Satyagraha, in addition to being my least favorite of Philip Glass’ early operas, is Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance to political repression. We’re seeing an excellent example of it being deployed up in Canada, as the trucker protest against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates continues.
Here’s an example of the philosophy in action:
BREAKING – several RCMP vehicles attempt to block intersection at HWY 15 & 4 ave in Surrey B.C. to prevent traffic towards PAC HWY border crossing.
The primary roadblock to solving the crisis remains Justin Trudeau.
Instead of treating the truckers as fellow citizens who have a valid, or at least reasonable, complaint about a relatively unimportant policy that the government vacillated on prior to its implementation, the establishment and center-left in Canada have reacted to them with outrage and contempt.
They are agents of malign foreign influence or white nationalists. They must be fought on the beaches and the landing fields.
Snip.
Justin Trudeau speaks as if an enemy horde has descended that must be resisted in another Battle of Maldon. âI want to be very clear â we are not intimidated by those who hurl abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless,â he said. âWe wonât give in to those who fly racist flags. We wonât cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.â
In this, he engaged in classic nutpicking, focusing on a few instances of misbehavior to tar the entire group. Itâd be hard to come up with a better expression of the high-handedness that has characterized pro-restriction officeholders and public-health experts during the pandemic than Trudeauâs sneering attitude toward the protestors.
Canada has been a relative monolith on Covid. Conservative officeholders have been broadly willing to go along with lockdowns and mandates. There has been no Ron DeSantis. Nor is there any conservative alternative media in Canada (with a few exceptions) to give a platform to dissenters from the Covid orthodoxy â the positive coverage of the truckers, for instance, has mostly been emanating from the United States.
Surely, this is why the truckers have taken on such an outsized significance.
In representing such a high-profile break from the Covid consensus, they have given conservative politicians permission â or affirmatively pressured them â to begin to back off restrictions. Already, the conservative leader who lost to Trudeau last year and is a relatively conciliatory figure has been dumped and will likely be replaced by a more combative alternative. Alberta and Saskatchewan have moved this week to lift various Covid restrictions.
The truckers are another sign of the class inversion in advanced Western countries. The Left continues to shed working-class voters and gain college-educated voters and the well-coiffed Trudeau, fully attuned to haut progressive sensibilities, is the perfect paladin for the upper-middle class. On the other hand, the right is doing the opposite and sees blue-collar virtue in the truckers to whom it once would have felt no natural connection.
One hopes that, on the ground, the whole episode doesnât have an ugly end.
Trudeau should give the truckers their victory on the vaccination mandate. His government, which already backed off on it once only to re-embrace it, can easily back off again. Itâs not as though this was a law passed by parliament. Itâs a unilateral, arbitrary rule of the sort that proliferated throughout the pandemic. And no one can seriously believe Canada is going to suffer a renewed Covid surge based on roughly 10 percent of its truckers not being vaccinated.
The idea Trudeau should give in only works if you assume that he’s actually working for the best interests of Canada and Canadians. The stubborn resistance to a return to normalcy on the part of left-wing politicians across the globe suggest that another agenda is at work.
Liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose diet seems to incorporate ever-more redpills these days, says Trudeau is starting to sound like you-know-who:
Joined by entrepreneur @VivekGRamaswamy and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, @billmaher ripped Canadaâs Justin Trudeau last night on his show for his recent comments about the Freedom Convoy pic.twitter.com/u47EIStOY0
Will the Canadian political establishment force Trudeau to blink, or is he going to push the crisis to bloodshed to make truckers bend their knees to the state?
That Biden Inflation is up to another 40 year high, a BLM founder heads to the big house, Democrats wake the normies, more corrupt insiders playing footsie with China, and only white liberals are upset at Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
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Welcome back Carter inflation is in full swing. “The consumer price index went up by 7.5 percent over the last year, the highest annual increase since February 1982.”
Remember the mention in last week’s LinkSwarm about how cooking oil prices drove an Austin restaurant out of business? Well it’s a global problem that’s leading to record-high food prices.
“Activist who founded Black Lives Matter Memphis is sentenced to six years in prison for illegally voting when she was still on probation for felonies including stalking….Pamela Moses, 44, voted illegally six times since she pleaded guilty to evidence tampering, forgery, perjury, stalking and theft under $500, seven years ago.”
The Democratic education establishment done screwed up by waking up normie parents.
Many public schools kicked off 2022 by switching back to remote learning â or canceling classes altogether â leaving frustrated parents across the country frantically searching for more consistent schooling options.
These past two school years of remote and hybrid learning, forced masking, and an intensified culture of unpredictability has pushed teachers, administrators, students, and parents to very edge. What began as a temporary interruption to student learning has become a vicious cycle of confusion, inconsistency and lost educational time.
Thanks to the unreliability of distance learning, children are retaining less of what theyâve learned, reading at lower grade levels and suffering from a lack of social interaction. There is little to no support for children who rely on school to provide a safe haven from difficult home lives, and students in free or reduced meal plans have a harder time receiving them.
As school policies continue to isolate students from friends and peers, such as forcing students to eat their lunch outside on buckets, or facing the same direction without talking, the tragic numbers of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to rise.
Millions of exasperated parents, many in deep-blue cities and states, are desperately pursuing educational alternatives that better suit their familiesâ needs and values. Parents are enrolling their children in private and charter schools in droves, while those without the financial means to do so remain stuck in a system captive to the whims of teachersâ unions and indifferent school boards.
Many teachers are going above and beyond in the name of what is best for kids, but their ability to truly innovate and explore new ways of teaching and inspire learning is being blocked by the unnecessarily restrictive demands of union leadership.
These unions tend to operate at state and national levels in ways that do not represent most of their members. Rather than sticking up for these vulnerable children, unions â as recently exemplified by the Chicago Teachers Union â are prioritizing strikes, walkouts and funding political campaigns, halting true progress as students remain stranded at home.
Fed-up teachers across the country have resigned their union membership, tired of their dues dollars funding an agenda they donât support.
Dr. Angelique Coetzee is the South African responsible for alerting health officials about the omicron variant of COVID-19 back in November. At the time of the discovery, she observed that it presented âunusual but mildâ symptoms.
This was undeniably good news. Despite being more transmissible, the omicron variant was less severe, and many believed that it meant that the pandemic was nearing its end. But Dr. Coetzee says that she was subjected to âa lot of pressure from European scientists and politiciansâ to revise her original diagnosis that omicron presented mostly mild symptoms so that the public would perceive omicron to be just as dangerous as the delta variant.
She was subsequently attacked for her refusal to push the preferred narrative.
âBecause of all of COVIDâs mutations, all of these scientists and politicians who arenât from South Africa were contacting me telling me I was wrong when I spoke out, that it was a serious disease ⊠they were telling me I had no idea what I was talking about, they kept attacking me,â she told the Daily Telegraph. âIn South Africa it is a lighter disease, but in Europe it has been a serious, serious illness, which is what the politicians want me to say ⊠there has been a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians who have said âPlease donât say it is a mild illness.ââ
Nepo, meet Tism: “GM hires [Missy Owens], Biden niece, former Obama aide to head environment, sustainability and governance policy.” It’s a very exclusive club, and none of us are in it.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called on the U.S. to stand up to the “generational threat” posed by China while unveiling a major report on Beijing’s “malign behavior” at the same time her husband’s law firm was working on behalf of companies linked to China’s military, intelligence, and security services.
As Cheney stood at the podium, her husband Philip Perryâs law firm was cashing in on legal and lobbying work that his employer â Latham & Watkins (LW), one of the largest law firms in the world â was doing for a host of Chinese companies, some of which were involved in the kind of activity that Cheney was warning had to be stopped.
More fallout from the midterm variant: Suddenly dire emotional appeals about Republican governors dropping mandates become strangely clinical when it’s Democrats doing the same thing.
Over at @CNNPolitics, the same agitprop story got recycled in Florida.
But now? Weâre told âDemocratic governors outpace the White House with masking pullbacks.â
Democrats were caught off guard by Donald Trumpâs numbers in South Texas in 2020. The Hispanic Republican women who live there were not.
Many of them have played a leading role in urging their neighbors in majority-Hispanic South Texas to question their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Hispanic women now serve as party chairs in the stateâs four southernmost border counties, spanning a distance from Brownsville almost to Laredo â places where Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Latino voters.
A half-dozen of them are running for Congress across the stateâs four House districts that border Mexico, including Monica De La Cruz, the GOP front-runner in one of Texasâ most competitive seats in the Rio Grande Valley.
Itâs some of the clearest evidence that Trumpâs 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics â perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters [Keep whistling past that graveyard. -LP], but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country.
âFor so long, people here just never had Republicans knocking on their doors and calling them the way we did in 2020. The majority of us are women that did it then and are doing it now because we feel itâs our responsibility to keep the American Dream alive,â said Mayra Flores, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination in a South Texas-based congressional seat.
For Flores, the road to becoming a Republican was similar to the path traveled by many Hispanic women in South Texas. She grew up seeing most of her immigrant family vote Democrat and felt that it was standard for Hispanics to only vote for Democrats. Then, she says, came an inflection point where she began to question her loyalty to the party.
A family member asked if she knew what both parties stood for, and after looking into it, Flores felt that her religious, anti-abortion and pro-border security views were more conservative than sheâd ever thought and more in line with the GOP. Five years ago, she got involved in her local GOP and now a majority of her family votes Republican, too.
She wasnât surprised at all to see Republicans gain ground in 2020 along the Texas-Mexico border, even as Democrats and Republicans outside the region expressed shock at results in places such as Zapata County â where Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee since 1920 to carry the county.
Neighboring Starr County saw the most dramatic shift of any county in the state when thousands more Republicans turned out to vote than in prior elections. While President Joe Biden ultimately won the county with 52 percent of the vote to Trumpâs 47 percent, that paled in comparison to Hillary Clintonâs 2016 performance, when she garnered 79 percent to Trumpâs 19 percent.
Can you hear them now, Democrats? (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Democrats want to continue allowing private money to fund public elections. Republicans want to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.
So far, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.
During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to state and local election boards to support their work and get out the vote. Most of the funding, about $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based progressive-led group that includes former operatives of President Barack Obama.
Democrats and others contend that such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic. Republicans assert that the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden, a mismatch that hurt them in 2020 and, if continued, would damage their chances in future elections.
District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.
The real reason for the increase in carjackings? Itâs because the perps simply arenât very afraid of being caught, or, if theyâre caught, being seriously punished, not with a âsocial justiceâ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions.
Another week, another hate crime hoax. “A 19-year-old black female college student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) is now facing disorderly conduct charges over lying to police after she reported a hate crime incident in her dorm last month….black female college student Kaliyeha Clark-Mabins now faces three disorderly conduct charges for filing a false police report over the matter.”
All over the world, people are realizing that this is stupid and then it’s time to end it. The problem for Joe Biden is that he’s been stuck in “I will end COVID mode,” and he’s now created an entirely paranoid set of American citizens who believe the minute you take off a mask, you’ll be struck by the wrath of God.
When your worldview is completely off, you have two choices: One, shift your worldview and announce that you made a mistake or: Two, keep doubling down. And Joe Biden has to keep doubling down, because the minute he announces it was a mistake, guess who the hero of this story is? It is no longer Joe Biden, it is no longer Andrew Cuomo, it’s the evil, horrible, no-good, very-bad Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who took the exact opposite approach, and they can never allow that to happen.
I believe that Shapiro is right, in that there is a contingent of Democrats willing to mask and lockdown forever rather than admit Republicans were right. But I believe Shapiro overlooks the time honored gaslighting strategy, where the Biden Ministry of Truth solemnly announced that we’ve always been at war against mask mandates, and that a significant fraction of their mainstream media enablers will shamelessly parrot their new lie, just like Jen Paski shamelessly lied that it was Republicans that wanted to defund the police.
It won’t work for the vast majority of American voters, but they don’t really expect it to. It just gives them the delusional fig-leaf that they were never wrong, to be followed immediately followed by even more “shut up” and “you’re a racist,” then a nice foreign war or riots over a random dead black felon to help change the subject.
Gov. Kathy Hochul will drop New Yorkâs stringent indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times, and marking a turning point in the stateâs coronavirus response, according to three people briefed on her decision.
The decision will eliminate a rule that prompted legal and interpersonal clashes over mask wearing, especially in conservative parts of New York. It was set to expire on Thursday and would have required renewing.
Ms. Hochulâs decision will let the mask mandate lapse just as a crushing winter surge in coronavirus cases is finally receding. But it was not yet clear whether the governor would renew or drop a separate mask mandate in New York schools that is set to expire in two weeks.
Are Democrats crazy enough to drop restrictions for adults but keep the ones harming children despite children at extremely low risk? Maybe. How else can they punish parents for daring to reject Critical Race Theory?
The same piece notes that New Jersey’s democratic governor also got religion on the issue.
It was Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey who began the effort last fall, weeks after he was stunned by the energy of right-wing voters in his blue state, who nearly ousted him from office in what was widely expected to be an easy re-election campaign. Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphyâs advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.
See, Democrats are listening to the science! The science of focus groups.
Another data point: CNNâs resident “doctor” Leana Wen says it’s time.
Despite nothing changing at all, CNNâs resident âdoctorâ Leana Wen claimed this week that âthe science has changedâ and so COVID restrictions including mask mandates should now be rescinded.
Wen failed to cite any studies or data that shows the science has changed.
Wen, who started to admit some weeks ago that masks donât work in stopping the spread of COVID, stated that âthe decision to wear a mask should shift from a government mandate to an individual choice.â
She added that kids in schools should not be forced to wear masks because it can be harmful and makes it harder for them to learn.
Welcome back to 2020, “Doctor” Wen, when everyone who didn’t have a (D) after their name already figured this out. I’m just going to leave these here:
Just wait, Leana Wen, who was born in Shanghai, China, is only 39 years old, managed to be interviewed on CNN regarding the Boston Marathon bombing, became the head of Planned Parenthood, and is CNN's Covid expert? Do I have this right? https://t.co/NyXiSMIZrM
Dr. Leans Wen, who was calling for your children to be forced to wear nothing short of a âmedical-grade, 3-ply surgical maskâ in schools a month and a half ago, would now like to move beyond âdivisivenessâ pic.twitter.com/pXHf3Y3sTP
Two Republican governors were way, way, waaaaay ahead of the curve of their Democratic counterparts in eliminating lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates. Both were ruthlessly smeared as dangerous extremists who wanted to kill grandma. One was Florida governor Ron DeSantis:
Where does DeSantis go to get his apology from the liberal media?
The second Republican governor who scared Democrats into doing the right thing was Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin.
Very, very rarely do you see the leadership of a major state political party so badly miscalculate where it stands, both in overall public opinion and amongst its own rank-and-file legislators. Three weeks ago, Virginia Democratic Party chair Susan Swecker declared that, âMasks are essential to keeping students safe and schools open, but Glenn [Youngkin] would rather use our children as political cover to appease the extreme, far-right fringes of his own party.â
Got that? Wanting parents to decide whether or not their kids wear masks to school is a position of the âextreme, far-right fringes.â So Virginia Democrats prepared themselves for an epic showdown over masking in schools.
And then they lost, badly. On Tuesday, almost half the Democrats in the Virginia State Senate said, âNah, weâre fine with having parents decideâ:
The Virginia Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.
Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, filed the provision Tuesday as an amendment to a bill about in-person learning introduced by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico. Democrats have 21 votes in the Senate to Republicansâ 19. Ten Democrats voted for the amendment, nine voted against it, and two abstained.
The bill is expected to clear the GOP-controlled House.
Youngkin hailed the Senate vote as a âvictory for parents and children.â His administration plans to fast-track the bill to becoming law once it reaches his desk, meaning that it could be the law in less than two weeks.
Never forget that just five days ago, the national press had a meltdown over Glenn Youngkin not wearing a mask in a grocery store that didn't require masks. Five days ago. Now, they are praising Democrats for lifting mask mandates.
It means they were chumped for 2 years and wasted a portion of their lives for NOTHING. I feel for these people as they were victims of a cruel psyop. They're going to have to deal with it eventually though.
Remember all the way back to November of last year, when there was great enthusiasm for New York Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams for not being insane? Granted, after Bill de Blasio, lots of people look sane by comparison, but Adams, an ex-cop, was widely hailed for condemning the “defund the police” madness, and for beating a variety of truly loony left types in the Democratic primary before beating Republican Curtis Sliwa in the general. His victory in deep blue NYC was seen as proof that even liberal bastions were tired of rising crime and the loony left’s antics.
The mayor, who said on Sunday that white supremacy and âanarchistsâ are on the rise, suggested that he can trust no one in the Police Department as much as he can his own kin.
(rolls eye) Yes, new York City is such a well-known nexus of “white supremacy.”
âPersonal security â my life, my life â I want in the hands of my brother with his 20-year law enforcement experience,â Mr. Adams said. âHe has the police experience, but he also has the personal experience. He knows his brother, and heâs going to keep his brother safe.â
New York City public school students are getting a taste of life under the new Adams administration. Starting this week, city schools will debut âVegan Fridaysâ with an inaugural meal of veggie tacos, broccoli, and carrot and lemon salad.
The city is phasing in the shift and plans to offer cheese sandwiches as a backup; officials said non-vegan items will be available by request. One school indicated that vegan breakfasts will consist of bagels and jelly, and cereal. Beverages appear to be exempt from the new rule, and milk will still be offered.
Adams, a proud and vocal vegan, promised to make school meals, which are free to the 930,000 students, healthier during his mayoral campaign.
âPlant-based options in schools means healthy eating and healthy living, and improving the quality of life for thousands of New York City students,â he said in a statement.
Adams supported a pilot project in Brooklyn that became the basis for citywide Meatless Mondays in 2019. Meatless Fridays followed last spring.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured âSocialistsâ, as who should say, âRed Indiansâ. He was probably right-âthe I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say âwhether my diet is ordinary or vegetarianâ. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
Even “sane” Democrats turned out to be loony tunes leftists once they get into power.
With several of the Biden administrationâs COVID-19 vaccine mandates still in effect â such as those affecting members of the military, federal contractors, and healthcare workers â Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) is calling on lawmakers to block government spending that funds the enforcement of those mandates.
Roy, along with 48 other Republicans in Congress, sent a letter to the GOP leadership in each chamber pledging to refuse consideration of âany federal government funding vehicle [. . .] that funds the enforcement of COVID-19 vaccine mandates at any level of government.â
The letter comes in advance of February 18, 2022, the date through which the federal government is currently funded thanks to two continuing resolutions (CRs) that were passed by Congress last fall.
According to the top-ranking Republican in the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress is headed toward passing another stop-gap measure to continue funding the government without any shutdowns.
Republicans like Roy â who also expressed frustration with the national debt surpassing $30 trillion â donât want to see that funding continue to support the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
During a House floor speech on Friday, Roy explained his position, saying, â[W]hen members of this body or the United States Senate vote for a continuing resolution â I want every American to listen to me â when they vote for a continuing resolution to fund government, they are voting to fund the enforcement of vaccine mandates that are causing our men and women in uniform to be forced out of service, to be discharged.â
Members of the Texas delegation who signed Royâs letter include Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX-01), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02), Lance Gooden (R-TX-05), Ronny Jackson (R-TX-13), Randy Weber (R-TX-14), Pete Sessions (R-TX-17), Troy Nehls (R-TX-22), Michael Cloud (R-TX-27), Michael Burgess (R-TX-26), and Brian Babin (R-TX-26).
Opposition to vaccine mandates is widespread in America, and almost universal among Republicans, which makes defunding them an excellent hill to defend. The only question is why more GOP legislators haven’t signed this pledge.
If Biden and congressional Democrats didn’t want their unconstitutional regulatory schemes held hostage to continuing resolutions, they should have tried to get them passed into law and passed an actual budget rather than a continuing resolution. Too bad pandering to their far left-wing base was more important than writing a budget Manchin and Sinema could sign off on.
He who lives by the continuing resolution dies by the continuing resolution.
[The sound you hear is the countless multitudes clicking off to another blog.]
Way back last decade, dispatches on the ongoing crisis were a regular staple of the blog. To summarize the crisis for those who weren’t paying attention back then:
A bunch of countries joined the Eurozone without following the requirements outlined for membership, including limiting budget deficits to 3% of less of their GDP, and overall debt-to-GDP ratio of 60% or less. How were they able to join? Simple: They lied and the Eurocrats turned a blind eye, because EU.
Foremost among those running into trouble were the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). (Cyprus and Malta also had serious issues, but their tiny size meant they presented no systematic risk for other nations, and Cyprus relieved its problems by becoming the dirty Russian money laundering capital of Europe.)
Ireland was probably the most incongruous of the five, since their debt only spiked when the Irish government nationalized Anglo Irish Bank to prevent it from collapsing.
In all other cases, the cause of of the problem was obvious: Each ran huge budget deficits to underwrite generous welfare state programs for countries with below replacement birth rates, and they were allowed to get away with it for a while because they used Germany’s credit rating in lieu of their own thanks to the Euro.
The problem finally came to a head after the SubPrime Meltdown in 2008 made various banks and regulatory agencies actually scrutinize balance sheets and realize just how broke the PIIGS were.
Greece was the worst, being the most dysfunctional, and absolutely refusing to slow down spending on their own. There followed a reoccurring farce where various Euro regulatory agencies (including the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, collectively known as “the Troika”) demanded Greece end their ridiculous high levels of deficit spending, Greece refused, the Troika threatened to cut off the tap entirely, Greece promised to be better, the Troika reluctantly extended them another loan, and then Greece continued to spend recklessly, setting up the next round of the farce.
A bunch of Eurozone countries then implemented “austerity,” which involved not cutting spending to balance their budgets, but merely reducing the deficits slightly.
None of these âausterityâ measures eliminated deficit spending, and none addressed the issue thatâs driving all of Europe (and us) bankrupt, namely unwillingness to carry out structural reforms of the welfare state. The few tiny reforms that have been undertaken have been, as NROâs Michael Tanner notes, ridiculously timid, and even those have been heavily weighted in future years. âSo far, European governments havenât even been willing to take a penknife to the welfare state, let alone an axe.â Plus a huge round of tax hikes…
Actual austerity would mean (at a minimum) reducing spending to the amount of money actually taken in. As best I can tell, none of the PIIGS, or France, or the UK has undertaken such real austerity. That âsevereâ Greek austerity that just caused a change in government? It reduced Greeceâs official deficit spending from 9.0% of GDP to 7.5% of GDP. They didnât even want Greece to stop digging a hole, they just wanted them to dig more slowly.
Austerity did not fail, it was declared difficult and left untried.
Eventually growth in the Eurozone picked up just enough, and the Troika managed to install enough of their own functionaries in various PIIGS positions to ensure that their half-assed, anemic austerity programs were actually followed that, along with Brexit and the Rise of Trump, it got Eurozone debt crisis off the front page and back under the rug.
So fast forward to today. Has the European debt crisis been solved?
Hah! Of course not. Does the EU ever really solve anything? European debt grew during the pandemic, but this time they get to blame Flu Manchu rather than slow growth, high taxes, declining births and a bloated welfare state.
Spain, Italy and Greece have all continued their PIIGS-ish ways. The UK, under ostensibly conservative Tory governments for the entire pandemic and constant attack for “austerity,” and they’re still piling up debt like one of the PIIGS, though the double-whammy of Brexit dislocations and idiotic lockdowns are more to blame than increased spending per se.
Ireland, with the lowest deficit for the period, seems to have proved that their membership among the PIIGS was transitory.
What then of Portugal? Have they improved? It turns out only slightly and relatively. Their debt increased by 13.9% for the period, making them better not only than Spain, Italy, Greece and the UK, but also France, Cyprus, Malta, Hungary and Slovenia. They evidently managed a balanced budget in 2019 (at least on paper). Their Flu Manchu deficit spending is still unsustainable, just slightly less unsustainable than many of their fellow Eurozone grave-diggers.
We don’t have much standing to condemn others, as the United States ratio stands at 106.70%. Donald Trump had numerous virtues as President, but he was no deficit hawk, and Biden would crank up deficits even higher if the Senate let him.
We can see the fruits of this orgy of deficit spending in the worldwide inflation we’re seeing. (Feel free to argue whether government budget deficits or central bank quantitative easing is more at fault.) Inflation may ruin nations, but it’s the deficit-spender’s friend, letting him pay off debt on the cheap with now devalued currency. And it’s the working poor whose lives are most impoverished by it.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul has always been a popular proposition to get Paul’s vote, but we’re now robbing Peter and Paul’s unborn grandchildren to delay financial reckonings until after the next election cycle.
Started working on a short post that became too long a post to finish today. So enjoy some video from Canada’s Trucker Revolution:
Instapundit also has an interesting article up: The workers of the world finally had an uprising and the left hates it.
So weâre finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if thereâs no justice, thereâs no peace.
Naturally, the left hates it.
For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots â it was to do what it was told by the âintellectual vanguardâ of the left.
A working-class revolution led by the working class is the leftâs worst nightmare because the working class doesnât want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that wonât get a lot of working-class people killed. Itâs not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, âmodern monetary theory,â foreign adventures and defunding police.
Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of âflyover country,â people who live in the middle of nowhere.
So naturally, the idea that those people might be staging a revolution is intolerable.
The idea that the wrong kind of people might be demanding freedom is simply intolerable to the left.
The Carter-era “misery index” (inflation + unemployment) is rising, Canada’s truckers are still honking, more Democratic sleazebag activity, the far left is coming for your kids, China continues to misbehave, and a tragic cheese display collapse shocks onlookers. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Biden continues to work his magic on the economy. Expected job numbers: +200,000. Actual job numbers: -300,000.
Why the BLS is applying such a grotesque seasonal adjustment to it, is unclear (actually, if one assumes that the Biden admin tapped the BLS secretary on the shoulder, then it is very clear).
It’s not just outside analysts who reach this conclusion: in Table C to its report, the BLS showed “December 2021-January 2022 changes in selected labor force measures, with adjustments for population control effects” and confirmed that if one had used an apples-to-apples basis for the January numbers, the number of Employed workers (from the Household Survey) would be down -272K. Instead, thanks to the population control effect adjustment of 1.471 million, the final number was 1.199 million!
In summary, while the markets had been trading for months on fake data when the BLS failed to catch up to covid reality, and was applying stale seasonal adjustments, they are doing so again today, only in the opposite direction with the BLS now overextending itself in the opposite direction, with a January seasonal adjustment that has never been greater!
Inflation hit 5.8% in 2021, the most in 39 years. Pretty sure this year is going to be a lot worse.
How bad is inflation? Dwight sent over this link on an Austin restaurant shutting down that includes an eye-opening inflation tidbit. “He pointed out that a container of fryer oil that a year ago cost about $17 had risen to about $50.”
Canada’s freedom truckers seem to be making headway with regional governments, some of whom have promised to lift vaccine mandates, but asshole authoritarian Justin Trudeau is refusing to budge.
There are two naturally occurring viruses that are parÂticularly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The first is RaTG13, which shares 96.2 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by the Wuhan Institute of Virologyâs Shi Zhengli. This virus was collected from bat feces in a copper-mine shaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, China, that was the site of a small-scale deadly viral infection with some curious similarities to Covid.
In April 2012, six miners were assigned to clean bat guano from the mine shaft. Four miners had been working at the site for two weeks, and two had been working there for four days when they all grew ill with a cough and fever and experienced difficulty breathing, aching limbs, heavy and bloody mucus and saliva, and headaches â symptoms of a viral respiratory infection that are similar to the effects of Covid. All six miners were admitted to a Kunming hospital in late April and early May, and three died â one after two weeks, one after a month and a half, and one after three months. The other three survived.
Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese pulmonoloÂgist whose high-profile role has been compared to that of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States, consulted on the cases of the miners. Recognizing that the virus afflicting the miners could be comparable to SARS, researchers sent blood samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for antibody testing.
In 2012 and 2013, teams of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted a study of coronaviruses in bats in that abandoned mine shaft â and one of the samples they collected was RaTG13.
The second virus that is particularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is really a cluster of three similar viruses discovered in Laos in autumn 2021. A team led by Marc Eliot, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, collected saliva, feces, and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos and found three new viruses that were each more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103, and BANAL-236.
Some skeptics of the lab-leak theory contend that the BANAL viruses proved that SARS-CoV-2 is likely a naturally occurring virus, and because Laos was roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan, this pointed away from the notion that the Covid pandemic could be traced back to a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other labs in the city. But there is ample reason to believe that viruses from Laos â perhaps not the BANAL trio, but similar ones â were also shipped from Laos to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In 2010, Wildlife Trust, a nonprofit international conservation organization dedicated to protecting wildlife, announced it was rebranding itself under the name EcoHealth Alliance. The organizationâs president, Peter Daszak, declared that his group had become âthe central organization defining the intersection of local conservation and global healthâ and touted itself as being âon the forefront of informing the public, businesses, and the scientific community about emerging diseases, including potential pandemics.â It is safe to say that EcoHealth Alliance is one of the largest, best funded, and best connected nonprofits, focusing upon âfield research and develop[ing] tools to save ecosystems and predict and prevent pandemics.â
EcoHealth Alliance/illegal gain of function section snipped.
We know for a fact that the people collecting samples do not always follow the necessary safety procedures. And the risk of accidental infection does not disappear once the viruses and bats are brought back to the laboratories.
Lab accidents happen. The first argument against the lab-leak theory that can be safely dismissed is the notion that Chinese scientists were simply too careful or too diligent to ever let a virus escape their lab. Accidents occur even in the most well-trained and highly regarded research facilities in the world. In June 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that they had unintentionally exposed personnel to potentially viable anthrax. A month later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found samples of smallpox, dengue, and spotted fever just sitting in a storage room. A decade earlier, the Chinese CDCâs National Institute of Virology in southern Beijing had accidentally released SARS. Twice.
In February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists detailing that from 2009 to 2015, a federal program âreceived a total of 749 incident reports from select-agent research facilities,â including â1) needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects, 2) dropped containers or spills/splashes of liquids containing pathogens, and 3) bites or scratches from infected animals.â
China obviously places the same importance on lab safety as it puts into quality control. Lets pick it up where more CCP perfidy kicks in:
Finally, there is the undeniably suspicious behavior of the Chinese government since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Until January 21, 2020, the Wuhan Regional Health Commission insisted that âno clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.â On January 4, 2020, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield was incredulous during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Redfield described asking his old friend Gao, âGeorge, you donât really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?â Gao insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But Redfield recounted that two days later, Gao broke down during a call, âaudibly and tearfully distraught after finding âa lot of casesâ in the community who had never visited the wet market.â
In late January and early February, the Chinese government ordered all labs processing samples of the strange new virus to destroy them. On January 3, Chinaâs National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The justification for this order was public safety, although it is hard to see the public-safety benefit in suppressing information about the disease.
It took a year to get a World Health Organization investigative team into Wuhan, and when that team arrived, it encountered angry refusals to turn over raw data about the earliest cases. According to the New York Times, âdisagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.â The Chinese government has refused to allow another team of investigators to enter Wuhan or the labs in the city. The Chinese government does not care if it looks guilty.
A much-hyped U.S. intelligence-community investigation completed in August offered almost nothing useful, declaring, âAll agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.â Ninety days of effort, with all the resources of the U.S. government, generated nothing new.
To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.
In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didnât have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being exÂtremely difficult to find in bats.
This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.
That would be a remarkable series of coincidences.
Read the whole thing.
Data point. “Younger, working-age people began dying in greater numbers as vaccine mandates hit.”
More data:
Been seeing a lot of governors crediting their mask mandates for "defeating" the Omicron wave. Thought I'd plot COVID cases in states with mask mandates vs. states without them, and, well⊠pic.twitter.com/WdhsyCINjp
Glenn Youngkin is governing Virginia according to the implicit campaign slogan that powered his victory: stop messing with our kids, you freaks! Thatâs the polite version, anyway. Other Republican officials should follow his lead and solidify the GOP as the party of parents.
Youngkin ran as a conservative champion of normalcy, especially in schools. His campaign was assisted when his opponent declared parents should not have a say in what their children are taught, thereby confirming everything Youngkin was running on.
Since being sworn in, Youngkin has banned school mask mandates, banned teaching racist ideas from sources such as critical race theory, and requested the new state attorney general, Jason Miyares, to investigate the apparent coverup by Loudoun County officials of a rape committed by a skirt-wearing boy in a girlsâ bathroom. He has also started cleaning house in the bureaucracy.
These measures have provoked pushback from the usual suspects. Left-wing teachers are now worried theyâll get in trouble for teaching the race essentialism derived from critical race theory. Some counties have defied the governor over school mask mandates, and are punishing students who choose not to wear them. But Youngkin is holding firm, knowing this is what he was elected to do.
Across the nation, parents are in revolt against the Democrat-led educational establishment, and Republicans should eagerly join the fray. After all, it was the Democrat-loving teachers unions that fought to keep schools shut down long after we knew that children were at almost no risk from Covid-19. Likewise, it has mostly been Democrats and their allies forcing children to wear masks when school is open, even though (as a few on the left are finally admitting) masks are particularly harmful for children, while offering no real benefits.
There are other indignities and cruelties, of course, from shutting down outdoor playgrounds to forcing schoolchildren to study or eat lunch outdoors in freezing temperatures. And these miseries have been inflicted long after any plausible ability to defend them as emergency measures, or to plead ignorance of the consequences. Under pressure from the teachers unions and education bureaucracy, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the well-being of children. Even many liberals now want an alternative to the endless school shutdowns, masks, and other pandemic security theater.
Students across the country as young as kindergarten-age are learning that âeverybody gets to choose their own genderâ and are receiving kid-friendly lessons on disrupting âWestern nuclear family dynamicsâ as part of this weekâs national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
The activist-driven curriculum for the Week of Action, which kicked off Monday, is based off the 13 âBlack Lives Matter Guiding Principles.â Those principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is âfree from patriarchal practices,â and âthe disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the âcollective villageâ that takes care of each other.â
Black Lives Matter at School offers kid-friendly versions of the 13 principles designed for elementary and middle-school students.
The Week of Action also includes a list of four national demands: end zero-tolerance discipline policies; mandate black history and ethnic studies; hire more black teachers; and fund counselors, not cops, according to a âstarter kitâ on the Black Lives Matter at School website.
In the starter kit, New York City kindergarten teacher Laleña Garcia, author of a childrenâs book about BLM principles, writes that while âdiscussing big ideas with little peopleâ it is necessary to âconsider age-appropriate language so that our students or children can grasp the concepts.â For example, she suggests not talking about police violence with âour youngest children.â
When discussing BLMâs principle of being transgender affirming, Garcia offers the following kid-friendly language: âEverybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.â
When discussing the BLM principle of a âBlack Village,â which includes the goal of disrupting the Western nuclear family structure, Garcia suggests teaching kids that âthere are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is that itâs people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe they choose to be a family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes, when itâs a lot of families together, it can be called a village.â
Speaking of Democratic policies endangering kids: Repeat child sex offender illegal alien arrested at the border.
Even in San Francisco, the backlash against the Soros-backed-Democrat-DA crime wave has begun: “S.F. police will no longer cooperate with DA Boudin over police shooting investigations.”
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he intends to sever an agreement with the San Francisco District Attorneyâs Office spelling out the D.A.âs lead role in investigating police use-of-force incidents, in-custody deaths and police shootings.
The agreement was originally struck in 2019 following intense debate in San Francisco over the role the cityâs police department should play in investigating its own officers following a rash of police shootings. Police and the District Attorneyâs Office renewed the agreement last year.
The more we learn about the Jenny Thornley affair, the more it appears that senior members of the Pritzker administration, including potentially the governor and his wife, may have facilitated a fraud on the state by a now-indicted former campaign aide to enrich her and then obstructed efforts to bring her to justice.
This is a tangled web, so stay with me as I set forth a timeline of events and characters, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The former executive director of the Illinois State Police Merit Board, Jack Garcia, discovered evidence that one of the employees under his direction, Jenny Thornley, was stealing money from the people of the state
Garcia is a well-known, skilled investigator who previously supervised the divisions of internal investigations and forensic services, before becoming the first deputy director of the Illinois State Police. Thornley was a campaign aide for Gov. J.B. Pritzker (her husband, Jared, was also a senior political appointee at the Illinois comptrollerâs office) and close enough to Pritzker and his wife, M.K., that she had their personal telephone numbers.
After assembling the evidence and building the case, Garcia scheduled meetings to fire Thornley and refer her for prosecution on the morning of Feb. 3, 2020. However, on the eve of that day, Thornley contacted (at least) the governor’s wife (pictured, at left) and asked her to intervene, alleging that Garcia had assaulted her sexually a week or so earlier.
The governorâs chief counsel promptly called the merit board (which is an independent agency created âto remove political influenceâ from State Police hiring, promotion and discipline) to âadviseâ it to: (a) cancel her firing and the referral for prosecution, (b) suspend Garcia (the experienced investigator who uncovered the Thornley fraud) and (c) retain an outside counsel proposed by the governorâs office. The merit board went along, but also suspended Thornley, and Garcia voluntarily took and passed a lie detector test.
Then Thornley sued to stop the investigation of her own claim of sexual harassment.
The outside counsel, Christina Egan, nonetheless completed an investigation by July 2020 (at the cost of $500,000 paid by the people of Illinois), confirming the evidence Garcia assembled that Thornley had stolen money and committed forgery, and finding no evidence of Thornleyâs sexual assault allegation. The State Police Merit Board then reinstated Garcia, fired Thornley, referred her for prosecution. She has now been indicted for theft and forgery.
However, after Thornley was fired, someone with clout in the Pritzker administration somehow granted her disability payments reserved for people that are actually state employees. These payments (amounting to some $71,000) went on for more than a year, ending days before she was indicted for theft and fraud. These extensive payments were for âinjuries” sustained from an âassaultâ that Egan determined had not occurred.
Speaking of Democratic family corruption: “Smoking gun documents tie Nancy Pelosi’s son to fraud and bribery scheme to remove permit violations against squalid San Francisco flop house owned by his ex-girlfriend and probed by the FBI.”
The criminal justice system in Harris County is broken,â said Aimee Castillo, sister of murder victim Josh Sandoval.
Suspect Devan Kristopher Jordon was out on three felony bonds when he allegedly shot Sandoval during a home invasion robbery last May. Jordon had also missed a court date the week prior to the murder, but authorities did not issue an arrest warrant.
âI think the criminal justice system is just a revolving door. They murder, they go in, and they come out, and they go in,â said Glenda Martin, Sandovalâs mother. âI think itâs a horrible thing.â
Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) presented a resolution honoring Sandovalâs life and noted that the suspect was also affiliated with the same crime ring allegedly responsible for the murder in Houston of an off-duty New Orleans police officer last August.
âThere are people who are hurting people who are being allowed to walk around and they should not be period. That is the point,â intoned Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4).
The fieriest moments of the meeting, however, came later from Steve Radack, former constable and former commissioner who said Democrats on the commissioners court had âblood on their hands.â
âI never dreamed that after serving 32 years on this court that there would be three members of this court â Hidalgo, Garcia, and Ellis â who would kiss the rears of hardened criminals, who victimize law-abiding citizens, including law enforcement officers,â said Radack. âIâm calling on you three to resign from office so the healing can begin.â
This is the worst cheese display collapse since Cheeses of Nazareth suffered a collapse of their famed "A Whey In A Manger" display the day before Christmas in 2019.
