Remember the U.S. Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon, AKA the XM-5, AKA the XM-7, AKA 6.8 x 51mm? Brandon Herrera has managed to get Sig Saur to send him the prototype of the new weapon (the Sig Spear) to test, and…he has some reservations.
The caveat here is that this is not an actual 6.8 x 51mm XM-7, it’s chambered in 308 Winchester/7.62 x 51mm (two calibers that are extremely close but not exactly the same), so the ballistics and operation are likely to be slightly different. (To make matters worse, the civilian version of the round is being marketed as 277 Fury. As far as I can tell from looking at Gunbroker, 277 Fury ammunition is available now, but models of the Sig Sauer MCX Spear chambered for the round aren’t yet on the civilian market.)
Pros:
Short stroke piston doesn’t need a buffer tube, meaning that the gun can have a folding stock. “Actually pretty cool.”
Decent trigger.
“This little right side bolt release here. Kind of a fan. Feels a little flimsy, but I like the placement.”
Left side fold-out charging handle is good.
“Hand guard here offers a lot of space to mount whatever shit you want.”
Two gas settings.
Silencer works (even if not hearing-safe quality).
Likes the flat dark earth (FDE) finish. “In my opinion, it’s a pretty sweet looking gun.”
“Gun recoil impulse not bad.”
“Running it suppressed it’s not that gassy.”
Very reliable, at least over the initial 200 rounds.
The cons:
“It’s fucking heavy, dude!…Unloaded it comes in at 8.9 pounds. For reference that is one full pound, or 13% heavier, than a full-size SCAR 17, which is also a semi-automatic 308 with a 20 round magazine.”
Folding aside, the stock isn’t great and wants to slip.
“This charging handle in the back is borderline fucking unusable. It feels, really flimsy, like I feel like I’m gonna fucking break it. And it’s stiff. It is so
fucking stiff! ‘How stiff is it, Brandon?’ Joe Biden in a room full of school kids.”
Potentially the biggest combat problem: Overinsertion of the magazine. “If you put too much force on the magazine when you’re inserting it, you will actually run up past the magazine release and get the weapon jammed.” Yeah, that sounds like a huge problem, and Sig needs to get that fixed ASAP.
The spring is a bit hard to get back in.
Super expensive right now.
From the comments on the video: “The fact that he’s actually able to unironically hold up a Scar 17 as a lighter, more affordable option is just batshit insane.”
Yeah, looks like Sig needs some more work here before it’s ready to field…
The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.
“The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
“We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
“Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
“Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
“They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”
The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
“They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
“They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
“Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
“Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
“One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”
Next: Why EVs are a disaster.
“All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”
To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:
There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.
This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?
Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.
Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
“I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
“They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
“Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
“The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
“The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
“We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
“El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
“All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”
“Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
“Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.
He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:
Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.
And he’s not a fan of Crypto:
Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”
Another criminal finds out the hard way that it is unwise to try and rob people in Texas.
A customer at Ranchito Taqueria shot and killed a man who robbed the restaurant in southwest Houston late Thursday night, according to the Houston Police Department.
It happened just before 11:30 p.m. Thursday at the restaurant on S. Gessner near Bellaire Boulevard.
Bellaire at Gessner is right where working classic Hispanic Houston meets Asian Houston, with a Hispanic Fiesta supermarket, Strake Jesuit (one of Houston’s premiere private Catholic high schools), and a Chinatown all within a few blocks.
Houston police said the armed man in a mask came inside the restaurant, demanding money and wallets from customers. However, as he was leaving, one of those customers shot the suspect.
The incident was caught on surveillance video.
Houston police also released surveillance photos of the customer who shot the robber in the video. Investigators said he is wanted for questioning for his role in the shooting. He has not been identified and is not charged at this time.
Seeing as how Houston’s legal system as started getting infected with social justice, I don’t see how turning himself in for questioning would be in the shooter’s best interest.
The shooter collected the stolen money from the robber and returned it to the other patrons, police said. Then the rest of the people in the restaurant left the scene before the police arrived.
Colion Noir has a reaction video, and why he thinks it’s a righteous shoot:
“When you look up the definition of Texas in a dictionary, it literally says everyone and their mama has a gun.”
“There are over 300 million guns in this country, and 90% of them are in Texas The rest are in Florida. Why would you possibly think you can walk into a taqueria in southwest Houston, Texas and think no one in there has a gun?”
Democrats being soft on criminals, pedophiles and common sense highlights this week’s LinkSwarm.
Man, there sure seems to be a lot of funny number counting going on in Philadelphia.
Regular readers are well aware that back in July, Zero Hedge first (long before it became a running theme among so-called “macro experts”) pointed out that a gaping 1+ million job differential had opened up between the closely-watched and market-impacting, if easily gamed and manipulated, Establishment Survey and the far more accurate if volatile, Household Survey – the two core components of the monthly non-farm payrolls report.
We first described this divergence in early July, when looking at the June payrolls data, we found that the gap between the Housing and Establishment Surveys had blown out to 1.5 million starting in March when “something snapped.” We described this in “Something Snaps In The US Labor Market: Full, Part-Time Workers Plunge As Multiple Jobholders Soar.”
Since then the difference only got worse, and culminated earlier this month when the gap between the Establishment and Household surveys for the November dataset nearly doubled to a whopping 2.7 million jobs, a bifurcation which we described in “Something Is Rigged: Unexplained, Record 2.7 Million Jobs Gap Emerges In Broken Payrolls Report.”
Snip.
We bring all this up again because late on Dec 13, the Philadelphia Fed published something shocking: as part of the regional Fed’s quarterly reassessment of payrolls in the form of an “early benchmark revision of state payroll employment”, the Philly Fed confirmed what we have been saying since July, namely that US payrolls are overstated by at least 1.1 million, and likely much more!
And the correction came after the midterms! What are the odds?
The Royal Bahamas Police Force took the failed financial tech entrepreneur into custody after the U.S. filed criminal charges against him, according to a press statement. FTX, which Bankman-Fried founded, imploded in November, costing investors millions of dollars in losses. The fallen businessman has been accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to artificially prop up another one of his enterprises: a crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, which he operated simultaneously while seemingly evading financial ethics scrutiny.
Speaking of abusing children: “Former CNN Producer Pleads Guilty In Pedo Scandal. Former CNN producer John Griffin, who worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Chris Cuomo, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce a 9-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity as his Vermont ski house. This is a different CNN pedophile than Jake Tapper’s former producer, Rick Saleeby, who resigned after it emerged that he solicited sexually explicit photos of an underage girl.”
The mother of an 11-year-old rape victim is suing a George-Soros backed prosecutor in Virginia who let the boy’s rapist walk free, alleging the prosecutor’s actions violated the minor’s civil rights and made him fear for his physical safety.
Amber Reel in November filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of her son after Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) let the rapist walk. Court filings show Descano was months late in sharing necessary evidence before a September trial, dooming the case and forcing his office to enter into a lesser plea deal with the rapist the same month. Ronnie Reel, who was released on time served, had faced life in prison for forcibly sodomizing the minor. Reel is the victim’s uncle.
This is the second high-profile case in the last month where the Soros prosecutor freed a dangerous offender. In December, Descano struck a plea deal that would clear the record of a man who fired his gun into a crowded Virginia bar. Soros donated more than half a million dollars to Descano’s 2019 campaign.
A grand jury had already indicted Reel in February for sodomy and aggravated sexual battery, and the case was set for trial in September. But Descano’s office didn’t share evidence with the public defender before trial, bungling Reel’s prosecution with its “woefully, woefully missed” deadlines. The case’s presiding judge said Descano’s office did a “disservice to the victim” and was “very concerning to the court.”
Because he dodged a felony sex crime conviction, Reel won’t have to register as a sex offender and won’t be barred from holding jobs in schools or other places that would put him near children. The victim and his mother in their suit say Descano’s “deliberate indifference represents egregious conduct that is shocking to the conscience.”
Speaking of pedophile friendly Democrats: “During the hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, California [Democratic] Rep. Katie Porter asserted that the phrase “groomer” is a “lie” used to maliciously discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and make them appear to be a “threat.” “You know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow and engaged in criminal acts merely because of their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity.” Yes, if your “gender identity” is “I like to have sex with children,” then yes, you’re a pedophile, and if you tell elementary school children what sort of sex you have, then yes, you’re a groomer.
Former state Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) will be the next mayor of Austin about two decades after he left that same office in the early aughts.
He defeated state Rep. Celia Israel (D-Austin) by a slim margin after finishing second in the general election. He’ll serve as mayor for the next two years before having to seek re-election in 2024 due to redistricting.
Watson lost Travis County, the city’s largest portion, by 17 votes while winning Williamson county by 881 and Hays County by 22. During the general and runoff races, he outspent Israel by a wide margin.
The two candidates sparred over housing and homeless policy during the general election and the runoff. About one-third of the voting population turned out to vote in the runoff versus the November 8 general.
Watson will take over for Mayor Steve Adler after his self-described “disruptive” tenure marked by a lingering homelessness problem, public fallout and a declining relationship with the police department, and a cumbersome and increasingly costly light rail transit project.
The United States has always had kind of a friends and family plan that it sells military gear to, but it has always reserved the very top top top stuff for itself and the Brits. Well, in this calendar year we have already seen the first two exceptions to that policy being made. The United States is sending air-launch cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines to the Australians. And now we’re giving Tomahawks to the Japanese, giving both of these countries the ability to independently destroy China’s economic links to the wider world without any additional help from the United States. And this sudden proliferation of countries that can now bring China to their knees independently, this is arguably the biggest strategic development of the Year, even more so than the Ukraine war, because it takes what has become the world’s second largest economy and puts it completely at the mercy of the domestic politics of a third party, and now a fourth party.
Oberlin College finally pays their judgment to Gibson’s Bakery. “The $25 million verdict plus interest and attorney’s fees resulted in an almost $32 million judgment, with interest running at about $4000 per day since June 2019. In all, over $36 million was owed.” Cudos to William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection for his thorough, ongoing coverage of this story from beginning to end.
F-35B fighter crashes in the Metroplex. Fortunately the pilot safely ejected, and it appears that the airplane (which was undergoing testing for Lockheed) looks recoverable. To my untrained eye it looks like a stuck throttle.
Peru’s Congress on Wednesday voted to remove President Pedro Castillo after he attempted to dissolve the legislative body following their third attempt to remove him from office.
Lawmakers voted 101-6 with 10 abstentions to remove Castillo from office for reasons of “permanent moral incapacity.”
I love the phrase permanent moral incapacity. If it caught on here, half of our political class would be forcibly retired.
Vice President Dina Boluarte was quickly sworn in to replace Castillo. The 60-year-old lawyer took the oath of office and became the first female leader in Peru’s history.
Her swearing-in capped hours of uncertainty as both the president and Congress appeared to exercise their constitutional powers to do away with each other. She said her first order of business would be to address government corruption.
Peru President Pedro Castillo announced the dissolution of congress and called for legislative elections to draft a new constitution hours before an impeachment debate, greatly escalating a political crisis and putting the Latin American nation’s democracy under threat.
“We took the decision of establishing a government of exception toward reestablishing the rule of law and democracy,” Castillo said in a televised speech Wednesday, adding that the incoming congress will draft a new constitution within nine months. “From today and until the new congress is established, we will govern through decrees.”
“Government of exception” is an awful fancy way of saying “dictatorship.”
Castillo’s move was met with nationwide protests and outrage by the Peruvian constitutional court which called the dissolution of Congress a coup, and said that Castillo is no longer president. Meanwhile, the Congress – which apparently did not get the memo that it has been dissolved – started the Castillo impeachment session early, and will most likely vote to remove the president.
Castillo’s move was hardly unprecedented, as previous Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori famously conducted his own successful autogolpe (auto coup) to purge the Peruvian government (and judiciary) of corruption. He would then defeat the Maoist Shining Path insurgency, be elected to two more terms as President, and then flee the country and resign by fax before being indicted on his own corruption charges. (He would eventually return to serve his prison term and receive a pardon that was later annulled by a court.)
This offers us an opportunity to look at the history of Peru’s governments from the sort of deep, informed vantage point that only 15 minutes of browsing Wikipedia can provide. Even if you limit it to Post-WWII presidents, that history is not a happy one.
Manuel Prado Ugarteche: Served without much upheaval throughout pretty much the entirety of World War II and passed the office to democratically elected successor Jose Luis Bustamante y Rivero. But his second term (July 28, 1956 to July 18, 1962) ended in a coup d’état and he died in exile. Speaking of which:
After troops loyal to the government crushed the revolt, President Bustamante suspended all civil rights.
The insurrection, he declared, had been the work of the APRA Party. Under the President’s orders, government troops occupied the APRA headquarters, seized the plant of its newspaper, La Tribuna, and arrested several prominent Apristas. But for the Military Cabinet, those moves were not enough. Postwar economic problems and strife caused by strong labor unions led to a military coup on October 29, 1948, which led Gen. Manuel A. Odria to become the new President.
Bustamante went into exile, then returned. Despite that whole “suspended civil rights and crushed rival political parties” thing, “In 1960 he was elected a member of the International Court of Justice in The Hague and served as its President from 1967 to 1969.” Died in Lima.
After two years, he resigned and had one of his colleagues, Zenon Noriega, take office as a puppet president so he could run for president as a civilian. He was duly elected a month later as the only candidate.
So much democracy!
Odriua came down hard on APRA, momentarily pleasing the oligarchy and all others on the right. Like Juan Peron, he followed a populist course that won him great favor with the poor and lower classes. A thriving economy allowed him to indulge in expensive but crowd-pleasing social policies. At the same time, however, civil rights in the nation were severely restricted and corruption was rampant throughout his regime. People feared that his dictatorship would run indefinitely; they were surprised when Odria legalized opposition parties in 1956 and called fresh elections. He did not run for office. He was succeeded by a former president, Manuel Prado.
Three main candidates participated in the Peruvian presidential elections of 10 June 1962: Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, founder and leader of the APRA, future president Fernando Belaunde, and former dictator Manuel A. Odria. Haya de la Torre gained most of the votes according to the official results, one percentage point ahead of Belaúnde.
However, none of the candidates reached the margin of one-third of the votes needed to become president.[citation needed] Therefore, the final decision lay with the Peruvian Congress. Haya de la Torre and Odría formed an alliance in order to install Odria as the new president.
At 3:20 in the morning of 18 July 1962 at the Presidential Palace, one of the thirty tanks stationed outside gunned its engine and rammed through the black wrought-iron gates. Manuel Prado, the constitutional President of Peru, was thrown out of office in a coup, just ten days short of completing his six-year term.
Perez Godoy, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed the military junta formed by high-ranked members of the Peruvian Military Force: General Nicolas Lindley, commander of Peru’s army; Vice Admiral Juan Francisco Torres Matos, Admiral of the Navy; and General Pedro Vargas Prada, chief of the air force. Once in the Palace, the four-man junta administered its own swearing-into office. The soldiers then suspended all constitutional guarantees, dissolved Parliament, arrested Electoral Tribunal officials “for trial” and promised “clean and pure elections” scheduled for June 9, 1963.
Snip.
Promising a “New Peru”, Pérez Godoy pushed through a 24% increase in the budget and decreed new taxes to pay for it, including a one dollar-a-ton levy on anchovies that provoked a strike and threatened to close down the thriving fishmeal industry.
And when he refused to approve the construction of a new hospital for Vargas Prada’s Air Force and six new ships for Torres Matos’ national steamship line, the other junta members turned on him.
What a tragedy it is when there’s no honor among coup leaders! If only Shakespeare had warned us…
He was deposed by the junta’s next man in line, Army General Nicolas Lindley, who swiftly moved into the presidency on March 3. Lindley restored the schedule for democratic elections and turned over the office of president to election winner Fernando Belaúnde.
Nicolas Lindley Lopez: Served a year as dictator then stepped down for a civilian government. Served as ambassador to Spain and died in Peru.
Fernando Belaunde: Served two non-continuous terms, the first of which involved a controversial settlement with Standard Oil. Want to guess how that term ended? “Belaunde himself was removed from office by a military coup led by general Juan Velasco Alvarado.”
Juan Velasco Alvarado: Served as dictator of Peru for seven years. “He pursued a partnership with the Soviet bloc, tightening relations with Cuba and Fidel Castro and undertaking major purchases of Soviet military hardware.” Followed by nationalizing American assets, etc. “Economic difficulties such as inflation, unemployment, food shortages.” Try to contain your shock. If you’ve been reading along so far, want to guess how Alvarado left office? “On August 29, 1975, a number of prominent military commanders initiated a coup…Prime Minister Francisco Morales Bermudez was then appointed president, by unanimous decision of the new military junta.” Live by the coup, die by the coup. Already in ill health, he died in 1977. Inspired Venezuelan commie scumbag Hugo Chavez.
Politically pressured from all sides, [he] failed in enacting successful political and economic reform.
A Constituent Assembly convened by the Morales Bermudez administration was created in 1978, which replaced the 1933 Constitution enacted during Oscar R. Benavides’s presidency. After elections were held in 1980, he returned power over to the first democratically elected government after 12 years of military rule, headed by President Fernando Belaunde.
Belaunde 2:
One of his first actions as President was the return of several newspapers to their respective owners. In this way, freedom of speech once again played an important part in Peruvian politics. Gradually, he attempted to undo some of the most radical effects of the Agrarian Reform initiated by Velasco, and reversed the independent stance that the Military Government of Velasco had with the United States.
Snip. “During the next years, the economic problems left over from the military government persisted.” Followed by:
Alan Garcia, another “two non-consecutive terms” president. Was his first term a success? Not so much.
His economic policy was based on APRA’s initial anti-imperialist values with García distancing Peru from international markets, resulting in lower investment in the country. Despite his initial popularity among voters, Garcia’s term in office was marked by bouts of hyperinflation, which reached 7,649% in 1990 and had a cumulative total of 2,200,200% over the five years, which destabilized the Peruvian economy. Foreign debt under Garcia’s administration increased to $19 billion by 1989. Owing to this chronic inflation, the Peruvian currency, the sol, was replaced by the inti in February 1985 (before his presidency began), which itself was replaced by the nuevo sol (“new sun”) in July 1991, at which time the new sol had a cumulative value of one billion (1,000,000,000) old soles.
According to studies by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics and the United Nations Development Programme, around the start of his presidency, 41.6% of Peruvians lived in poverty. During his presidency, this percentage increased by 13% (to 55%) in 1991. Garcia also made an attempt to nationalise the banking and insurance industries. The International Monetary Fund and the financial community recoiled after Garcia’s administration unilaterally declared a limit on debt repayment equal to 10% of the Gross National Product, thereby isolating Peru from international financial markets.
His presidency was marked by world-record hyperinflation with the annual rate exceeding 13,000 percent per year. The administration devastated the local economy as well as all governmental institutions. Hunger, corruption, injustice, abuse of power, partisan elitism, and social unrest raised to dramatic levels spreading throughout the whole nation due to Garcia’s misdeeds and incompetence, spurring terrorism. The economic turbulence exacerbated social tensions and contributed in great part to the rise of the violent Maoist rebel movement known as the Shining Path, which launched the internal conflict in Peru and began attacking electrical towers, causing a number of blackouts in Lima. The period also saw the emergence of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).
He was so unpopular he didn’t even run in 1990, so he was succeeded by Alberto Fujimori, a surprise winner in a runoff against the free-market oriented novelist (and later Nobel Prize laureate) Mario Vargas Llosa.
Alberto Fujimori: We’ve already covered him. Disgraced and imprisoned, he’s still a strong candidate for the most effective postwar Peruvian President. After his resignation, the Presidency passed to:
Valentin Paniagua, despite being third in line for succession, because one guy had resigned and the other was too much of a Fujimori loyalest. Served for a year, formed a national unity government and pulled back on a lot of the “secret judge and jury” tribunals Fujimori had instituted, and was able to do so mainly because Fujimori was so successful at crushing Shining Path. Followed by:
His administration was characterized by the beginning of the country’s macroeconomic boom, promoting foreign investment, the signing of free trade agreements, and the implementation of various investment projects in infrastructure and human development. At the same time, Toledo suffered a governance crisis, scandals in his personal life, and allegations of corruption against his inner circle, signs that hit his popularity until he fell to 8% of popular approval.
Snip.
On 16 July 2019, Toledo was arrested in the United States for an extradition order to Peru, as reported by the Peruvian Public Ministry. On 8 August, attorney Graham Archer, requested a request for release on bail before judge Thomas Hixson. On 12 September, the judge ruled his request for reconsideration inadmissible. On 19 March 2020, he was released on bail.On 28 September 2021, a U.S. District Court approved the extradition of Toledo, ruling that evidence presented in the case against Toledo were “sufficient to sustain the charges of collusion and money laundering” under the U.S. Peru Extradition Treaty.
Followed by:
Alan Garcia 2. Did it work out better than the last time? Not really, but it started off better:
Throughout Garcia’s second term, Peru experienced a steady economy, becoming the fastest growing country in Latin America in 2008, surpassing China in terms of rising GDP. The economic success of his presidency would be acclaimed as a triumph by world leaders, and poverty was reduced from 48% to 28% nationally. In addition, Peru signed free trade agreements with the United States and China during García’s presidency, but accusations of corruption would persist throughout his term and beyond.
After leaving office: “Died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head as police officers under a prosecutor’s orders were preparing to arrest him” on corruption charges as part of the Odebrecht scandal. Next up:
Ollanta Humala: “Originally a socialist and left-wing nationalist, he is considered to have shifted towards neoliberalism and the political centre during his presidency.” How did it end? “In 2017, Humala was arrested by Peruvian authorities on corruption charges.” Next:
First impeachment
Main article: First impeachment process against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
On 15 December 2017, the Congress of the Republic initiated impeachment proceedings against Kuczynski, with the congressional opposition stating that he had lost the ″moral capacity″ to lead the country after he admitted receiving advisory fees from scandal-hit Brazilian construction company Odebrecht while he was Peru’s Minister of Economy and Finance between 2004 and 2005. Kuczynski had previously denied receiving any payments from Odebrecht, but later confessed that his company, Westfield Capital Ltd, had been receiving money from Odebrecht for advisory services, while still denying that irregularities existed in the payments.
Fujimori pardon snipped.
Second impeachment, Kenjivideos and resignation
After further scandals broke out surrounding Kuczynski, a second impeachment vote was to be held on 22 March 2018. Two days before the vote, Kuczynski stated that he would not resign and decided to face the impeachment process for a second time. The next day on 21 March 2018, a video was released of Kuczynski allies, including his lawyer and Kenji Fujimori, attempting to buy a vote against impeachment from one official.
Followed by:
Martin Vizcarra. Who was also impeached twice, and also tried to dissolve congress.
On 9 November 2020, the Peruvian Congress impeached Vizcarra a second time, after declaring him “morally incompetent”; he was removed from office.[9] The President of Congress and opposition leader, Manuel Merino, succeeded him as President of Peru the following day. Vizcarra’s impeachment incited the 2020 Peruvian protests, as many Peruvians and political analysts believed the impeachment was unsubstantiated, with several Peruvian media outlets labeling the impeachment a “coup”. Vizcarra was banned from holding public office for 10 years after allegedly jumping the line to get a COVID-19 vaccine, with an 86–0 vote in congress.
Manuel Merino. He only served six days before resigning. Followed by:
Francisco Sagasti: Managed to run a caretaker government from November 7, 2020 to July 28 2021, and carried out successful elections without being indicted, deposed or killing himself, which has to count as a success.
Castillo was noted for appointing four different governments in six months, something which had no precedent within Peruvian political history. He faced two impeachment proceedings in the Peruvian Congress, although both failed to reach the necessary votes to remove him from office.
Following the second failed impeachment vote, a series of protests across the country took place due to the rising fuel prices and instability allegedly generated by Castillo’s administration, which largely affected transportation workers. His administration was not able to find a solution to the political crisis, as it escalated in addition to mining protests as the country’s economy plummeted. Castillo ultimately left the Free Peru party in June 2022 to govern as an independent. In July 2022, a fifth inquest was launched into Castillo’s alleged corruption involvements.
Bringing us to the third impeachment and his removal from office.
It’s a rich tapestry of political dysfunction.
Well, that’s more like three hours of Wikipedia reading, but it does drive home the point that the very moment anyone takes office as President in Peru, the deck is stacked against them…
Howdy! Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! I spent six days up in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, visiting relatives and buying some 180 books, some for myself and some to deal. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
We keep hearing that it’s impossible rig government unemployment statistics, but something funny is going on.
A superficial take of today’s jobs report would note that both jobs and earnings “blew past expectations, flying in the face of Fed rate hikes”, and while that is accurate at the headline level, it couldn’t be further from the truth if one actually digs a little deeper in today’s jobs numbers.
Recall that back in August, September, and October we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were surging and the number of multiple-jobholders soared.
Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but have become downright grotesque.
Consider the following: the closely followed Establishment survey came in above expectations at 263K, above the 200K expected – a record 7th consecutive beat vs expectations – and down modestly from last month’s upward revised 284K…
… numbers which confirm that at a time when virtually every major tech company is announcing mass layoffs…
… the BLS has a single, laser-focused political agenda – not to spoil the political climate at a time when Democrats just lost control of the House as somehow both construction (+20K) and manufacturing (+14K) added jobs according to the BLS, when even ADP now reports that these two sectors combined shed more than 100,000 workers in November.
Alas, there is only so much the Department of Labor can hide under the rug because when looking at the abovementioned gap between the Household and Establishment surveys which we have been pounding the table on since the summer, it just blew out by a whopping 401K as a result of the 263K increase in the number of nonfarm payrolls (tracked by the Household survey) offset by a perplexing plunge in the number of people actually employed which tumbled by 138K (tracked by Household survey). Furthermore, as shown in the next chart, since March the number of employed workers has declined on 4 of the past 8 months, while the much more gamed nonfarm payrolls (goalseeked by the Establishment survey) have been up every single month.
What is even more perplexing, is that despite the continued rise in nonfarm payrolls, the Household survey continues to telegraph growing weakness, and as of Nov 30, the gap that opened in March has since grown to a whopping 2.7 million “workers” which may or may not exist anywhere besides the spreadsheet model of some BLS (or is that BLM) political activist.”
A non-profit bankrolled by some of the nation’s largest corporations and left-wing billionaire George Soros is conducting a racial census of House and Senate staff as part of its effort to establish a “Bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Office,” according to internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were told by the researcher that the organization’s current data indicated they “may identify as white” and asked the staffers to update if the information was incorrect.
Information collected by the group will be used in its annual report that lobbies for “structural changes on Capitol Hill that would allow for more people of color to be hired in senior positions,” a previous report from the group states. That report is made possible in part by millions of dollars in donations to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies from Apple, Google, Meta, Pfizer, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, among dozens of other large corporations and nonprofits.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ survey is part of a broader trend by left-wing organizations to pressure workplaces and governments to increase affirmative action policies. Often couched in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” those policies have received criticism for coming at the expense of competence and offering advantages based on race instead of merit.
Rush was charged with a second-degree felony, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon family violence. An emergency protection order was issued against him, and he was soon back on the streets after making a $40,000 bond, KVUE reported.
“For $4,000, you can get out, go home, watch Netflix after trying to murder your ex-girlfriend — are you kidding me?” one of the customers said.
So in addition to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possible attempted murder, our super-genius lawyer also violated section 46.03 of the Texas penal code by carrying a gun into a bar. And he bonded out. For all that Democrats blather about “gun violence,” they don’t seem top treat gun felonies with any seriousness when they actually occur. Thanks, Soros-backed DA Jose Garza!
But it turns out that Rush didn’t just go go home to watch Netflix, as he was found dead on Thursday.
In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.
His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.
In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.
Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November.
Speaking of disinformation, CNN carries out more mass layoffs, including Chris Cillizza. Let’s have a moment of silences for his careerOK that’s enough.
Legal Insurrection conducts a 2024 presidential preference poll. Not surprisingly, DeSantis comes in first and Trump second. Nikki Haley third over Ted Cruz is a mild surprise. Greg Abbott ranked dead last, tied with Liz Chaney, is a much bigger one.
The combination of pretending to transition to a green energy future combined with dependence on Russian gas and the fallout of the Russo-Ukrainian War has Germany looking at some very tough choices:
“Europeans have chosen to largely remove natural gas from their industrial space, and so we are seeing huge amounts of industrial closures across the entire industrial space.”
“Natural gas isn’t just part of their electricity system, it’s part of their petrochemical system, which is what makes their manufacturing sector possible. So in shutting all this stuff down the Europeans are choosing, maybe not consciously, but they are choosing a general de-industrialization trend for the entire continent.”
“No one is making nitrogen-based fertilizer in Europe anymore. No one is smelting aluminum anymore. A lot of the steel foundries are shutting down.”
And so far it’s a relatively mild winter in Europe. Next year will be worse.
Zeihan talks about how Germany “fudges” some of it’s green energy pledges. (In a previous video he mentioned some bit of legerdemain where they don’t count fossil fuel baseload power that spins up to take over for solar at night.) So exactly what has Germany’s much-vaunted green energy programs accomplished? Not much.
In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050.
Sure, Germany hasn’t managed to transition away from fossil fuels, but they have managed to make their energy infrastructure expensive and unreliable…
Blue cities bleed, more Democrats violating election laws, another Democratic congressional staffer exposed for carrying water for Red China, Elon Musk takes over and immediately starts cleaning house at Twitter, and more transexual lunacy. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
As polling continues to show crime is a top issue for voters, the number of homicides has skyrocketed nationwide.
In fact, homicide rates rose by an average of nearly 10% in 50 of the most populated U.S. cities between the third quarter of last year and the third quarter of this year — and are still rising — according to a new study.
WalletHub compared 50 of America’s largest cities based on per capita homicides for the third quarter (July through September) of each year since 2020, using locally published crime data to compile its findings.
According to WalletHub, these were the ten cities with the highest homicide cases per 100,000 residents from July through September:
St. Louis, Mo. (19.69)
Kansas City, Mo. (14.86)
Detroit, Mich. (13.24)
Baltimore, Md. (12.45)
New Orleans, La. (10.99)
Milwaukee, Wisc. (10.46)
Memphis, Tenn. (9.99)
Philadelphia, Pa. (9.36)
Norfolk, Va. (7.78)
Chicago, Ill. (7.71)
The top prosecutors in most of these cities are backed by progressive megadonor George Soros, a billionaire who’s spent the last several years injecting tens of millions of dollars into local district attorney races nationwide, backing candidates who support policies such as abolishing bail, defunding the police, and decriminalizing or deprioritizing certain offenses.
In St. Louis, for example, Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner is one of the first prosecutors bankrolled by Soros’ financial network of organizations and affiliates, heavily funded by these sources in 2016 and again in 2020.
Amid high homicide figures, Gardner has declined more cases and issued fewer arrest warrants than her predecessor, charging fewer felonies and prosecuting thousands of fewer cases as a result. She has also deferred prison sentences for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies as part of her reform initiatives.
Gardner has said this is part of her “platform to reduce the number of cases unnecessarily charged in order to focus on the more difficult cases for trial.”
Last year, Gardner came under fire after three murder cases under her purview were dismissed in one week due to prosecutors in her office not showing up for hearings or being unprepared.
Her campaign website boasts that she’s “made jail and prison a last resort, reserved for those who pose a true public safety risk,” while limiting “the arrest and detention of people accused of misdemeanors and low-level felonies.”
Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is another Soros-funded prosecutor.
Soros spent almost $1.7 million through the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC to help Krasner in 2017, pouring more than five times as much money into the race as Krasner himself. Four years later, Krasner received a combined $1.259 million from Soros-funded groups for his reelection.
During his tenure, Krasner has cut the future years of incarceration by half and slashed the length of parole in probation supervision by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA. He has also made a priority of not prosecuting people who are illegally in possession of guns unless they hurt or kill people.
The top prosecutors in New Orleans, Milwaukee, Norfolk, and Chicago have also been backed by Soros-linked money. Many of the others are self-described progressive prosecutors.
According to some experts, progressive prosecutors pursuing soft-on-crime policies have contributed to the spike in homicides and other violent crime.
“Prosecutors in most major cities have failed the people they serve by refusing to prosecute criminals, including those charged with violent crimes,” Tristin Kilgallon, associate professor of pre-law and history at the University of Findlay, told WalletHub. “Countless violent crimes have been committed by those who have been released back into the streets due to recent ‘bail reform’ initiatives or by prosecutors who declined to pursue charges.”
“Texas Secretary of State Finds ‘Serious Breaches’ in Harris County 2020 Election Audit. Auditors found multiple chain of custody issues and violations of state and federal law requiring maintenance of records in the state’s largest county.”
Issues found by auditors relate primarily to the county’s extralegal “drive-thru” voting initiated by then-interim County Clerk Chris Hollins.
Auditors found that for at least 14 polling locations the county does not show chain of custody for the Mobile Ballot Boxes (MBB) and that there were multiple MBBs created for some voting locations. Auditors say the MBBs from the polling locations “were not the MBBs ultimately tabulated.” They also note that they have been able to locate some missing MBBs, but have not been given an explanation as to why the originals were not tabulated. Each MBB can hold 9,999 ballots.
Another issue found by auditors is that poll book and provisional voting data provided by the county do not match the number of cast vote records on some of the devices.
Ennis also noted that after upgrading voting systems the county does not appear to have retained “any equipment or computers that provide relevant reports or alternatively, can read the MBBs” from 2020 or recover the cast vote records stored in them as required by both state and federal election codes.
Why, it’s almost like the Democrats running Harris County wanted to commit election fraud…
Speaking of election fraud, Facebook has been fined $25 million for breaking Washington State election law.
According to court documents, King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North found Meta to be in violation of Washington’s political disclosure law 822 separate times between 2019 and 2021 and issued the maximum possible fine for each instance, which totaled up to $30,000 per violation.
Meta was also ordered to “come into full compliance” with the state’s election transparency laws within the next 30 days as well as pay the attorney’s fees for the case, which Ferguson has requested be tripled for a total of $10.5 million. The final total will be decided by North at a later date.
According to The Seattle Times, the state’s election transparency laws, which have been in place since 1972, require ad sellers to “disclose the names and addresses of political buys, the targets of such ads and, the total number of viewers of each ad.” The judge found that Meta had intentionally violated the standards.
Washington Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson said “that he had “one word for Facebook’s conduct in this case – arrogance.”
He told the Times, “It intentionally disregarded Washington’s election transparency laws,” Ferguson said. “But that wasn’t enough. Facebook argued in court that those laws should be declared unconstitutional. That’s breathtaking.”
When Pennsylvania Democrats insist that a candidate who suffered a life-threatening stroke in May is recovering well and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” that candidate must look and sound fine to prove they’re telling the truth. Last night, in the lone debate in the Pennsylvania Senate race, John Fetterman looked and sounded very, very far from fine. But you can judge for yourself by watching the whole debate here.
I expected Fetterman’s debate performance to be a Rorschach test, with Democrats insisting that he was fine and hand-waving away any problems, and Republicans pointing to every verbal misstep, pause, or oddly worded answer. But by the end of the hour, there was little debate, no pun intended. John Fetterman’s ability to hear, understand, process information, and speak appears to still be severely impacted by his stroke. Perhaps the worst moment of the night came when one of the moderators asked him about a statement he made in 2018 opposing fracking, and how he could square that past stance with his current claim that he always supported fracking. After a long pause, presumably from reading the moderator’s question from the monitor, Fetterman said, “I, I, I do support fracking and . . .” and then for a moment, Fetterman’s head shook, and his mouth moved, but no words came out. Then he picked up again: “I don’t . . . I don’t. I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.” With everyone watching likely mortified and embarrassed to watch Fetterman struggle to finish the sentence, the moderator mercifully moved on to the next question.
Elon Musk took over Twitter late Thursday and fired company CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, senior legal representative Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.
Musk, the world’s richest man, acquired the social media giant through a $44 billion purchase. He reportedly had until Friday to complete the deal.
In a video tweet that went viral, Musk appeared at Twitter’s corporate offices Wednesday carrying a sink, implying that employees would need to accept that he was now in charge.
This is a good start, but all the people on the Safety and Trust Council need to be fired, and all accounts suspended or banned need to be restored.
Rishi Sunak is the new UK Prime Minister, and Nigel Farage is not impressed:
A House Democratic staffer was fired after her outreach to other congressional aides allegedly on behalf of the Chinese embassy was revealed this week, National Review has learned. After an investigation found that the staffer had acted improperly, her boss, Representative Don Beyer, swiftly removed her.
“Congressman Beyer was totally unaware of these activities prior to being contacted by the House Sergeant At Arms,” Aaron Fritschner, his deputy chief of staff, told National Review in a statement this morning. “As soon as he learned of them, he followed every directive he was given by security officials. The staffer in question is no longer employed by the office of Congressman Beyer.”
Fritschner added that Beyer, who has a hawkish record on China, was “deeply upset” upon learning about the activities of the now-former staffer, Barbara Hamlett.
Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Pinkey Carr, a Democrat, was found to exhibit such misconduct that comprise more than 100 incidents over a period of about two years.
The misconduct “encompassed repeated acts of dishonesty; the blatant and systematic disregard of due process, the law, court orders, and local rules; the disrespectful treatment of court staff and litigants; and the abuse of capias warrants and the court’s contempt power,” stated the court’s per curium opinion. “That misconduct warrants an indefinite suspension from the practice of law.”
Higher inflation, widespread corruption in the federal government, the Bank of England makes Liz Truss blink, and Muslims take exception to Dearborn Public School’s gay agenda. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees. Its investigation found that “thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.”
“Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the Journal reports. “When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.”
The federal employees weren’t even subtle about it. Per the Journal, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.”
That’s sus.
To get an understanding of how shady this behavior is, consider examples from a few specific agencies. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, the Journal found that “more than 200 senior officials… or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.”
Similar corruption plagues the Department of Defense, where, per the investigation, “officials in the office of the secretary or their family members collectively owned between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies, on average, during years the Journal examined. Some owned stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. considered blacklisting the companies.”
Sometimes there’s a major story out there you don’t have time to really pay attention to, and such is the case with the UK “mini-budget”/Bank of England story. Basically, new UK PM Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Treasury Kwasi Kwarteng went “We’re going to cut taxes despite soaring inflation” and the Bank of England (which evidently said that UK pension funds were hours from collapse last week) went “No you’re not.” Well, Truss just blinked, Kwarteng is out, and now the UK government is going to raise taxes.
Here’s a video explainer of the complexities of the Bank of England intervention in the bond market.
I’ll still trying to wrap my mind around the phrases “pension fund margin call” and “unlimited quantity” of short term repo liquidity reserves.
The Biden administration’s new technology restrictions are already causing disruptions in China as US semiconductor equipment suppliers are telling staff based in the country’s top memory chip maker to leave, according to WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter.
State-owned Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. has seen US chip semiconductor equipment companies, including KLA Corp. and Lam Research Corp., halt business activities at the facility. This includes installing new equipment to make advanced chips and overseeing highly technical chip production.
The US suppliers have paused support of already installed equipment at YMTC in recent days and temporarily halted installation of new tools, the people said. The suppliers are also temporarily pulling out their staff based at YMTC, the people said. –WSJ
It’s hard to overemphasize how badly screwed China’s chip industry is with this latest move. Semiconductor equipment not only needs regular maintenance, but extremely specialized expertise when something goes wrong and your yields crash, wizards who can look at a wafer defect chart and determine by experience what’s gone wrong with which tool. Without support and spare parts from the western semiconductor equipment giants, expect yields to start crashing in a matter of months, if not weeks, especially if Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron join the pullout.
The IRGC may be mobilizing retired servicemembers and other affiliated officers to suppress protests in Tehran on October 15.
Protesters have killed more Iranian security personnel in the current protest wave than in any previous wave in the regime’s history according to regime statistics.
Anti-regime protests occurred in at least 11 cities in seven provinces.
Social media accounts that are representing themselves as youth groups organizing and coordinating protests called for countrywide unrest on October 15.
Snip.
Social media accounts that are representing themselves as youth groups organizing and coordinating protests called for countrywide unrest on October 15. Dozens of social media accounts are presenting themselves as provincial components of a broader youth movement aimed at overthrowing the regime. The movement does not appear to have a central headquarters or hierarchy—at least on social media—and some of these groups’ rhetoric is notably disjointed from the others. These accounts claim to have a presence in multiple Iranian cities, including Tehran, Karaj, Neyshabour, Hamedan, Shiraz, and Ahvaz. Some of these accounts called for protests in Khuzestan on October 14, which did materialize in three different cities across the province on that date. Another account claimed that it had activated “sabotage groups” to destabilize the regime on October 14. The Tehran Neighborhood Youth group currently has the most followers and has posted for the longest period of time, possibly suggesting that it inspired copycat accounts based in other cities.
Some of these groups are presenting themselves as having moved from protest organization to coordinating phase one insurgency attacks.
In private, Democratic party officeholders are super racist.
But they’ll arrest parents and take their children if you fail to bow to their transexual madness. “Virginia Democrat Bill Would Criminally Prosecute Parents Who Don’t Affirm Their Kids As Transgender. Previous attempt at the bill was co-sponsored by a senator who served jail time for having sex with a teenager.”
A Virginia Democrat lawmaker says she will introduce legislation to have parents criminally prosecuted if they do not “affirm” their child as transgender. Teachers and social workers would report parents to Child Protective Services under the bill envisioned by state Delegate Elizabeth Guzman (D-Fauquier).
Guzman told WJLA that “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”
Guzman, a social worker, went public with her plans to introduce the bill a week after The Daily Wire reported that a National Association Of School Psychologists official named Amy Cannava boasted that she was working with an unnamed state delegate matching Guzman’s description to craft such legislation. “I want to see a kid in a home with food and shelter and insurance and support, but I also don’t want to lose kids to death,” Cannava said, adding that “I will not deny the fact that I have put parents in their place in my office or at school.”
Cannava is also affiliated with a group called the Pride Liberation Project that said it would pick up trans and gay teens who didn’t like their parents, and “work with other supportive adult organizations in the region to find you someone who can provide you a kind and affirming home.”
A similar bill was quietly introduced in 2020 by Guzman and four other Democrats immediately after they took control of the legislature in the 2019 elections. It redefined the term “abused or neglected child” to include one whose parent “inflicts, threatens to create or inflict, or allows to be created or inflicted upon such child a physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.”
The sole Senate sponsor of the 2020 bill was Joe Morrissey, who served prison time for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after sleeping with his teenage secretary. He accepted a plea deal after initially being indicted on possession of child pornography and other charges.
You know who else hates rolling out the gay agenda to public schools? Muslims.
The only religious people the left is truly scared to offend are Muslims. Criticizing Muslims is completely off the table according to the left’s rules of engagement, so if Muslims are upset about something, the amount of twisting, back-bending, and acrobatics the left will perform in order not to offend them will be something to see.
So when hundreds of Muslim parents, upset at gay porn in the school libraries, showed up to a school board meeting in Dearborn, Mich., and it devolved into shouting and chaos with board members running away and gay protesters being chased to their cars, the fallout was absolutely hilarious. The headline in the Detroit Free Press after the event went haywire was “LGBTQ and Faith Communities Struggle for Unity.” BAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Can you imagine what the headline would have been if it were a Baptist church chasing gay protesters to their cars? “Fascist White Supremacist Book Burners Bash Gay Man in Parking Lot,” or “Rabid Religious Zealots Terrorize Gay Man Defending Right to Read,” or something equally terrible. I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying this disaster.
Enjoy this thread and all the videos in it. I know I did.
Shouting between various factions as groups take over Dearborn public schools board meeting. Board members have left. Unclear if they are coming back or if meeting will restart. Heavy police presence. pic.twitter.com/XIMEqIRR1X
Problem: Too many Germans are voting for a rightwing party the left disapproves of. Solution: Ban it. Thank God banning other political parties in Germany has never had any negative consequences…
Speaking of things that could never possibly have any negative consequences, Balarus dictator and Putin toady Alexander Lukashenko decrees that all price increases are forbidden. Enjoys those coming goods shortages, Belarussians. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Florida Surgeon General releases study showing heightened cardiac death rates for men ages 18-39 after taking the Flu Manchu mRNA vaccine. So Twitter banned him. Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The Narrative. (They later reinstated him.)
Ukrainian troops shoot down a cruise missile with a MANPADS.
Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million to Sandy Hook families. As I noted last week, Alex Jones is an unreliable loon, but that judgment seems excessive and punitive merely for running his mouth.
More Democrats convicted for committing voting fraud, Russian forces are driven out of Lyman, and the Eurocrats freak out of Italy’s voters daring to disobey their wishes. Plus advice on what not to invest in.
In February, 2021, the Biden administration-run Centers for Disease Control (CDC) awarded a Soros-backed pro-migrant nonprofit $7.5 million under the guise of pandemic-related support for “LATINX ESSENTIAL WORKERS AS HEALTH PROMOTERS,” and aimed “to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate impacts among Latinx and Latin American immigrants,” according to an analysis by the Daily Caller.
The group, Alianza Americas, is currently suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other Florida officials over migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month.
The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Network.
Alianza Americas is “focused on improving the quality of life of all people in the U.S.-Mexico-Central America migration corridor.” The membership-based group, which Soros’ Open Society Foundations network (OSF) sent almost $1.4 million to between 2016 and 2020, was awarded a $7.5 million CDC grant in February 2021, according to a grant listing reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. -Daily Caller
The CDC funds were distributed under a program called “Protecting and Improving Health Globally: Building and Strengthening Public Health Impact, Systems, Capacity and Security.”
Add this to the many, many things Republicans should investigate if they gain a congressional majority.
Former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers, a Pennsylvania Democrat, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deprive voters of civil rights, bribery, obstruction of justice, falsification of voting records, conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election, and orchestrating schemes to fraudulently stuff ballot boxes for specific Democrat candidates in Pennsylvania elections held from 2014 to 2018. Myers was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond to 30 months in prison, three years supervised release, and ordered to pay $100,000 in fines, with $10,000 of that due immediately, according to a statement from U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero.
“A right-wing alliance led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party” won Italy’s election and will form a new majority government.
Naturally, the Eurocratic elite are far from thrilled that Italians exercised unapproved voting preferences. “EU Commission President Threatens Italy On Eve Of Election, Says Brussels Has ‘Tools’ If Wrong Parties Win.”
Funny how they mention that some fascists were involved in founding Meloni’s party, but never mention how the Partito Democratico, the leftist and second largest party in Italy, were formerly commies.
“This Ohio School District Is Promoting an ‘LGBTQ+ Resource Guide’ With Instructions on Sex Work, Abortions. Hilliard City School District guide also encourages students to transition gender without parental consent.” All this encouraged by the National Education Association, which evidently thinks it is perfectly fine to literally instruct your children on how to be whores. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
A double-dose of Glenn Greenwald:
I can't stress this enough: at its core, Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology.
Dissenting ideas are "disinformation" and must be censored by Big Tech. Trump voters are inherently criminal ("insurrectionists") and should be imprisoned.
This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it's the mindset of tyrants everywhere:
This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow: https://t.co/kmG4zTgPwh
Important investing tip: A single deli in rural New Jersey is not, in fact, worth $100 million. Which explains the fraud charges.
Speaking of bad investments, remember how growing hemp was going to make farmers rich? Yeah, not so much.
Since I post a lot of Peter Zeihan videos, I thought it only fair that I post this critique of Zeihan by Yaron Brook. He opines that, while Zeihan has important things to say about geography and demographics, he ignores the central role of ideas in shaping the world.
