Hey, remember that whole “Sam Altman fired as CEO/reinstated as CEO of OpenAI” thing a couple of weeks ago? Here’s the archive story.
Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors, the company said.
The board would be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.
“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”
The return of Mr. Altmanand the potential remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.
“i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Mr. Altman said in a post to X. “with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.”
OpenAI’s board surprised Mr. Altman and the company’s employees on Friday afternoon when it told him he was being pushed out. Greg Brockman, the company’s president who co-founded the company with Mr. Altman and others, resigned in protest.
The ouster kicked off efforts by Mr. Altman, 38, his allies in the tech industry and OpenAI’s employees to force the company’s board to bring him back. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of negotiations, the board said it was going to stick with its decision.
But in a head-spinning development just hours later, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, said that Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and others would be joining the company to start a new advanced artificial intelligence lab.
Nearly all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees signed a letter telling the board they would walk out and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated, throwing the future of the start-up into jeopardy.
Four board members — Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder; Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora; Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and computer scientist — had initially decided to push Mr. Altman out.
Well, here’s Patrick Boyle to provide some context:
A few takeaways:
There are two OpenAIs: “The non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware, and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC.”
Musk was an early, and big, investor in the non-profit. “The founders pledged over one billion dollars to the venture, but actually only contributed around $130 million dollars- the majority of which came from Elon Musk.”
When he felt OpenAI was falling behind in 2018, he wanted to take over OpenAI himself. When the board rejected that, he resigned and took future pledged money with him, which blew a huge hole in their budget. (Whatever you think of Musk, I don’t think not being busy enough is his problem.)
Then came the for-profit doppelganger.
“The profits being capped at 100 times any investment.”
“The company explained this decision saying, ‘We need to invest billions of dollars in the coming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.’ This transition from nonprofit to for-profit required OpenAI to balance its desire to make money with its stated commitment to ethical AI development.”
“This unconventional structure meant that Open AI had a board of directors, which in theory controls the entire corporate structure (which includes the charity and the capped profit company) – but which unlike other boards is not accountable to shareholders. The directors are in fact not allowed to own any stock to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are specifically not supposed to be aligned with shareholders.”
“The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”
“In the real world, where the role of money is reasonably well defined, Open AI is an unprofitable company and is expected to need to raise a lot more money over time from investors like Microsoft, to keep up with the high costs of building more sophisticated chatbots.”
“Despite this lack of profitability, the company is valued by investors at 86 billion dollars, and Bloomberg reported last weekend that ‘some investors were considering writing down the entire value of their OpenAI holdings to zero.'”
“Former colleagues would have an open door to follow and join a new AI unit, according to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. As much of a win as this might have appeared for Microsoft (people were saying that they had managed to buy the hottest AI firm for zero), this might not have been the optimal outcome for them, as they would likely have had to deal with antitrust regulators and lawsuits from other Open AI investors.”
“The majority of Open AI’s 700 or so employees signed an open letter to the board demanding that the board resign and that they rehire Altman. The letter stated that the board had told the employee leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’ The employees said that unless their demands were met, they would resign from Open AI and join the new subsidiary of Microsoft being headed up by Altman and Brockman.”
“You have to wonder what the employee contracts at Open AI look like that the entire staff could leave to work for a major investor in the company leaving Open Ai as an empty shell.”
“Typically, executives like Altman would have contracts that prevent them from hiring away key staff once they are no longer at the firm, and staff would have signed NDA’s preventing them from taking any technology with them.”
“The OpenAI story is a bit of a crazy one, where Microsoft and a number of other sophisticated investors agreed to put billions of dollars in, and employees got stock grants, all at an $86 billion valuation, without the contractual or fiduciary rights that investors might normally expect.”
Rival Anthropic has a similar structure.
“Bad corporate governance has been a growing issue particularly in Silicon Valley where companies like Google, Facebook and Snap structured their IPO’s such that founders were left with unchallenged power to do almost anything that they want.” Google and Facebook are garbage companies, but there are some scenarios where only founders can keep the company on a long-term vision rather than goosing quarterly profits (Jobs at Apple comes to mind).
Warren Buffet has a similar mechanism (A shares of stock only he controls) to keep control of Berkshire Hatheway.
“Since you are buying shares of companies in perpetuity, leadership who are not accountable to shareholders can take value destructive paths without answering to anyone. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses its efforts to build the metaverse, has lost around $46.5 billion dollars since 2019. Would Mark Zuckerberg have been able to waste this much money if he was accountable to investors?” I have a fairly strong suspicion that division is being used to hide all sorts of shenanigans.
Boyle is deeply suspicious of “stakeholder capitalism” as opposed to the old-fashioned, profit-maximizing kind.”
The thing missing from this summary, and all the coverage of the story I’ve seen, is why Altman was originally let go, and none of the principals involved seem to be talking about it…
Congratulations! You’ve successfully made it to the last month of 2023! Give yourself a cookie!
I’ve spent most of today getting my latest book catalog ready to send out, so I’m probably going to have to break this LinkSwarm into two parts. This part: More Biden corrupton evidence, Big Brother wants all your tweets, Jihadi gets stabby in Ireland, and a couple of fairly notable political deaths.
A bank money-laundering investigator expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden, according to an email obtained by the House
Biden received a $40,000 personal check from an account shared by his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in September 2017 — money that was marked as a “loan repayment.” The alleged repayment was sent after funds were filtered from Northern International Capital, a Chinese company affiliated with the Chinese energy firm CEFC, through several accounts related to Hunter Biden and eventually down to the personal account shared by James and Sara Biden.
Northern International Capital sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and CEFC associate Gongwen Dong on August 8.
On the same day, Hudson West III then sent $400,000 to Owasco, P.C., an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden. Six days later, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by James and Sara Biden. Sara Biden withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group on August 28 and then deposited the funds into her and her husband’s personal checking account later that day.
On September 3, 2017, Sara Biden wrote a check to Joe Biden for $40,000.
We all know that if Trump did something remotely close to this, he’d already be in prison.
Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted former President Donald Trump’s tweets leading up to the January 6 riot, according to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released Monday.
Smith’s comprehensive search warrant sought the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.
The special counsel also demanded a list of all devices used to log into Trump’s then-Twitter, now X account, as well as information on users who interacted with the then-president in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, the court filings show.
Among the information Smith sought were lists of all Twitter users who “favorited or retweeted” Trump’s tweets, “as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account” in “mentions” or “replies.”
The special counsel also requested a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” and a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account during the aforementioned timeframe.
“There is no benign or reasonable justification for that demand,” wrote former FBI agent/whistleblower Steve Friend on X.
Henry Kissinger, the legendary diplomat who played a central role in advising Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford on foreign policy, died at his home in Connecticut late Wednesday at age 100.
Kissinger was the only person to simultaneously be secretary of state and hold the position of White House national-security adviser. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho for their work in brokering the 1973 Paris Agreement ending America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923. Three months before Kristallnacht, his family fled, bound for New York City. Kissinger served in the Army during World War II and was assigned to the 84 Infantry Division, voluntarily staying behind at the Battle of the Bulge to reportedly conduct “hazardous counter-intelligence duties” while also “making good use of his German.”
Kissinger was a key Cold War figure as Secretary of State, and one who doesn’t deserve all of the extensive condemnation he receives (for different reasons) from left and right, nor the hosannas of praise he received from the mainstream media during is heyday. The instantly betrayed peace treaty with North Vietnam (the won he won the Nobel Peace Prize for) was shameful, but LBJ’s incompetence and Washington elite failure of nerve probably doomed South Vietnam before Kissinger even got to the negotiating table. The opening to China was a brilliant move to counter the Soviet Union at the time, and helped usher in a brief period of economic and political liberalization that has now been almost completely undone. SALT1 and the ABM treaties were violated by the Soviet Union before the ink was even dry.
Kissinger was at his best down deep in the intricacies of face-to-face diplomacy, and played a key role in negotiating details after the Yom Kippur War. Indeed, Kissinger’s goal of stabilizing the Middle East (at least as far as preventing another major Arab-Israeli War) was met.
Kissinger was ultimately wrong for favoring detente over rollback, but that preference was also emblematic of the Washington foreign policy establishment of the time, and it would take Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to set America on the right course (and the Soviet Union to the dust-heap of history).
Sandra Day O’Connor dead at 93. Eh, she wasn’t the worst Republican appointee to the Supreme Court.
Irish riot over illegal alien stabbing spree against children. Rioting is bad, mmkay, but Irish citizens, like those across the rest of the EU, are tired of the enforced consensus for allowing unassimilable Islamic immigrants to cross the border and immediately apply for the welfare rolls.
Not just Ireland. “‘We are here to stab white people’: Teen killed, 16 others wounded in French village after migrant gang reportedly descends on winter ball.”
High prices and “lot rot” are doing CarMax in. Not to mention the Biden recession…
I didn’t intend to do an all “China is Screwed” video roundup weekend, but the videos keep stacking up and I need to post some rather than producing a giant unwieldy post with hours of footage.
First up: Young people’s whose job prospects and futures are so dim that they’re actually living in concrete pipes.
Takeaways:
Certainly America has no shortage of transients living rough, but in contrast to ragged drug addicts, alcoholics and dangerous lunatics, the people living in these pipes look to be normal, healthy 20-something Chinese.
Just because you’re living in a concrete pipe doesn’t mean you can’t be a live-streamer. Like the under-the-bridge streamers seen in previous videos, you wonder how widespread this behavior is, or whether we’re just seeing the edge of the freak show.
“Despite the female hosts not being beautiful and the male hosts not handsome, it doesn’t affect viewership.” I do rather want to check their numbers, here.
“This is because it’s happening in the industrial city known as the world’s factory – Dongguan in Guangzhou.” It’s on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou and Hong Kong. “After more than thirty years of China’s reform and opening up, Dongguan, which has always been at the forefront of economic development, has recently seen a wave of business closures and foreign capital relocation.” See also: all those previousChina is screwed videos.
“When foreign capital withdraws, thousands of Chinese workers lose their jobs. Among these people, some have worked in factories for decades and are now middle-aged. It’s overwhelming to be suddenly faced with unemployment and consequential cost-of-living pressures, coupled with labor competition against millions of university graduates.” I’m sure that sucks, just like getting laid off here sucks. But in a capitalist economy, even a flawed one like we have, is always going to be more flexible about creating jobs that one ruled by a communist party’s aristocracy of pull.
“Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.” Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.
Foreign companies like Microsoft and Nokia are now moving to Vietnam and India. “Japanese companies like Panasonic, Daikin, Sharp, and TDK are planning to move their manufacturing bases back to Japan. Well-known companies like Uniqlo, Nike, Funai Electric, Samsung, and others are also accelerating their withdrawal from China.”
Like industry is also fleeing from elsewhere in China.
“The once bustling Bund in Shanghai is now overgrown with weeds due to lack of maintenance and tourism, presenting a scene of desolation. Everywhere in Shanghai’s luxury residential communities, there are messages about subleasing and selling at a loss. The elites, celebrities, and tycoons left Shanghai at the first chance they got after the lifting of the lockdown. The political uncertainty in China and the frequent changes in regulatory clauses by the authorities have made entrepreneurs miserable.” Communists making entrepreneurs miserable? This is my shocked face.
“Domestic entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest further, and foreign investors are hastening their departure.”
Various Chinese company specific layoffs and financial difficulties snipped.
“Wall Street leading figures, after enjoying three years of benefits from the broad opening of China’s financial market, are planning large-scale cuts to projects and staff in China…Goldman Sachs has lowered its five-year plan expectations, and Morgan Stanley has decided not to set up a securities dealer in China, reducing its derivative and futures business investment to $150 million. JPMorgan Chase & Co. began cutting its dedicated staff in China earlier this year.” There’s not a violin small enough.
In a capitalist economy, there would be some sort of middle ground between the empty ghost cities and people living in pipes near megalopolises. If you don’t regulate the economy so heavily as to make building housing impossible (I’m looking at you, California and NYC), then profit will drive developers to create housing to fill a market need. With China’s crazy misallocation of loans to unprofitable housing to satisfy regional government growth targets, supply has been so severed from demand that such market-making is impossible.
China is going to come out of it’s decades-long growth spurt with crumbling cities and people that mostly are still poor.
Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts.
That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer.
This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.
Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days.
Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest?
Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel plants from the grid.
These plants are supposed to be replaced by renewables — wind and solar — but wind doesn’t work on windless days, and solar doesn’t keep your air conditioning running on steamy nights.
The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.”
Institute for the Study of War: “Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.” Other sources are reporting modest Ukrainian gains.
A comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory reveals that Meta-owned Instagram has been home to an organized and massive network of pedophiles.
But what separates this case from most is that Instagram’s own algorithms were promoting pedophile content to other pedophiles, while the pedos themselves used coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza.
Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.
The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.” -WSJ
According to the researchers, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as “little slut for you.”
Sellers of child porn often convey the child’s purported age, saying they are “on chapter 14,” or “age 31,” with an emoji of a reverse arrow.
Speaking of Meta, they’re threatening to “pull news feeds on its platforms for California residents if the state legislature passes the Journalism Preservation Act.” That act “requires big tech companies to pay news outlets a journalism usage fee.” For once the pedo-coddlers are right: No one should be forced to subsidize failing social justice-infected newsrooms.
Speaking of pedophiles: “Itasca ISD Superintendent Michael Stevens arrested, charged with online solicitation of a minor.” Maybe parents wouldn’t worry so much about educators trying to screw their children if educators didn’t keep trying to screw their children.
This week in Democrats passing unconstitutional laws that strip citizens of rights: “llinois’s Gov. J. B. “Jumbo Burger” Pritzker signed himself a whale of a state law yesterday that went into effect IMMEDIATELY. And, immediately, restricted Illinois citizens from pursuing constitutional claims against their state government unless they filed the lawsuits in one of two, Democratic approved, state sanctioned, Democratic counties – Cook or Sangamon.” That’s a prima facie violation of the First Amendment “right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Free New York City crack pipe vending machine cleaned out overnight. “Free crack pipe vending machine” sounds like the punchline to a Norm MacDonald joke from the 1990s, but it’s now evidently the policy of New York Democrats.
North Dakota’s Republican Governor is running for President. Burgum is evidently a billionaire after being an early investor in Great Plains Software, which was sold to Microsoft in 2001. The fact he’s close to Bill Gates doesn’t give me a lot of warm fuzzies, and Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved that rich-but-unknown outsiders shoveling money into a Presidential campaign costs you a lot of jack and earn you boatloads of squat. He’s a pretty decent public speaker, but in a blow-dried 80’s executive sense, and he sort of looks like if Richard Belzer had played the Michael Douglas role in Falling Down.
I know nothing more than this. Evidently local media have ignored it as well:
Tweaker idiot takes the 801 bus hostage. All passengers have exited the bus. Driver is in her seat like a mamaluke. APD is nowhere to be found. Viva la leftists. pic.twitter.com/EpwDhrtCUX
— Blastbeat Industries (@BlastbeatATX) June 9, 2023
“Due To High Crime, Mafia Closes Its Chicago Office.” “How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It’s insane!”
“Biden’s job growth is mostly immigrants working for low wages.” Also this: “The Department of Homeland Security has been issuing an unknown number of two-year work permits to illegal immigrants, which will keep them in the workforce suppressing wages and fanning the flames of discontent amongst Americans unable to find jobs until the next presidential election.” What the hell?
“Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media.”
The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported . This same “disinformation” group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress.
“Any outfit like that engaged in censorship shouldn’t have any contact with the government because they’re tainted by association with a group that is doing something fundamentally against American values,” Jeffrey Clark, ex-acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the Washington Examiner. “The government or any private entity shouldn’t be involved with this entity that’s engaged in conduct that is either legally questionable or at least morally questionable.”
GDI compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” that it feeds to corporate entities, such as the Microsoft -owned advertising company Xandr, emails show. Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.
The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on this exclusion list. The list includes at least 2,000 websites and has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” said GDI’s CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast.
GDI has identified that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
Another huge story that the news media has done it’s best to ignore: a toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The blew it up to prevent a BLEVE and ended up releasing Phosgene gas. That’s carrying your World War I reenactment too far.
90-year California Democratic Senator old Dianne Feinstein to retire after 2024. But…
A few hour later she was evidently unaware she had retired. Increasingly, “crazy” or “senile” seem to be the two most common flavors of the Democratic Party…
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! Biden not just dropping, but deflating and throwing away the ball on border security, Andrew Cuomo finally behaves badly enough for the MSM to notice, and some tidbits about hacking attacks.
Biden’s proposed budget wants to cutting funding for border security…by 96%:
His administration has presented Congress with a Department of Homeland Security budget proposal that calls for slashing spending on what it calls “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” by 96%.
In fiscal year 2021, Congress approved $1,513,000,000 in funding for border security assets and infrastructure. Biden is now asking that Congress approve just $54,315,000 for fiscal year 2022. That is a reduction of $1,458,685,000—or 96.4%.
What exactly is Biden cutting?
Biden’s DHS has presented Congress with a 562-page “overview” of its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal for Customs and Border Protection. The explanation for its “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” plan is presented on pages 326 through 350 of this document.
The presentation divides “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” into six categories: Integrated Fixed Towers; Remote Video Surveillance Systems; Mobile Video Surveillance System; MVSS-M2S2 Modular Mobile Surveillance System; Border Security Assets and Infrastructure End Items; and Border Wall System Program.
In the past two fiscal years—as reported in Biden’s proposal—the Border Wall System Program has been the most significant of these. “This investment,” it says, “includes real estate and environmental planning, land acquisition, wall system design, construction, and construction and oversight of a physical barrier system.”
In fiscal year 2020, it received $1,375,000,000. In fiscal year 2021, it received the same amount.
Now, if Biden gets his way, the federal government will not spend one penny in fiscal year 2022 on planning or constructing a “physical barrier system” at the border.
Obviously, Democrats want a massive influx of illegal aliens so they can amnesty them and have them vote for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As illegal aliens are still being allowed to cross Texas’ open border, U.S. Border Patrol has reportedly reassigned all hands from “apprehending” to “processing.” A former federal agent says these massive waves of illegal aliens are one of the “biggest sources” of rising cases of the Chinese coronavirus and advises Texans to contact all their state officials to stop illegal crossings at the border.
Victor Avila, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has previously told Texas Scorecard that federal and state officials aren’t making serious efforts to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border. He said the number of illegal border crossings has recently skyrocketed.
On Tuesday, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith (R) told Texas Scorecard that U.S. Border Patrol informed him they had been given new orders. “They’ve all been reassigned to processing,” Smith said. “None of them are actually going to be enforcing the border.” Avila commented, “That is what I’m hearing exactly.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe described processing as “paperwork, documentation, etc.”
“We’re in a bad spot now,” Smith said. “Texas is on its own.”
Speaking of border security: “Texas landowner fears for kids’ safety amid worsening border crisis, says they can’t play outside anymore.”
“More Illegal Immigrants, Border Agents Testing Positive for COVID-19.” The way Democrats love expanding governemnt in the name of fighting Flu Manchu, you wonder if this is a bug or a feature… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released their report on COVID-19’s origins, pointing to evidence of a lab leak, genetic modification, and a cover-up, making the case the virus accidentally emerged from the Wuhan lab in August or September 2019.” Or pretty much what every conservative blogger has been saying for almost a year and a half…
This week’s Democratic political scandal de jour is an official state probe of New York Governor Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo committed multiple instances of sexual harassment. “These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” said State Attorney General Letitia James. It would be ironic if it was this rather than killing some 15,000 elderly New Yorkers by putting Flu Manchu cases in nursing homes that brought Cuomo down.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once widely celebrated for leading New York out of the coronavirus pandemic’s darkest days, is now embroiled in crisis over how many of the state’s nursing home residents died because of the virus and an apparent effort to hide the true toll.
Beginning last spring, Mr. Cuomo was criticized over a state requirement that forced nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized with Covid-19 once they recovered. Critics said the policy had increased the number of virus-related deaths among nursing home residents.
At the time, Mr. Cuomo and his aides dismissed the outcry as politically motivated, and in July, the State Health Department released a report that found the policy was not responsible for an increase. The report did, however, raise questions in some quarters about how the state was reporting deaths.
In January, New York’s attorney general said the administration had undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand. Mr. Cuomo later acknowledged as much, blaming the lower figure on fears that the Trump administration would use the data as a political weapon.
“Don’t you see? We had to lie to you, because Orange Man Bad!”
The suggestion that the actual death count had been covered up intensified criticism of Mr. Cuomo, including from his allies in state government. The scandal deepened after reports that the governor’s aides had altered the July report to hide the true figure.
In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Cuomo’s aides had gone to far greater lengths than previously known to obscure the death toll, repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months.
First, there was the nursing-home scandal, in which Governor Cuomo deliberately undercounted the number of seniors who died due to his directive placing COVID-positive residents back into understaffed, underequipped nursing homes — and then misled New Yorkers and federal officials about it. Estimates suggest that as many as 15,000 New York seniors due to his actions. Worse yet, while covering up these deaths, he took a cool $5.1 million to write a book touting his COVID leadership and then allegedly used state staff and resources to produce this propaganda piece. One needn’t be a skeptic to link the timing of the deal to the cover-up of the scandal.
And that’s just one of the many fires engulfing the Cuomo administration. At this point, it’s hard to keep up with the litany of abuses perpetrated by Governor Cuomo and his staff. Despite anointing himself as a champion of women, Cuomo has been hit with more than ten accusations of sexual harassment since December. First, he said he’d investigate these allegations himself. When public pressure forced him to establish independent investigations of the charges, he stalled for time and declined to comment while the investigations played out. Now, with a Democratic state attorney general investigating the claims, the governor and his top aides have stonewalled, threatened, and gaslit witnesses and state officials, accusing them of playing political games.
There have also been reports that Cuomo’s friends, family, and donors received preferential access to COVID-19 tests and health information. There’s the matter of a $62 million COVID-related state contract being given to a medical network that donated $230,000 to the Cuomo campaign. There’s the claim by gaming interests that the governor’s team threatened them until they coughed up campaign money. And another investigation is centered around allegations that a top Cuomo aide linked vaccine access to political support of the governor.
In an attempt to silence these stories, the governor has responded with brute force. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is on the record as saying Governor Cuomo hurls invective at officials and the media to make them feel “belittled.” Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim — who lost a close family member to COVID in a New York nursing home — called for Cuomo to provide answers about the nursing-home tragedy. Cuomo personally phoned Kim and threatened to “destroy” him, before holding a press conference in which Kim was referred to as a “habitual liar.” Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi has released text messages showing threats she’s received from the Cuomo administration.
The behavior displayed by Governor Cuomo is appalling, but it’s nothing new. This is who he is, and who he has always been.
More ethical lapses snipped.
The obvious lies, the ham-fisted cover-ups, the corruption — we’ve seen it all time and time again from this governor. When there’s even a hint of an investigation into wrongdoing that implicates him or his cabal, Cuomo cuts his losses and scorches the earth. This is who he is: a mean-spirited bully with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, ruthless in defense of his own venal interests and public image.
The Cuomo administration has run the gamut of travesties and tragedies. Personal viciousness is the governor’s calling card, and criminal behavior his M.O. Even as they’re barraged with one scandal and outrageous revelation after another, he and his inner circle continue to operate as though it’s all business as usual. So why is Cuomo still the governor of New York? Democratic lawmakers — the very same ones who called on him to resign when the sexual-harassment claims first emerged — continue to stand with him and normalize his behavior more than seven months later, partially out of fear and partially out of a complete lack of interest in governing.
Meanwhile, Cuomo seems locked into the Ralph Northam strategy: Assume that the (D) after his name absolves him of all sins against Social Justice and just wait out the storm confident no one will dare hold him accountable for his actions. And don’t forget the media’s nonstop fluffing of Cuomo back in 2020:
The Rolling Stone cover; Politico declaring him a “social media superstar”; Harry Enten of CNN declaring that, “The rise of Cuomo shows that times of tragedy can make very unlikely political heroes”; Carl Bernstein declaring that, “[It’s] real leadership of the kind the president of the United States should have provided to the American people throughout this crisis, but hasn’t”; Jesse McKinley and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo’s handling of the crisis has fostered a nationwide following; Mr. Biden called Mr. Cuomo’s briefings a ‘lesson in leadership,’ and others have described them as communal therapy sessions”; Ben Smith of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis”; the New York Post (!) declaring that New York women were developing crushes on him; and Jen Rubin gushing: “Watching Andrew Cuomo is inspiring, uplifting, fascinating. He weaves details and humor and math and common sense all together. He is magnificent.” Even the Columbia Journalism Review started to worry that the adoring tone of the coverage was overlooking real problems with Cuomo’s decision-making.
And this is all separate from his appearances on his brother’s CNN program. I suspect you remember or can find examples I didn’t list above. Oh, another classic example, from Rebecca Fishbein of Jezebel: “I swooned when he told a reporter he had his own workout routine. I have watched a clip of him and brother Chris Cuomo bickering about their mother at least 20 times. I think I have a crush?”
Democrats in Washington want Andrew Cuomo to resign to allow the Democrat lieutenant governor to run New York state. If a Republican were next in line for the job, Democrats would be falling on grenades for Cuomo. That is, after all, what happened in Virginia when Governor Black Face unleashed his oppo research on the Democrats in the line of succession.
There are no criminal charges against Cuomo.
Cuomo’s problem is not sexual harassment. His problem is Democrats see him as a threat if he chooses to run for president.
Democrats in Washington want no part of playing second fiddle to an outsider. They had their fill of outsiders as presidents with Bill Clinton. Democrat senators want the White House all to themselves. In the 6 presidential elections since Clinton, Democrats have nominated a senator or former senator for president and vice president each time.
National Review wants you to know that Huey Long was a bad role model. Or you could just, you know, watch All the King’s Men, which remains a timeless classic. It won the Oscar in back-to-back years with All About Eve, another timeless classic, both of which showed you what the old studio system could achieve when they were working at the top of their game.
Inside the fight against a ransomware attack against the Texas town of Borger (which is way the hell up north of Amarillo):
In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.
Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.
Expensive Ivy League college film degrees are a scam. “Recent graduates from the Columbia University film program have an average loan debt of six figures against a low-to-mid five-figure income. And given that the master’s program takes four years, Columbia alumni enter the competitive field at around age 30, a detrimentally late start. Graduates soon face the shocking realization that they not only crippled their future but also wasted their money and youth.”
Automotive News published a report on Thursday of this week noting that EVs were 2.3 times more expensive to service than ICE vehicles after three months of ownership. Analytics firm We Predict compiled the data by looking at roughly 19 million vehicles between the 2016 and 2021 model years.
That figure drops to just 1.6 times more expensive after one year, the report noted, as a result of a 77% drop in maintenance costs and a decline in repair costs. The data showed that service techs spend about twice as much time diagnosing problems with EVs as they do with regular gas vehicles. They spend about 1.5 times longer fixing them and the labor rate for repairs was about 1.3 times higher.
Presumably some of this gap will drop as technicians become more familiar with them.
Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.
Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.
Also this: “Orchestras should hire diversity consultants to develop ‘extra-musical evaluation’ criteria for orchestral positions, such as serving as an institutional spokesman.” Diversity consultants always demand hiring more diversity consultants. What are the odds?
The Offspring fire longtime drummer Pete Parada for refusing to get a Flu Manchu vaccine. “Given my personal medical history and the side-effect profile of these jabs, my doctor has advised me not to get a shot at this time.” If the other members are vaccinated, why the hell should they care? Stupider still: Parada already caught the virus last year, so he probably has more immunity than the vaccine provides…
Col. Dave Severance, who helped take Iwo Jima (and commanded the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, the one in the famous photograph), dead at 102.
Where does this rank among disturbing YouTube videos? I give it a three.
Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.
Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.
Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:
A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.
Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.
Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.
Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.
It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.
You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.
You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.
Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.
Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.
As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.
(Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.
Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.
And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.
Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.
For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.
But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.
And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.
Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.
This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.
Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.
These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.
Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
“Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
“Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.
Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
“China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
The IDF has successfully completed Operation Guardian of the Walls. This is what the 12-day-long operation looked like in numbers: pic.twitter.com/AM2WoqPx4K
If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
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.”
At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The espionage group is exploiting four newly-discovered flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server email software, and has seeded hundreds of thousands of victim organizations worldwide with tools that give the attackers total, remote control over affected systems.
On March 2, Microsoft released emergency security updates to plug four security holes in Exchange Server versions 2013 through 2019 that hackers were actively using to siphon email communications from Internet-facing systems running Exchange.
Microsoft said the Exchange flaws are being targeted by a previously unidentified Chinese hacking crew it dubbed “Hafnium,” and said the group had been conducting targeted attacks on email systems used by a range of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs.
In the three days since then, security experts say the same Chinese cyber espionage group has dramatically stepped up attacks on any vulnerable, unpatched Exchange servers worldwide.
In each incident, the intruders have left behind a “web shell,” an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser. The web shell gives the attackers administrative access to the victim’s computer servers.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, two cybersecurity experts who’ve briefed U.S. national security advisors on the attack told KrebsOnSecurity the Chinese hacking group thought to be responsible has seized control over “hundreds of thousands” of Microsoft Exchange Servers worldwide — with each victim system representing approximately one organization that uses Exchange to process email.
Microsoft’s initial advisory about the Exchange flaws credited Reston, Va. based Volexity for reporting the vulnerabilities. Volexity President Steven Adair said the company first saw attackers quietly exploiting the Exchange bugs on Jan. 6, 2021, a day when most of the world was glued to television coverage of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
But Adair said that over the past few days the hacking group has shifted into high gear, moving quickly to scan the Internet for Exchange servers that weren’t yet protected by the security updates Microsoft released Tuesday.
“We’ve worked on dozens of cases so far where web shells were put on the victim system back on Feb. 28 [before Microsoft announced its patches], all the way up to today,” Adair said. “Even if you patched the same day Microsoft published its patches, there’s still a high chance there is a web shell on your server. The truth is, if you’re running Exchange and you haven’t patched this yet, there’s a very high chance that your organization is already compromised.”
This is a huge problem, because Exchange is only used by just about every big business in America, not to mention numerous government agencies. It dominates the market so thoroughly that it’s hard to find market share reports on its competitors.
Here’s a timeline of the hack. Evidently Chinese hackers exploited no less than four zero day exploits to pull off the hack.
Internet security is hard, and no one in the Federal government (with the possible exception of DoD and certain three initial agencies) seems to take it seriously.
