Posts Tagged ‘Elon Musk’

LinkSwarm For December 15, 2023

Friday, December 15th, 2023

Hamas gets flushed. Stupid Jackson Lee loses the Houston mayoral runoff, and a whole lot of irony. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • House Republicans authorize impeachment inquiry against Biden.
  • Hamas is finally enjoying the enema of the state.

    Israel has begun the process of flooding the network of tunnels beneath Gaza in an effort to flush out the impacted Hamas assets lodged there, according to U.S. officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military operation has so far involved the installation of seven massive pumps and testing the process of flooding the Hamas holes with water from the Mediterranean Sea, and now the great enema has begun in earnest.

    “Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield,” explains WSJ. “The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.”

    The tunnel system has been dug throughout much of Gaza and is also active at the Egyptian border, the crossing at which Hamas militants smuggle many of their weapons into Gaza. It is a critical infrastructure for the terrorists’ ability to continue to wage their bloody war against the only democracy in the region. Remove the network of tunnels from the table, and you severely cripple that ability.

    Hamas is exactly the sort of thing that should be flushed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • McThag runs the numbers and says inflation is running much, much hotter than the Biden Administration admits.

    Thanks to Home Alone and Irish we know that a particular cart of groceries went from $19.83 in 1990 to $77.28 today.

    389.7% inflation over 33 years.

    Annualized, that’s just 4.208% inflation, since the goal is 3%, that doesn’t seem so bad.

    The problem is that cart of goods was $44.40 last year. That’s an annual inflation of 2.4755% from 1990 to 2022. Below the Fed’s desired rate, good for us, bad for the national debt.

    That means we had 174% inflation in one fucking year.

    Did you get a 174% raise last year? I didn’t.

  • CDR Salamander says it was foolish to expect a short Russo-Ukrainian War.

    A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.

    The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West – with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO – expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.

    Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.

    Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.

    Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.

    What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.

    For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.

    The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.

    Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.

    Yes, I’ve seen the math – the metrics – but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.

    At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.

  • “FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch…In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”

    Jagged Little Pill is now 28 years old. I don’t think I’ve listened to it for the last 27.

  • “Texas Sen. John Whitmire Defeats Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee for Mayor of Houston.”

    Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) has won a resounding victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18) in a runoff election for mayor of Houston, carrying the race by 64 percentage points according to election results.

    “Voters have spoken and I am humbly grateful to the people of Houston for electing me as their next mayor,” said Whitmire in a statement.

    The election results largely mirrored the latest polling in the race where Whitmire maintained a lead over Jackson Lee, especially in runoff scenarios where negative perceptions of the congresswoman indicated many voters who had supported one of the other 18 candidates in the first round would likely move strongly towards Whitmire. Polls also indicated crime and public safety were among the top concerns for Houstonians — an issue on which Whitmire, as the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, held a distinct advantage over Jackson Lee.

    I didn’t follow that race closely because it’s been obvious for a long time that Lee simply isn’t very bright, something even the lefty sorts at the Daily Beast noticed.

  • Actually, conservative groups racked up a number of wins in Houston’s elections this year.

    In the Democratic-leaning Houston, Republican-backed candidates have slightly increased their presence on the 16-member city council with the help of the local party, outreach efforts into minority communities, and campaign efforts from conservative organizations.

    According to unofficial election results, candidates Julian Ramirez, Willie Davis, and Twila Carter all won runoff elections for At-Large Positions 1, 2, and 3, and incumbent Mary Nan Huffman handily fended off a challenge from attorney Tony Buzbee for District G. The victors will join incumbent Amy Peck, who ran unopposed for District A, and Fred Flickinger, who won the District E seat on Election Day last month.

    Each of the five contested candidates have enjoyed the support of the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Republican Party of Texas, and groups like the Kingwood Tea Party.

    Pundits frequently forget that not so long ago, Houston was a Republican stronghold. Ted Cruz won Harris County (albeit it narrowly) in 2012, and Greg Abbott carried it in 2014.

  • Trump holds a record lead in Iowa.
  • Planned Parenthood Received Nearly $2 Billion in Federal Funding over Three-Year Span, Congressional Probe Finds.” The proper amount should be “Zero.”
  • 64% of Palestinian refugees taken in by Denmark in 1992 now have criminal records.
  • “Elon Musk took another shot at Disney CEO Bob Iger Thursday, after the state of New Mexico sued Meta for allegedly enabling child sexual abuse and trafficking – yet Disney and other woke advertisers, who paused advertising on X in a kneejerk reaction to claims of antisemitism – apparently have no problem when it comes to the sexual exploitation of minors.”
  • How the Deep State’s censorship apparatus worked to worked to censor free speech during the 2020 election.
  • Spring Branch ISD Teacher Accused of Sexual Relationship with Student. Stephen Griffin taught at Memorial High School and is facing 2 to 20 years in prison.”
  • Worse, a teacher at Fort Bend ISD was arrested for sex trafficking.
  • Woke coffee shop employees fired for harassing Jewish customer. Good.
  • Once again, Communist China tries to ban Christmas and fails miserably.
  • Someone stole $100K of Dr Pepper syrup. Get a rope…
  • A black scholar Harvard President Claudine Gay plagerized is plenty pissed off.

    One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall’s Christopher Rufo reports.

    “I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” Swain wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”

    Rufo interviewed Swain, who said that the plagiarism went far beyond a few paragraphs – and that Gay’s “whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.”

    “She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did,” she told Rufo, adding “Something changed in the mid-1990s, [when] we were having a big affirmative action debate.”

    Rufo asked Swain what she thought would happen to a white person under these circumstances, to which she replied “A white male would probably already be gone.”

    Harvard announced that Gay would keep her job after a week of calls for her ouster, first, regarding her refusal to condemn calls for violence against Jews on campus, and then, after the plagiarism accusations broke. Despite a donor revolt spearheaded by billionaire Bill Ackman, a petition signed by 700 faculty members on Gay’s behalf won in the end.

  • LADDER FIGHT! (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Turkish MP has heart attack after saying Israel will ‘suffer the wrath of Allah’ in Parliament.” I’ve already used the Alanis Morissette meme…
  • “Hedge fund Muddy Waters on Wednesday revealed a bet against a publicly listed real estate investment trust managed by private equity giant Blackstone.” Huge tracts of commercial real estate are vacant, and in places like New York City, that’s long been the case before Flu Manchu struck.
  • IBM President caught on tape pushing illegal racist hiring quotas.
  • Mark Miller and comic store owner stand up to comic cancel culture.
  • Popular Science isn’t.
  • Andre Braugher, RIP. He was great in Homicide.
  • Three-D printed Nerf dart minigun actually shoots faster than an actual Minigun.
  • “Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter Team Up For New Movie Where Everyone Is Pale And Weird.”
  • “Children On Best Behavior After Santa Announces Naughty Kids Now Receive The Marvels On Blu-Ray.”
  • Elon U?

    Thursday, December 14th, 2023

    It seems like Austin is becoming something of a center for anti-woke universities. First the University of Austin anounced it was starting a campus here, and now Elon Musk has filed paperwork to start a new university.

    Billionaire Elon Musk is likely to start a university in Austin that will begin with a primary and secondary school centered on science, technology, engineering, and math, according to a report by Bloomberg, which reviewed financial statements of Musk’s charitable foundation.

    The outlet reported that the new organization filed documents with the Internal Revenue Service seeking tax exempt status. Musk’s university will seek accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

    Bloomberg added that Musk transferred $2.2 billion to his charitable foundation in 2022. Some years ago, Musk also started a school for his own children and the children of other employees of SpaceX.

    Musk moved to Texas in 2020 and has since purchased X, formerly known as Twitter. He also announced in the fall of 2021 that he would move Tesla’s headquarters to Austin.

    In one way, Austin is a weird choice for the Anti-Woke University Capital of the US, since it’s a blue dot in a red oasis. In another way in makes a lot of sense, as Austin has been tagged the “cool” place to live for quite a while, and has attracted anti-woke refugees like Musk and Joe Rogan.

    Also, if Musk’s university is going to focus on STEM, “Silicon Hills” has one of the biggest concentrations of tech companies outside Silicon Valley. That’s a good pool to draw expertise from, and a place for students to find jobs.

    If Musk can found a university that actually teaches useful information, without being infected with social justice, and can avoid inflicting postcolonial studies and Queer Theory on students, more power to him.

    Bret Weinstein Talks Elon Musk On Dave Rubin: Fighting Censorship And The Lone Wolf Problem

    Saturday, December 9th, 2023

    This is a very interesting clip of Dave Rubin interviewing the always-interesting Bret Weinstein on a variety of intertwined topics.

    The main focus of this segment is a mystery: Why did Musk block Weinstein on Twitter right after spending a fair amount of time agreeing with him on the need to fight censorship, but they touch on a whole lot of interesting ideas in the process.

  • DR:

    That’s why I talk about Elon as much as I do on the show. Because I don’t I think if you would have said to Elon 10 years ago: “You’d own Twitter, you’d be in this free speech fight, you’d have, you know, the ADL calling you an anti-semite,” like the list of craziness that everyone now knows. I think he’d say “What are you talking about? That’s completely insane. I’m trying to get us to Mars. I’m building this cool car, blah blah blah.” But he, I think, is sort of the avatar for what you’re talking about there, the brave person that doesn’t know exactly what they’re going towards, something like that. But then he’s like “I better buy this freaking Twitter thing because I see all the danger.”

  • BW:

    I think you’re right about Elon. I don’t know for sure that you are, but I think you’re right about what he’s trying to do, and how he ended up there, and how it would surprise him. I had a meeting with him. I flew to San Francisco, and I had a meeting with him, and he said it had been a very good meeting, and he wanted to meet again. A series of events unfolded over the course of the next 24 hours. My Twitter account got commandeered. Maybe that was organic, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t think—I know Elon had nothing to do with it. But anyway, I reached out to him, and tried to alert him to this, because I was concerned that he and I had private communications, and he didn’t, want you know… I don’t think there was anything compromising in them, but he didn’t want them in the world, and he needed to know that this…and he ended up, uh, blocking me after having this meeting, and I remain blocked.

    Curious.

  • BW:

    Now, the reason I raise it is because there’s a defect in all of those players that I mentioned who have all been shoved onto the same team, right? They have some incredible strengths, and I have to tell you um there’s been a lot of pain inflicted on us for standing up. But the camaraderie, the discovery of people, people who were up to the challenge, their coming together as a coalition, has been extremely rewarding and dwarfs any suffering that might have come along with this.

  • DR: “Yeah, it sounds kind of corny, but I mean that those three days or whatever it was we had at ARC [Alliance for Responsible Citizenship] to see everybody together again, and all be, like, we’re still alive we’re still here it’s powerful.”
  • BW: “The problem is, that all of those people who have the characteristics that I listed, that are courageous, that are insightful, and that have integrity, they tend they have a lot of Lone wolfess in them. Which means that they have a defect they’re terrible at confederating.”
  • BW: “I see him as very strategically clever, but I don’t think he’s any good at confederating, either. And my little story where he blocked me, it’s like, look, hey Elon, there aren’t that many people out here trying to advance the ball who have something um meaningful to contribute to the team. We have to stop tripping over each other.”
  • BW: “What happened was…I believe that Dark Horse [podcast] that [wife] Heather [Heying] and I [do] have faced a whole bunch of suppression that that has not yet shown up anywhere.”
  • BW: “We are demonetized to this day. YouTube demonetized us. I believe they were going to throw us off. Joe Rogan held an emergency podcast, and you know YouTube hasn’t messed with us since. But they didn’t remonetize. More than half our income in a one fell swoop. And we know that decision happened in the C-suite at Google.”
  • Weinstein believes that the real push to demonetize and silence him came when he started to examine alternatives to the consensus Flu Manchu narrative.

    When we started to take it out of the realm of “Here’s a bunch of stuff you can’t understand and leave it to the virologists and the epidemiologists and the public health authorities” and the answer was “No, actually you can understand it and some of what you’re being told isn’t right.” Right when we started to do that and then we started to interact with people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, and then those people went on to affect a huge audience, largely on Joe Rogan’s program. That changed the narrative, and so I think something has meddled with us in a particular, in a unique way, because frankly there weren’t that many people who could bridge the scientific to public.

  • Rubin brings the subject back to Musk. BW: “You talked to Elon about the things he was discovering inside of the crime scene that he bought. And one of the things that he discovered was that there were lots of mechanisms that caused things to be deboosted that weren’t labeled as such. And so he kept finding more and more levels and I was trying to convey to him, ‘Look, I think you will find something special when you figure out what happened to us.'”
  • When Musk blocked him over these, he said “Stop spamming me!”
  • DR: “What you’re really saying, in essence, is that you were a little too ahead of something in the game at which the speed is played that he may not want to be involved in that just yet.”
  • BW: “On Dark Horse we have the phrase ‘Zero is a special number.’ What that means is if you can turn a single social media platform, a single newspaper, or a single university so that it functions towards its stated goal, you actually stand a chance of fixing the, system because if there’s one social media platform on which you’re treated like an adult and you can exchange ideas freely and discuss them back and forth, nobody’s going to want to be on the ones in which you’re treated like a child.” I would like to think he’s right here, but I see an awful lot of people on the left acting as though the only good thing about the pre-Musk Twitter was the ability to banish users for WrongThink.
  • It’s an interesting conversation with a lot to chew on. Just why is their such a strong nexus between Social Justice and wanting to force conformity on Coronavirus?

    But I also wonder: Just how much of a remnant is there on the left in favor of free speech? Are are any significant advocates for it under the age of, say, 50?

    Explaining The Sam Altman/OpenAI Thing

    Tuesday, December 5th, 2023

    Hey, remember that whole “Sam Altman fired as CEO/reinstated as CEO of OpenAI” thing a couple of weeks ago? Here’s the archive story.

    Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors, the company said.

    The board would be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.

    “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

    The return of Mr. Altmanand the potential remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.

    “i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Mr. Altman said in a post to X. “with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.”

    OpenAI’s board surprised Mr. Altman and the company’s employees on Friday afternoon when it told him he was being pushed out. Greg Brockman, the company’s president who co-founded the company with Mr. Altman and others, resigned in protest.

    The ouster kicked off efforts by Mr. Altman, 38, his allies in the tech industry and OpenAI’s employees to force the company’s board to bring him back. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of negotiations, the board said it was going to stick with its decision.

    But in a head-spinning development just hours later, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, said that Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and others would be joining the company to start a new advanced artificial intelligence lab.

    Nearly all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees signed a letter telling the board they would walk out and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated, throwing the future of the start-up into jeopardy.

    Four board members — Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder; Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora; Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and computer scientist — had initially decided to push Mr. Altman out.

    Well, here’s Patrick Boyle to provide some context:

    A few takeaways:

  • There are two OpenAIs: “The non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware, and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC.”
  • Musk was an early, and big, investor in the non-profit. “The founders pledged over one billion dollars to the venture, but actually only contributed around $130 million dollars- the majority of which came from Elon Musk.”
  • When he felt OpenAI was falling behind in 2018, he wanted to take over OpenAI himself. When the board rejected that, he resigned and took future pledged money with him, which blew a huge hole in their budget. (Whatever you think of Musk, I don’t think not being busy enough is his problem.)
  • Then came the for-profit doppelganger.
  • “The profits being capped at 100 times any investment.”
  • “The company explained this decision saying, ‘We need to invest billions of dollars in the coming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.’ This transition from nonprofit to for-profit required OpenAI to balance its desire to make money with its stated commitment to ethical AI development.”
  • “This unconventional structure meant that Open AI had a board of directors, which in theory controls the entire corporate structure (which includes the charity and the capped profit company) – but which unlike other boards is not accountable to shareholders. The directors are in fact not allowed to own any stock to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are specifically not supposed to be aligned with shareholders.”
  • “The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”
  • “In the real world, where the role of money is reasonably well defined, Open AI is an unprofitable company and is expected to need to raise a lot more money over time from investors like Microsoft, to keep up with the high costs of building more sophisticated chatbots.”
  • “Despite this lack of profitability, the company is valued by investors at 86 billion dollars, and Bloomberg reported last weekend that ‘some investors were considering writing down the entire value of their OpenAI holdings to zero.'”
  • “Former colleagues would have an open door to follow and join a new AI unit, according to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. As much of a win as this might have appeared for Microsoft (people were saying that they had managed to buy the hottest AI firm for zero), this might not have been the optimal outcome for them, as they would likely have had to deal with antitrust regulators and lawsuits from other Open AI investors.”
  • “The majority of Open AI’s 700 or so employees signed an open letter to the board demanding that the board resign and that they rehire Altman. The letter stated that the board had told the employee leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’ The employees said that unless their demands were met, they would resign from Open AI and join the new subsidiary of Microsoft being headed up by Altman and Brockman.”
  • “You have to wonder what the employee contracts at Open AI look like that the entire staff could leave to work for a major investor in the company leaving Open Ai as an empty shell.”
  • “Typically, executives like Altman would have contracts that prevent them from hiring away key staff once they are no longer at the firm, and staff would have signed NDA’s preventing them from taking any technology with them.”
  • “The OpenAI story is a bit of a crazy one, where Microsoft and a number of other sophisticated investors agreed to put billions of dollars in, and employees got stock grants, all at an $86 billion valuation, without the contractual or fiduciary rights that investors might normally expect.”
  • Rival Anthropic has a similar structure.
  • “Bad corporate governance has been a growing issue particularly in Silicon Valley where companies like Google, Facebook and Snap structured their IPO’s such that founders were left with unchallenged power to do almost anything that they want.” Google and Facebook are garbage companies, but there are some scenarios where only founders can keep the company on a long-term vision rather than goosing quarterly profits (Jobs at Apple comes to mind).
  • Warren Buffet has a similar mechanism (A shares of stock only he controls) to keep control of Berkshire Hatheway.
  • “Since you are buying shares of companies in perpetuity, leadership who are not accountable to shareholders can take value destructive paths without answering to anyone. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses its efforts to build the metaverse, has lost around $46.5 billion dollars since 2019. Would Mark Zuckerberg have been able to waste this much money if he was accountable to investors?” I have a fairly strong suspicion that division is being used to hide all sorts of shenanigans.
  • Boyle is deeply suspicious of “stakeholder capitalism” as opposed to the old-fashioned, profit-maximizing kind.”
  • The thing missing from this summary, and all the coverage of the story I’ve seen, is why Altman was originally let go, and none of the principals involved seem to be talking about it…

    LinkSwarm For November 3, 2023

    Friday, November 3rd, 2023

    Israel rolls on in Gaza, Democrats get indicted on election fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty, censorship schemes get busted, and George Soros’ evil fingers are everywhere. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Israel’s ground offensive has surrounded Gaza City, where it seems to think most of Hamas infrastructure is located.

    The blue circles indicate Israel military activity, which does rather suggest they’re pounding the snot out of Hamas.

  • “House Weaponization Panel Gets IRS To End ‘Abusive’ Surprise Visits.”

    House Republicans on the GOP’s “weaponization” subcommittee said in a Friday report that the IRS has agreed to end its “abusive” policy of surprise visits to taxpayers’ homes following pressure from the panel.

    The Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s oversight revealed, and led to the swift end of, the IRS’s weaponization of unannounced field visits to harass, intimidate, and target taxpayers,” reads the report. “Taxpayers can now rest assured the IRS will not come knocking without providing prior notice—something that should have been the IRS’s practice all along.”

    The IRS announced in July that it would end most unannounced agent visits to the homes of Americans, citing security concerns.

    But it also came after the agency engaged in what appeared to be witness intimidation, after visiting the New Jersey home of journalist Matt Taibbi on the same day he appeared before Congress to testify on government abuse.

    Following the incident, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded answers from the IRS, writing “In light of the hostile reaction to Mr. Taibbi’s reporting among left-wing activists, and the IRS’s history as a tool of government abuse, the IRS’s action could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate a witness before Congress.”

    Taibbi thanked Jordan on Saturday, writing in response to the report:

    One of the cases outlined is my own. My home was visited by the IRS while I was testifying before Jordan’s Committee about the Twitter Files on March 9th. Sincere thanks are due to Chairman Jordan, whose staff not only demanded and got answers in my case, but achieved a concrete policy change, as IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel announced in July new procedures that would “end most” home visits.

    Anticipating criticism for expressing public thanks to a Republican congressman, I’d like to ask Democratic Party partisans: to which elected Democrat should I have appealed for help in this matter? The one who called me a “so-called journalist” on the House floor? The one who told me to take off my “tinfoil hat” and put greater trust in intelligence services? The ones in leadership who threatened me with jail time? I gave votes to the party for thirty years. Which elected Democrat would have performed basic constituent services in my case? Feel free to raise a hand.

    If silence is the answer, why should I ever vote for a Democrat again?

    Why indeed.

  • How George Soros destroyed law and order in the United States without changing a single law.

    In the conversation with [Joe] Rogan, Musk then explains George Soros’ massive bet (now overseen by his son, Alexander Soros) on funding city and state district attorney elections nationwide. He said, “The value for money in local races is much higher than in national races – the lowest value for money is a presidential race.”

    “Soros realized you don’t actually need to change the laws – you just need to change how they’re enforced – if nobody chooses to enforce the law – or the laws differentially enforced – it’s like changing the laws,” Musk said.

    This leaves with a new interview from one Maryland sheriff, just outside of crime-ridden Baltimore City, in Wicomico County, who drops a truth bomb about radical progressive lawmakers in the state, some of whom have likely been funded by Soros, who purposely fail to enforce law and order and only embolden criminal.

    “I’m in my 40th year of law enforcement, and I have never ever seen it this bad,” Sheriff Mike Lewis said.

    Lewis continued: “I’ve never seen a government so ingrained – and quite frankly complicit – in the criminal activity taking place in our nation.”

  • Speaking of Soros: “Soros has funneled over $15M to pro-Hamas organizations through Open Society Foundations.” Of course he has.
  • This week in Democratic Party corruption. “The FBI is investigating whether New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s 2021 campaign conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign donations.” New Yorkers could have had Curtis Sliwa, but noooooooo….
  • And speaking of campaign finance fraud: “FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Found Guilty on All Counts.”

    A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, guilty on all seven criminal fraud counts for his role in the crypto exchange’s downfall.

    Those counts include wire fraud on customers of FTX, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX, wire fraud on Alameda Research lenders, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders to Alameda Research, conspiracy to commit securities fraud on investors in FTX, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on customers of FTX, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

    He faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for March 28 at 9:30 a.m.

    During a month-long trial in a Manhattan federal court, prosecutors claimed Bankman-Fried misled investors and mishandled billions in funds. He was accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to boost his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.

    Nicolas Roos, an assistant U.S. attorney, said Bankman-Fried committed crimes of “epic proportions.” He alleged during closing arguments that Bankman-Fried built his company on a “foundation of lies and false promises.”

    Snip.

    Bankman-Fried was a Democrat megadonor, giving nearly $39 million to Democrat-aligned causes during the 2022 election cycle.

    Prosecutors said he “misappropriated and embezzled FTX customer deposits, and used billions of dollars in stolen funds for a variety of purposes, including … to help fund over a hundred million dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans to seek to influence cryptocurrency regulation,” according to an August indictment.

    Both Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and the former head of Alameda, and FTX co-founder Gary Wang, testified against Bankman-Fried during the trial. Ellison and Wang both pleaded guilty in December to multiple charges.

  • More of that Democratic Party voter fraud the MSM swears doesn’t exist: “A Bridgeport, Connecticut judge ruled on Wednesday to overturn the city’s Democratic primary election after video emerged of a woman who appears to be the city’s vice chair of the Democratic Town Committee, Wanda Geter-Pataky, committing ballot fraud.”
  • “The Department of Health and Human Services has sent over $800,000 to a group in Texas where they distribute crack pipes, according to the Dallas Express…The funds were sent to the El Paso Alliance, a non-profit that helps people recover from alcoholism and drug addictions, according to its website.” Knowing what I know about leftwing activists, I’m guessing that $80,000 went to crack pipe distribution, and the rest disappeared into various leftwing pockets.
  • “Boston Children’s Hospital given $1.4 million in taxpayer money for child sex changes.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Mike Pence stops pretending he’s running for President.
  • Biden gets a primary challenger in the form of U.S. Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips. We’ll see if the DNS tries to screw him less than Bernie Sanders…
  • California is still having trouble managing this newfangled electricity thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • China’s least awful communist official, former Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, just died of a heart attack at age 68, and the CCP is banning memorial wishes for him.
  • Despite the Texas law against teaching Critical Race Theory, Katy ISD students are being told to reflect on their white privilege.
  • “America’s Top Law Firms Issue Warning to Colleges to Address Antisemitism.”

    More than two dozen top U.S. law firms have issued a stern warning that law schools move with “urgency” to address the rising antisemitism on campus, or else it could affect recruitment, National Review has learned.

    “Over the last several weeks, we have been alarmed at reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assaults on college campuses, including rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel. Such anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms,” the statement published on Wednesday reads.

    “As educators at institutions of higher learning, it is imperative that you provide your students with the tools and guidance to engage in the free exchange of ideas, even on emotionally charged issues, in a manner that affirms the values we all hold dear and rejects unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values,” the letter continued. “There is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.”

    Snip.

    Signatories included: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Milbank LLP, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Paul Hastings LLP, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Proskauer Rose LLP, Ropes & Gray LLP, Shearman & Sterling, Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett LLP, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, Watchtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, Norton Rose Fulbright, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP.

  • Darryl Schriver was fired from his position as CEO of Tri-County Electric Cooperative [north and west of Fort Worth] after his alleged use of company expenses to purchase Star Wars collector pens, Apple products, Oakley sunglasses, Texas Christian University (TCU) football tickets, airfare for his wife, and more.” A company credit card is just about the stupidest way in the world to attempt to embezzle funds. Also: “The filing then details Schriver’s rejection of a $50,000 bonus and subsequent demand for a bonus worth up to $75,000 so that the take-home amount after taxes was $50,000.” Smooth move, Ex-Lax…
  • Jewish homes in Paris marked with Stars of David. It’s good that sort of thing has never led to any negative outcomes in Europe…
  • Good: Disney is making it’s live-action Snow White remake a more traditional film, including actual dwarfs rather than random guys. Bad: The CGI dwarfs look absolutely horrible. It’s as though Disney wants to punish movie-goers for rejecting their woke vision…
  • Adam Ford leaves the Bee.
  • “Hamas Leader Appointed Senior Fellow At Harvard University.”
  • “‘I Wouldn’t Have Gone Along With The Nazis In 1939,’ Says College Student At ‘Kill The Jews‘ Rally.”
  • A young go-getter:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • No Wonder They’re Scared Of Elon Musk

    Saturday, October 14th, 2023

    I’m not an Elon Musk fanboy. I’m not a fan of electric cars, and not everything he does is genius, and some of it is just strange. But I do appreciate how his purchase of Twitter has put the left into tizzy over no longer being able to censor their opponents (though, as I’m still suspended, Musk needs to fix the broken appeals process).

    But this video on the rapid pace of SpaceX expansion shows another reason Musks’ political opponents fear him: The man simply gets shit done.

  • At Orbital Launch Site 2, co-located at Kennedy Space Center’s lc39a pad:

    Because of NASA’s trepidation at the thought of a Starship failure and definitely delaying SpaceX from completing its Crew Dragon or Falcon Heavy contracts for the agency [And probably because the Biden Administration is pissed over Twitter and Musk’s resisting the Flu Manchu shutdowns. -LP], the company de-prioritized Starship Florida’s pad, slowing progress. SpaceX has nonetheless made significant progress. In 13 months, SpaceX has:

    • Created foundations
    • Modified one of pad 39a’s giant spherical tanks to store cryogenic methane
    • Installed miles of plumbing
    • Built and assembled a second skyscraper sized Starship launch tower
    • Installed the legs of the pad’s Orbital Launch Mount (or OLM)
    • Installed a water Deluge system at the base of the OLM
    • Assembled most of the OLM’s donut-like mount offsite
    • Constructed a new super-sized storage tank
    • And delivered a forest of smaller storage tanks.
  • “SpaceX has also completed the fabrication of a massive pair of steel arms transported them to pad 39a, attached them to a wheeled vehicle, and installed the structure on the Starship launch tower in Florida.”
  • “SpaceX employees have affectionately dubbed these arms ‘chopsticks,’ and they are an essential part of what CEO Elon Musk refers to as mechazilla,” which can stack and unstack Starship components. NASA never assembled components on the launch pad, they assembled them in the massive Vehicle Assembly Building and then rolled them out (very slowly) on crawlers.
  • “Many engineers even consider this ground structure to be more challenging than the production of the Starship spacecraft itself. However, SpaceX has not only one watchtower in Texas, but also constructed an additional launch Tower in Florida.”
  • “Currently, Falcon 9’s completed 66 launches.”
  • “It’s not unreasonable to expect more than 90 missions before the curtain Falls on 2023.”
  • “SpaceX has launched three crewed missions to the ISS along with three Falcon heavy rockets.”
  • They’re also launching payloads for Northrup Grumman.
  • “Lastly the missile defense agency has plans to launch the hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor mission into orbit later this year using a Falcon 9 rocket.”
  • That sort of breakneck pace is one the old NASA used to work at, the one crewed by the guys that won World War II (plus a smattering of indefatigable German scientist snatched up during Operation Paperclip) and who beat the Soviets to the moon. If today’s NASA had undertaken the expansions SpaceX has on pad 39a, they’d probably be in their third round of finalizing the Request For Proposal to send out to ask other people to bid on the work.

    Musk gets shit done and his company is now vital to the Military Industrial Complex.

    No wonder they’re scared of him…

    CEO Gets $379 Million For Money-Losing EV Company

    Monday, September 11th, 2023

    I’m not a big fan of electric vehicles, which still don’t have the range or battery longevity to be tempting as a regular driving option.

    Also, outside Telsa (which obviously has some record of financial success), the whole EV space seems screwy. Today’s case in point: A company called Lucid, which I only know from various sketchy speed-test videos on YouTube, paid its CEO $379 million for 2022:

    It’s rare for CEOs to rebuke their peers’ outlandish pay packages—mostly because they’d be throwing stones from glass houses—but Lucid Motors’ CEO Peter Rawlinson drew sharp criticism from his EV rival Elon Musk on Monday after earning the title of the highest paid executive in the automotive business.

    “Beware any company where leadership compensation is not linked to performance,” the Tesla CEO wrote on X in response to a post about Rawlinson’s pay.

    Rawlinson received a $379 million compensation package in 2022 for his role at the luxury EV maker Lucid, including a $575,000 base salary, $5.5 million of stock options, and an incredible $373 million in stock awards, according to a new CEO compensation survey from Automotive News and Equilar.

    Notwithstanding Musk’s criticism, Rawlinson earned his huge pay package after hitting market-cap targets for Lucid early last year, SEC filings show. Lucid, like 88% of the 250 largest publicly traded U.S. firms, now uses performance-based compensation for at least some portion of its executive pay.

    Snip.

    Lucid’s stock fell more than 82% in 2022, and the company earned total revenue of just $608.2 million. Also, when comparing Rawlinson’s pay to his peers in the automotive business, his latest compensation package appears extreme. Rawlinson’s total compensation in 2022 was 11 times greater than the $34 million earned by the second-highest-paid automotive CEO, GM’s Mary Barra, and 21 times greater than the $18.3 million Ford CEO Jim Farley made.

    CEOs at fellow EV startups aren’t making anywhere near Rawlinson’s total compensation, either. Rivian Automotive CEO Robert Scaringe earned roughly $1 million in 2022, even though his company is now worth over $22 billion, over 50% more than Lucid Motors’ roughly $14 billion.

    Keep in mind that Lucid lost over $2 billion over the last year. Now, startups can take a while before they turn profitable, but paying the CEO of an unprofitable company hundred of millions of dollars to boost the stock price of a money-losing company sounds awful pump-and-dumpish to me. The EV space is hardly free of companies that turned out to be run by fraudsters.

    Lucid claims the Lucid Air Sapphire is going to be the fastest production EV in the world, and has heavily FX-edited videos to prove it. Then again, they also had similar videos six years ago.

    Like Musk, I still think your company should actually turn a profit before paying your CEO more than any other CEO in the world.

    I’m old fashioned that way.

    Caveat Emptor.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Twitter Lawsuit Against Ken Paxton Dismissed

    Wednesday, December 28th, 2022

    Here’s a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General filed under the pre-Musk Twitter regime that was just dimissed.

    In a Tuesday press release, Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed legal victory over Twitter after a federal appeals court threw out the social media company’s lawsuit against him.

    After President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter following the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, the Texas Office of the Attorney General issued a “civil investigative demand” (CID) for Twitter to reveal information on how it moderates content.

    Paxton said he wanted to determine whether Twitter had violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

    As we know from the ongoing Twitter revelations following Musk’s takeover, there was a whole lot of deception (and censorship) going on.

    Twitter then sued Paxton in the Northern District of California for violation of the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the case as not “prudentially ripe,” meaning it would be better decided in the future when there was more information.

    A discussion of “ripeness” as a legal concept in lawsuits is far beyond the scope of my expertise. (Ditto “standing.”)

    A panel of judges affirmed that decision and added that the case was “not constitutionally ripe,” meaning it rested on hypothetical future events rather than present facts because Twitter did not claim the CID had a “chilling effect” on its free speech at the time.

    Twitter then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which affirmed the panel’s judgment that the case was constitutionally unripe.

    “The issues here are not fit for judicial decision,” wrote Judge Ryan D. Nelson in the opinion, “because Twitter’s allegations do not show that the issuance of the CID is chilling its speech or causing it other cognizable injury that the requested injunction would redress.”

    Paxton’s press release claimed the lawsuit was a “thinly-veiled distraction.”

    “I’ve been asking Twitter for years to answer questions about its content moderation and large-scale censorship, but Twitter’s only response has been to try and hide behind its bogus lawsuits against me,” he wrote.

    “Now that yet another court has ruled in our favor and more details surrounding Twitter’s censorship have come to light, I look forward to helping get to the bottom of any actions that the company took to mislead consumers.”

    Musk might want to order his Twitter employees to go ahead and comply with Paxton’s records requests.

    After releasing so many details of Twitter’s censorship regime, Musk might think about releasing the memos behind Twitter’s lawsuit strategy under the previous regime…

    LinkSwarm For December 16, 2022

    Friday, December 16th, 2022

    Democrats being soft on criminals, pedophiles and common sense highlights this week’s LinkSwarm.

    

  • Man, there sure seems to be a lot of funny number counting going on in Philadelphia.

    Regular readers are well aware that back in July, Zero Hedge first (long before it became a running theme among so-called “macro experts”) pointed out that a gaping 1+ million job differential had opened up between the closely-watched and market-impacting, if easily gamed and manipulated, Establishment Survey and the far more accurate if volatile, Household Survey – the two core components of the monthly non-farm payrolls report.

    We first described this divergence in early July, when looking at the June payrolls data, we found that the gap between the Housing and Establishment Surveys had blown out to 1.5 million starting in March when “something snapped.” We described this in “Something Snaps In The US Labor Market: Full, Part-Time Workers Plunge As Multiple Jobholders Soar.”

    Since then the difference only got worse, and culminated earlier this month when the gap between the Establishment and Household surveys for the November dataset nearly doubled to a whopping 2.7 million jobs, a bifurcation which we described in “Something Is Rigged: Unexplained, Record 2.7 Million Jobs Gap Emerges In Broken Payrolls Report.”

    Snip.

    We bring all this up again because late on Dec 13, the Philadelphia Fed published something shocking: as part of the regional Fed’s quarterly reassessment of payrolls in the form of an “early benchmark revision of state payroll employment”, the Philly Fed confirmed what we have been saying since July, namely that US payrolls are overstated by at least 1.1 million, and likely much more!

    And the correction came after the midterms! What are the odds?

  • Accused FTX crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas.

    The Royal Bahamas Police Force took the failed financial tech entrepreneur into custody after the U.S. filed criminal charges against him, according to a press statement. FTX, which Bankman-Fried founded, imploded in November, costing investors millions of dollars in losses. The fallen businessman has been accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to artificially prop up another one of his enterprises: a crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, which he operated simultaneously while seemingly evading financial ethics scrutiny.

  • “Ukrainian Military Is Targeting Russian Fuel Supply Lines As Winter Approaches.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Did Russian forces have a torture chamber for children in Ukraine?
  • “SEC Chairman Gensler Scrubbed Evidence Of Clinton, Soros And Pelosi Meetings.”
  • Speaking of abusing children: “Former CNN Producer Pleads Guilty In Pedo Scandal. Former CNN producer John Griffin, who worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Chris Cuomo, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce a 9-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity as his Vermont ski house. This is a different CNN pedophile than Jake Tapper’s former producer, Rick Saleeby, who resigned after it emerged that he solicited sexually explicit photos of an underage girl.”
  • Speaking pedophiles: “Mother of Child Rape Victim Sues Virginia Soros Prosecutor in Federal Court.”

    The mother of an 11-year-old rape victim is suing a George-Soros backed prosecutor in Virginia who let the boy’s rapist walk free, alleging the prosecutor’s actions violated the minor’s civil rights and made him fear for his physical safety.

    Amber Reel in November filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of her son after Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) let the rapist walk. Court filings show Descano was months late in sharing necessary evidence before a September trial, dooming the case and forcing his office to enter into a lesser plea deal with the rapist the same month. Ronnie Reel, who was released on time served, had faced life in prison for forcibly sodomizing the minor. Reel is the victim’s uncle.

    This is the second high-profile case in the last month where the Soros prosecutor freed a dangerous offender. In December, Descano struck a plea deal that would clear the record of a man who fired his gun into a crowded Virginia bar. Soros donated more than half a million dollars to Descano’s 2019 campaign.

    A grand jury had already indicted Reel in February for sodomy and aggravated sexual battery, and the case was set for trial in September. But Descano’s office didn’t share evidence with the public defender before trial, bungling Reel’s prosecution with its “woefully, woefully missed” deadlines. The case’s presiding judge said Descano’s office did a “disservice to the victim” and was “very concerning to the court.”

    Because he dodged a felony sex crime conviction, Reel won’t have to register as a sex offender and won’t be barred from holding jobs in schools or other places that would put him near children. The victim and his mother in their suit say Descano’s “deliberate indifference represents egregious conduct that is shocking to the conscience.”

    (Hat Tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of pedophile friendly Democrats: “During the hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, California [Democratic] Rep. Katie Porter asserted that the phrase “groomer” is a “lie” used to maliciously discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and make them appear to be a “threat.” “You know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow and engaged in criminal acts merely because of their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity.” Yes, if your “gender identity” is “I like to have sex with children,” then yes, you’re a pedophile, and if you tell elementary school children what sort of sex you have, then yes, you’re a groomer.
  • Speaking of Democrats being on the side of criminals, Oregon’s outgoing Democratic governor Kate Brown commuted the life of every death row inmate to life in prison.
  • Speaking of Democrat-run locales letting criminals walk free, a fire destroyed decades worth of NYPD-stored evidence.
  • “Federal Judge Prevents Biden’s DHS From Ending Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy.” Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Kirk Watson, the less heinous of the two remaining Democrats in the runoff for Austin mayor, defeated state Rep. Celia Israel.

    Former state Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) will be the next mayor of Austin about two decades after he left that same office in the early aughts.

    He defeated state Rep. Celia Israel (D-Austin) by a slim margin after finishing second in the general election. He’ll serve as mayor for the next two years before having to seek re-election in 2024 due to redistricting.

    Watson lost Travis County, the city’s largest portion, by 17 votes while winning Williamson county by 881 and Hays County by 22. During the general and runoff races, he outspent Israel by a wide margin.

    The two candidates sparred over housing and homeless policy during the general election and the runoff. About one-third of the voting population turned out to vote in the runoff versus the November 8 general.

    Watson will take over for Mayor Steve Adler after his self-described “disruptive” tenure marked by a lingering homelessness problem, public fallout and a declining relationship with the police department, and a cumbersome and increasingly costly light rail transit project.

  • Japan buys the Tomahawk missile.

    The United States has always had kind of a friends and family plan that it sells military gear to, but it has always reserved the very top top top stuff for itself and the Brits. Well, in this calendar year we have already seen the first two exceptions to that policy being made. The United States is sending air-launch cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines to the Australians. And now we’re giving Tomahawks to the Japanese, giving both of these countries the ability to independently destroy China’s economic links to the wider world without any additional help from the United States. And this sudden proliferation of countries that can now bring China to their knees independently, this is arguably the biggest strategic development of the Year, even more so than the Ukraine war, because it takes what has become the world’s second largest economy and puts it completely at the mercy of the domestic politics of a third party, and now a fourth party.

  • Twitter ends their radical “Trust and Safety” Council. Good. Long overdue.
  • Oberlin College finally pays their judgment to Gibson’s Bakery. “The $25 million verdict plus interest and attorney’s fees resulted in an almost $32 million judgment, with interest running at about $4000 per day since June 2019. In all, over $36 million was owed.” Cudos to William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection for his thorough, ongoing coverage of this story from beginning to end.
  • New York City Mayor Eric Adams finally allows police to take mentally ill people off the street. Long overdue.
  • NBC News Suspends Reporter Ben Collins Over His Elon Musk Coverage.” It seems that Collins was very, very upset that Matt Tiabbi was allowed to speak truths about twitter’s previous abuses that went against The Narrative. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, whose tagline was “The Stig Loses His Car Keys.”)
  • Quis custodes corrumpit? “Bill Gates Donates $319 Million To Media”
  • How about “No.” Does “No” work for you? “Biden Wants $8 Billion In Taxpayer Funds To Shut Down Coal Power In South Africa.”
  • F-35B fighter crashes in the Metroplex. Fortunately the pilot safely ejected, and it appears that the airplane (which was undergoing testing for Lockheed) looks recoverable. To my untrained eye it looks like a stuck throttle.
  • “The US government is giving out free wasps.”
  • You may be cool, but chances are you’ll never be jump 100,000 feet from a ballon in space cool. Colonel Joseph William Kittinger II, RIP.
  • New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s global warming film earns all of 80 dollars per screen.
  • World’s largest free-standing aquarium didn’t.
  • “Canadian Healthcare System Introduces Punch Card Where On Your 10th Visit You Get Free Suicide.”
  • “DOJ Arrests Sam Bankman-Fried For Running Out Of Bribery Money.”