I’ve covered Peter Zeihan videos on China’s crashing demographics before. We already knew China was “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.” Now he’s dug into new some new data.
It’s much worse than he thought.
“We’ve gotten some new data out of the Chinese that has made it way to the U.N, and so the updates have allowed us to update our assessment, and oh my God, it’s bad.”
“Here is the new data, and as you can see, the number of children who are under age 5 has just collapsed, and they’re now roughly twice as many that are age 15 as age 5.”
“What happened back in 2017, well before Covid, is that we had a sudden collapse in the birth rate, roughly 40% over the next five years among the Chinese, the ethnic Han population, and more than 50 percent among a lot of the minorities. And that is before Covid, which saw anecdotally the birth rate drops considerably more.”
“We’re never going to get good data on death rate, or at least not anytime soon, because the Chinese, when they did the reopening, just stopped collecting the data on deaths and Covid and everything because they didn’t want the world to know how many Chinese died, so they don’t know.”
And if you look at the data from the Shanghai Academy of Science, it’s even worse than the official state numbers.
“China aged past the point of demographic no return over 20 years, ago and it wasn’t just this year that India became the world’s most populous country, that probably happened roughly a decade ago. And it wasn’t in 2018 that the average Chinese aged past the average American, that was probably roughly in 2007 or 2008.”
“This is not a country that is in demographic decay, this is a country that is in the advanced stages of demographic collapse. And this is going to be the final decade that China can exist as a modern industrialized nation state, because it simply isn’t going to have the people to even try.”
“Labor costs you’re having now or as low as they’re ever going to be. Consumption is as high as it’s ever going to be.”
“So even before you consider the political complications or issues with operating environment or energy access or geopolitical risk or regulational risk, the numbers just aren’t there anymore so you have to ask yourself why you’re still there.”
Add to that the fact that China economy is probably overstated by 60%, and it looks like China’s brief days in the sun are already over.
With all that’s going on, it’s easy to forget that China’s “Thousand Talents” program of systematic industrial espionage continues apace.
While China has attempted to steal trade secrets in semiconductors, aerospace and biotech, their espionage also has far more prosaic targets. Here’s the interrogation of a woman who stole the secret formula for the chemical lining inside a Coke can:
Dr. Xiaorong You, aka Shannon You, was just sentenced to serve 168 months in prison.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, You stole valuable trade secrets related to formulations for bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) coatings for the inside of beverage cans. You was granted access to the trade secrets while working at The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee. The stolen trade secrets belonged to major chemical and coating companies, including Akzo-Nobel, BASF, Dow Chemical, PPG, Toyochem, Sherwin Williams, and Eastman Chemical Company, and cost nearly $120,000,000 to develop.
You stole the trade secrets to set up a new BPA-free coating company in China. You and her Chinese corporate partner, Weihai Jinhong Group received millions of dollars in Chinese government grants to support the new company. Documents and other evidence presented at trial, showed You’s intent to benefit not only Weihai Jinhong Group, but also the governments of China, the Chinese province of Shandong, and the Chinese city of Weihai, as well as her intent to benefit the Chinese Communist Party.
If China can steal something, they will steal something. Design your corporate security appropriately.
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.
Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”
The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.
At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.
The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.
Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…
You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.
Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.
Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.
Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.
Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.
Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.
Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
Remember how a bunch of young Chinese just decided to give up and let it rot? Recently, a whole bunch of them have decided to make Dali in Yunnan Province their own slacker city.
Takeaways:
“Recently a city has become popular because it has been occupied by young people who want to lie flat. It’s Dali, a historical and cultural city in Yunnan province, southwest China, with a population of about 650,000. It has few factories in the area, and tourism accounts for a large share of the municipality’s revenue.”
It’s built around a large lake.
“A few video bloggers who are secondary landlords in Dali city claim that an army of 100,000 people lying flat have gathered and have occupied the city.”
“Here 350 yuan a room per month.” That’s a bit over $50.
“The cost of living in Dali is 8,000 Yuan a year. That is $1,162.”
“Young people [in China] see no hope for their future and choose to lie down. Their motto is no buying a home, no car, no marriage, no baby, no consumption.”
Chinese woman: “It isn’t that I don’t want to have children. I can’t afford it. Housing is so stressful! Without a home, I’m afraid to get married. The cost of having a baby is high. There’s no money or time to raise them, and women’s work is easily affected by childbirth.” All things that help contribute to China’s disasterous demographics.
“I’m a leek. I resigned myself to my fate, but I won’t drag a child down to this mess.” “Leek” was a buzzword five or six years ago for someone the Chinese government regarded as a disposable worker/consumer. Sort of like “cog in the machine.”
“Before the lying flat people converged on the city of Dali, it had already become a gathering place for digital nomads,” i.e. people who can work remote jobs from anywhere with a decent Internet connection.
For the past 20 years, the professional software engineer has been synonymous with young and rich in China. They’re the 996th Generation, who work from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week, sacrificing their health, but also enjoying the dividends of China’s dotcom boom over the last 20 years. But now China’s Internet industry has entered an era with State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in, private companies out, where even big tech companies are being nationalized. The overall economy is slowing down, regulatory bans are proliferating, and the epidemic is exacerbating this trend. Engineers are at increased risk of losing their jobs, and their income and benefits are reduced from time to time. Engineers who have lost their jobs will join the ranks of those who are lying flat. They usually have nothing to do, spending most of their time on the internet playing games and chatting, consuming two packs of instant noodles a day.
“The employment market in Shanghai is very bad right now…what is scary is that there are no jobs for you to work again. Private companies are closing their doors, going bankrupt.”
As always, it’s hard to determine just how widespread “lying flat” is among young Chinese. If the videos are anything to go by (a big “if”), they all seem considerably cleaner and better behaved that America’s ranks of tent-dwelling, drug-addicted transients. And many seem to be actually renting space for their tents.
At 9:50 in, you see that cyberpunk dystopian scene of hundred of young video blogger “hosts” broadcasting from their own tiny spaces under a bridge. “Why are there so many young people in China working as online hosts? It’s not that it’s glamorous, it’s more of a helpless attempt under the current job hunting predicament.” Supposedly this happens in multiple Chinese cities, though evidently streaming locally in rich areas like Shanghai brings higher “tips.”
A Soros-backed DA is stepping down, a Harvard prof lying about playing footsie with commies sentenced, and another Democratic fundraiser convicted of fraud. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Good news, everyone! Soros-backed St. Louis Democrat DA Kim Gardner has resigned.
On Thursday, a progressive prosecutor who was notoriously funded by far-left billionaire George Soros announced her resignation, after months of bipartisan pressure to do so.
Fox News reports that Kim Gardner, the Circuit Attorney for St. Louis, announced that her resignation will be effective June 1st. Gardner was one of the first prosecutors in the country to be bankrolled by Soros, who has since expanded his efforts to other major cities across the country. She was first elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020, largely due to Soros’ financial backing. Prior to her resignation announcement, she had declared her intention to run for a third term in 2024.
After years of criticism for being soft on crime and siding with criminals over victims, Gardner faced a whole new wave of criticism from both parties over an incident in February: Teenage volleyball player Janae Edmonson, who was visiting St. Louis from Tennessee for a tournament, was hit by an out-of-control car while crossing the road; although Edmonson survived, she had to have both of her legs amputated.
The driver of the car was Daniel Riley, a man who was out on bond while awaiting trial for an armed robbery case. It was later revealed that Riley had violated the terms of bond dozens of times, but was never arrested. When the blame turned to Gardner for failing to keep him off the streets, she falsely claimed that her office had attempted to have Riley jailed once again, only to be denied by a judge; there are no records of her office filing any such motion or otherwise seeking the revocation of Riley’s bond.
Following the Edmonson incident, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R-Mo.) filed a petition quo warranto, the process by which the state attorney general can fire a prosecutor who has been determined to be neglectful of her duties. Bailey claimed that as many as 12,000 criminal cases have been dismissed due to Gardner’s failures, with another 9,000 having been thrown out right before they were set to go to trial, due to Garnder’s office refusing to provide evidence and speedy trials for defendants.
After Gardner’s announcement, Bailey released a statement demanding that she vacate her office immediately, rather than wait for another month.
Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said he will pull his mercenaries out of the meat grinder that is the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 10, one day after Russia’s Victory Day Celebrations, which Russian president Vladimir Putin is expected to use to shore up support for the Russian invasion.
The Wagner Group, a well-known mercenary unit known to be one of Russia’s most competent fighting divisions, is leading the charge on Bakhmut, a city that that has gained outsized symbolic importance.
“I am withdrawing the Wagner PMC units from Bakhmut, because in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” Prigozhin said in full military fatigues and carrying an automatic weapon. The video he released showed him surrounded by masked Wagner fighters. Prigozhin also released a statement to the same effect.
His forces had no choice but to withdraw to rear bases to “lick the wounds,” said Prigozhin, as translated by the Washington Post. If Wagner goes through with the withdrawal, it would be viewed as catastrophic in terms of morale. The Russian invasion has ground to a standstill after large-scale Russian and Ukrainian offensives last year. Kyiv, which has been amassing ammunitions including tanks and fighter jets, is expected to launch a fresh counterattack in the very near future.
Prigozhin also launched a remarkable video tirade overnight on Telegram in which he displayed bodies of dozens of Wagner soldiers killed in Bakhmut. He angrily laid into the Russian Defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, for supplying Wagner with only 30 percent of the ammunition that’s needed.
The statement released today claimed that number was even lower, standing at 10 percent.
One caveat is that we’ve heard complaints from Prigozhin about his ammo supply before.
Russian soldiers dig trenches in horse graveyard in occupied Ukraine. Now they have anthrax.
“Biden CIA chief met with Epstein several times after financier convicted of child sex crime. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014, when the top spy official was deputy secretary of state and after Epstein was convicted of child sex exploitation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Harvard chemistry professor sentenced for lying about ties to CCP…Former Harvard University Chemistry Department Chair Charles M. Lieber was sentenced Wednesday to time served and over $80,000 in fines for committing fraud and for failing to disclose his connections to the Chinese Communist Party.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
New Jersey Democratic campaign strategist James Devine was charged with election fraud for allegedly submitting more than 1,900 fake petitions to help secure a 2021 Democratic gubernatorial primary ballot spot for candidate Lisa McCormick, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced Tuesday.
Devine was McCormick’s campaign manager and sent the fake voter certifications to the New Jersey Secretary of State’s Division of Elections via email in April 2021, but the New Jersey Democratic State Committee challenged his attempt days later, arguing that all the forms featured same the style of signature and at least one of the named voters was deceased, Platkin said.
A judge subsequently took McCormick off the primary ballot, and Devine is now charged with third-degree offenses concerning nomination certificates or petitions, tampering with public records or information and fourth-degree falsifying or tampering with records.
LoRA updates are very cheap to produce (~$100) for the most popular model sizes. This means that almost anyone with an idea can generate one and distribute it. Training times under a day are the norm. At that pace, it doesn’t take long before the cumulative effect of all of these fine-tunings overcomes starting off at a size disadvantage. Indeed, in terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT. Focusing on maintaining some of the largest models on the planet actually puts us at a disadvantage.
Our Glorious Elites try mightily to keep us peons from expressing #WrongThink, two high profile media firings, and more Blue City decline. Enjoy a short but sweet Friday LinkSwarm!
It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign. This at least is the allegation in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken released by Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.
In that letter, which is not easy to find, you’ll see three snippets of dialogue from questioning of Morell, who appears to have organized the open letter. In the first snippet, he explains that the idea originated with a call from Blinken, then of the Biden campaign.
I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.
My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.
In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”
Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.
When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital security workshops for journalists and human rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.
Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.
After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.
I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon.
In particular, I was unaware of the scope and scale of the work of groups like the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis and consultancies such as Public Good Projects, Newsguard, Graphika, Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub and others.
New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams ripped President Joe Biden’s policies on the southern border Friday, saying that the White House’s position on the issue has turned the Big Apple into a disaster.
Adams has repeatedly asked for assistance from the federal government as New York City deals with thousands of illegal immigrants who have made their way to the city thanks to Biden’s lax border policies. New York City will spend $4.2 billion to house and care for illegal immigrants by the middle of 2024.
“The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” the first-term mayor said during a panel discussion hosted by the African American Mayors Association, the New York Post reported.
The Democrat then said that his city would have seen the biggest financial turnaround in the city’s history if it hadn’t been for the illegal immigration crisis.
“If you removed the $4.2 billion that have been dropped into my city because of a mismanaged asylum seeker issue, you [would have] probably witnessed one of the greatest fiscal turnarounds in the history of New York City,” he said.
Adams is delusional if he thinks illegal aliens alone are destroying his city. Graft, corruption, high crime engendered by leftwing Social Justice policies, high taxes, horribly burdensome regulation, and all the other hallmarks of undivided Democratic Party rule all played bigger roles in New York City’s demise. But the extra illegal aliens didn’t help. So how do you think Texas citizens have felt about the crisis all this time?
“Dem Bigwigs Caught Hobnobbing With Secret Chinese Police Mole.” “New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was recently caught on video rubbing elbows with one of two men arrested for running a secret — and illegal — Chinese police station in New York City’s Chinatown. The hobnobbing occurred at a gala for the Fukien American Association.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Bud Light’s Marketing VP Takes a Leave of Absence and Will Be Replaced.” Not good enough. Alissa Heinerscheid needs to be fired for cause for destroying billions in shareholder value.
Taking the next two in the order they were announced, not order of importance: Don Lemon fired from CNN. Also:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has laid out the devastating results of runaway government spending on the middle class and why it’s so important to claw back lost ground for the average American, who has “received a pay cut for 24 consecutive months … as inflation has persisted.”
He also noted the average American family has lost the equivalent of more than $7,000 in annual income.
There is a direct link between spending, borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, and these disastrous results for Americans.
President Biden has spent trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.
These unchecked costs drove the deficit to record highs and pushed the debt over $31 trillion.
A former Connecticut Planned Parenthood honcho took his own life days after police failed to arrest him on child pornography charges — botching the raid by knocking down the door of the suspect’s New Haven neighbor.
Tim Yergeau, 36, the former director of strategic communications at the Southern New England branch of Planned Parenthood, died by suicide on Tuesday amid a child pornography investigation in Connecticut last week.
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a proposal that would prohibit schools from instituting policies that “categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.” The policy would allow schools to implement certain limitations in the interest of fairness or safety, however.
The proposed rule, which would impact any school or college that receives federal funding, would expand Title IX protections to include gender identity. Under the proposal, a “one-size-fits-all” ban on transgender athletes playing on teams that match their stated gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The rule, which is likely to face challenges, will face a lengthy approval process.
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of the text of Title IX, which provides special protection for biological women, not men pretending to be women.
Under the radar, a package of bills is ramming through sweeping changes that will reorient our public schools around a new paradigm — subordinating academic basics to an obsessive, politicized preoccupation with race and social justice activism.
“Critical Social Justice” ideology (CSJ) — the vehicle for manipulating our young people into adopting this worldview — is laced strategically through a variety of bills, including “ethnic studies” (HF 1502), “Teachers of Color” (HF 320) and now the House and Senate omnibus education bills (HF 2497/SF 2684).
Taken together, this legislation will inject reductive, racialized thinking into every classroom in Minnesota’s approximately 500 school districts and charter schools; change the fundamental mechanics of education in our state; and give the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) broad new powers that amount to an end-run around our state’s hallowed tradition of local control.
Here’s a story I missed earlier: “Kazakhstan Impounds Property of Roscosmos Subsidiary.” That’s the Russian company that’s the main operator of Baikonur spaceport. Haven’t seen any resolution to this, mainly because Russia is so broke thanks to mismanagement, sanctions, and an illegal war of territorial aggression.
Jay Leno drives the 1,025 horsepower 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. I have an irrational desire to own something with a Hellcat engine, which I need like I need a hole in my head. Plus I like the look of the Shelby GT-500 Mustang better, and I’m not buying one of those either.
“Disney has proudly employed sex predators for years, and this act of aggression by DeSantis will force thousands of our proud pedo-American workers to leave the park to stay outside the 1,000-foot radius required by law,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger. “This is tyranny!”
The Democratic Party may not be any good at cultivating a healthy economy, governing, or protecting the rights of average Americans, but they excel in all forms of election cheating.
But don’t think Democrats are content with merely sucking up illegal American contributions. No, Democrats have also mastered the art of illegally sucking up illegal campaign contributions from foreigners abroad.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio took the stand and testified in the federal trial of Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, founder of the hip hop band Fugees, and his alleged involvement in a money laundering scheme that included a huge — and illegal — donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
DiCaprio recalled a conversation with Malaysian financier Jho Low, who mentioned that he was looking to donate millions of dollars to the Obama campaign by giving the money to Michel and having him pass it to Obama’s people.
Fast Facts:
Low was sentenced — in absentia — to a 10-year sentence in a Kuwaiti court for his role in laundering roughly $1 billion of the almost $4.5 billion worth of Chinese currency he allegedly swindled in what’s known as the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal.
Low claimed he wanted to donate between $20-$30 million dollars to Obama.
It is illegal for American presidential candidates to accept donations from foreigners.
The DOJ charged Low for trying to donate money to lobby the Trump administration, hoping to have the charges against him relating to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal dropped.
Low is on the lam and is believed to be hiding in China or Macau. China denies harboring him.
“It was a significant sum, something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified in court. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”
Additional witnesses testified that they were wired money from Low and asked to forward it to the Obama campaign.
Michel allegedly took the mad stacks from Low and used them to lobby Obama’s government on behalf of Low and the Chinese Communist Party.
He distributed $21.6 million to American straw donors who would then donate it to the Obama campaign, concealing the fact that the money came from Low.
But just because Democrats seem to love sucking up money with people connected to communist China, don’t think that they’re not looking at other foreign Sugar Daddys.
The Berger Action Fund is a nondescript name for a group with a rather specific purpose: steering the wealth of Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, into the world of American politics and policy.
As a foreign national, Wyss is prohibited from donating to candidates or political committees. But his influence is still broadly felt through millions of dollars routed through a network of nonprofit groups that invest heavily in the Democratic ecosystem. Such groups don’t have to disclose the source of their funding — or many details about how they spend it.
Newly available tax documents show that his giving through the Berger Action Fund, which describes itself as advocating for “solutions to some of our world’s biggest problems,” swelled in 2021 to $72 million, cementing Wyss’ status as a Democratic-aligned megadonor.
Representatives for Wyss insist they comply with laws governing the giving of foreign nationals and have put in place strict policies limiting the use of donations to “issue advocacy” — not partisan electoral activities. But the fact that the money cannot be publicly traced highlights the difficulty of putting such assertions to the test.
Those same groups have helped to bankroll efforts to lift President Joe Biden’s agenda and paid for TV ads promoting Democratic congressional candidates ahead of last year’s midterm elections.
One quarter of the year gone! Career criminals coddled by Soros Stooges, crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murders children, lots of Flu Manchu fraud, and Botox makes you crazy(er). It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Everyone and their dog is covering the ham sandwich Trump indictment, so I’ll leave that to others. I will note that Alan Dershowitz is not impressed. “Based on what we know about this case, it may be one of the weakest cases in my six years of experience.”
On the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn’t allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.
So that’s what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn’t have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.
That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese’s husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.
Reese is a corrections officer and her husband’s primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn’t be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn’t wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn’t leave him unattended.
French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.
“Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County,” said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.
Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.
“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.
“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.
“Shall I name names?”
Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Luft claimed that he tried to reach out to the DOJ about the Chinese energy company CEFC paying Hunter $100,000 and James Biden, Joe’s brother, $65,000 “in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.”
James O’Keefe has not allowed his forced exit from Project Veritas to stop him. His new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records.
“FEC data shows that some senior citizens across the U.S. have been donating thousands of times per year,” O’Keefe began. “Some of these individuals’ names and addresses are attached to over $200,000 in contributions. We went and knocked on a few of their doors to corroborate the data that we received from a group of citizen journalists called Election Watch in Maryland.” The video then showed O’Keefe visiting someone who is listed as donating over $217,000, through 12,000 separate contributions. This money was earmarked for various entities through leftist platform ActBlue over three years’ time. Some of the donations were made with variations of the person’s name and address, O’Keefe stated.
The data he obtained was state and FEC data, O’Keefe said. “We’re wondering if these donors are victims of what appears to be a money-laundering scheme, or [if] these residents actually participated in the scheme. We’re making phone calls, we’re knocking on doors, these are things that you can do, we hope you do that.” There are “bizarre amounts of data” on homes and individuals making many thousands of dollars of donations, O’Keefe said, urging others to help him investigate.
The first person shown opening the door to O’Keefe, a Marylander listed as donating $32,000 in 3,000 different contributions, said he was unaware of the donations but advised O’Keefe as a solution to hit Donald Trump “with a bat.” The man added, “I want to see a scar on his f**king head. Now stop f**king with me,” and slammed the door.
Another donor, Cindy, according to O’Keefe, supposedly donated over $18,000 in 1,000+ donations to ActBlue in 2022, which would necessitate donating “three times a day, every day, for the whole year.” When asked if she’d donated over $18,000, Cindy responded with a quick laugh, “I doubt that. No, I don’t think so… I wish I could have donated $18,000 to Biden’s presidency.”
Meanwhile Carolyn Lenz, in Tucson, Ariz., told OMG that she “absolutely [did] not” donate over 18,000 times for $170,000+ to ActBlue. She looked at the data showing “she” donated multiple times a day, often in $5 to $15 increments, and insisted that the donations were not hers. “They must be” fraudulent, Lenz said.
After rejecting her in 2018, the voters of Alameda County, California selected Pamela Price as their new District Attorney last year. Price had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros for her two campaigns. That probably tells you most of what you need to know, since Soros only funds candidates who are soft on crime and willing to empty the jails as much as possible. Price quickly proved herself no exception, seeking to cut a plea deal with a killer who had been arrested for one triple murder for hire, was accused in the murder of a court witness, and several other violent crimes. Rather than the 75 years to life sentence that Delonzo Logwood was eligible for, Price wanted to cut him loose after fifteen years. Thankfully, a County District Judge stepped in and rejected the deal out of hand. (Free Beacon)
A California judge this week blocked a newly-elected progressive prosecutor’s effort to slash a triple murderer’s sentence.
Alameda County district judge Mark McCannon rejected District Attorney Pamela Price’s plea deal for a 31-year-old man jailed for a 2008 triple murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Price, who took office in November and has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the progressive billionaire George Soros, attempted to sentence Delonzo Logwood to just 15 years in prison, though he was eligible for a sentence of 75 years to life.
You can’t keep a bad man down. Keith Chastain, 38, is a one-thug crime spree.
Chastain racked up an impressive array of arrests in Fresno County, California, (of course). Between Feb. 19 and March 21, he was arrested 10 times for a menagerie of crimes encompassing 15 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, including:
six stolen cars
fraud
DUI (duh)
drugs (duh)
vandalism
Chastain was hit with three additional charges — DUI, trespassing, and auto theft — but those were dropped when cops failed to file the charges in time.
Snip.
“Unfortunately, this is not as unique of a situation as it seems,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sherriff’s office, stated. “California has watered down the laws so much over the years for property criminals and repeat offenders that they are not held accountable like they should be. Sadly, it is our community members who suffer due to these soft-on-crime policies.”
According to court documents, Edwin Maldonado spent many months thumbing his nose at what he was ordered by the court to do.
His punishment for that is more like a prize.
“You’ve got someone who was rewarded for being a failure, and this guy was a failure over 1,000 and some odd times,” said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.
First, Maldonado gets a felony charge for drug possession. A few weeks later, he’s charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He makes his $30,000 bond and walks out of jail.
“I’ve certainly had clients hauled back into court on violations, maybe two or three times that have been alleged,” said criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto.
Associate Judge Tiffany Hill presided over a bond revocation hearing for Maldonado.
“For obvious reasons, you are not abiding by your rules and conditions period, and God knows what he was doing when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” Kahan said.
According to court documents, Maldonado failed to comply with any of his bond conditions for eight months.
According to his GPS monitor, he left his curfew zone 847 times, was called 453 times about his whereabouts, and had more than 1,000 GPS monitor violations.
A suspect arrested and charged in a recent brutal “jugging” robbery in Houston that left a woman paralyzed was out on a $100 bond for a weapons-related charge.
On the morning of February 13, Nung Truong, 44, withdrew money from a bank ATM but was followed for approximately 24 miles by two suspects. Surveillance video released by the Houston Police Department shows a black male bumping into Truong and causing her to drop her belongings. The suspect initially fled with an envelope but returned seconds later to body-slam Truong to the ground before taking $4,300 in cash.
A mother to three children aged 13, 15, and 20, Truong is now paralyzed and unable to walk or care for herself.
Last Friday, Houston Police arrested Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, for the attack and charged both suspects with Aggravated Robbery with Serious Bodily Injury.
According to court records, on January 26, 2023, Harrell had been granted a General Order bond of $100 for Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. He also faces charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon related to an incident in February in which he threatened another victim with a gun. Harrell is currently being held in the Harris County jail on bonds totaling $240,000.
Snip.
Although Harrell’s Unlawful Possession of a Weapon charge was assigned to Harris County Court 2 under Judge Paula Goodhart, his bond was signed by Judge David Singer.
Elected to Harris County Criminal Court 14 in 2018, Singer lost in the March 2022 Democratic primary election and his term ended December 31, 2022. As a one-term judge, Singer is not eligible under state code to serve as a visiting judge.
The 11th Administrative Judicial Region confirmed to The Texan that Singer is not listed as a visiting judge.
The Harris County Office of Court Management emailed the following statements to The Texan:
“David Singer was appointed as associate judge pursuant to Section 54A.002 of the Texas Government Code and the Local Rules for Harris County Criminal Courts at Law. His start date was Jan. 1, 2023.”
Finland gets the green light to join NATO, with Turkey and Hungary approving their membership. Sweden’s application is still under negotiation. As I noted previously, tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia.
Poor priorities. “European Ammo Maker’s Growth Stymied By TikTok Data Center Sucking Up Electricity.”
LA City Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas convicted of taking bribes. “He was convicted of one count of bribery, one of conspiracy, one count of honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services wire fraud. The jury acquitted him on 12 other counts.”
Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Federal prosecutors announced a 58-year-old Plainview man is facing 102 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $4 million in federal relief funds passed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Friday, Andrew Johnson pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Texas to three counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, according to a news release published by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Johnson swindled millions from the Paycheck Protection Program passed in the early weeks of the pandemic to help stave off the economic effects of business closures, government restrictions, and shelter-in-place mandates. As part of the fraud, Johnson applied for and received forgiveness for 27 bogus loans.
He spent more than $3.5 million of the stolen funds on “home renovations, vacations, clothing, cosmetic surgery, college tuition, cars, wedding expenses, and equipment for an unrelated business venture,” according to the DOJ.
After an investigation that took longer than a year, the Office of the City Auditor in Austin said it found Central Texas Allied Health Institute (CTAHI), a nonprofit City of Austin contractor, committed fraud against Austin Public Health and falsified health records.
According to the investigative report, CTAHI misrepresented over $1.1 million in financial transactions across three contracts with Austin Public Health and was incorrectly paid roughly $417,000 between December 2020 and September 2021 because of fraudulent contract claims. The report also claimed CTAHI falsified its COVID-19 vaccine contract performance by overstating vaccination totals and fabricating patient data.
“This is up there with some of the biggest cases we’ve investigated on my team,” said Brian Molloy, chief of investigations at the Chief of the City Auditor.
CTAHI, President Todd Hamilton, and Dr. Jereka Thomas-Hockaday — both of whom were named in the report — denied the claims made in the report in a statement Thursday.
Snip.
CTAHI’s three contracts with Austin Public Health were for COVID-19 testing, workforce development, and COVID-19 vaccines, according to the city. Between December 2020 and September 2021, the city said CTAHI submitted 23 claims for reimbursement to APH under the workforce development and COVID-19 vaccine contracts.
Flu Manchu is the fraud fount that just keeps giving… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NHL might stop pushing gay pride after backlash from players and fans. “Philadelphia Flyer’s player Ivan Provorov didn’t want to participate in a ‘Pride’ event during warmups…Soon, other players also refused to participate after Povorov showed it could be done, and some entire team organizations dropped their planned LGBT pride events. And thanks to this one man’s stand, the NHL is considering dropping the whole ‘Pride’ push.”
Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel and coiner of Moore’s Law, is dead at age 94. Semiconductors have radically changed just about every facet of the world.
Recently Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a “strategic partnership.” Here’s Peter Zeihan explaining exactly what “strategic partnership” means.
“Vladimir Putin of Russia entertained president or chairman Xi Jinping of China, and they had one of the big hoity-toity summits where they pledged their unending support for each other. The reality, of course, is nothing of the sort.”
Putin used the magic phrase strategic partnership, which, for the uninitiated, sounds really important and like an alliance. But this is the phraseology that the Russians have been using for centuries, where they [want] a partnership with the country that they don’t trust, and they expect the other country to pay for everything, and they expect to stab that other country in the back at the earliest opportunity.
Unless, you know, the other country is just cold and brutal enough to stab them in the back first.
“That’s the magic phrase that you know that they really, really, really, truly despise each other. And that this is only an alliance of convenience. It has to do with getting out from under some of the sanctions that had to do with Ukraine war. So let’s put that in a box.”
“Within hours of leaving Russia, Xi Jinping of China invited the leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to a summit with just him, not the Russians.”
“This is the Chinese making a naked power play for control of Russia’s backyard.”
Zeihan reiterates his theory that Russian rational for the war is plugging historical gaps through which they’ve been invaded. “There are other access points that the Russians are really paranoid about…one of them is the Altai Gap that leads straight to China.” AKA the Dzungarian Gate.
When the Russians see the Chinese making this sort of naked power play to get on the other side of that gap and position themselves politically, economically, maybe militarily with countries that are on the wrong side of that line while the Russians are occupied in Ukraine, the Russian mind immediately falls into kind of this revanchist position where they realize that they are now under assault from all possible angles. And this is like the worst case scenario for the Russians, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it, because they have completely committed their entire conventional forces to their Western periphery in the war with Ukraine.
“Now that the Chinese are actually nibbling on the eastern periphery, we know that this relationship is now in its dying years, because the Russians know the Chinese absolutely cannot be trusted. I can’t say, for the rest of it, that’s really realization.”
It’s no secret that one of the motives behind Xi Jinping’s various actions on Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., is China reasserting control over “historical lands,” and China lost a lot of land in Outer Mongolia and the Far East/Siberia to Russia in the 19th century that it had previously controlled. (See the treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860) for details.) And all that land is a lot closer to Beijing than Moscow.
Like Hitler and Stalin, Xi and Putin deserve each other.
