I haven’t been covering the Ken Paxton impeachment because I don’t think I have anything novel to say about it that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. Enjoy the Friday LinkSwarm!
U.S. credit card debt tops $1 trillion. Thanks, Joe Biden.
Truth about our current economic situation:
We went into a recession after two back to back quarters of -1.5 over a year ago. When this happened, the establishment changed the parameters that define recession. We’ve remained at a net loss with job creation and “Bidenomics”. This isn’t recovery and everyone knows it. https://t.co/RXltpBNxhp
The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes. Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.
There was a clip, there was always a clip. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing.
Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood. The audience would titter in excited anticipation.
It was a delight to watch.
Snip.
What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.
As essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. Then you moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm.
TV news was even shakier, as networks often recorded over old tapes. Some of this footage only exists today because of the obsessive efforts of one Philadelphia woman who recorded news broadcasts on 140,000 VHS tapes over forty years.
And so, if you were a pundit or a commentator or a “spin doctor” PR flak, you could say whatever suited your needs at the moment, or even lie with impunity — as long as your lie did not become its own pseudo-event. Your lasting impact was whatever stuck in viewers’ heads and hearts. And if you changed your tune in the months or years afterwards, who would remember?
The Daily Show would remember.
The explosion of live broadcast and cable news had created a new, completely under-valued resource for whoever thought to harness it: catalog clips. Soon, new digital technology could preserve content in amber, allowing for its retrieval, repurposing, or referencing at any time.
It’s a long essay, and I don’t necessarily agree with all the writer’s points, but it’s worth reading.
There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.
There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”6
One can see how Sweden’s path diverged from that of its peers by consulting the latest Human Freedom Index, which has data through 2020. During this first year of the pandemic, Sweden’s freedom rating only fell by 0.19 on a 10‐point scale, compared to 0.49 in Britain and 0.52 in the United States. The only rich country that saw a smaller decline in freedom than Sweden was Singapore, at 0.16.7
Snip.
Analysts from other countries—and even some Swedish scholars—predicted disaster. One influential Swedish model, inspired by the famous British Imperial College study, predicted that Sweden would have 20,000 COVID-19 patients needing intensive care by early May 2020 and a need for intensive care units around 40 times over capacity. By July 1, Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Imperial College model predicted between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths without mitigation efforts, and a peak demand of intensive care unit patients 70 times higher than capacity.
Snip.
When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.
“Poland Aims To Create Largest Army In Europe Within Two Years.” Golly, who would need a large army with such historically peaceful neighbors as Germany and Russia?
e Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) declared a statewide lockdown of all its correctional facilities on Wednesday morning, citing increased contraband-related incidents and drug-related inmate homicides.
TDCJ said most inmate-on-inmate homicides “are tied back to illegal drugs … and over the last five years, the volume of illegal narcotics entering the system has substantially increased.”
In response to the drug and murder epidemic in Texas jails, TDCJ is implementing the following strategies to restore order:
Systemwide Lockdown: Each facility will limit the movement of inmates and their contact with those outside the prison. Inmates and staff will undergo intensified searches to intercept and confiscate contraband.
Digital Mail: TDCJ is completing the rollout of the digital mail program. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in paper soaked in K2 or methamphetamines coming into our facilities. The digital mail program will halt this contraband being sent through traditional mail. Effective September 6, 2023, all inmate mail should be addressed and sent to the Digital Mail Center. All mail received this week will be delivered to the digital mail processing center. More information about this program can be found here: TDCJ News – TDCJ Digital Mail Rollout.
Increased K9 Searches and Other Technology: To assist in contraband detection and outside funding related to contraband, TDCJ will be deploying additional resources. Specialized search teams and narcotic dogs will be deployed to units and staff will be subject to enhanced search procedures.
Comprehensive Searches: All persons entering our facilities at all locations will undergo comprehensive searches.
“Due to the fact staff will be concentrating on these search efforts, visitation will be canceled until further notice. Inmates will still have access to the phone system and tablets,” TDCJ said.
If drugs are getting into Texas prisons, there’s over a 90% chance correctional staff are getting them in there.
“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.
“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.
Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”
Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.
CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.
“California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent.”
Remember how the UK was economically lagging other countries in Europe and Remainers blamed Brexit? Yeah, not so much.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.
These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.
The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’ The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.
Mark Felton visits Buckingham Palace, and is Not Amused. “The rooms open to the public are, of course, lavishly decorated. The amount of gold painted furniture, pianos and urns, similar to what I imagine Liberace’s house look like. The walls are hung with the usual assortment of well-fed Hanoverians.” Plus: No bathrooms for you, lowly peasant!
A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.
To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.
Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.
Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.
“Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
San Diego tries enforcing the law, a sampler of the lies Obama told about his life, Blade-Runners take on Big Brother’s cameras, a nuke rises in Texas, and a Cthuloid horror swims the chilly waters of Antarctica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
San Diego tries “this one weird trick” to deal with homeless problem: Enforcing the law.
Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.
The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”
Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.
Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.
Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.
Do you think Austin’s government might start enforcing the city’s camping ban? Of course not. Then how are they supposed to rake off the graft? (Hat tip: Instapundit, who offers some takeaways worth highlighting:
1. The homeless respond to policy and incentives like anyone else. The mere announcement of a future camping ban (plus some enforcement of other existing rules) rapidly cleared out major problem areas.
2. The provision of shelter or housing is neither necessary nor sufficient to accomplish these clear-outs. Of the people asked to leave Balboa Park on the first day of enforcement (issuance of warnings), none accepted offers of shelter.
3. The NGOs that have colonized the homeless problem have neither the incentive nor the knowledge to solve it. The head of one shelter was confused by the magical disappearance of his potential clients. “Where did they go?”
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
Snip.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.
The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.
Snip.
Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.
It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.
Read the whole thing to see all those facts about Obama that the media ignored…including his fantasies about having sex with men.
Members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.
In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.
Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”
According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.
His office has not yet commented on the delay of water resources.
How much damage could have been prevented with the extra water is not yet known. However, the question of “Why?” needs to be addressed in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history. Though bureaucratic red tape might be the most obvious suggestion, a recent interview with M. Kaleo Manual offers some interesting and disturbing insight. Manuel waxes philosophical on “water equity” (“equity” being a pervasive woke buzzword) and an ancient “reverence” of water as god-like. He uses these beliefs to support his rationale for keeping tight controls over Hawaiian water supplies; not as a resource to be used, but as a holistic privilege offered by the government.
Economist who named BRICS says the idea of a common BRICS currency is “embarrassing.”
“It’s just ridiculous,” [Lord Jim O’Neill] told the Financial Times in an interview on Monday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”
The economist spoke ahead of the 15th BRICS summit next week, where the nations will meet to decide whether to expand membership to other countries and may also float the idea of the common currency.
The following story was related to me by a former Governor of Minnesota, who was of Norwegian descent. A number of years ago, a Norwegian dignitary (the Prime Minister, I think) visited Minnesota. Talking to our governor, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about Minnesota’s crime rate, saying that there was much less crime in Norway. Minnesota’s governor replied, “We don’t have a crime problem with our Norwegians, either.”
That anecdote came to mind when I read, in the London Times, “Sweden’s slide from peaceful welfare state to Europe’s gun-killings capital.”
Today, Sweden is Europe’s capital of gun homicide. Last year, according to the Swedish national council for crime prevention, 63 people were shot and killed: more than double the European average and, per capita, multitudes higher than London or Paris.
… The effect on Swedish society has been striking. As well as the lives lost, the violence has brought down a government, changed laws and policies, and become the biggest talking point in a country that once prided itself on its reputation as a peaceful welfare state.
Violent crime will do that, although, to be fair, Sweden’s homicide rate is considerably lower than ours. But it is now significantly higher than homicide rates in quite a few other European countries, including Norway. Why is that? Have Swedes suddenly started getting violent? No.
It has also kicked the hornet’s nest of integration. Today, one fifth of all people living in Sweden were born outside the country.
Dow Chemical is planning to build a small nuclear reactor to power their plant in Calhoun County. Good for them. The TRISO-X fuel they’re using sounds like it will be a pebble bed reactor design.
“Target Sales Dipped in Last Quarter Due to Pride Backlash.”
More Biden Crime Family evidence surfaces, another mysterious Chinese bio-lab (this one much closer to home than Wuhan), more blue city real estate disaster, and Tim Scott screws up. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden vehemently denied ever talking business with his son, “or with anyone else” in the run-up to the 2020 election. In fact, Biden even fat-shamed an Iowa voter who approached the subject during the Democratic primaries. On the debate stage with Donald Trump, the former vice president peddled conspiracies of Russian interference when emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed otherwise.
On Sunday night, the New York Post reported on anticipated testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. The 48-year-old who went golfing with the Bidens in 2014 is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how Hunter Biden put his father in contact with foreign businessmen and potential investors at least 24 times. According to the Post, such meetings were either in person or by speakerphone, with Hunter Biden often dialing in Joe.
Beyond those meetings, there are more than 180 other episodes where the president interacted with his son’s business partners, contrary to his campaign claims of “absolute” separation.
As the evidence for at least an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden mounts, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and co-host Ben Ferguson discussed the latest bombshell – 170 suspicious activity reports (SARs) from six banks over the past few years – on their podcast with House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY).
As Townhall reports, these SARs are submitted and sent to the Treasury Department when banks “have a strong suspicion” that a crime has been committed, so as to protect the bank.
As Comer emphasized, these are submitted “very seldom.”
If someone were to have two, the chairman explained, it would be hard for that person to open up a bank account.
Submitting an SAR, Comer added, also is “inviting the regulators to come in and regulate,” which is the last thing banks want.
The full transcript from Devon Archer’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee from Monday, July 31, has been released. During that testimony, Archer told Rep. Dan Goldman that Hunter Biden had been placed on the board of directors for Ukrainian energy company Burisma in order to “legally” intimidate people.
During that question period, Goldman asked Archer “So based on everything you saw, heard, and observed, did you have any knowledge of Joe Biden having any involvement with Burisma?”
Archer said that while he did not have “direct” knowledge, it was his view that Burisma would not last were in not for Joe Biden’s involvement. “My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it. That’s my, like, only honest opinion,” Archer said. He went on to say that the company was able to survive for as long as it did because Hunter was on the board.
“Just because of the brand,” Archer said. The “brand” refers to the Biden name. Speaking with The Post Millennial, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the brand was not only Biden, but the vice presidency during Biden’s tenure.
“How does that have an impact?” Goldman asked.
“Well, the capabilities to navigate D.C.,” Archer said, “that they were able to, you know, basically be in the news cycle. And I think that preserved them from a, you know, from a longevity standpoint. That’s like my honest—that’s what I—tht’s like how I think holistically.”
“But how would that work?” Goldman asked.
“Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer replied.
“In what way?” Goldman pressed.
“Legally,” Archer said.
Archer also spoke about the meetings during which Joe Biden would call in, or be called. “He put him on speakerphone, again, occasionally. Specifics, like, you know, dinner—you know, dinners occasionally.” Archer was asked to describe the dinners, and said “I remember a dinner in Paris with a French energy company that was—we were speaking to an advisor, and then—we were speaking to. And it was really a Rosemont Seneca Advisors type of—a Rosemont Seneca Advisors kind of a pitch, at the end of the day. And there was a talk, and he said that we’re at this—you know, we’re at this restaurant in Paris, and he put him on the speaker. So that did happen. There were other people there.”
That dinner, specifically, was attended by “myself; Hunter; Eric Schwerin; and then the executives from the French energy company,” Archer said.
Another was in “Beijing, at, you know, some restaurant,” Archer said, “—or Chengdu or something like I don’t remember the—I don’t remember specifics. This was just—it was not—t was like a, you know—especially with the time zone difference, there was—you know, there were meetings where his dad would call and he would be talking to him or put him on speaker. I’m not going to—you know, that’s—that happened.”
Archer said that the conversation at that dinner, with Jonathan Li, was primarily niceties. But it was his contention that getting the vice president on the phone, showing off that kind of access, was what those calls were all about. Archer testified that Hunter Biden would say things like “Hey, guys, my dad’s on the phone.”
Another call, which Archer revealed during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, took place in Dubai. During this impromptu meeting, Hunter Biden was contacted by Burisma’s CEO Zlochevsky, who said “We’re under pressure. We need to go—we want to talk to Hunter.” Hunter called DC, and Archer was “not in the earshot” of that call.
It was only 5 days after that call that Joe Biden “has a trip to the Ukraine, and he makes a statement: ‘It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.” That was in 2015, and Biden withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine until such time as the prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired.
Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Biden between 1970 and 1975, told Newsmax last week that the president’s brother, Frankie Biden, tried to intimidate him during his divorce with Jill, and claimed the family threatened him with repercussions.
“Frankie Biden of the Biden crime family comes up to me and he goes, “Give her the house or you’re going to have serious problems,”” Stevenson said. “I looked at Frankie and I said, “Are you threatening me?” and needless to say, about two months later, my brother and I were indicted for that tax charge for $8,200.”
When asked to clarify whether he thinks Joe Biden was behind the tax charge, Stevenson told host Greg Kelly: “I not only think it, but I know it,” adding that he “could not believe the power of Joe Biden and the Department of Justice. I couldn’t believe it.”
Kelly also noted the parallels between Stevenson’s case and Hunter Biden’s ongoing tax troubles – noting that Hunter was hit with just two misdemeanor counts for $2.2 million in unpaid taxes, while Stevenson and his brother were slapped with two felonies for just over $8,000 in unpaid taxes.
This is a weird, disturbing story: Mysterious Chinese bio-lab discovered in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley.
Court documents detail the horrors and dangerous nature of an illegal lab found in Reedley, California, exposed several months ago by a city code enforcement officer. What was found inside prompted the fire chief to send a letter to city officials describing it as a “potential disaster for the city.”
An investigation into the warehouse was prompted by a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.
“Frankly, we knew that should not have been there and when she went to investigate, she found that there was activity or operation or something happening within that building,” said Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.
The city then obtained a search warrant to look inside what should have been an ordinary warehouse. Inside, they found thousands of vials, many of which contained bio-hazardous materials like human blood, and other unknown substances.
“There was over 800 different chemicals on site in different bottles of different acids. Unfortunately, a lot of these are being categorized under ‘unknown chemicals,’” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado. “A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do [on] those chemicals.”
Health officials also discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were dead.
Prado said the warehouse occupants claimed they were “doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support [and develop] the COVID test kits that they had on-site.”
According to court documents, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present, including E. coli, malaria, and the virus that causes COVID-19.
“Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.” Their response was simplicity itself: They lied.
A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.
Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.
“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.
Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.
” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.
“We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.
The rap on Tim Scott is that he is too nice to be a modern Republican, but that’s wrong – he’s too weak to be a modern Republican. The man consistently defaults to submission to the woke left, but the times call for a warrior and his brand is soft surrender. Yeah, it would be nice to live in an era where we have the luxury of a president who dodged the draft in the culture wars, but we do not live in that time. Tim Scott needs to stay right where he is, an affable but unaccomplished senator firmly within the tradition of the political puffballs that South Carolina’s GOP inexplicably turns out. Let him be nice somewhere where his alleged niceness won’t shaft us again.
It could have been different, but that would require a different man than Tim Scott. There are moments that define a candidate, moments where they have a choice and the choice they make makes or breaks them. Kamala Harris decided to take what is essentially a footnote within the Florida history standards and contort it into some sort of lie about how Ron DeSantis loves slavery. It’s one of those issues where the claim is so facially ludicrous that you have to wonder if Kamala is stupid or cynical – and come to the conclusion that she is probably both. But she went with it and DeSantis pushed back and we were moving on when someone in the regime media asked Tim Scott about it.
This was his decision point. It was an opportunity to show who he is. And Tim Scott whiffed.
Taking the wrong side in the social justice war is disqualifying. Scott has gone from being maybe my third favorite candidate in the field and a strong Veepstakes possibility to being behind Doug Bergrum and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis…
Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.
People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.
We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too…
There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.
Speaking of blue city retail apocalypses: “Field Office, a Trophy Complex Unable to Find Tenants, Defaults on $73.8 Million Loan. Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property stopped making payments.”
The owners of Field Office, a 290,375-square-foot office complex near the Willamette River, have defaulted on their $73.8 million loan after being unable to find enough tenants, becoming the latest office owners to throw in the towel on Portland’s struggling office market.
Field Office is owned by New York investment bank Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property Co., a Dallas-based real estate firm with operations in Portland. The pair bought Field Office from local developer Project^ and National Real Estate Advisors, an investment firm based in Washington, D.C., for $118 million in April 2019, according to public records.
Funny how letting antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters and crime run rampant through your downtown destroys property values. #ThisIsYourCityOnSocialJustice
Black Florida State University professor who published numerous studies on “systemic racism” is fired for just making shit up. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
You’re a Texas republican congressman who’s also an ER doctor and you try to assist a teenage girl having a medical emergency? That’s a handcuffing.
A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.
Courtney Rogers worked for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Compass Group USA Inc. from her home office in San Diego, California.
The company had more than 280,000 employees and $20.1 billion in revenue in 2019, according to its LinkedIn profile.
“Back in 2018, NBA megastar LeBron James opened his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio with the noble goal of transforming the lives of at-risk students and parents in his hometown. But it appears that the school has some major challenges five years into its existence. According to a report from the Akron Beacon Journal, the I Promise School’s fall class of eighth graders has has not seen a single student pass the state’s math test in five years – since the group was in the third grade.”
The Hunter Biden scandals refuse to go away, California continues to hemorrhage taxpayers, Texas teachers behaving very badly, more Flu Manchu heart attacks, and a golden new parking aid. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal collapsed. Here’s former federal prosecutor Will Scharf discussing how the DoJ’s trickery backfired:
Typically, if the Government is offering to a defendant that it will either drop charges or decline to bring new charges in return for the defendant’s guilty plea, the plea is structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(c)(1)(A). An agreement not to prosecute Hunter for FARA violations or other crimes in return for his pleading guilty to the tax misdemeanors, for example, would usually be a (c)(1)(A) plea. This is open, transparent, subject to judicial approval, etc.
In Hunter’s case, according to what folks in the courtroom have told me, Hunter’s plea was structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(c)(1)(B), which is usually just a plea in return for a joint sentencing recommendation only, and contained no information on its face about other potential charges, and contained no clear agreement by DOJ to forego prosecution of other charges.
Instead, DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers effectively hid that part of the agreement in what was publicly described as a pretrial diversion agreement relating to a § 922(g)(3) gun charge against Hunter for being a drug user in possession of a firearm.
That pretrial diversion agreement as written was actually MUCH broader than just the gun charge. If Hunter were to complete probation, the pretrial diversion agreement prevented DOJ from ever bringing charges against Hunter for any crimes relating to the offense conduct discussed in the plea agreement, which was purposely written to include his foreign influence peddling operations in China and elsewhere.
So they put the facts in the plea agreement, but put their non-prosecution agreement in the pretrial diversion agreement, effectively hiding the full scope of what DOJ was offering and Hunter was obtaining through these proceedings. Hunter’s upside from this deal was vast immunity from further prosecution if he finished a couple years of probation, and the public wouldn’t be any the wiser because none of this was clearly stated on the face of the plea agreement, as would normally be the case.
Judge Noreika smelled a rat. She understood that the lawyers were trying to paint her into a corner and hide the ball. Instead, she backed DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers into a corner by pulling all the details out into the open and then indicating that she wasn’t going to approve a deal as broad as what she had discovered.
DOJ, attempting to save face and save its case, then stated on the record that the investigation into Hunter was ongoing and that Hunter remained susceptible to prosecution under FARA. Hunter’s lawyers exploded. They clearly believed that FARA was covered under the deal, because as written, the pretrial diversion agreement language was broad enough to cover it. They blew up the deal, Hunter pled not guilty, and that’s the current state of play.
And so here we are. Hunter’s lawyers and DOJ are going to go off and try to pull together a new set of agreements, likely narrower, to satisfy Judge Noreika. Fortunately, I doubt if FARA or any charges related to Hunter’s foreign influence peddling will be included, which leaves open the possibility of further investigations leading to further prosecutions.
More on how Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal blew up.
The Hunter Biden defense and the Biden Justice Department hid the sweeping immunity term, shielding Hunter from all future prosecution, in a “diversion agreement” related to the gun offense on which Hunter was not pleading guilty and is anticipated not to be prosecuted. (See here, p. 7, para. 15.) The “diversion agreement” is separate from the plea agreement to the misdemeanor tax charges (see here) — i.e., the only charges to which Hunter actually planned to plead guilty. The plea agreement is where one would ordinarily find the all-important immunity term (since the immunity is given by the government in exchange for the guilty plea). Both the diversion agreement and the plea agreement incorporate an outrageous statement of facts (which is appended to the tax plea agreement, linked above). This fictitious presentation, which appears to have been drafted by Hunter’s lawyers, is nevertheless endorsed by the Biden Justice Department, even though it is utterly inconsistent with the prosecutors’ face-saving protestations, under pointed questioning Wednesday by Judge Maryellen Noreika, that they are conducting a continuing investigation in which Hunter is a subject and could be charged.
It could not be more obvious that, if the government were truly conducting a continuing investigation, prosecutors would never in a million years give one of the main subjects of that investigation a plea to minor tax charges — with the promise of a recommendation of no imprisonment — in the middle of that investigation.
This corrupt episode happened because this case is not a legitimate case — it’s a sham. In legitimate prosecutions, the defendant and the Justice Department are adversaries, with defense lawyers looking out for the defendant’s interest and the prosecutors vindicating the public interest in seeing that lawbreakers are held to account. The Hunter Biden case, to the contrary, is a travesty, in which the defense and the prosecution are on the same side.
That is why the prosecutors have never filed an indictment that lays out the case against Hunter in exacting, painful detail — the way the Justice Department typically does. To do that would be politically devastating for the president, who is implicated in his son’s conduct. Plus, if prosecutors fully describe the serious charges that appear to be supported by evidence already known, it would become politically impossible to settle the case on two trivial tax misdemeanors with no jail time, in addition to disappearing a gun felony carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence.
That is why the plea agreement could not be a normal plea agreement. The point of an agreement is to outline in detail the full extent of the immunity the defendant is getting in exchange for his plea. Because the Hunter Biden defense and the Biden Justice Department are on the same side, the collective objective was to give Hunter as much immunity as possible, with as little said as possible about why he needs it.
Biden family business associate and President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s “best friend in business” has canceled his scheduled appearance on Monday to give testimony before the House Oversight Committee for a third time. Well, something seems to really have this guy spooked, wouldn’t you say? Why in the world would this guy cancel not once, not twice, but thrice, er, I mean three times? It doesn’t take someone with an IQ north of 180 to see this.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, spoke with Fox News and stated that Devon Archer canceled the deposition he was scheduled to participate in before the committee. Archer is currently under a subpoena from the committee but has now backed out three times, according to Breitbart News.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped campaign finance charges against alleged ‘crypto scammer’ Sam Bankman-Fried, who was accused of misusing customer deposits and who made $90 million in campaign contributions to around 300 predominantly left-wing political candidates or action committees (PACs).
Prosecutors argued the United States “mishandled” the process of extraditing Bankman-Fried from the Bahamas, writing a letter stating, “In keeping with its treaty obligations to the Bahamas, the government does not intend to proceed to trial on the campaign contributions count.”
Bankman-Fried, who had a net worth of around $26.5 billion at his peak, ranked behind only George Soros in donations to the Democrats last year.
Two Texas teachers accused in separate sex crimes against children were arrested on the same day and each charged with sexually assaulting a child and trafficking a child for sex.
Red Oak ISD teacher and coach Gershon Caston, 38, was arrested Thursday and charged with three first-degree felonies:
Aggravated sexual assault of a child
Trafficking a child to engage in sexual conduct
Compelling prostitution by a minor
Snip.
Former Nacogdoches ISD teacher Annaleigh Andrews, 24, was also arrested Thursday and charged with a dozen felonies:
Three counts of trafficking a child to engage in sexual
Three counts of sexual assault of a child
Three counts of improper relationship between student and educator
Three counts of enticing a child with intent to commit a felony
Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked a measure that would have stopped the Biden administration from discriminating against Jewish-made Israeli products.
The Democratic members of the Senate Commerce Committee rejected a measure from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) that would have blocked the Federal Trade Commission from penalizing products produced by Israelis living in contested territories, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
Speaking of unexpected heart attacks, LeBron James’ 18-year old son Bronny James suffered cardiac arrest during a basketball workout. He survived. You know, I never remember hearing about young athletes having heart attacks pre-Flu Manchu vaccines…
I suspect this Peter Zeihan video might count as trolling my readers: “Why Fiat Currencies Will Always Beat Gold.” I think it’s broadly true in the cases he articulates, but doesn’t take into account the possibility of hyperinflation and/or widespread social unrest.
Meta, AKA “The Artist Formerly Known As Facebook,” announced that they just lost $21 billion on their Reality Labs division, AKA the Metaverse, AKA the worst virtual reality environment since January 2022.
Meta’s second-quarter earnings showed that Reality Labs, its virtual and augmented reality development business, has lost a staggering $21.3 billion since January 2022 — and executives warned the bleeding will only get worse.
The unit recorded $276 million in Q2 sales this year — down from the $339 million it drew in during Q1, underscoring how VR and AR technology has yet to infiltrate the mainstream.
The losses were wider than analysts expected, though CFO Susan Li suggested in the report that Meta will continue to invest in the tech, which is used to power the metaverse.
“For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” Li wrote.
Just last month, Meta unveiled its Quest 3 headset for $499, which Mark Zuckerberg touted as “the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality,” though it’s unclear how successful the tech has been so far.
Hint: Not at all.
Just how do you lose $21 billion? That’s a burn rate of over a billion a month. You could hire a mountain of developers and engineers for that money, maybe 100,000 or so of them even at California salary rates. Wikipedia (usual caveats apply) says Occulus only had 17,00 employees in 2022. Meta only paid $2 billion to acquire Occulas (which became Reality Labs) in the first place. Hell, you could fund over 200 startups at $100 million a pop, and it would still be more likely for any one of them to be profitable than Reality Labs.
Usually you have to be a politician to lose that much money. I wonder if Reality Labs losses might be covering up losses in other divisions. Or if the money is getting siphoned off to somewhere else entirely…
Earlier this month, Meta found itself on the defense in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by stand-up comic Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, who alleged that Meta’s artificial intelligence-backed language models were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing the authors’ work.
The suit against Meta points to the allegedly illicit sites used to train LLaMA, the ChatGPT competitor the company launched in February.
Naturally, anything involving large corporations ripping off science fiction writers attracts my attention, and I used to bump into Kadrey back when I was on the SF con circuit. The same firm is also suing on behalf of Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad.
There probably needs to be some sort of regulation on how much AI generated content can come from any particular living creator. If I feed an AI all of Paul McCarthy’s songs, and ask it to produce a new one based on those, is it copyright infringement?
I suspect a number of lawyers are going to be getting a lot of money off AI in the near future…
If you’ve wondered why homelessness in California seems so much worse than in other states, Siyamak Khorrami’s interview with El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson for California Insider provides some answers:
Some takeaways:
“According to the latest report, California alone has one third of the U.S homeless population today.”
“What we have is you can be arrested or cited did over and over and over and over again, and there’s no consequences. And it’s just getting worse and worse.”
The same transients sprawling unconscious on city streets in LA and San Francisco are now found in San Diego.
“If you look at the people and look in their eyes, you see a lost [soul], almost like a post-apocalyptic look. It’s not somebody who’s lost their job or lost their housing, it’s someone who is addicted to drugs. In large part have fried their brains. They’re suffering from mental illness.”
“Stanford recently looked at it last year, their school of economics looked at it, and they found were over the last 10 years, most of the United States homelessness dropped by roughly 9%. In the same period here in the state of California, it went up by 43%.”
He says that other blue states aren’t having the same problem California is, but that’s slightly misleading. There are blue cities that are starting to see some of the same problems (Seattle, Portland, Austin) that are starting to have the same problems because they follow the same playbook. But they do touch on Seattle at the end of the interview.
“The most notable, unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use, and decriminalizing large or low-level property crimes.”
You can’t trust crime statistics, because people have just stopped reporting things. Auto thefts are still reported for insurance purposes. “Vehicle thefts here in the state of California have gone up significantly, so much so that on a per capita basis we are double the State of Florida.”
One Target accurately reporting thefts for a month doubled San Francisco theft statistics.
“Employees that don’t want to come to work and be exposed to that, because of being told don’t contact anyone.”
“Shoppers stop coming to stores. You just had Nordstrom’s in San Francisco close after 35 years. They’re one of their hallmark stores. That is a huge store in San Francisco closed because theft.”
“Every year more people leaving than are coming to the state because of poor public policy decisions.”
“The single dividing line between us and everywhere else in that regard is the legalization of hardcore drug use, or the decriminalization of hardcore drug use.”
“Harm reduction centers” just prevent people from dying on that particular day, and do nothing to keep drug users from gradually killing themselves over months and years. Those non-profits are “simply enabling them to continue to that that addiction and to use those drugs, knowing it will kill them.”
Pierson: HUD, uh, in 2015, 2016 decided…”Hey, we’re a housing entity. Why are we spending 60%, 70% percent of our resources on rehab for people? And so let’s get out of that business and go and do this other one.” I think that happened at a time which was critical in for California, to where we were already going down this housing housing first, or type in harm reduction type philosophy.
Khorrami: Then you exacerbate it by giving the homeless housing, and then you give them, let them use the drugs, and then you’re not really thinking about dealing with their addiction, right?
Pierson: Yeah, it’s absurd.
“We have based all of our policy on the slogan called ‘Housing First.’ What it says is, if you provide them housing and you provide this, provide some services to him, the person will stop using drugs.”
New York (which I personally would not point to as a model, it’s simply less of an obvious failure) has a ratio of one social worker to eight homeless people. California has a ratio of one to thirty-two.
“Compassion isn’t enough.”
“Compassion isn’t letting someone die in a ditch somewhere. Compassion isn’t letting someone lay on the street with a needle in their arm. That’s not compassion.”
“Enough is enough. You’ve tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or ten years. It didn’t work. We need a course correction, and we need to do something about it now.”
Seattle is an extreme example of what’s happening here in California. Everybody, the businesses are fleeing. The people who are living there that can leave are leaving. And it is very similar to what we’re doing, where open rampant hardcore drug use, little or no consequence for property crimes, and they also have a horrendous problem with law enforcement staffing. They simply can’t hire law enforcement officers because, frankly, the way they’ve treated them. It is a handful of really bad policy decisions that created this problem.
No one wants to work at Nordstrom’s because they know their car will be broken into while they work.
One flaw with the interview is that they did not discuss the role of the Homeless Industrial Complex in creating the situation. My working theory is that the appalling decisions we see being made on homelessness and crime are because the hard left is actively benefiting from the situation because it provides myriad ways to rake off graft and fraud. Ditto the lunacy of defunding the police.
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!”
And those are just the ones with over 100 employees. There are much more with fewer (including Gordon Ramsay North America, which has a chain of restaurants, which has moved its headquarters to Irving, despite having no restaurants in Texas). (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
For the past few years, Atlanta has been roiled by corruption scandals centering on the city’s decades-old program to favor minority-owned businesses in government contracting. The troubles started when Elvin “E. R.” Mitchell, Jr., a black contractor, began paying what became more than $1 million in bribes to city official and friend of the mayor Reverend Mitzi Bickers. Mitchell and his associates wanted to ensure that they could keep winning city-favored contracts and subcontracts for minorities, despite submitting bids higher than their competitors’. Mitchell also helped Bickers bribe officials in Jackson, Mississippi, so that she could secure minority-favored contracts on some of that city’s projects. Meantime, Larry Scott, head of Atlanta’s Office of Contract Compliance, which ensures that minority firms win contracts, started a side gig to help such businesses get favorable deals with the city—receiving over $220,000 in unreported income and partnering with the mayor’s brother and sister-in-law in the scheme. Mitchell, Bickers, Scott, and several other city officials have been sentenced on federal charges ranging from bribery to wire fraud.
Affirmative-action plans in schools or workplaces get the headlines, but the practice of favoring minorities in government contracts is almost as old, and even more far-reaching. Such favoritism—in the form of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBE), or Minority and Women Owned Business Enterprises (MWBE) programs—exists across all levels of government and in states and cities of every political hue.
The subject of government contracting, or procurement, may not seem exciting, but its importance can’t be overstated. Nearly 10 percent of the U.S. economy goes through government contracts. The federal government spends over $600 billion yearly on contracts, making it the largest buyer of goods and services on the planet. State- and local-government spending on contracts totals about $1.3 trillion annually. Government contracts and purchases range from aircraft carriers and highway construction projects to office supplies and human-resources software. Favoritism to minority-owned companies pervades this vast universe.
Minority contracting was never a coherent way to make amends for the nation’s long, lamentable history of racism. Instead of righting historical wrongs, the policy has enriched a small subset of already-wealthy businesses, bred corruption and fraud, deepened racial divisions, and cost taxpayers countless billions of dollars—while doing nothing to help the truly disadvantaged. Indeed, minority residents of urban areas pay the highest price for lackluster and expensive services caused by such programs. One underappreciated reason for the unparalleled costs of American urban and infrastructure projects is that the government too often picks contractors based on their sex or race, not the quality or cost of their bids.
Snip.
Today, governments use several methods to favor minority contractors. At the federal level, Congress has stated that “not less than 5 percent” of all contracts should go to “disadvantaged” businesses. Regulations clarify a “presumption” that “Black Americans; Hispanic Americans; Native Americans,” and “Asian Americans” are disadvantaged. Government treats the goal as a floor, not a ceiling: in recent years, the true share of contracts going to disadvantaged firms has been around 10 percent, and politicians have urged the bureaucracy to push the total higher. The SBA then sets goals for individual agencies—recently demanding, for example, that the Department of Transportation offer 21 percent of all contracts to disadvantaged enterprises. It also requires that federal “prime contractors” (the lead contractor on a project) create subcontracting plans to maximize minority participation.
State and local governments set even higher goals for minority procurement but usually focus on encouraging large businesses to subcontract out to minorities. Chicago insists that 26 percent of all construction dollars go to minority companies and 6 percent to women-owned businesses. But a city-funded report noted that “almost all City funded construction projects require M/WBE” goals for subcontractors and that “project goals should exceed the ‘baseline’ goal.” Maryland has a target of 29 percent of contract dollars to minority firms. New York City and State have set a goal of 30 percent of all contracts going to MWBE, and the city itself goes into more detail, setting precise contracting goals for each race and business category (for instance, black-owned businesses should get 11.81 percent of all city professional-service contracts).
Agencies have various ways of meeting these benchmarks. Federal agencies can directly award contracts to minority firms, without a normal bidding process and through a no-bid deal, if they cost less than $5 million. This arrangement, of course, has caused abuse. After 9/11, the federal government, hoping to accelerate security purchases, expanded awards to “Alaska Native Corporations,” which had a special exemption that allowed them to get no-bid minority contracts of unlimited amounts. Federal contracts to these corporations increased 20-fold in the decade ending in 2009, when spending totaled almost $6 billion. The army’s infectious-disease center at Fort Detrick, in a no-bid deal, shifted the management of all its contracts to an Alaskan Native Corporation, whose most significant former venture was a failed cruise-ship line. Another such corporation won a port-scanning deal and then subcontracted it out to traditional defense companies; only 33 of the corporation’s 2,300 employees were Alaskan Natives. Though Native Americans are the smallest “disadvantaged” group assisted by the federal government, they get 2.7 percent of all federal contracts—more than twice the proportion of any other group.
Snip.
The City of Austin Disparity Study for 2022, conducted by Colette Holt & Associates, a large disparity-study firm started by a lawyer who had previously worked for Chicago’s city government, is typical. It approaches 300 pages and contains a recitation of every supposed ill that has befallen a minority business in the Texas capital. The report uses only anonymous quotes that make accusations against unnamed individuals about racism or sexism. “There is no requirement that anecdotal testimony be ‘verified’ or corroborated,” the report notes.
Try as they might, these studies have had little success proving racism or sexism in contracting. They typically use a “disparity ratio” to show the difference between the number of available minority firms and the number of government contracts going to these firms, though these ratios rarely account for the ability of different firms to perform government jobs. Yet studies conducted by Austin and Washington State found that MWBE firms were more likely to get contracts than were those owned by white men. A Missouri disparity study found that minority firms were more likely to get contracts than nonminority firms. A Chicago disparity study found that black and Hispanic firms were about twice as likely to get construction contracts, and Asian firms four times as likely, relative to their availability.
These reports’ surveys of minority firms find that most aren’t worried about discrimination. Of those MWBEs responding to a survey in Austin, 75 percent said that they had not experienced barriers to contracting based on race or gender. Over 85 percent agreed that they did not get different prices or terms because of their race or gender. Disparity studies ignore such data and argue that the minority of minorities who report unspecified discrimination need assistance.
When studies admit that there is no discrimination in contracting, politicians refuse to abide by them. Miami-Dade County made the mistake of employing a legitimate accounting firm, KPMG, for a disparity study, which determined that companies owned by blacks and Hispanics were not underused. The Miami mayor rejected the study. Los Angeles’s city council rejected a study that found that black firms did not suffer discrimination in contracting. The occasional lawsuit will surface, challenging these disparity studies when they provide no evidence of discrimination. But in such cases, governments will simply look for another minority contractor to conduct another study calling for more minority contracting.
Minority-contracting programs are a magnet for fraud. No-bid contracts represent an obvious avenue, but the most common kind of MWBE fraud is simple: contractors with subpar bids either lie about being run by minorities or lie about involving other minority businesses in the contract. The Wedtech scandal in the 1980s involved such fraud; though John Mariotta, a Puerto Rican immigrant, had started the company, it was partially run by Fred Neuberger, a Romanian Jew who escaped the Holocaust in Europe but did not count as “disadvantaged” for the purposes of the 8(a) program. Similar issues arose with the recent Atlanta scandals: while contractor Charles Richards was white and won many “prime” contracts, he promised to subcontract work to Mitchell’s minority firm, and then paid Mitchell without asking his firm to do any work. A 2016 Department of Transportation presentation stated that more than one-third of its contracting-fraud cases involved minority contracting and that, over the preceding five years, cases involving minority-contracting fraud had led to $245 million in financial penalties and 425 months of incarceration for offenders.
These cases tend to follow a certain playbook. A minority-owned front company wins the government contract, takes a small cut, and issues a pass-through contract to a white-owned firm. The largest such case in American history involved Schuylkill Products, a Pennsylvania firm that manufactured concrete bridge beams but had used a Filipino-owned front company for 15 years to win more than $130 million in contracts. The federal investigation led to several prison sentences in 2014. Front-company and pass-through fraud has dogged construction work at Chicago’s O’Hare airport and New York casinos. According to the New York State inspector general, the minority firms in the casino-fraud case did little more than submit invoices. A former Dallas councilman, meantime, went to prison for his role in setting up minority front companies for government contracts. Sometimes, the fraud is even more direct: in Seattle, the owner of a company that was paid to clean up homeless camps falsely identified as black on city forms. She also happened to be a city employee.
Target has repeatedly boasted about efforts to support the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, also known as GLSEN, an entity which helps teachers place LGBTQ books in school libraries and hide their students’ so-called gender transitions from parents.
Conservatives have launched a boycott against Target after the retail behemoth marketed a female swimsuit as “tuck-friendly” and with “extra crotch coverage,” as well as hired an artist who creates Satanic items to make various designs for the company. Links between the company and GLSEN, which supports “affirming learning environments for LGBTQ youth” and activates “supportive educators,” resurfaced amid the backlash against Target.
The retail behemoth boasted last year about donating more than $2.1 million to GLSEN over the past decade, lauding the group’s mission to create “affirming, accessible, and antiracist spaces for LGBTQIA+ students.” Target also actively promotes GLSEN on its online store.
Strangely enough, having a DA who will prosecute criminal and not lawful citizens defending themselves makes a difference. “San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins follows the law and the evidence and does not make decisions based on what may be politically expedient.”
Speaking of Soros-plagued cities: “Citywide Youth Curfew Begins In Baltimore As Mayor Strives To Restore Law And Order.”I doubt Mayor Brandon Scott’s policy will make that much of a difference, though maybe with Soros-tool Marilyn Mosby out of office and awaiting trial on federal perjury charges, maybe there’s a chance of Baltimore improving. But remember:
Of course. “Just Stop Oil’s Hollywood Patron Has Holiday Home in Ireland That he Jets Off to ‘When the Going Gets Tough.'” “Oscar winner Adam McKay, whose films include The Big Short and Don’t Look Up, is one of a group of multi-millionaires behind the Climate Emergency Fund. The Beverly Hills-based fund raises cash from its mega rich supporters and distributes it to ‘disruptive’ activists, including handing almost £1million to help Just Stop Oil wreak havoc in the U.K.” Being a Democrat means never having to apologize for your hypocrisy.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the Atlanta Police Department (APD) arrested Marlon Scott Kautz, age 39, of Atlanta, Savannah D. Patterson, age 30, of Savannah, Ga., and Adele Maclean, age 42, of Atlanta, on Wednesday on charges of money laundering and charity fraud in association with fundraising efforts for the domestic terrorists who are currently in jail.
“The GBI, along with the Atlanta Police Department, have arrested three people on charges stemming from the ongoing investigation of individuals responsible for numerous criminal acts at the future site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center and other metro Atlanta locations,” reads the GBI’s press release.
The trio ran a non-profit called Network for Strong Communities, which worked with another group called the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which, at least on paper, was a bail fund for the thugs who attacked the training center property and other areas in Atlanta.
Given that, it might be time to take a look at Worth It or Woke for honest movie reviews.
Dwight has a good look at the Battleship Texas, and (for Memorial Day) seaman Christen Christensen, who was killed in combat during the bombardment of a German shore battery off Cherbourg.
Don’t let JinJin eat poop off San Francisco’s street, or they may end up tripping balls.
Californians continue to flee the no-longer golden state, and many of them end up in Texas. ABC7 News in the bay area interviewed eight who fled as to why California dreaming has become a nightmare.
Some takeaways:
“In the span of two years, California’s population has dropped by more than a half million people.”
“I was assaulted twice on the BART.”
“I’ve never had a house this large in my life.”
“It is definitely a lower cost of living in Texas.”
“The home that I once remembered and knew back in the 1980s and the 1990s, a lot of that’s gone now.”
“Home prices are lower [in Texas], and there’s plenty of job opportunities.”
The former mayor of Ventura, CA moved to Texas in 2014. “One of the things I greatly fear about Venture and elsewhere in coastal California is that it’s not a place for everybody anymore, and especially not a place for young families. It’s a place basically where older, affluent people now live. And I think something has really been lost there.”
“Home prices in Texas cost less than half of homes in California. U.S. Census Bureau numbers show that the middle and lower classes are leaving California at a higher rate than the wealthy.”
“Many who have left in recent years say they simply couldn’t afford to stay.”
A mother with six kids says it’s simply impossible to afford a house large enough in California. “I feel like the California Dream was the American Dream in my grandparents’ and parents’ era. That’s just not possible for our generation to live that American Dream in that state anymore. It’s so expensive that you’re struggling every month just to get by and pay your rent and your mortgage and put food on the table.”
Food truck owner: “The reason why I left California, honestly, is just the cost. The cost of living, the cost of running a business, regulations.”
Mention of the Move to Texas Facebook group for Californians looking to get the hell out of their failing state.
“Some people are moving to Texas because of their conservative values.”
” It seems that the environment, politically in California, has just been a one-party rule. Republicans have done absolutely nothing to change anything in any way, it seems to me. They’ve been cowardly about it.”
“It’s very sad in Contra Costa County. You can’t even be conservative. You kinda have to hide if you’re conservative almost.”
Man whose family moved to California from South Korea in the 1970s: “Unfortunately my parent’s grocery stores were burned down in the L.A. riots, two of them, near Koreatown. And so that was, you know, quite a traumatic experience for my family.”
“I definitely think [California] is mismanaged. We moved primarily because of the crime. And, for me, it was not only the crime but also, you know, the amount of homelessness, needles. I was assaulted twice on the BART. Those particular assaults I really do think it had to do with the same kind of violence that I saw in the Bay Area towards Asian Americans.”
“I miss the ocean but not enough to move back.”
What would it take to move back to California? “Number one, the whole state would have to clean up. Get some of those rotten politicians. Be tough on crime again, like you should. People’s attitudes would just have to change. But for the most part, I really am happy here.”
“My commute is seven minutes to work.”
“Yeah, we definitely have not even contemplated moving back. We are just really happy out here.”
One party Democratic rule has hollowed out the state of California, and the people Democrats used to claim to represent (the working poor and the middle class) are the ones most harmed by the graft, corruption, incompetence, and radical social justice-engendered spiraling crime rates.
Until that changes, expect people to continue to flee California.
