It’s tough to be a pimp young worker in today’s China. In addition to being repressed by the communist government, they’re unable to afford cars or houses, and many can’t even find jobs. As a result, some have turned to the philosophy of bai lan, or “Let it rot.” They’re just giving up on working or caring anymore and openly embracing loserdom.
Naturally, the CCP is not pleased. Commies have never been tolerant of “parasitism” getting in the way of their political goals.
A few takeaways:
The unemployment rate for those 16-24 is 18.2%. “The highest rate since official figures began.”
Even graduates of prestigious Peking University were competing for entry level bureaucratic jobs.
The repeat Flu Manchu lockdowns were the last straw for many. “What is the point of working hard when you can lose your basic rights as a human being, when your home can be broken into and when your private items can be thrown away at will? Chinese people once thought that if they worked hard and followed the rules they could have a good future but that seems to be an illusion.” Yeah, totalitarian Communist states are funny that way…
Unspoken is just how these young working-age Chinese who have given up manage to afford food and shelter, but I’m just assuming they’re following the time-honored tradition of sponging of their parents. What are they going to do, kick out their only heir?
The problem with reports like this is that it’s hard for those of us outside China to determine just how widespread this phenomena is. Is it “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Mel Torme” or “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Nirvana”? It sucks to be young with dim prospects during a recession, and it sucks a lot worse to be under the heel of a communist dictatorship. Combining those isn’t a recipe for happiness.
Hey Chinese bai lan sufferers: Have you considered launching a revolution against the communist government instead? That would give you lots of excitement and fill your life with purpose! It may shorten it as well, but I suspect it beats lying around waiting to die…
The economy is contracting (thanks Biden), attacks and counterattacks in eastern Ukraine, regulation madness, and something from the 1875 crime blotter in 2022. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Note: Today’s LinkSwarm will be a bit shorter than usual because: A.) I’m off Twitter for the time being, so I’m not grabbing links there, and B.) I took the day off from work and I’m just feeling lazy.
Sure, the Biden Administration sucks on basic competence when it comes to the American economy, but to balance that, they also suck on regulation.
The Biden Administration capped off its first full year in office with more than $201 billion in regulatory costs and 131 million hours in new annual paperwork, putting it far ahead of the two immediately preceding administrations’ respective first years by a wide margin.
Actions related to vehicle emissions and COVID-19 safety measures provided the vast majority of these administrative burdens.
Additionally, in terms of executive orders issued during the first year of an administration, the 77 put forth by President Biden represent the highest number since the Ford Administration.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and Russian forces seem to be making a slow, grinding advance on the strategic city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. “Moscow has poured thousands of troops into its assault on Severodonetsk and its sister city of Lysychansk. The twin cities, straddling the Siverskyi Donets river, have been in Russian sights for months. They currently comprise the lone Ukrainian redoubt in the Luhansk oblast.” Taking Lysychansk will require Russians to cross the Donets, previous attempts at which have been disasterous for them.
Russia has succeeded in taking Lyman, but Ukraine has launched counterattacks against the Russian forces encircling Severodonetsk.
The Texas Association of School Boards is set to leave Its parent organization, the National School Board Association, according to records obtained by Texas Scorecard.
The National School Boards Association made headlines last year following their letter to President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting federal intervention in local school board meetings and referring to concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.”
It has since been revealed that the NSBA leadership urged the Biden Administration to deploy military forces in an effort to prevent parents from attending school board meetings.
Since then, parents have been calling on the state organization—the Texas Association of School Boards—to leave the organization, as more than 20 states already have.
“Professor Fired Over Tweets Questioning BLM Movement Gets Reinstated, Awarded Back Pay After Arbitrator Finds In His Favor.” “An arbitrator has ruled that a University of Central Florida professor, Charles Negy, has to be reinstated.”
Who’s been funding the attacks on Elon Musk following his Twitter bid? Would you believe Bill Gates? Of course you would. “Would you believe what perfidy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is up to this week?” Why yes, I would. The biggest difference is that Blofeld has better fashion sense and never tried to inflict Microsoft Bob on the world…
I’ll take headlines from 1875 for $400: “Loving County judge arrested for cattle theft….Loving County Judge Skeet Jones is accused of livestock theft and organized criminal activity.”
Inflation is soaring, Democrats are lying, and more MSM pedophiles are exposed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Slow Joe Biden is hoping voters will ignore all that inflation on his watch. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.
Apparently, the Biden administration’s approach is to just insist that the economy is doing great and hope people believe it, despite their mounting frustration every time they buy groceries, out to eat, or fill up their tank. On the day President Biden took office, retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.38 per gallon. This morning, they are $4.19 — not all that different from the $4.20 they were a month ago….
By and large, Democrats just don’t want to discuss or acknowledge inflation — at least not in their campaign ads:
And as of Friday, [Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim] Ryan was one of seven Democratic candidates who have run ads this year that mentioned inflation, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, dozens of Republican candidates and allied groups have done the same. In polls, Americans have cited inflation as a top issue.
“Burying your head in the sand,” Mr. Ryan said, “is not the way to approach it.” Asked about the biggest challenges facing his party, he replied, “A response to the inflation piece is a big hurdle.”
To Democrats, inflation is like Bruno: We just don’t talk about it.
Snip.
With poll after poll showing that inflation is foremost in voters’ minds, you would think that the president would be holding regular events focused on the problem and showcasing what his administration is doing to solve it.
“I get video almost every day now from people who we featured on ‘Dirty Jobs” and ‘How America Works.’
“They’re just sending me videos of them at the gas pump and some of them are filling up 18-wheelers. And, I’m not kidding you, $1,100, $1,200.
“Most people, all we can think about is the price for us at a relative terms know it’s awful.
“When you put $1,200 in your gas tank and just six months ago it was costing you $600 or 700, the exponential reality of it is starting to sink in. You just can’t walk that back. It touches every single thing that matters in this country. From food production to transportation … all of it,” Rowe explained.
Hmmmm:
Meet Elizabeth Deutsch. She's currently a law clerk for Justice Breyer.
And, in my humble opinion, she's the most likely person to have leaked the draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs, purporting to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show.
Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.
“Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.
Snip.
GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached.
But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.
Snip.
According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.
“Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News.
“As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.”
The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.
The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.
After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment?
Snip.
This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation” scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.
They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various “fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as “fact-checkers” — to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise — the term “disinformation expert” is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.
Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.
Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials”: to discredit dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed experts to constitute “disinformation.”
This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a “Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.
Business leaders are waking up to the destructive “woke” policies being foisted on businesses by boardrooms more concerned with virtue signaling than their primary responsibility of ensuring corporate profitability and enhancing shareholder values.
In short, the “woke” buck stops here, more corporate executives are saying. Mixing the politics of culture wars with business is a losing strategy.
Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi is leading the charge. He ran McDonalds from 1991-1997, bringing the chain’s McNugget to market and also served on the boards of Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que, Great Wolf Resorts and Snap-on Inc. These days, he’s launching The Boardroom Initiative, comprised of three conservative advocacy groups — The Job Creators Network, which was founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, The Free Enterprise Group and Second Vote. The goal: get business back to business and out of politics.
“Corporations have no business being on the right or the left because they represent everybody there and their sole job is to build equity for their investors,” Rensi told FOX Business.
Rensi knows how to grow a business. While leading McDonalds, he saw U.S. sales double to more than $16 billion, the number of U.S. restaurants grow from nearly 6,600 to more than 12,000 and the number of U.S. franchisees grow from 1,600 to more than 2,700.
“It is not the province of board members or executives to take shareholder money profit and spend it on social matters,” Rensi explained. “Corporations should not get involved in social engineering.”
Trump goes 55-0. Everyone he endorsed won their primary or made the runoff. All those are from Indiana, Ohio, and Texas. I didn’t realize that so few states have had their primaries already. Hopefully that record will be shattered and Dr. Oz (a bad pick by Trump) will lose when Pennsylvania votes May 17th.
Trying to make your children into the Youth Stasi: “DC elementary school gives 4-year-olds books to report racist family members.”
The only surprise here is that he didn’t work for CNN. “MSNBC Anchor Busted ‘Driving 3 Hours’ To Meet Little Boy For Sex.” “A New York group specializing in exposing child-sex predators seemed to all but confirm this after they posted a video online Friday busting a potential pedophile who appeared to be NBC anchor Zach Wheeler. Wheeler had driven an approximate total of 3 hours in order to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex, the group claims.”
Speaking of school districts wasting money and lying to you:
You're not alone if you feel like your school district is lying to you while smearing your reputation. It happened to me. The answer is not to retreat, but to get louder and expose their lies and hypocrisy.
Stagflation is back, scammers continue to loot taxpayer money from the federal government, Team Global Warming continues it’s perfect losing streak, and dispatches from a deadly accordion war. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The U.S. economy shrunk by 1.4% in Q1. “Unexpectedly!” So now we’ve got stagnation to go with that soaring inflation, a key ingredient in the Biden Administration’s Welcome Back Carter cosplay. One more quarter of decline and the recession is officially at hand…
In June, the FBI got a warrant to hunt through the Google accounts of Abedemi Rufai, a Nigerian state government official.
Hello, I am Prince Abedemi Rufai. You are probably surprised by this email…
What they found, they said in a sworn affidavit, was all the ingredients for a “massive” cyberfraud on U.S. government benefits: stolen bank, credit card and tax information of Americans. Money transfers. And emails showing dozens of false unemployment claims in seven states that paid out $350,000.
Rufai was arrested in May at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as he prepared to fly first class back to Nigeria, according to court records. He is being held without bail in Washington state, where he has pleaded not guilty to five counts of wire fraud.
Rufai’s case offers a small window into what law enforcement officials and private experts say is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the U.S., a significant part of it carried out by foreigners.
Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in Covid benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, officials and experts say. And they say it is still happening.
Among the ripest targets for the cybertheft have been jobless programs. The federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment relief has been stolen, but credible estimates range from $87 billion to $400 billion — at least half of which went to foreign criminals, law enforcement officials say.
Those staggering sums dwarf, even on the low end, what the federal government spends every year on intelligence collection, food stamps or K-12 education.
Keep in mind, this is just one government program.
Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in U.S. history — the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.
Biden Administration creates unconstitutional Ministry of Truth to fight “disinformation,” i.e. truth and opinion that hurts Democrats. This is the lunatic running it:
For 20 Years, This Prosecutor Had a Secret Job Working For the Judges Who’d Decide His Cases.”
One of Ralph Petty’s victims is trying to hold him accountable, but she will have to overcome prosecutorial immunity.
Ralph Petty worked as an assistant district attorney in Midland County, Texas, for 20 years. Like any prosecutor, he fervidly advocated for the government. But he wasn’t just any advocate, because he wasn’t just a prosecutor. Each night, Petty took off his proverbial DA hat and re-entered the courthouse as a law clerk for the same judges he was trying to convince to side with him by day.
“A married English teacher at Langham Creek High School was arrested after allegedly sleeping with a 15-year-old student.” Spoiler for those thinking of clicking through for the pic: She’s no prize.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Bold new architecture project becomes ugly and nonfunctional.
In Kurokawa’s original plan, the Nakagin capsules were meant to be replaced every twenty-five years with updated iterations. That didn’t happen, in part because of the funding that would have required. Each capsule would have cost, according to some estimates, almost nine million yen, or about seventy thousand dollars, to repair. A single capsule couldn’t be removed without removing all those above it, so all units would have to be vacated and updated at once. Over time, the building fell into disrepair. Concerns about asbestos made the towers’ ventilation system unusable, and residents complained about mold and incessant leaks during rainstorms. The owners’ association first voted to sell the building to a developer, in 2007, but the firm soon filed for bankruptcy, throwing the building’s fate into uncertainty. Kurokawa, who had pushed for renovations, died that same year. By 2010, the towers’ hot water had been shut off. The building had become more a work of art than the dynamic architecture that Kurokawa envisioned.
“New York Democrats Aim To Tax Ammo To Fund Anti-Gun Research….New York Senate Bill S8415, which would add an arbitrary 5-cent tax per round of ammunition larger than .22 Caliber. Rounds smaller than .22 Caliber would be subject to a 2-cent tax per round. According to the bill, the tax revenue would go to the state’s Gun Violence Research Fund.” That would be unconstitutional with a capital “un.”
Lake Mead hit by megadrought. “After nearly half a century, the first intake is out of service and can no longer draw water. Water levels at the lake hit record lows this week, falling to 1,056 feet. Luckily, SNWA has two other intakes at much lower levels that are still operational.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden economy kicks in, China behaves badly (again), and rock stars are fed up with woke. Let’s lead off with this weird photo people have been taking about all week:
How did you make the Carters look like tiny puppets?
Puppet people aside, what better image for the week in which Biden seems to be bringing stagflation back?
If you were wondering when the Trump boom would end and the Biden bust begin, it just did:
U.S. job growth for the month of April fell far below what experts had predicted, as data reported Friday showed an increase of 266,000 jobs, versus an estimate of 1 million — the largest miss relative to expectations since at least 1998.
Economists had suggested a positive outlook for the report, with the White House hoping for a gain of at least 700,000 jobs — making Joe Biden the first president ever to hit 2 million new jobs in his first 100 days. But expectations came crashing back to reality with data showing an overestimation of nearly 800,000 — the worst miss in decades.
The U.S. unemployment rate rose slightly from 6.0 percent to 6.1. March’s payroll gains were also revised downward by nearly 150,000 jobs, from an initial print of 916,000 to 770,000. Labor force participation rate rose slightly, to 61.7 percent.
Huh, irresponsible tax-and-spend policies, rampant inflation and paying people not to work evidently aren’t a recipe for economic success. Who knew?
Speaking of inflation, it looks like it’s back, baby! Rising metal, oil, and ag commodity prices all point to inflation. “Wood prices are at an all-time high at over $1,370 per 1,000 board feet.”
Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owns stock in “Proterra, an electric vehicle company that is being actively promoted by the Biden administration. Further, Granholm being the Secretary of Energy means she gets to make regulations that can directly enrich herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Joe Biden said today, “Most people don’t know: you walk into a store and you buy a gun, but you go to a gun show you can buy whatever you want and no background check.”
This isn’t even close to being true. In fact, gun shows are subject to the same rules as apply everywhere else, which are that:
commercial transfers require federal background checks, but that
private transfers only require federal background checks if they are conducted within one of the thirteen states that superintend non-commercial firearms transactions
There are no special rules for gun shows. The same set of laws applies to them as applies to, say, your kitchen table: If you are in the business of selling guns, you are federally obliged to run a check. If you are not, you are not — unless your state requires you to. That’s it. There’s no “loophole” here, and nothing about gun shows that separates them from the broader debate about private sales.
A new poll from ABC and the Washington Post published on Wednesday found a significant drop in support for new gun-control laws, especially among young people.
The number of Americans supporting enacting new gun laws over protecting gun rights fell from 57 percent to 50 percent, a seven-point drop from when the poll was last conducted in 2018. The number of Americans favoring gun rights jumped from 34 to 43 percent, a nine-point jump. The difference between the two positions narrowed by 16 points overall.
The sharpest decline in support for new gun-control measures came among 18 to 29-year-olds and Hispanics. Both groups saw a 20 percent drop. Rural Americans and strong conservatives saw a 17-point drop.
Worker shortage is so acute that a Tampa MacDonald’s is paying people $50 just to interview for a job. “Some 17 million Americans remain on jobless benefits. Perhaps many of these people want jobs but are getting paid more to sit on the couch.”
How Michael Dell used several financial maneuvers to turn $3.6 billion into more than $50 billion.
The Who’s frontman Roger Daltry says that the woke are ruining the world. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.”
And Daltry wasn’t the only rock star calling BS on the woke. Also taking aim: punk rock icon John Lydon:
Johnny Rotten blames ‘wokeness’ for US ‘collapse’
Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Lydon had some rotten things to say about “wokeness.”
In a recent profile with the Times UK, the aging punk rocker decried “cancel culture” and the activists who campaigned to tear down national monuments which they say promote historical racism. The statues include that of Winston Churchill, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers.
He also blamed academia as well as the media for giving “the space” to “tempestuous spoilt children.”…
Addressing calls to tear down Churchill’s statue in London, Lydon dismissed criticism that the wartime prime minister was racist. However, critics point out that the leader once referred to Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans,” and thought that black people are “[not] as capable or as efficient as white people.”
“This man saved Britain,” Lydon asserted. “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.”
If there are any bigger haters in history than today’s cancel culture, Lydon conceded, it’s the Nazis — and Churchill took care of that.
Florida “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones is a big fat liar. “NPR describes Jones as a ‘top scientist’ leading Florida’s pandemic response. In fact, Jones has held three jobs in her field; all three have ended in her being terminated and criminally charged.”
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.
Sad news (and possibly foul play). “University of Texas linebacker Jake Ehlinger, the younger brother of former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger, was found dead Thursday.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Slow Joe slows the economy and holds a press conference, global trade founders on a single choke-point, and Democrats behave badly (a LinkSwarm evergreen). Plus a load of Archer memes.
“Slow” evidently applies not only to Slow Joe Biden’s mental speed, but also to the effect he’s having on the economy. “Americans’ Income Collapsed By Most On Record In February,” falling 7.1%.
Slow Joe finally held a press conference. It didn’t go well. “President Joe Biden struggled through his first official press conference on Thursday, pausing frequently to check his notes on the podium and occasionally losing his train of thought as if distracted by the voices echoing madly in his geriatric brain.”
Tucker Carlson also reviewed Biden’s “slow and painful” performance:
Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.
The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.
Some of those deaths could be undetected Covid-19 cases, and some could be unrelated to the pandemic or the lockdowns. But preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks due to failure to receive prompt treatment. Many fewer people were screened for cancer. Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. The number of people killed last year in motor-vehicle accidents in the United States rose to the highest level in more than a decade, even though Americans did significantly less driving than in 2019. It was the steepest annual increase in the fatality rate per mile traveled in nearly a century, apparently due to more substance abuse and more high-speed driving on empty roads.
The number of excess deaths not involving Covid-19 has been especially high in U.S. counties with more low-income households and minority residents, who were disproportionately affected by lockdowns. Nearly 40 percent of workers in low-income households lost their jobs during the spring, triple the rate in high-income households. Minority-owned small businesses suffered more, too. During the spring, when it was estimated that 22 percent of all small businesses closed, 32 percent of Hispanic owners and 41 percent of black owners shut down. Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”
The deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year, according to a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke, who analyzed the effects of past recessions on mortality. Other researchers, noting how educational levels affect income and life expectancy, have projected that the “learning loss” from school closures will ultimately cost this generation of students more years of life than have been lost by all the victims of the coronavirus.
After the pandemic began in March, the number of excess deaths in the United States rose for all American adults. During the summer, as the pandemic eased, the rate of excess mortality declined among older Americans but remained unusually high among young adults. When statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control totaled the excess deaths for age groups through the end of September, they reported that the sharpest change—an increase of 26.5 percent—occurred among Americans aged 25 to 44.
That trend persisted through fall, and most of the excess deaths among younger people were not linked to the coronavirus, as researchers from the University of Illinois found by analyzing excess deaths from March through the end of November. Among Americans aged 15 to 54, there were roughly 56,000 excess deaths, of which about 22,000 involved Covid-19, leaving 34,000 from other causes. The Canadian government also reported especially high mortality among Canadians under 45: nearly 1,700 excess deaths from May through November, with only 50 of those deaths attributed to Covid-19.
Noem has – perhaps had – a future as a conservative conservative, and her utterly insane unforced error last week has hugely damaged her prospects. There are lessons here, people.
What did she do? She vetoed a bill defending women athletes from the insanity of letting men dominate them, a “style and form” veto, and then offered the most weaksauce weasel word explanation imaginable. Here tweet thread trying to explain it was lame; her appearance on Tucker was condescending gibberish. Watching it, woke cons started out disappointed with her and ended up infuriated at her. Here’s the irony – Kristi Noem stepped on her Ted Lieu in the context for a transexual policy issue.
It was really quite remarkable how amateurish and totally unnecessary it all was, but we’ve been seeing a lot of this lately. Recently, Greg Abbot decided to label all of Gab’s users “anti-Semites” because…well, who knows? It’s one of those things that you do that ticks off the base while the liberals continue to hate you. Good plan.
On the plus side, it lets us disqualify the weakhearts now.
It’s unclear who told Noem this was a great idea, but that person ought to be exiled to one of those other Dakotas. It’s 2021 and there are Republican consultants who still think the base is dumb. SMDH. The base is not dumb. The base is based. And we’re not going to be fooled with painful tweet threads and interviews about how 2 + 2 = 5 and how we need to not fight because it might make our enemies angry with us or – horrors! – cost us something to make a stand. Noem decided that instead of holding strong on an issue that conservatives care about, she would not merely rollover to the tech/Chamber of Commerce lib axis but also attempt to talk us into thinking this was just a routine administrative decision and that she is totally behind us 100 percent.
Except she isn’t.
We’re not stupid. Is she? Because if she thinks that conservatives, the cheated-on spouses of American politics, are not hyper-vigilant to any sign of betrayal then she’s too dumb to be our prezzy. We’ve been shafted too many times, and she is hallucinating if she thinks anyone will get a pass – including her. One of the most basic things we expect GOP politicians to do is protect our girls from getting clobbered by boys pretending to be girls. This is not one of those fringe issues where we’re, “Yeah, okay, sometimes you gotta compromise.” This is foundational.
Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police. They also came armed with explosive mortar fireworks, a favorite projectile weapon among antifa to disorientate, deafen, blind and injure cops.
Though the protest-turned-riot was ostensibly organized to oppose the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would allow police to impose more conditions on protests and increase penalties for those convicted of vandalizing statues, among other things, the demonstration had all the hallmarks of a far-left gathering.
The ‘Kill the Bill’ protest was promoted by the Bristol chapters of a Black Lives Matter-style group, Extinction Rebellion and Momentum, the hard-left wing within the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, British antifa groups also encouraged their comrades to support the violence.
‘Be careful about sharing footage with people’s faces who aren’t wearing masks,’ warned one antifa group. ‘Solidarity with all the comrades out there in Bristol fighting the bill and facing hard repression,’ tweeted Brighton Antifascists. ‘Spread the fire,’ they urged. And the fire spread.
Hundreds of protesters had gathered earlier in the city center carrying hammer and sickle flags, symbols of anarchist-communism, and signs against racism and fascism. The most frequent message spray-painted on vehicles and buildings at the riot? Antifa’s adopted slogan of ‘ACAB’ — all cops are bastards.
I recently visited Bristol. I noticed immediately that the leftist student politics of the University of Bristol and other colleges seemed to define the city’s wider political culture. That is, Bristol is a left-wing political monoculture, much like Portland.
Around the turn of the century, Portland was the new belle on the block, not despoiled like San Francisco or in bed with high tech like Seattle. Oregon was not known nationally for much more than Nike and pinot noir and former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, but maybe (with the exception of Packwood) that was OK. Maybe the city could debut as a fresh canvas, eco-friendly and affordable, a place to achieve your achievable dreams.
A lot of people were willing to take the chance, including my family. We moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2004, and for a while, everything seemed on the up. The city in 2009 was, according to The Wall Street Journal, attracting “college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country.” New residents built the city they wanted to live in: farm-to-table restaurants and 40 million brewpubs and too many bike paths and aggressively progressive politics. When then–Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swung through on the campaign trail in 2008, more than 75,000 people lined Portland’s waterfront to see him.
Portland had entered the national stage. Was it a little bit goofy, a little bit twee? Sure, but also energetic in the way a young city can be, with people cutting what seemed to be genuinely new paths. Would the dudes slinging Korean barbecue out of an old R.V. take it brick-and-mortar? Who knew? Who cared? The dynamism of what-could-be hung in the very air.
Snip.
Portland’s leadership seemed likewise unserious. Democratic Mayor Sam Adams had to fly home from Obama’s first inauguration to face charges of having had a sexual liaison with an underage legislative intern with the readymade name of Beau Breedlove, and in 2019 he was accused by his former executive assistant of sexual harassment. In 2015, Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber resigned amid allegations of influence peddling by his fiancé.
“It’s not a well-governed city. It’s not a well-governed state. Portland has basically had three failed mayors in a row,” says T.B., who previously held a high-ranking position in state government and who asked not to be identified by name. “Tom Potter was a former police chief who became mayor. He was totally hapless. Sam Adams was hyperkinetic, one thing after another and scandalous and so totally ineffective. And then Charlie Hales—I don’t know exactly what happened to him, but he also served one term; they all did. And now you have Ted [Wheeler], who I think has had three police chiefs since taking office. There’s certainly political instability at the municipal level, to say the least.”
Out of instability, good things nevertheless grew—including Portlandia. The comedy series debuted in 2010 and served up the city at its most parodic, with real-life Mayor Sam Adams playing a bumbling mayoral assistant and restaurant diners demanding the life story of the chicken they were about to eat.
The show riffed on slacktivism and five-hour yoga classes and men whose only “safe space” was Reddit. It was often genuinely funny. Who didn’t like to laugh at themselves?
Snip.
Young people had come here to achieve those achievable dreams. What was taking so long? Why did they have to live three, four people to a house, when just a few years ago rent was affordable? When my husband told baristas at the cafés he owned that, no, he couldn’t raise the starting wage to $12 an hour—this was in 2014—seeing as they also received tips and health insurance, the response was a general chilling, an “us against them” ethos that seemed to seep into the city. Activists became more vocal, denouncing businesses they saw as anti-LGBTQ. The city’s most active queer center was called out in 2015 for being too “white-centric.” And in 2016, students at Reed College formed RAR (Reedies Against Racism) and staged a protest against the 1978 Saturday Night Live skit “King Tut,” claiming Steve Martin’s portrayal of the Egyptian pharaoh was racist. “The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface,” a student told the student newspaper.
The anger seemed free-floating; it was gathering momentum, was becoming an identity in itself.
When Donald Trump won the presidency, Portlanders’ anger catalyzed into a manic animus that took the form of compulsive marching and letter writing and CNN watching and the schadenfreude-tinged hope that Mike Flynn/Stormy Daniels/the Russia scandal would sweep the president out of office any day now. In this way, Portland was not different from other heavily Democratic U.S. cities.
Snip.
But there was a problem: Trump was both far away and a master of eliding responsibility. Without the satisfaction of seeing their enemy downed, people grew antsy. Someone needed to take the blame for stagnant wages, and rising rents, and what some saw as the misallocation of social and emotional resources. And so, in a preview of the protests that would come to roil Portland following the death of George Floyd, those who considered themselves more finely calibrated toward injustice than the rest of us took matters into their own hands.
“You probably remember there was massive rioting in the Pearl District the day after Donald Trump was elected. Millions of dollars of damage were inflicted,” says journalist Michael Totten. “How many people in the Pearl District voted for Donald Trump? It’s probably not even 1 percent. Who on earth are these people who declare war on a place where nobody voted for Donald Trump? That’s not how people in a democratic society are supposed to behave. You don’t go trash neighborhoods with the opposing political party in a healthy democracy, but they didn’t even do that. They declared war on the city as a whole.”
If there was zeal in using one’s power thus, crude as it was, there was also a mandate: If good citizens needed to fight racism, why not start at home? The food world, which arguably more than any industry had put Portland on the cultural map, was the first target. Andy Ricker, whose restaurant Pok Pok was the only place the late Pulitzer Prize–winning food writer Jonathan Gold wanted me to take him when he visited Portland in the early 2010s, was called out for making Thai food while not being Thai. Two young women closed their burrito cart within days of opening it after they received multiple death threats for making homemade tortillas despite not being Latinas. The local press, which had once lauded such people and places, now published lists of business owners “wantonly cooking the food of other countries, arguably at the expense of people from those very cultures.”
So much for ALL being welcome. People instead seemed to be asking: Are you with us or against us?
Then details of the riots and assaults. If anything, author Nancy Rommelmann is far too even-handed with antifa’s crimes, and fails to note that their antics preceded Donald Trump’s election by quite a while.
Displacement. “Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry”:
Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.
Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.
The U.S. Secret Service reportedly got involved in a bizarre incident back in 2018 involving Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, and Hallie Biden, who was married to the late Beau Biden.
According to the report, on October 23, 2018, Hallie Biden, who became romantically involved with Hunter sometime after Beau’s death, found Hunter’s .38 revolver in his pickup truck, which was parked at her house, then took the gun to a nearby grocery store and threw it away in a trash can behind the building. Upon returning to retrieve the gun from the trash, the Bidens discovered it was no longer there, reports Politico.
Delaware police investigated, concerned that the grocery store’s proximity to the local high school might mean the missing gun could be used in a crime. But then, Politico notes, a “curious thing happened.”
Two sources, one with direct knowledge of the incident, say Secret Service agents allegedly approached Ron Palmieri, the owner of the gun store where Hunter bought the firearm, in order to retrieve the paperwork involving the sale.
The owner of the store refused, suspecting the Secret Service officers intended to get rid of any evidence of Hunter’s ownership of the gun in the event the gun would be involved in a crime.
Honestly, it’s probably not even the tenth weirdest and/or most corrupt thing Hunter Biden has been involved in… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, Democratic Party operative and coronavirus expert impersonator.
Someone is trying to torpedo the historic Abraham Peace Accords between Israel and various Arab states. Namely the Biden Administration:
Media reports on March 18 revealed that the United Arab Emirates has suspended its plans for an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi with Israel, the United States, and other Arab signatories to the historic peace agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration. Supposedly, the Emiratis are angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed as a “prop in his election campaign.”
In fact, as the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.
Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?
Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.
No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.
But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.
But isn’t peace in the Middle East the collective dream of the Beltway policy establishment, left and right? Trump, love or hate him, got Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan as well as the UAE to normalize relations with Israel, the first peace agreements with the Jewish state since Jordan signed in 1994—and Biden said he wanted to build on the Abraham Accords. But as it turns out, “peace” has a very particular meaning for American policymakers. For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.
Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords. To bind Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the Trump White House had to bracket the issue that previously kept these traditional American allies apart—the Palestinians. That alone earned Trump the wrath of Washington’s wise men.
“Yale Psychiatrist Who Declared Trump Mentally Unfit Has Been Fired, and She’s Suing.” Funny how that happened when Bandy Lee broke the Goldwater Rule. I would break out an appropriately tiny violin, but I’m afraid my atomic force microscope is being recalibrated…
South Carolina State Rep. Cezar McKnight (D) has represented his district for six years. It’s heavily Democratic, and two-thirds African American — two demographics that people don’t typically associate with social conservative causes. But the threat of transgenderism to our kids isn’t just a conservative concern, McKnight insists. “Black Democrats tend to be more conservative than white progressives,” McKnight told an AP reporter. They’re very much on board with the idea that children should not be pressed to permanently mutilate their bodies over gender confusion that is almost always temporary.
That’s why McKnight felt comfortable introducing a bill that would ban minors from pursuing transgender treatments or transitioning until they’re old enough to vote. “I would not have ever put this bill forward if I didn’t think the people in my district wouldn’t be receptive, and they are. Pastors, young parents, older parents, they all tell me the same thing: if you want to do this, wait until you’re 18.” A member of the Legislative Black Caucus, he says he’s received “an outpouring of support from his constituents, “who have told him that, while they don’t necessarily oppose this type of procedure on its face, they think that it’s one that should only be made when a person has reached adulthood.”
Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo’s book on how he bravely spread the Wuhan coronavirus in New York nursing homes has reportedly garnered a seven figure advance from the Crown Publishing Group. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Looks like I may have to start doing BidenWatch again, given all the stupid things the newly ensconced Biden Administration has been up to…
US government debt now stands at $20 trillion, or roughly 100% of GDP. This should be a concern, but Democratic economists are not worried. A much-discussed November 30 paper by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Jason Furman suggests that Democratic thinking has veered into the paranormal, with an emphasis on levitation. Governments will be able to borrow and spend as much as they want for whatever purpose they want, the authors argue in so many words, and interest rates will remain low forever.
As Washington Post editorialist Charles Lane commented Dec. 7, “Far from burdening future generations, governments have a golden opportunity to fund long-standing needs by borrowing for investments in future prosperity—the list includes child care, early education, job training and clean water.”
The argument so easily refuted by casual reference to the facts that it takes a doctorate from Harvard (which both Summers and Furman hold) to suspend disbelief in the obvious. The authors aver:
We note that with massive increases in budget deficits and government debt, expansions in social insurance, and sharp reductions in capital tax rates, one would have expected to see increasing real rates if private sector behavior had remained constant. We suggest that changes in the supply of saving associated with lengthening life expectancy, rising uncertainty and increased inequality along with reductions in the demand for capital associated with demographic changes, demassification of the economy, and perhaps changes in corporate behavior have driven real interest rates down. This characterization is rather like Hamlet without the Ghost, for the ghost in the interest machine during the past decade has been the Federal Reserve Board’s multi-trillion-dollar purchases of Treasury and agency securities. Summers and Furman do not mention this in their 50-page excursus.
Today, President Biden doubled-down on critical race theory in the federal government.
In response, I am announcing a new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions.
Thomas Zimmerman, who will serve as a Special Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel under Joe Biden, formerly served as a visiting scholar at what the FBI has called a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” The National Pulse can reveal.
While at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, Zimmerman also served as a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security.
The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), which the FBI views as a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” was involved in a 2019 criminal case involving a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative selling classified U.S. defense documents to China.
The operative, Kevin Mallory, was contacted by a SASS official via LinkedIn to begin the relationship that culminated in a 20-year prison sentence for Mallory.
It must be understood that Critical Social Justice is an administrative and bureaucratic ideology by its very design. It was formulated by activist academics to train not just activists but, very specifically, either people who will go on to produce the culture industry (like in media and arts) or who will become administrative bureaucrats where they can produce a kind of unaccountable policy that we find in HR departments, where pushback is irrelevant unless it’s from the top down. These sorts of people dream of positions not specifically of power and influence, like the presidency, but of training and administrative roles where they will receive relatively little scrutiny or opposition while they engage in their favorite activity of all: telling other people what to do, not directly, but through a shield of very official and institutionally binding paper.
For any of his late and thin comments about the violence that has rocked our streets for the last half of this year, Biden has given us absolutely no indication that he’s going to resist any of this bureaucratic totalitarianism. In fact, he’s done the opposite, using the language of the ideology, like saying he has a “mandate” from the voters (in an election that hasn’t yet even been decided, two weeks later) to take on “systemic racism,” and tapping individuals like Mehrsa Baradaran (who believes in full reparations) for the Treasury Department and Margaret Salazar (whose focus is on “cultural responsiveness”) for Housing and Urban Development. These come among roughly 500 more appointments to his administrative bureaucracy—so far—who allegedly express a commitment to racial justice, in line with precisely the racial equity programs touted by Biden and Harris on their campaign and now transition websites. In few domains has it been signaled that this will be more powerfully considered than in public health and the Covid-19 response, which Biden has already indicated will lead to a permanent position: “At the end of this health crisis, it will transition to a permanent Infectious Disease Racial Disparities Task Force,” we’re told on the Covid-19 priorities page on Biden’s “Build Back Better” transition site.
This renders Biden and, perhaps, Harris largely irrelevant to the “Woke” impacts of their election. They are, if you’ll accept the metaphor, “not the room.” These administrators are the room. Biden (and Harris, maybe) can be as moderate as moderate gets, and if even a modest fraction of the administrators in key departments favor the Critical Social Justice style of policy, that’s most of what we’ll get. So far, we have reason to suspect that at least an eighth of Biden’s administrative apparatus will be in that vein, including in key and powerful sectors like public health—to say nothing of apparatuses like the FBI.
Tulsi Gabbard reveals why congress won’t attempt to reign in Big Tech:
"It goes to money… Google will have a big reception, members of Congress will go, and then they'll pick up their checks."@TulsiGabbard explains why Congress has failed to act on big tech censorship pic.twitter.com/i7TOJYQ7lv
He was made a martyr. Yes, die-hard anti-Trump Democrats always would hate him, and die-hard pro-Trump Republicans would love him no matter what. But the great American center, comprised of reasonable Democrats and Independents, flocked towards Trump during and after the prior impeachment. They saw he was being railroaded.
He now is being railroaded again. We still all are trees inside the forest, lacking the broader perspective that time will afford. Right now tensions are too high for people to step back a moment and to gauge objectively. But that is only today. The Democrats irresponsibly have just done something that perhaps is all but unprecedented in American history: they charged, tried, and convicted a person — the impeachment phase of the political drama — in less than a day. If impeachments are meant to be fit in during a coffee break, why did the last one drag on so long? Why did Clinton’s and Johnson’s? Last year’s annual Trump impeachment took weeks of testimony from witnesses all over the place. Remember their names — all your favorites — from last time? Kurt Volker. Marie Yovanovitch. Fiona Hill. George Kent. Gordon Sondland. Bill Taylor. Laura Cooper. Alex Vindman. His medals. Catherine Croft. It went on and on and on. If they had not shut it down for Christmas, Kato Kaelin would have been next.
But this time it was Darkness at Noon: instead of pretending honesty, Pelosi and her Democrats did the impeachment as Josef Stalin conducted his show trials in the Soviet Union: first declare the guilt, then type up some charges, and then vote to convict without so much as a meaningful hearing. She did not even bother with the souvenir pens — presumably just ink-refill cartridges this time.
“City councilman in Louisiana arrested for election fraud.” “Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin Thursday morning announced their offices have arrested an Amite City Councilman on eight counts of election fraud. Emanuel Zanders, III is accused of submitting voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.” I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
As COVID-19 settled into its new home in NYC, my local coffee shop closed, my gym shuttered, I lost my job at SUNY, and everything I loved was temporarily put “on pause.” A term that nine months later now feels like a cruel joke. None of us knew what we were facing back in March, or how long it would last. The streets became quiet, the city became still. All the sounds, the familiar faces, the busy restaurants, the daily rituals, the very pace of our existence slowed to a full stop. The silence was deafening.
The homeless and mentally ill flourished in my Chelsea neighborhood overnight. Many residents fled our beloved city to safer suburbs and second homes. After a night in the West Village where I saw men looting cars, and a gunpoint robbery happen by the West 4th train station, I no longer felt comfortable here. I decided that I couldn’t abide the lawlessness and my first pandemic at the same time, so I spent the first wave of the pandemic upstate in a guest room at my family’s house, where at least I didn’t have to worry about the crime.
After spending three months in quarantine upstate, I decided it was time to start putting my NYC life back together. The idea of suffering through this time with my closest friends felt like a step in the right direction. Even if we didn’t have our bars and restaurants for an undetermined amount of time, at least we’d have each other.
I imagined my summer would be filled with long walks, bike rides on the West Side Highway, and small gatherings on rooftops. I imagined we’d get over COVID and that the energy of the city would come back slowly over the next six months. I was optimistic, loved my city and loved my life here with all my heart. I hopefully assumed most New Yorkers had the same feelings I did. And then the riots happened.
The dark tone of daily life here now seems permanent. For months after the riots, stores in my area were still being burglarized. The helicopters were so close they would shake my top-floor apartment all night. In peak summer there were always two or three homeless people on both sides of every street in my area. Every aspect of my life became about avoiding them and staying far enough away from anyone who might attack me. Someone broke into my building one night but fled when they accidentally set off the alarm on the roof. The whole summer felt like living in a war zone.
Dating used to be a pleasure for me, but during my summer in Chelsea there were so many stabbings and robberies within one block of my apartment, I no longer felt comfortable making plans that involved meeting anywhere. I’d walk to get coffee in the morning and get harassed and threatened by homeless people every day.
Six months after NYC’s first wave of riots, I was clearly wrong about my hopes of returning to the fast-paced yet wonderful life that I once loved.
The City of Houston wants to regulate your homes for looks. “Everything from what color you paint your home, to whether you put shutters on your windows, would be subject to government control.” Nuts to that.
In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.
On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a “sex cult leader,” was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.
It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.
Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his “kittens”.
Skipping over a lot, including the bit where he went from being a Holocaust denier to being a supporter of building the Third Temple in Jerusalem.
In July 2018, Oktar was arrested on a number of charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.
According to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office, he was caught while attempting to run away from the arresting officers. As he was led away, he told journalists that the charges were a conspiracy by the British deep state.
“They are thinking of covering the whole region with Christianity. They targeted me because they saw me as the effective inhibitor of this game,” he would later say in court.
Though “the British deep state” has yet to officially comment on the case, many have questioned the timing of Oktar’s arrest, considering accusations against him dated back decades.
In 1999, Oktar and a number of associates were arrested and charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organisation with the intent to commit a crime. A Turkish prosecutor listed a number of companies tied to BAV, which was accused of using blackmail and sex traps to generate revenue. The legal process against Oktar and BAV lasted two years, during which the majority of the complainants retracted their claims.
In the case file during his most recent trial, prosecutors presented an array of photos depicting sexual acts involving members of the organisation purportedly taken secretly at Oktar-owned properties for the purpose of blackmail. It also revealed WhatsApp messages involving male and female members of the group, in which they were given instructions to get used to anal sex.
Yuksel told MEE that he was aware of a number of senior politicians who had been involved with (or had relatives involved with) Oktar and were compromised by their association with him. However, he declined to offer any names.
In October 2017, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it had signed a new memorandum of understanding with the China University of Petroleum, a school directly affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.
According to a statement released at the time by the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, the agreement would “encourage academic cooperation through research and study in furtherance of the advancement of learning.”
But in October 2020, the U.S. Department of Education released a report critical of such foreign entanglements, specifically deeming contracts with China University of Petroleum a security risk.
“Academic research regarding oil and gas extraction should not be considered separate from the Chinese government’s geopolitical ambitions,” the Education Department report reads, adding, “China’s largest oil companies are state owned and dominate China’s oil market, so this could cross paths with Chinese government endeavors.”
Welcome to the last LinkSwarm before the election! Halloween is tomorrow, and I will actually be handing out candy in the time-honored traditional manner.
The economy grew at a white hot 33.1% rate during the third quarter, which is what happens when you lift the counterproductive economic lockdowns Democrats want to keep in place. We’ve still got recovering to do (something that’s not going to happen under a Harris-Biden Administration’s huge tax hikes), but it looks like we’re enjoying the V-shaped recovery that so many economists assured us was impossible.
The next few days will be a Cat 5 hurricane of mainstream media spin and Democrat bullSchiff designed to make you think that you’ve already lost this election. They want your morale shattered, your spirit broken, and you to put a lid on your participation in saving your country from leftist tyranny.
It’s all a lie.
It’s a psychological operation designed to keep you on the sidelines.
We got this.
All you need to do is vote.
People reach out to me all the time looking for hope, and I’ve got plenty, because things are breaking our way. You have structural factors like the fact that incumbents tend to win, particularly when the economy is improving and we’re not in some idiotic new war. You have factors like how the Democrat candidate is a desiccated old weirdo who pretty much called a lid on his campaign back in July and whose corruption is being shown to be more corrupting every single day. You have manifest enthusiasm for our guy and tumbleweeds for theirs. You have people moving from Hillary to Trump, but nobody moving from Trump to Grandpa Badfinger. Trump dominated the debate where Oldfinger doubled down on his deeply unpopular program of destroying millions of oil industry jobs, single payer, and Matlock for All. On the inside, the insiders almost unanimously think Trump will win – that’s the real talk behind the scenes among people whose names you know. Early voting numbers are GOP-friendly, and many polls now show Trump moving up or taking the lead.
We have the heat, we have the momentum, we have this to lose.
Speaking of rappers endorsing Trump, Lil Wayne (who I have actually heard of) all but did that as well:
Just had a great meeting with @realdonaldtrump@potus besides what he’s done so far with criminal reform, the platinum plan is going to give the community real ownership. He listened to what we had to say today and assured he will and can get it done. 🤙🏾 pic.twitter.com/Q9c5k1yMWf
AMD buys Xilinx for $35 billion in an all-stock transaction. Xilinx dominates Field Programable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and has fingers into a lot of weird verticals I don’t have any visibility into. Like AMD they’re fabless, and like AMD they use TSMC as their foundry. Assuming all the usual merger hurdles (both regulatory and cultural) can be overcome, this is probably a good move for both sides.
The owners of a bunch of famous Austin businesses come out against the tax-hiking rail bond. “‘We are not open, we are not going to be open for a long time so no money coming in paying an extra $3000,’ said Shannon Sedwick with Esther’s Follies.” Also opposing the huge tax hike for the bond: Former Democratic State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, who will never be mistaken for a fire-breathing conservative.
What GOP insiders hoped would be a quiet race for Speaker of the Texas House got suddenly heated on Thursday, with four establishment Republicans officially in the hunt – and at least one other poised to jump in. Most Texans have never heard of none of them.
Officially filing declaring their candidacy today are Republican State Reps. Chris Paddie of Marshall, Trent Ashby of Lufkin, John Cyrier of Bastrop, and Geanie Morrison of Victoria joining Democrats Senfronia Thompson of Houston and Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio
Republican Dade Phelan of Beaumont was also reportedly considering jumping into the race as the “Team Bonnen” candidate.
Remember how the New York Times hyped an op-ed by “Anonymous” slamming Trump? Honestly, I barely do, because all the fake “anonymous” #JustTrustMeBro “sources” “familiar with” Trump just blur together in my mind. Well, turns out the “Senior Trump Official” was a minor official turned CNN staffer, so they, and most of the liberal media complex that trusted them, just straight lied to us to smear Trump. You know, just like all their other anti-Trump “bombshells.”
It’s bad enough that Gov. Cuomo presided over the needless COVID-19 deaths of thousands of vulnerable people in New York nursing homes.
It’s bad enough that he wrote a shameful book praising himself for his pandemic response and now is doing a victory lap of self-congratulation in the worst-hit state in the nation.
It’s bad enough that he is mounting a pre-election scare campaign on COVID vaccines to stir up anti-vax sentiment for political purposes.
But now we discover that Cuomo got campaign funds from the hospital organizations that lobbied for his lethal policy for the elderly and which then bought TV ads whitewashing his culpability.
An exclusive audit of campaign donations to Cuomo by OpenTheBooks.com shows disturbing links with industry bodies which demanded the disastrous order forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-infected patients hospitals didn’t want.
“Jeremy Corbyn suspended from Labour Party over response to antisemitism report.” Wow, that’s not closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, that’s closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, run off to a different region, been captured, fattened, slaughtered, made into hamburgers, and consumed at a St. Swithun’s Day feast in Wessex.
Broadcast this video in reply to every single BLM claim that Police across the country target Blacks. Walk away! pic.twitter.com/BSA1HOsqFo
— 👠IStandWithTrump ⭐️⭐️⭐️WhoDoesFBIserve? (@superyayadize) October 24, 2020
“$150 MILLION worth of illegal cannabis, weapons, and 3 kangaroos seized by York Police.” That’s York, Ontario, a locale for which I’m reliably informed kangaroos do not constitute native fauna.
Biden refuses to reveal his position on court-packing, but he still wants to take your guns and hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed, plus more on the enthusiasm gap, fracking flip-flops, and we’re all going to be millionaires (the Weimer Republic kind). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Hey Joe, are you gonna pack the courts?” “Not telling!”
As the Senate moves forward on the president’s Supreme Court pick, both former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, continue to deflect when asked if they would try to add more justices to the nation’s highest court, a practice known as court packing.
Biden and his party face increasing pressure because of the frustration of many progressives at the Republican effort to rush through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime liberal icon, with Amy Coney Barrett just before the Nov. 3 election. Because the addition of Barrett is expected to create a conservative majority on the high court some have called for adding more justices.
The question of adding seats to the Supreme Court also hinges on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans currently hold a slim 53 to 47 majority. If Democrats are able to wrest control of the GOP, maintain control of the U.S. House and Biden wins the presidency, the party would need to pass legislation expanding the court beyond its current limit of nine justices.
Lord knows progressive frustration is a just a swell reason to overthrow centuries of tradition.
“According to an analysis from Real Clear Politics, Biden holds a 4.4 percentage point lead over the president in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona,” she explains. “However, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.8 points in these swing states this time in 2016—a slightly greater advantage than the one Biden currently has.”
Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Trump won, are also smaller than Clinton’s leads at this time four years ago. “The Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden is ahead with a 6.3 lead in Pennsylvania and a 6.2 advantage in Michigan. Comparably, Clinton was leading in these two states by 9.2 points and 9.6 points, respectively, this time in 2016.”
Similarly, polls for Wisconsin and North Carolina show Biden with a smaller lead than they did for Hillary Clinton back in 2016.
The only outliers to this trend are Florida and Arizona. Biden’s lead in Florida is at 3.5, compared to Hillary’s 3.2 point lead in 2016. Biden also leads in Arizona by 3.4 points, compared to Trump’s 0.7 point advantage in 2016.
NBC News featured several "undecided" voters at Monday's Biden Town Hall that had previously been featured as Biden supporters on MSNBC:pic.twitter.com/61ZRXmcktT
Asked about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.”
Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to “repeal” anything. That’s Congress’ job, and if Biden isn’t blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, “repealing” the tax cuts won’t happen.
But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By “repealing” Trump’s tax cuts, he would be doing just that.
The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.
A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Biden’s plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.
At least, you say, that $4.3 trillion in added taxes under Biden would cut the deficit more than Trump’s plans, right? Wrong.
The CRFB notes that its projections show a 10-year rise in federal deficits of $8.3 trillion for Biden, versus $6.9 trillion for Trump.
Enthusiasm for Trump among his voters “is historically high,” said Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll. “We saw that very early in the cycle, in his primary vote totals,” when the president drew unusually large voter turnout in uncontested races.
“Meanwhile, Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low — so low that the Democrats run the risk of replaying 2016,” Baris said.
Just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.
Rank-and-file Dems are sounding the alarm.
“I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs,” Pennsylvania voter Susan Connors told Biden worriedly at a CNN-sponsored town hall Sept. 17.
Experienced political hands have a saying: “Yard signs don’t vote.” And research appears to bear that out — a 2016 study found that political signage increases vote share by a mere 1.7 percentage points, on average.
Biden holds a 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, a commanding position with Election Day less than four weeks away. But the exuberant signs and displays of Trump passion may actually point to a yawning enthusiasm gap that could make a big difference on Election Day — just as they did in 2016.
Four years ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a 13-point enthusiasm gap in Trump’s favor, a result echoed by other surveys, The Hill reported.
Many people . . . said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016 — and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs — was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted,” Daniel Allott writes in “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Nation” (Republic Books), out Oct. 20.
It’s deja vu all over again… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A federal appeals court has reinstated a fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, reversing a decision by an Obama-appointed judge (and wife of Mueller special counsel lawyer) to vacate Archer’s conviction and grant him a new trial.
Archer and several of his business partners were indicted on March 26, 2018 in a $60 million bond scheme which defrauded Native Americans. Hunter was not implicated in the fraud, however Archer and the other partners repeatedly name-dropped the former Vice President’s son.
Following a trial which lasted nearly one-month, Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud. After requesting that the district court set aside the jury’s verdict, Judge Ronnie Abrams – the wife of Mueller special counsel attorney Greg Andres (who himself was a Deputy Assistant AG in the Obama DOJ, according to RedState) – granted Archer’s wish. What’s more, Abrams was Hunter Biden’s classmate at Yale Law school.
In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel said that Abrams made a mistake by prioritizing her own theory above that of the jury’s, and that her assessment undercut the significance of the proof in its totality.
Mike Pence dominated in that debate. He was calm and cool. Rock-solid. Kamala Harris’s body language and voice reflected her nervousness—a stark contrast to her previous debate performances during the Democratic primary when she was still in the race. But neither her body language, her failure to answer questions, nor her constant reliance on fake stories as lines of attack were the key tell that she lost.
The liberal media conceded Pence’s victory by describing Pence’s debate performance. And their go-to explanation was to attack the vice president by accusing him of “mansplaining.”
“China Censors Mike Pence’s Debate Comments On China But Freely Broadcasts Kamala Harris’s.” “‘China censored Pence’s comments on China,’ Canada’s Globe and Mail Beijing Correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe reported. ‘Signal returned when Harris began talking again.'”
Of all the people they know — including RINOs and squishes and NeverTrumpers who voted against Trump in 2016 — many of the NeverTrumpers are now reluctant Trump voters, and many of 2016’s reluctant Trump voters are now enthusiastic Trump voters.
On the other hand, they don’t know anyone who has moved from voting for Trump in 2016 to voting for Biden.
One friend tells me that the suburban well-to-do Wine Moms and Squish Sisters he knows are now fully on the MAGA train.
Everyone they know who’s moved on The Trump Question (and Trump seems to be the only issue in 2020) has moved in favor of Trump.
They also note that the “Shy Trumper” effect — where Trump supporters won’t admit to pollsters they still support Trump — is still strong, based on their own experience.
One relates that he did not tell his own children that he voted for Trump, due to social pressure and the idea that he didn’t want to “normalize” Trump’s bad behavior to his children.
If you can’t tell your own kids you voted for Trump, you’re not going to tell a pollster.
And this person works in conservative politics, too!
If even people in the conservative movement can’t admit they’re Trump supporters — well good luck getting Wendy Wine Mom to admit that on the phone.
A friend of mine was a hardcore NeverTrumper in 2016 but now is a crawl-over-broken-glass Trump Voter. No, he doesn’t really like Trump, but unlike Jonah Goldberg and Steve Schmidt, he recognizes the profound threat the left poses to what is left of America.
He has kept in touch with his NeverTrump pals. Media types. The types who annoy you on Twitter.
And while he won’t Name Names, he tells me that many of the NeverTrumpers I hate are now “red pilled” Trump voters.
They just won’t admit it publicly.
Snip.
If there were a lot of Trump defectors, the media would be profiling them and lionizing them and promoting them 24-7.
But I haven’t seen a single story about Trump 2016-Biden 2020 defectors.
The media hasn’t found any — despite the fact that by announcing that you’re now a full-on Democrat Liberal, you gain employment opportunities and social prestige.
So if the media can’t find any of these people… do they even exist?
YouTuber Liberal Hivemind says that Biden is losing voters every day:
“Those blacks, always working menial jobs before they hop back on a city bus and head home to their housing projects. Anyway, I’m Joe Biden. Vote for me cause Donald Trump is racist.” https://t.co/MHaxeYNcB7
chronicled many times over the last three years when Democratic senators questioned judicial nominees about their faith, suggesting in various forms that a candidate’s Catholic or Christian beliefs might render them unfit to serve on the bench.
Several of those questions were posed by Harris herself, focusing especially on Catholic candidates. In late 2018, for instance, Harris grilled Brian Buescher, nominated to be a federal district judge in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization with more than 2 million members worldwide who conduct charitable work. Here’s one of Harris’s written questions to Buescher:
Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?
She went on to ask whether Buescher was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization” and whether he had “ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights.”
Harris posed these and other similar questions to Paul Matey and Peter Phipps, Catholic nominees who, like Buescher, are members of the Knights. Among the questions she posed to Matey based on his involvement in the Knights were:
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson’s description of abortion as “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale”?
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that legal abortion in the United States has “resulted in more than 40 million deaths”?
* Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution?
Race snapshot:
Campaign snapshot for Sunday:
– Trump is fully recovered (it seems)
– None of the 34 allegedly infected at White House seem to be in medical danger, including Chris Christie
Nvidia Corp. NVDA, 2.38% surpassed Intel Corp. INTC, -1.38% as the largest U.S. chip maker by market cap for the first time on Wednesday. Nvidia shares closed up 3.5% at $408.64, giving it a market cap of $251.31 billion, while Intel shares finished up 0.5% at $58.61, giving it a market cap of $248.16 billion, according to FactSet data. For the year, Nvidia shares have gained 74% while Intel shares have slipped 2%, compared with a 11% gain in the PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX, 3.14%, a 17% gain in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, 1.64%, and a 1.9% decline in the S&P 500 index SPX, 0.66%. While it is not the first time a U.S. chip maker has surpassed Intel in market cap, it is the first time for Nvidia. Back in 1999 and 2000, Texas Instruments Inc. TXN, 1.89% surpassed Intel in cap a few times, and between late 2012 and mid-2014 Qualcomm Inc. QCOM, 3.80% and Intel often jockeyed for the No. 1 position, according to Dow Jones data.
Nvidia is a fabless semiconductor company that designs graphics processor units (GPUs), the chips that drive computer screens, especially those for gaming systems and consoles. They were also popular for Bitcoin and other crypto-currency mining rigs, though that market seems to have played itself out. They earned just over $3 billion in profit in their fiscal Q1.
Intel, of course, makes CPUs, the central processing units at the heart of pretty much every computer. They’ve had trouble recently as rival AMD has lapped them in a number of markets, Apple is abandoning them as the Mac CPU manufacturer to go with a custom ARM-based system-on-a-chip, and reportedly Intel has had process yield problems with their chips. However all of that hasn’t prevented them from announcing over $5 billion in profits for their last fiscal quarter, though they also announced they’re pushing out their 7mm process node.
Owning your own fabs has become a very expensive proposition, but once they’re up and running, the costs are lower and give you full control of the process. So far Nvidia has benefited greatly from having TSMC fab their chips, but it’s rumored that all of TSMC’s cutting edge 5nm fab wafer starts are already spoken for next year (Apple is another customer), and it will take time for more fab capacity to come online. That may start to constrain Nvidia’s growth.
Nvidia is certainly having a better year than Intel, but 80 times earnings is a pretty crazy P/E ratio. Some market correction is probably in order.
