Before social justice was the ruling religion/scam of the far left, The Church of Global Warming held sway in their hearts. They still mutter the catechisms, and lots of Democratic Party bigwigs still have their fingers in the green scam pie, but the world as a whole, freed from their bondage to Big Green thanks to shifting political sands, is jumping off the “carbon neutral” bandwagon while the jumping is good.
In Texas, scrutiny from Attorney General Ken Paxton has caused several big banks to pull out of NetZero pacts.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has revealed that three major United States-based banks have withdrawn from the United Nations-led Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
Launched in April 2021, the group comprises banks “committed to aligning their lending, investment and capital markets activities with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” according to the alliance’s website.
The group’s first commitment statement provides more details, pledging to “transition all operational and attributable GHG emissions from our lending and investment portfolios to align with pathways to net-zero by mid-century, or sooner.”
In October 2023, Paxton opened a review of the statuses of Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and other financial institutions pursuant to Senate Bill 13, first passed by the Texas Legislature in 2021.
The law prohibits governmental entities from entering into contracts with companies that boycott oil and gas companies. The financial institutions’ membership in the NZBA raised questions about their compliance with this law.
His review specifically focused on companies required to provide letters detailing their compliance with SB 13. Those already known to be a part of NZBA—like Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo—are listed in the letter.
Other financial institutions listed are Barclays, DNT Asset Trust, Fidelity Investments, RBC Capital Markets, the Royal Bank of Canada, State Street, and TD Bank.
“Any company submitting a standing letter to us in the future must inform us if it or any affiliate is a Net Zero Alliance Member. To the extent we learn that a company with a current standing letter, or its affiliate, is a Net Zero Alliance Member, the company will be treated similarly to the companies identified on the attached list,” explained Paxton’s letter on the review process.
Wells Fargo announced it was leaving the alliance on December 20, followed shortly thereafter by Bank of America on December 31. Morgan Stanley left NZBA on January 2, and JPMorgan exited on January 7.
“More and more financial institutions are taking a major step in the right direction by leaving the radical and anti-energy Net-Zero Banking Alliance. The NZBA seeks to undermine our vital oil and gas industries, and membership could potentially prevent banks from being able to enter into contracts with Texas governmental entities,” explained Paxton. “I am glad that Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan have terminated their NZBA membership.”
In addition to the four banks pursued by Paxton, financial giant Citigroup left the alliance on December 31. Goldman Sachs left on December 10, kicking off the mass exodus.
It turns out that the vast majority of Americans are far more interested in such frivolous objectives as “feeding my family” and “paying rent” than paying $120 trillion to theoretically drop the temperature of the globe by 1.5°C three-quarters of a century hence. Banks, now free of having to curry favor with radical “environmental justice” warriors in Biden’s ghost administration, are following suit and backing away from pie-in-the-sky decarbonization goals.
This may count as an “old man yells at cloud” moment, but before the Flu Manchu lockdowns and the resultant supply chain breakage, HEB’s house brand of Diet Root Beer went for $2.25 a 12-pack. Now, here in early 2025, it’s going for $5.20. I calculate that as a 131% inflation rate over five years, considerably above the official 21.9% phony baloney “let’s lie for Biden” rate. So what gives?
My first thought was “Well, aluminum prices must have gone through the roof again.” Nope.
Aluminum shot way up in 2022, and then came right back down, and has been essentially flat for two years.
As one of the biggest costs in soft drinks 12-packs, you’d think prices might be stable for that, but no. The prices for name brand soft drinks have gone up as well.
Even if we can all agree that the real inflation rate is much higher than admitted, why are soft drinks up so much more than even the unofficial rate?
If you have any idea, please feel free to share in the comments below.
President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, said during an interview over the weekend that the administration will be deporting illegal aliens from Venezuela regardless of whether or not Venezuela takes them back.
Homan made the remarks during a Sunday interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan, when asked about countries like Venezuela that are not accepting deportations back from the U.S.
“Well, first of all, we got President Trump coming to the Oval Office, and he’s proven during his first administration, his leadership on illegal immigration was a game changer, because, for instance, El Salvador wouldn’t take back MS-13 members when I was the ICE Director,” he said. “It took President Trump 48 hours to get El Salvador to take back their criminal aliens into their prisons.”
“And Mexico didn’t want to do the Remain in Mexico program,” he continued. “But President Trump was able to get Remain in Mexico established in Mexico. He was able to get Mexico put military on the southern and northern border.”
Homan noted that President Joe Biden was so weak that countries simply refused to take their criminal illegal aliens back and the administration never “forced these countries to take them back.”
“If for instance, Venezuela don’t take their people back, there’s other ways we can do it,” he said. “There’s other countries be willing to accept them. We’re hoping that President Trump will work with Venezuela and like he did with Mexico and El Salvador, and get these countries take them back. If they don’t, they’re still gonna be deported. They’re just gonna be deported to a different country.”
“We’re not gonna be held up on removing public safety trust in this country,” he continued. “We gotta put the safety of the American people first. We’ve had too many young women murdered and raped and burned alive by members of Venezuelan gangs. They need to be a priority under this administration. They’re gonna be a priority starting day one, and they will be deported.”
One of those Venezuelan gangs is Tren de Aragua, which we’ve talked about here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Homan says he’s going to send them all back, no matter what the Caracas commies say.
It’s funny what you can accomplish when your biggest concern is protecting the American people rather than currying favor with transnational political elites, or trying to advance the electoral chances of the Democratic Party…
It’s almost impossible to kill a bad lefty idea, and Universal Basic Income is one of the worst. The idea that government agencies should fork over taxpayer dollars to random people for breathing goes against the basic American ethos of freedom and hard work, so naturally lefties are in love with the idea as it being a down-payment on full-bore socialism. But it’s been tried, and failed, many times before, so much so that Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 back in 1984 covered the colossal failure of the SIME/DIME experiments back on pages 148-152.
In October, I reported on the release of the largest research project ever on universal basic income (UBI). The study’s results were disappointing for advocates of the idea. In short, the research showed that many people who received the income reduced their hours working and increased leisure time. Furthermore, people didn’t use their leisure time in any of the productive activities advocates often claim (e.g., self-improvement, entrepreneurship, time with family).
In December, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on UBI authored by economists Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, Sara Constantino, Johannes Haushofer, and Jonathan Morduch was released.
The study examined 2,097 households in Compton, California. They gave around one-third of the households a guaranteed monthly income of an average of $487 and examined how recipient households acted relative to the non-recipients.
The most obvious impact of a guaranteed income is going to be on a recipient’s work decisions. Predictably, many people who received the guaranteed income reduced their working hours.
The researchers found that part-time workers (those who worked less than 20 hours per week) reduced their time working by 13 percent. Less time working means less money. How much less? The paper states:
The negative impacts on labor market participation translate into negative impacts on household income. While the average monthly cash transfer amount for the treatment group is $487… the net impact on total monthly household income over the past 30 days including the cash transfer was just $92 and not significantly different from zero.
This means that these part-time worker households who received a nearly $500 transfer ended up only being $100 richer overall, because they reduced their working hours. Furthermore, this $100 difference was not statistically significant, which means it’s unclear whether the transfer really leaves people with more income than before!
It should be noted that full-time employees did not significantly change their working habits. This fact also does not bode well for UBI advocates. Why?
Ask yourself, why would part-time employees work less, but full-time employees work the same amount? One explanation is that it is generally easier to pick up part-time work than it is to find a full-time job. As such, full-time workers were likely reluctant to leave behind their stable full-time jobs for a temporary guaranteed income. Additionally, an income of $500 per month is likely not enough to make up for the loss of a full-time job. So it’s unsurprising that this program didn’t affect the decisions of full-time employees.
However, if this program were a permanent government program, I would expect that some full-time employees would also leave their jobs or cut back hours. If you expect to get a guaranteed monthly stipend for two years, you aren’t going to quit your job, because you’re going to have to take on the cost of finding a new full-time job when it ends. However, if you’re going to get it forever, you’re more likely to do so.
So it turns out that paying people for breathing meant they actually did less work.
Alert the media.
Also this: “To give a stipend to every adult would be more than a trillion dollars every year.”
UBI’s a failure, and UBI will always be a failure, and this latest failure will do nothing to prevent leftists from trying it again somewhere else.
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
If you’re looking for a sign that Trump Derangement Syndrome is finally breaking across America, the news that Apple CEO Tim Cook is donating $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration is a pretty good sign.
Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, reports Axios. The donation will be a personal donation directly from Cook rather than a donation from Apple.
Following Trump’s win, Cook congratulated him on social media site X, and in December, Cook had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Cook aimed to maintain a relationship with Trump during Trump’s first term as president, and it appears Cook plans to continue on with that plan going forward.
Sources that spoke to Axios said that Cook is donating to the inauguration “in the spirit of unity.” Apple is not expected to make a donation.
Trump is taking office as Apple faces regulatory pressure both in the United States and in other countries. In March 2024, Apple was sued by the United States Department of Justice for allegedly violating antitrust law in multiple ways with its platforms. The Apple vs. DoJ legal battle will play out during Trump’s term.
Amazon, Meta, Uber, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Coinbase, Toyota, Ford, GM, AT&T, Black & Decker, and Charter Communications are also making donations to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Some will point out that Cook is not a Republican, and in fact donates to Democrats. Yes, that’s the point. Big executives used to routinely donate money to a President’s inauguration to curry favor. That Cook, the CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world, one with a granola-crunching lefty reputation to boot, would donate to Orange Cheeto Hitler, is a sign that the fear of being dragged by social justice warriors for daring to deal with Trump is finally dissipating.
Like an evil spell being lifted, the online shrieking of purple haired radicals is no longer enough to keep ordinary people from working with Trump. The demonization of Trump as a figure beyond the pale was one of the left’s biggest efforts in systemic preference falsification. That it’s now collapsing, just like the fake popularity of “defund the police” and “sex is a social construct” collapsed, is a sign that social justice is finally losing what power it had over the general public, and the radical left can no longer maintain the illusion of popularity and inevitability they tried to cultivate for so hard and so long.
It turns out that the social justice left is the one on the wrong side of history…
If you look at some of the key ills plaguing America over the last ten years, Facebook has certainly had a hand in perpetuating some of them. Wokeness, censorship, echo chambers, commodification of user information and spam are just some of the evils Facebook (AKA Meta) has helped inflict on the citizenry.
Now Facebook is inflicting AI-generated profiles on its users.
Kneon: “Facebook is experimenting with AI generated profiles on Facebook and Instagram.”
K: “it’s going to be pretty scary because I mean you already don’t know who you’re dealing with on the internet, and I’ve heard some pretty convincing or seen some pretty convincing video. They actually had uh one of the uh AI video generators doing like an influencer video for Tik Tok and you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a real person.” If you’re doing influencer videos on Tik-Tok, I’m already halfway convinced you’re not a real person…
K: “It’s going to make it a lot harder to tell who you’re dealing with on the internet.”
Is one of the profiles woke? Of course it is. Geeky Sparkles: “‘Proud black queer mama of two, truth teller.’ It’s a truth teller, but it’s an AI, so it’s already not real but it’s going to tell you the truth. ‘Your realest source for life’s ups and downs.’ Uh, but it’s not real, it’s an AI who doesn’t know about life’s up and ups and downs, but you know it’s a black queer, it identifies as ‘a black queer mama.'”
K: “Their parent company Meta company is rolling out a wide array of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook.”
GS: “Why? Why do you need an AI character?” Why indeed?
K: “From someone who worked in marketing for years, and as a business owner, we have had some interesting things happen with Facebook advertising, and I don’t think all your money is going to ads being seen by real people.”
GS: “If advertisers are upset, and bots are a problem and bots and fake accounts are a problem because advertisers are getting scammed, they feel like they’re getting scammed and it’s an issue and we have to stop bots, why would flooding the market with generative AI characters and make your own make sense?”
K: “Meta hopes to attract a younger audience in a face off with competitors like Tik Tok and Snapchat.” First, why would Meta think younger users are all like “Hey, you know what I love? Fake profiles!” Second, if you’re taking your cues from Tik-Tok and Snapchat, you’ve already lost.
GS: “It’s hard to be a Tik tocker and make content all the time, or it’s hard to have enough content to keep going, but these AI can generate it indefinitely, so we’ll just tell people on Tik Tok to buy your shit.”
Maybe the goal is to create Ai influencers who pimp one company’s product and slam competitors.
Or create fake women on OnlyFans to make a mint.
In fact, there are already AI influencers earning money.
GS: “They’re talking about the Dead Internet Theory. And Dead Internet Theory, for those who don’t know is [basically] more and more accounts and activity on the internet are done by computers and fake people than real people.”
K: “Facebook feels dead now. Like endstage MySpace.”
In the wake of these revelations, there are conflicting accounts in different MSM sources as to whether Facebook has shut these accounts down or not.
Maybe different MSM writers are talking to different AI bot pretending to be “inside sources.” Or maybe the MSM “writers” are bots as well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sure a lot is advertiser driven, but I wonder if some of the investment boom in AI is coming from lefty executives watching the collapse of their systemic preference falsifaction falling away due to events like Trump’s election (all of them) and Brexit and thinking to themselves “Shit, we need to fool the rubes even harder” by using social justice bots to give The Narrative the illusion of popularity.
Fortunately for us, I think it’s too late for them to pull it off. Maybe Bluesky could finally surpass Twitter/X in user base, if we ignore that 98% of them are bots…
But still, caution seems to be in order. More than ever, everything you see online should be treated with a degree of skepticism, even if you agree with it.
Happy New Year! The Biden Administration is made of lies (which you already knew), a few links about guns, mysterious deaths in Tarrant County jails, Russian finds new, embarrassing ways to lose equipment, Hasbro destroys D&D’s legacy, and a look at biblical werewolves. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
One of Biden’s main legacies: Corrupting official government economic statistics:
Another 653,000 fake jobs revised away by govt statisticians. They were faking the data during 2023 and 2024 to try to boost Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In the revisions, they have also admitted to 818,000 fake jobs being removed from the 2023 data.
A brand new investigation from the Wall Street Journal has revealed that scientists knew early on that the COVID-19 virus was an engineered virus that escaped a lab, but the information was suppressed by intelligence agencies and removed from all presidential briefings on the matter.
Three scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, had reported their findings that the virus was manipulated in a lab. They shared their findings with the FBI, but were soon told to stop.
In August of 2021, Biden was briefed on the origins of COVID-19 after a 90-day investigation from intelligence agencies. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines briefed the President and left out all research pointing to a lab leak from her briefing.
Sarah Hoyt has a pretty good plan moving forward: We win, they lose.
It’s going to take a long time for us to stop flinching and deciding we’re going to be betrayed. 2020 left scars in the collective psyche, and scars take a long time to fade if they ever do.
The last four years we were hunching our shoulders and just enduring the blows, and that will take a long long time to fade.
And sure, there are things that won’t go our way. But you shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Look, the edifice that supports the boot on our necks is not only rickety. It always was rickety.
Keeping the big lie of the all powerful centralized government in place was a full scale production, and it required a fully coordinated media, fully coordinated panels of “experts”, and a trusting public that believed all of it. Or at least a majority of the public that believed all of it.
It has been eroding for a while, since social media and blogs got really big in the wake of 9/11. Despite their best efforts at censorship, a massed multitude of — what did they call us? — hobbits is harder to control than a few journalists who want to be invited to the right parties.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the first time the media lost to the hobbits. Really lost, publicly. They didn’t like it. The hell the establishment has put us through since is their payback.
It came with unexpected consequences though. The main ones being: their masks were yanked off; and we don’t believe them anymore.
This is the sort of thing that not all the king’s horses and not all the king’s men can put together ever again.
Sure, we’ll “lose” some. Sure, they’re making cunning plans to thwart the will of the people.
But be not afraid. If we win even a few places, it’s enough for the whole edifice of oppression and lies to come tumbling down.
It has been tumbling down, already, even while they were nominally in power, which is why we won 2024.
Be not afraid. This is very important. The rest will fall into place, provided you keep your heads and remember you’re Americans.
Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won’t tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I’ve seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list.
Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions.
Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face. It’s a very opaque process ofc, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean – a portly Hispanic woman – tell me two minutes into the interview that “women in STEM are very important to me”, and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn’t been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they’d hired … no one.
One of the many controversial chunks of the short-term spending bill that sparked debate recently included funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But what’s the problem? After all, who doesn’t like “Global Engagement”?!
Well, this agency — formed by Barack Obama — has been moonlighting as a censorship czar, handing out taxpayer dollars like candy to groups that spend their time suppressing conservative voices online.
(In other words, your average Obama administration government office.)
But after widespread backlash, the new version has no room for the Global Engagement Center.
Snip.
Reports from the Washington Examiner indicated that the GEC bankrolled groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, organizations that basically police speech with the finesse of a drunk mall cop. The Federalist and the Daily Wire even sued the GEC over its role in suppressing right-leaning voices.
Thanks to the new continuing resolution, the GEC finally met its own doom, with yet another scrap of Barack Obama’s legacy shuffling off into the sunset like Joe Biden’s last remaining marble.
Sounds like some companies are asking for a lawsuit:
Just got a dm from someone who works in recruiting at one of big tech companies. He said it's internal policy within the team he works for to reserve roles for what they call “outside talent”.
They are not allowed to recruit Americans for these roles but must go through the…
Suspicious. “North Texas Activist Is Latest to Die in Tarrant County Jail. Mason Yancy was the ninth person to die in Tarrant County Jail custody this year….Yancy was well known to grassroots activists in North Texas and across the state as an advocate for limited government and First and Second Amendment rights. He co-founded Open Carry Texas with activist-turned-attorney CJ Grisham.”
Anti-Chinese riots in Africa, following a disputed election in which Daniel Chapo of the ruling FRELIMO (socialist, formerly communist) party was declared the winner. Seems like the citizens of Mozambique aren’t big fans of Belt and Road…
Waterloo records in Austin is relocating under new ownership. “Caren Kelleher, founder and president of Gold Rush Vinyl, confirmed Thursday she and business partner Trey Watson (CEO of Armadillo Records) will be taking over Waterloo Records. The vinyl shop has operated in Austin for more than 40 years, including 35 years at its current location along West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard.” I used to spend a fair amount of time searching their used CD bins, but I all but stopped going downtown during the “homeless camping” fiasco. (Hat tip: .)
“Your troubles” in this case include wokeness, illegal aliens, Islamic radicalism, EU overeach, Russian troops or gun control.
First up: An interview with Polish MP Dominik Tarczynski:
I haven’t remotely watched all of this yet, but just the first two minutes of excerpts are fire:
“Muslims hates us, and they do not even hide it. They said that they will take over this country by the numbers of children. ‘We are making babies, you are not.'”
“Not even one illegal will come to Poland. Never I said that not even one Muslim will come to Poland, and they called me islamophobe.
“Obviously, not every Muslim is a as a terrorist, but most of the terrorists are Muslims, and that is a fact.”
“We can use live bullets, now, so if you want to come to Poland [illegally] you will be killed.”
“Whatever happens in America, six months later we have it in Europe. If the wokeness will continue in America it will spread around the world.”
“The world needs Trump, because we need normality.”
“If you do not know your history you will not build your future. 70 years of Communism that was so unbearable and now we are leaders, because we know what it means to lose your freedom.”
“If politicians will not be brave to stop this madness, nothing will change. So what we should do is to fight for European Union, make it great again, make it Christian again, and not let them take by hydra our land.”
Also, being situated between Germany and Russia, Poland has suffered invasions, occupations and genocides at the hands of those two neighbors (and others), so it’s no surprise that they’re buying modern military equipment in a big way.
In 2024, the Polish Ministry of Defense (MOD) plans to sign over 150 contracts for the purchase of various types of military equipment, stated Deputy Minister of Defense Paweł Bejda at the Sejm (Polish Parliament) on March 7, 2024. He assured that further purchases will be made based on the results and recommendations of the audit currently being conducted at the Ministry of Defense, regarding, among others, assessment of the functioning of the system for acquiring military equipment.
The MoND has plans to conclude contracts for, among others, AH64 Apache attack helicopters, radar aerostats, additional tanks, Homar-A and Homar-K (HIMARS in Poland is called Homar) multi-launch rocket launchers, and helicopters of various types including multi-role and support, as well as modernization of F-16 aircraft. In addition, the matter of individual soldier’s equipment is considered an important concern. So far, the main focus has been large and expensive operational programs which has left other areas underinvested, like basic equipment for Polish troops, such as uniforms, helmets, bulletproof vests, etc.
Among the 150 contracts announced by the Ministry of Defense, the following will be higher priority:
Having seen what Russia did in Ukraine, Poland is determined to make sure they have the means to fully defend themselves even before the fully weight of NATO can be brought to bear against any potential invasion.
Something else Poland is doing: Giving all their children mandatory gun training.
Knife-wielding Tren de Aragua gang members are mobbing border crossings at El Paso, Texas, in an attempt to break into the US — and have said they will attack border guards who try to stop them, according to a shocking Texas law enforcement memo leaked to The Post.
Last week, 20 of the Venezuelan gangbangers — armed with blades, tire irons and broken liquor bottles — tried to force their way into the US at a border gate, the missive from the Texas Department of Public Safety read.
Another attempt to break through is expected for New Year’s Day, the memo warned.
Before the social justice warriors running the Biden Administration threw open the borders, I had never heard of Tren de Aragua, but now they’re taking over hotels in El Paso, apartment complexes in San Antonio and Colorado, and now they’re even in our middle schools.
Someone somewhere in the bowels of the Obama/Biden policy establishment made the conscious decision to let criminal illegal alien gangbangers into the United States, knowing full well that the side effect would be more dead Americans. And they made the judgment that those dead Americans were acceptable collateral damage for reaching that “permanent Democratic majority” they were dreaming of.
November’s election results suggest that American voters strongly disagree.
Video game YouTuber Asmongold documents some interesting behavior in the new video game Marvel Rivals: It censors your text messages if you try to say anything critical of Communist China.
