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.
The past is another country, and it’s hard to understand Jimmy Carter (who died yesterday at age 100) without understanding the very weird decade that thrust him into prominence.
The cultural milieu of the 1970s usually gets squeezed down to “disco” and “cocaine,” but there was an awful lot more (both good and bad) going on then. It was one of the greatest decades for movies ever, but with a focus on unlikable antiheroes, urban decay and downer endings (Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver). The reaction to that extreme brought us Rocky and Star Wars (and, speaking of cocaine, The Star Wars Holiday Special). There was a tremendous ferment in music, from progressive to punk rock, very little of which was getting played on the radio, while things like “Muskrat Love” and “Disco Duck” topped the charts.
Politically, the unpopular (though not as unpopular as depicted in the movies) Vietnam War had come to an end with America pulling out, South Vietnam collapsing, and the genocidal Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia. Democrats had controlled both the House and Senate for all but four years since FDR’s election. Watergate had taken out Nixon, but not before he had carried 49 states in crushing George McGovern.
The 1976 Democratic Presidential Primary was a different kettle of fish. Scoop Jackson was considered an early favorite, but faded. Carter, seen as moderate centrist in contrast to McGovern’s far left “acid, amnesty and abortion” vibes, won a plurality at the Iowa caucuses. George Wallace, still a segregationist (don’t let Democrats get away with their “the parties switched places/southern strategy” myth) dominated the Mississippi caucuses. From then on out, Carter dominated the primaries, distancing himself from Wallace, Jackson, Arizona Rep. Mo Udall and California’s Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown. Then he beat Gerald R. Ford, the first un-elected Vice President to ascend to the Oval Office, after he survived a brutal primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, who hadn’t jumped into the race until September of 1975.
Once in office, Carter, a nasty piece of work masquerading as a plaster saint, proved unequal to the multiple challenges besetting the nation. Post-Bretton Woods inflation resisted all attempts to tame it, and was soon joined by high unemployment rates, hitting ordinary Americans with a one-two punch of stagflation that Keynesian economists assured us was impossible.
In foreign policy, Carter’s supine weakness encouraged the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic in Iran, which led to Iranian hostage crisis, all of which encouraged the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan.
Even beyond policy, Carter seemed snakebit. “Lust in my heart,” Billy beer, the jogging collapse, the “malaise” speech. And, let’s not forget, the killer rabbit. Even nature seemed to have it in for Carter.
All of that combined to make Carter vulnerable enough to lose soundly to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
It must be said that late in his term, Carter would finally embrace some policies that would pave the way for Reagan’s success: Rebuilding the military, deregulating significant segments of the economy, and appointing Paul Volcker to the federal reserve.
I suppose I’m supposed to talk about his charitable work in his retirement, but Carter’s primary traits seemed to be that he got both crankier and more leftwing as time went on, and seemingly more bitter over how America had rejected him in 1980.
Carter’s longest lasting legacies will probably be the Camp David Accords (which cost the American taxpayer billions in subsidies to Egypt and Israel every year), and the USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), a nuclear powered fast attack/electronic warfare submarine (Carter served in a submarine prior to his political career).
100 is a good, long run, especially given that the last year was spent in hospice care. Many a wag online has suggested that God kept Carter alive long enough to see Trump win a second term.
I’ve not been covering every twist and turn of the Texas House Speaker’s race because it’s obvious there’s a lot of Liar’s Poker going on. The current state of play is the Rep. David Cook is the Republican choice to be speaker of a majority Republican House, while Rep. Dustin Burrows is the latest head of the Joe Straus/Dennis Bonnen/Dade Phelan RINO hydra to keep Democrats in power-sharing in the House, along with at least one or more actual Democrats (I think Rep. John Bryant and Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos also declared they’re running) also supposedly running. After Cook secured the GOP caucus nomination, Burrows said he had a list of enough Democrats and Republicans backing him to become speaker, even though multiple reps on his list said they hadn’t agreed to back him at all.
It’s quite confusing.
Now we have more information on just who is backing Burrows, and it turns out to be Chinese gambling Interests.
For the past two legislative sessions, a Chinese casino operator, Sands, has been trying to expand gambling in Texas.
Sands, which established itself in Las Vegas, divested entirely from the U.S. market in 2022. That was the same year they went all-in on China, where the company operates a casino complex. Sands signed a 10-year concessions agreement with the Chinese government to continue its gambling operations.
The operation is in Macao, a special administrative region China took over in 1999. Sands, according to Yahoo Finance, derives a substantial portion of its revenues from China.
This is problematic. No business in China is allowed to operate without CCP approval. Doing business in China requires companies to operate at the whims of a political machine singularly focused on power expansion. This is an environment where American businesses are made to bend the knee to set up shop.
An example of this is the formerly family-friendly Disney Corporation. In the 1990s, then-CEO Michael Eisner and his lieutenant Bob Iger both went on an apology tour in China after releasing a film that upset Beijing.
Eisner promised the company would not take action that “insults our friends.” In 2010, it was widely reported that current-CEO Iger met with the CCP’s head of propaganda. He gave his word that the Mouse House would use its platform to “introduce more about China to the world.”
China is constantly working to maintain its public image abroad, and cultural institutes are a big part of its efforts in the U.S. Last week, Sands reportedly donated $15M to the University of Las Vegas to establish a Chinese Culture Institute.
Like Disney’s promise to introduce more about China, Sands’ China Institute will promote appreciation and understanding of the Chinese language, traditions, and history to UNLV students.
It will also facilitate student and faculty exchanges, not unlike former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’ trips.
Why would Sands busy itself spreading CCP propaganda? Simple: it’s incentivized to do so. According to a release announcing UNLV’s new institute, Sands “has been a steady supporter of fostering Chinese culture since it opened Sands Macao in 2004.”
Last week, in a bid to secure the Texas House speakership surreptitiously, State Rep. Dustin Burrows broke caucus rules and went to the House Democrat caucus and its leader, Gene Wu, to gather enough votes.
A Houston-based state representative, Wu is an outspoken and abrasive member best known for publicly hoping that then-President Trump would die from COVID-19. Wu has a liberal voting record and has also faced scrutiny for his alleged ties to the CCP.
His ascent to lead Democrats in the Texas House was a shock to Capitol observers after the 2024 election. Burrows’ uniting with Wu is noteworthy, especially given the latter’s links to the CCP and the gambling interests trying to invade Texas.
One of Gene Wu’s largest political donors during the 2024 election cycle was Sands.
The casino’s political action committee donated $4,000 to Wu. Although that’s not a large contribution compared to the PAC’s global giving in Texas, it was enough to be one of Wu’s largest donations of the cycle.
Wu has attended events hosted by Chinese consulates and opposed the 2020 federal closure of the Houston Chinese Consulate, which was shut down due to espionage concerns. He has also been a vocal opponent of legislation aimed at banning hostile foreign entities, including China, from purchasing land in Texas.
In 2023, when the Texas House was entertaining a measure to establish casinos in the state, Wu voted to gut an amendment that would have forbidden gambling companies with links to China from operating in Texas.
The 2023 bid to link Texas to China via gambling ultimately failed, but the Texas Lottery, through acts of commission and omission, has managed to pull it off.
Jackpot.com is a platform that has been selling lottery tickets online in Texas since 2023. The company also operates an exclusive lottery in China called Lotto China, which has raised eyebrows given China’s strict control over gambling operations within its borders. Additionally, the country has been known to export gambling to neighboring countries as a tool for conducting surveillance.
Call be old fashioned, but I don’t think Texas Republicans should be beholden to Chinese communist gambling interests…
We’ve previously covered that China’s demographics are in severe decline and that China’s GDP may be overstated by 60%. Now a researcher says that China’s population could be overstated by 37-50%.
(Before we dig in, two caveats: First, the channel is Lei’s Real Talk, from someone who came over from communist China and was a stu7dnet in the U.S. when the Tiananmen Square, but she doesn’t use her full name, which she says is to protect her family back in China. Second, she’s using AI to answer some of her questions. Still, the math-based questions don’t seem conducive to the “AI hallucinations” we see elsewhere, but some caveat lictor seems in order.)
“We know China is facing a series of economic challenges. Weak consumer, confidence falling real estate prices, high debt, industrial overcapacity, sluggish exports, and so on and so forth. But the underlying issue of the faltering economy, in my opinion, is a severe population crisis.”
“China’s actual population is far below than the official figure of 1.4 billion.”
“I want to compare China and India’s population between the 30-year period from 1990 to 2020. Let’s also compare their average fertility rate between the two countries and their medium age.” If you run those very basic numbers, things don’t add up.
“In 1990, China’s population is over India is by about 270 million [1.14 billion vs. 870 million], and 30 years later China’s population is still over India by 30 million [1.41 billion vs. 1.38 billion].”
“However, if you look at the fertility rate, India’s average fertility rate [2.97%] during the 30 years years is so much higher than China’s [1.70].” All these are the official published rates.
“With that kind of fertility rate in India consistently over 30 years, India’s population should be larger than China’s. Mathematically it’s impossible that China’s population is still greater than India’s.”
I’m skipping over a detailed breakdown of the two country’s respective fertility rates by decades.
“I asked GPT to apply the fertility rates for each country and give me the total population in 2020 for India and China respectively, and this is the results it generate. In 2020 population, India’s population was 1.38 billion, China’s was only 890 million.” India’s number is off the official figure by 4%. China’s number is off by 37%, or 520 million people. And this is at a time when life expectancy for China has been increasing.
Analysis of various other population factor considerations snipped.
“I asked AI to recalculate everything by replacing the official fertility of 1.7 and 1.5 from the year to 2000 to 2010 replaced them with Dr. Yi Fuxian [University of Wisconsin Madison demographic researcher whose work we previously mentioned here] fertility assessment of 1.1. It came up with a shocking total population of 695 million, and that’s less than half of the announced population of 1.4 billion.”
We didn’t see a huge drop in economic output because China’s economy is investment driven.
“Population loss took place over 30 years, and particularly started since 2000, and this reduction in population didn’t show up as reduction in consumer spending until this generation reached the age of 18, or even older, when they started to spend money. So now we start to see the impact on consumer spending because there’s a time lag.
Plus Flu Manchu deaths.
“China suddenly saw a wave of kindergarten closures, so in some cases private kindergartens have been shrunk by 20% in some regions.”
“So for all these factors combined, I think China’s real population may be between 600 million and to 800 million.”
Given the GDP overstatement estimates, this enormous overstatement of China’s population seems plausible. It also makes all those wild claims of “China will soon overtake the US economically” look even more ridiculous.
China’s “one child per couple” policy will be seen by future generations as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in history.
Congratulations on making it to the end of a difficult but exhilarating 2024, and I hope you had a Merry Christmas! Christmas week is always slow, so this will be a smaller LinkSwarm than usual, and thank goodness for that. More Biden misdeeds, lots of Russian stuff blows up, two horrible gay pedophiles go to prison forever, and Democratic judges going out of their way to punish the victims. Let’s dig in!
President Joe Biden is transferring more student loan debt onto American taxpayers with only weeks left until he departs the Oval Office.
The Biden administration announced Friday that it is giving $4.28 billion of student debt relief to almost 55,000 more public service workers including teachers, nurses, and law enforcement officials.
“From Day One of my Administration, I promised to make sure that higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” Biden said in a statement.
“Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt.”
The Department of Education is forgiving the debt through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a policy that permits the forgiveness of remaining student loans for public employees who have made 120 monthly payments.
Federal bureacurats are simply more equal than mere citizens…
Remember how Biden commuted and pardoned some of the worst people in the world earlier this month? Well, he found worse ones still.
President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, reclassifying their sentences to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from allowing their executions when he returns to office in January.
The 37 men were all convicted of murder. Their sentences will be reclassified from execution to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the White House.
The men whose sentences are being reclassified include Shannon Agofsky, who murdered a bank president, dumped his body in a lake, and then killed another man in prison; Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks, who escaped from prison and killed two women while on a 17-day crime spree; Ricky Allen Fackrell, a white supremacist who killed a prison inmate; and Daryl Lawrence, who killed a police officer during a bank robbery.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in statement. “But guided by my conscience and my experience, . . . I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
Biden only left three men on federal death row: Robert Bowers, the gunman who shot and killed eleven worshipers at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine people at a black church during a Bible study in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber.
Biden’s so opposed to the death penalty he only refused to commute sentences for those criminals the public would pay attention to…
Do blue state Democratic officials think they can defy the federal government on deporting illegal aliens? A hard rain is gonna fall.
Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Thursday that incoming border czar Tom Homan is starting with Democratic Chicago to deport illegal immigrants in order to set a precedent for other cities threatening to block his efforts.
Since President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Homan as border czar, the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director has warned Democratic mayors to step aside as some have threatened to refuse cooperation with ICE on mass deportations.
Snip.
Hanson argued that Homan’s focus on Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will set a precedent, emphasizing that the incoming border czar is listening to Democratic constituents concerned about illegal immigration in their city.
Snip.
I know the most obnoxious, the most crazy, the most nullification advocate in one of the second or third largest cities is Chicago, that crazy Mayor Johnson,’” Hanson continued. “‘So we’re going to tell him first, you try to stop the federal government and you think you’re South Carolina 1832 or you think you’re firing on Fort Sumner. You’re going to regret it because you were breaking federal law and we have a lot more federal laws that you would want us to follow in your interest than you do federal laws to break.’”
“That’s going to be interesting because what Homan is basically doing is talking over the mayor’s head to the black constituencies of Chicago and saying, don’t worry, your mayor doesn’t, he’s going to break the law, but I’m going to follow it and I’ll put him in jail for your benefit so that you don’t have to worry about Venezuelans and Colombians shooting you or taking over your social services,” Hanson added.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump plans to continue military support for Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Dec. 20, citing undisclosed sources.
Three officials familiar with discussions revealed that Trump intends to keep supplying US military equipment to Ukraine after his inauguration.
Trump’s foreign policy team also informed European officials that he plans to push NATO allies to raise their defense spending to 5% of their GDP. NATO member states currently follow a goal of allocating 2% of their GDP to defense spending.
A Georgia couple was sentenced to 100 years in prison without parole after adopting two boys and sexually abusing them.
William and Zachary Zulock will each spend the rest of their lives behind bars, after pleading guilty to aggravated sodomy, aggravated child molestation, incest, and sexual exploitation of children. Each were sentenced on Dec. 19.
Sanders said he first encountered some of these services while investigating Kremlin-funded disinformation efforts in Ukraine, as they are all useful in assembling large-scale, anonymous social media campaigns.
According to Sanders, all 122 of the services he tested are processing transactions through a company called Cryptomus, which says it is a cryptocurrency payments platform based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cryptomus’ website says its parent firm — Xeltox Enterprises Ltd. (formerly certa-pay[.]com) — is registered as a money service business (MSB) with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).
Sanders said the payment data he gathered also shows that at least 56 cryptocurrency exchanges are currently using Cryptomus to process transactions, including financial entities with names like casher[.]su, grumbot[.]com, flymoney[.]biz, obama[.]ru and swop[.]is.
These platforms are built for Russian speakers, and they each advertise the ability to anonymously swap one form of cryptocurrency for another. They also allow the exchange of cryptocurrency for cash in accounts at some of Russia’s largest banks — nearly all of which are currently sanctioned by the United States and other western nations.
An analysis of their technology infrastructure shows that all of these exchanges use Russian email providers, and most are directly hosted in Russia or by Russia-backed ISPs with infrastructure in Europe (e.g. Selectel, Netwarm UK, Beget, Timeweb and DDoS-Guard). The analysis also showed nearly all 56 exchanges used services from Cloudflare, a global content delivery network based in San Francisco.
“Purportedly, the purpose of these platforms is for companies to accept cryptocurrency payments in exchange for goods or services,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to find any goods for sale with websites using Cryptomus, and the services appear to fall into one or two different categories: Facilitating transactions with sanctioned Russian banks, and platforms providing the infrastructure and means for cyber attacks.”
“Wells Fargo Exits Net-Zero Banking Alliance After Texas Probe Into Anti-Energy Policies Attorney General Paxton has ended a review of the bank and allowed state governmental entities to do business with Wells Fargo again.”
Another day, another fake hate crime hoax. “A Tennessee college revealed that racist messages found written on campus were fabricated by a student in an apparent attempt to make Donald Trump supporters look bad. Rhodes College confirmed to Fox News Digital that a student had admitted to leaving the messages strewn about campus that were found over Thanksgiving break and were being investigated as a hate crime. Instead, it turned out to be yet another race hoax.”
Georgia woman arrested for evicting squatter from her house. And then the judge scolded her for her “privilege.” Sounds like a whole lot of people need federal equal protection lawsuits filed against them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
