hearts for his injuries, and the Bronze Star with “V” Device for valor for his attempt to assist a downed radioman. The injuries left him with limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left arm. He minimizes the effect in public by keeping a pen in his right hand, and learned to write with his left hand. In 1947, he was medically discharged from the Army as a captain.

    Dole started his political career as a solid conservative with a great dry wit who gradually got squishier over the years. He was a fixture as Kansas Senator from 1969-1996. He was Gerald R. Ford’s running mate in 1976, and served as Republican Majority leader from 1985-87.

    He launched multiple unsuccessful Presidential campaigns, finishing way back of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and a host of others in 1980, then losing to Bush again in 1988.

    He finally won the nomination in 1996, with Jack Kemp as his running mate, when the American electorate opted to reelect draft-dodging Bill Clinton over wounded World War II hero Dole (thanks again, in no small measure, to H. Ross Perot’s third-party run). It goes without saying that he would have made a much better President than Clinton, though I wonder if the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 becomes law without a Democratic President pushing for it.

    Dole was a good Republican who simply stayed in Washington too long, where he and second wife Elizabeth Dole became one of the earliest “power couples” that have become the normal way of doing business there. Dole was widely liked and seemed to be a good sport, as this clip with Saturday Night Live‘s Norm Macdonald (who we also lost this year) shows:

    He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2017, one of only eight senators to receive it.

    Whatever you think of both Dole and Bush, the moment when the wheelchair-bound Dole is lifted to standing to properly salute the casket of his fellow veteran and former rival is deeply moving:

    Dole was important figure for a long time in American politics, and another stark reminder that World War II is passing out of living memory.