As revelations continue to roll out about a third set of classified documents being illegally kept by Joe Biden, and crackhead son Hunter Biden paying The Big Guy $50,000 a month to rent his house (which would have meant that Hunter only got to keep $33,333 of his Burisma salary…assuming there was no other graft being passed on) a question occurs to me: Which Democratic Kingmaker(s) want to force Biden out of office?
With midterms safely past, news about the classified documents (which was known in advance of the midterms) was allowed to leak out, indicating that whoever arranged Slow Joe’s greased-skid path to the White House has lost confidence in his ability not to screw things up so badly that Democrats get slaughtered in 2024. And this despite the decided unpopularity both of VP Kamala Harris and backup catspaw Pete Buttigieg. My working theory is that the same people who installed Biden will try to install Gavin Newsom in 2024.
But the question is who is calling the shots in the Democratic Party? George Soros? Barack Obama? Valerie Jarrett? Ron Klain? Randi Weingarten? (I might previously have included Tom Steyer on this list, but if he really were calling the shots he wouldn’t have tried that disasterous presidential run.)
If you have good theories and solid evidence on who is actually calling the shots in the Democratic Party these days (and thus the likely candidate for wanting to push Biden out), let me know in the comments below. As Instapundit noted, those that foisted Joe Biden on us have an awful lot to answer for…
The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.
“The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
“We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
“Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
“Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
“They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”
The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
“They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
“They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
“Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
“Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
“One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”
Next: Why EVs are a disaster.
“All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”
To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:
There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.
This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?
Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.
Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
“I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
“They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
“Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
“The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
“The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
“We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
“El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
“All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”
“Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
“Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.
He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:
Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.
And he’s not a fan of Crypto:
Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”
The national mood is gloomy, and it’s taking a heavy political toll on President Biden, as voters increasingly question whether he is up to the job of leading the nation, or for that matter finishing his sentences.
According to the polls, the two biggest concerns of the public, by far, are the pandemic and the economy. Consequently Congress is focused, laserlike, on: the Senate filibuster rule. This is a legislative tactic that is evil when the other side uses it but good when your side uses it. At the moment the Democrats want to change the rule, so of course the Republicans, led by Sen. Mitch “I am smiling, damn it” McConnell, are opposed to changing it, which means Washington is consumed by a bitter, vicious, nasty, name-calling battle pitting the Democrats against Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are also Democrats.
In the end, as is so often the case with these burning issues that consume the nation’s capital, nothing happens, which is the whole point of the constitutional system of checks and balances put into place by the Founding Fathers, all of whom — and this is a testament to their wisdom and foresight — are dead.
Meanwhile the national debt, for the first time ever, creeps over $30 trillion, which is more than the entire U.S. economy is worth. Fortunately this is nothing to worry about. Forget we even brought it up.
February
There is trouble in, of all places, Canada. The news up there is that the capital city, Ottawa (from the Algonquin word “adawe,” meaning “Washington”) is besieged by a massive protest convoy of trucks, clogging the streets, honking horns, blocking traffic and making it impossible for anybody to get anywhere. Granted, this is the situation pretty much every day in, for example, New York City, but apparently in Canada it is a big deal. As tensions mount, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a controversial move, invokes emergency powers enabling the government to freeze the protesters’ access to beaver pelts.
Ha-ha! We are poking some good-natured fun at Canada, which is actually a modern nation and an important trading partner that we depend on to supply us with many vital things. Celine Dion is only one example. In all seriousness, the Canadian trucker strike is a significant event that raises some important issues, which everyone immediately stops caring about because of the situation in Ukraine.
Ukraine is a nation that, through poor planning, is located right next to Russia. This is unfortunate because Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who relaxes by putting kittens into a food processor, has long wanted to establish closer ties with Ukraine, in the same sense that a grizzly bear wants to establish closer ties with a salmon.
On Feb. 24 the Russian army invades Ukraine. Everyone assumes the Russians will easily prevail, but the Ukrainians put up a surprisingly strong resistance (we are using the term “resistance” in the sense of “physically fighting back,” as opposed to “tweeting defiant hashtags”). Most of the world rallies around the underdog Ukrainians and their charismatic president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who is basically the opposite of Vladimir Putin. (Although to be fair, if Putin did comedy, he would kill.)
March
In economic news, inflation continues to worsen despite intensive efforts by the Biden administration to explain that it is caused by Vladimir Putin, corporate greed, covid, supply-chain issues, global climate change, the filibuster rule, the murder hornets and various other factors totally unrelated to any policies of the Biden administration.
April
Elon Musk says he wants to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which works out to one dollar for every apocalyptic tweet emitted about the sale by alarmed verified Twitter users who are deeply concerned about the precedent of allowing billionaires to buy major media platforms, which have traditionally been small mom-and-pop operations like The Washington Post and Facebook. Another verified concern is that Musk favors “free speech,” which we are putting in quotation marks because although it sounds good — Free speech! — if everyone is allowed to have it willy-nilly, the public could be exposed to misinformation that has not been verified by the verifiers, as opposed to the current situation, in which everything on Twitter is 100 percent accurate.
Meanwhile, for a few exciting hours, a trending topic on political Twitter, which we swear we are not making up, is “testicle tanning.” Don’t even ask.
May
Meanwhile parents scramble desperately to find baby formula amid a shortage that has left U.S. store shelves bare, although there are plentiful supplies abroad. In an emergency effort reminiscent of the legendary Berlin Airlift, the U.S. government provides temporary relief by using an Air Force transport plane to fly 35 tons of American babies to Germany. The operation is deemed a success, although, as an official noted, “afterward we had to burn the plane.”
The war in Ukraine continues but receives less and less coverage in the United States as Americans turn their attention to the historic Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial. At issue is Heard’s 2018 Washington Post op-ed alleging that Depp, once the embodiment of cool in the role of dashing pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, has developed a case of face bloat and currently looks, quote, “like the owner of a struggling water-bed store.”
June
Johnny Depp wins his historic defamation lawsuit, with the jury ordering Amber Heard to repay the 783 billion person-hours the American public wasted watching the trial. The verdict unleashes a wave of thoughtful media think pieces the likes of which the nation has not seen since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.
In economic news, Americans grow increasingly alarmed as the price of a gallon of gasoline and the value of the average 401(k) plan rapidly converge from opposite directions. For its part, the White House is growing increasingly irritated by the way people keep whining about soaring inflation and the collapsing stock market and the possibility of a recession while ignoring all the positive economic accomplishments that the Biden administration has achieved despite the efforts of Vladimir Putin, who — WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP FORGETTING THIS — is the cause of everything bad.
July
In financial news, Elon Musk announces that he no longer wants to purchase Twitter and will instead use the $44 billion to buy two Springsteen tickets.
Snip.
As the month comes to a close, the economy dominates the news with the Commerce Department reporting that the U.S. gross domestic product shrank for the second consecutive quarter. Traditionally this has meant that we are in a recession, but President Biden reassures the nation that it actually is not a recession, for reasons clearly stated on the teleprompter.
September
As Russian forces suffer mounting losses in Ukraine, an increasingly desperate Vladimir Putin, in what observers say is a clear violation of international law, annexes Connecticut.
In a legal development that causes widespread swooning on MSNBC, New York Attorney General Letitia James files a lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements and failure to pay $327 million worth of parking tickets. Just for fun, Trump declares that he’s guilty, while the Democrats call the lawsuit a politically motivated witch hunt. Everyone enjoys a hearty laugh before order is restored.
On a sadder note, the world mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the beloved monarch who reigned over the United Kingdom during its transition from the center of a vast global empire to a popular tourist destination roughly the size of a pickleball court. She is succeeded by her 143-year-old son, King Charles the Uncomfortable, who will be officially crowned next year in a traditional British ceremony-gasm featuring numerous horses.
In response to yet another viral TikTok “challenge” video, the Food and Drug Administration issues an urgent bulletin stating that people who eat chicken that has been marinated in NyQuil “probably deserve to die.”
October
The national debt creeps up by yet another trillion and now exceeds $31 trillion, but again this is nothing to worry about because it has absolutely no economic consequences. We don’t know why we even bother keeping track.
Speaking of money: Elon Musk announces that he has decided to buy Twitter after all, because the only Springsteen tickets he could get for $44 billion were “way the hell up in the balcony.”
Snip.
Abroad, Liz Truss resigns as prime minister of the United Kingdom after a turbulent term lasting a little under 14 minutes. She is replaced by Rishi Sunak, whose name can be rearranged to spell “Is A Hunk, Sir.” In China, President Xi Jinping wins an unprecedented third term when delegates to the Communist Party congress unanimously elect, after careful consideration, not to die.
November
As the historic midterm elections approach, with the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, verified blue check mark media personalities on Twitter focus with a ferocious intensity on the single most critical issue facing the nation, if not the world: the status of verified blue check mark media personalities on Twitter.
The problem is that Elon Musk intends to charge people $8 a month for a blue check mark, which would mean any nonelite rando could get one, which would be a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Twitter Verification Clause. Some verified users go so far as to declare, on Twitter, that they are seriously considering leaving Twitter, although it is not immediately clear what they would do with the extra 14 hours per day.
In a non-embedable video, the YouTuber formerly know as The Russian Dude announced that he had been called up for military service as part of Putin’s “partial mobilization” to throw more cannon fodder into the Ukrainian meatgrinder. (I’m pretty sure that’s an important decision point in why he’s now known as The Canadian Dude.)
Oddly enough, all his male friends received conscription notices as well.
Commenters have long stated that Putin doesn’t want to declare a General Mobilization, because under Soviet Russian law, that requires an actual declaration of war, something still lacking in Vlad’s Special Military Operation.
Now this is not even a theory, only conjecture based on a single data point, but what if Putin is actually carrying out a General Mobilization of all eligible males of military age while calling it limited mobilization? It’s not like Putin’s war machine hasn’t already committed more heinous crimes, or that Russia has an independent press capable of calling him on it any more.
Maybe Putin wants to roll the dice on one final spring push for Kiev, putting a million men under arms to launch a massive attack, relying on the Russian doctrine of quantity having a quality of its own to final snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Like I said, conjecture only, but it certainly doesn’t make any less sense than the multiple bungling stupidities Russia has committed in the war…
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I still haven’t had time to wrangle all those Twitter revelations into a coherent article, so that will have to wait for another post.
How different it feels this time around. Broadcasters are lustily cheering anti-lockdown protesters in China. Members of Congress offer unqualified support. President Joe Biden, although more guarded, is sympathetic.
No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) captured the mood: “To the people of China — we hear you and we stand with you as you fight for your freedom.”
Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were crushing liberty.
So, what changed? Perhaps pundits tell themselves that the disease is less virulent now, or that vaccination has altered the balance of risk, or that, in some other way, Beijing’s crackdown is less proportionate than those of 2020. But none of these explanations stacks up.
Yes, the coronavirus became less lethal. All viruses that spread through human contact eventually become less lethal because they have an evolved tendency to want to keep their hosts up and active and therefore more infectious. For this to happen, they require a critical mass. Enough people need to be incapacitated or killed by the original version to give milder strains an advantage. And, yes, the vaccines helped, too.
But the trade-offs are essentially the same in China today as they were three years ago — coronavirus deaths versus other deaths. The current unrest was sparked by a fire in Xinjiang, which was allowed to become needlessly deadly because the authorities were following COVID protocols. In other words, they were elevating COVID above other forms of harm.
Most countries did the same in 2020 with, as we now see, disastrous results. The lockdowns did not just cause an economic meltdown from which we will take years to recover. They also failed on their own terms. They killed more people than they saved.
Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality between 2020 and 2022. Go on, have a guess. That’s right. Sweden, which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate, saw cumulative excess deaths rise by 6.8%, the lowest figure in the OECD. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures were 18% in Australia, 24.5% in the U.K., and 54.1% in the U.S.
“Loudoun County Fires Superintendent over Handling of Sexual-Assault Cases. The Loudoun County school board fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler in a closed-door meeting Tuesday night after a special grand jury released a report blaming the district for failing to escalate cases of student sexual assault in 2021.” The black-pilled who proclaim that electing Republicans is useless aren’t considering the Glenn Youngkins of the world.
he Washington Post announced in October that it was welcoming a new communications chief. The paper’s official announcement lauded Kathy Baird, a veteran of Nike and the public relations giant Ogilvy, as a “key strategic partner” positioned to “realize our ambitious vision for the publication.”
It also noted her membership in the “Rosebud Sioux Tribe” and service on the board of IllumiNative, which it described as “a nonprofit working for accurate and authentic portrayal of Native people.”
That’s one way to put it. IllumiNative is a self-described “racial justice organization” funded by a dark money behemoth that encourages elementary school students to fight for Democratic Party initiatives like universal health care. Its purpose is similar to various far-left activist groups, focusing on “breaking through systems of white supremacy” and “grassroots organizing,” according to IllumiNative’s website.
Argentina’s Vice President (and former President, and former First Lady) and leftwing Paronist Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is sentenced to six years of corrupt fraud.
Paralympian: “Hey, can I get a wheelchair ramp?” Veterans Affairs Canada: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like assisted suicide instead?” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Suspended Smith County Constable [Curtis Harris] Found Guilty of Theft, Official Oppression. Since his indictment, the 34-year-old Democrat has been jailed for violating the conditions of his bond and removed from office by a judge.” Smith County is in northeast Texas, and the biggest city is Tyler. Not to be confused with Deaf Smith County, which is completely different…
Great Pyrenees watchdog fights off 11 coyotes, killing eight. Good boy! I didn’t realize there were coyotes in Georgia, but evidently they’ve been extending their range from the southwest.
I’m going to leave the whys and hows of how Republicans lost a winnable seat to others. What I am going to note is that we know, with a 100% surety, one reason Walker didn’t lose the runoff: A failure to send out enough donation solicitation emails.
The Walker campaign sent out a shitload of those.
Because I have a blog, am signed up to various political sites, and have occasionally donated small amounts of money to various Republican candidates, I get a tsunami of fundraising emails, all of which filed in a Political folder. And no one, including the Ted Cruz campaign (I donated to both senate and presidential runs) has sent me more email solicitations than the Herschel Walker campaign.
Since Walker announced his run on August 25, 2021, I have received no less than 751 fundraising emails. Here’s a screencap of just the Walker emails I received July 19-26:
But it’s not just Walker himself asking for money for his campaign. People who have asked me for money for Walker include:
Mary Vought (executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund)
President Trump
Marco Rubio
Jim Jordan
Ted Cruz
Ron DeSantis
Nikki Haley
Brian Kemp
Ronna McDaniel (RNC chairwoman)
Elise Stefanik
Tim Scott
Mike Pompeo
Erich Pratt (Gun Owners of America)
Charlie Kirk (for Turning Point PAC)
Josh Hawley
Tom Cotton
Etc.
Even his dog Cheerio “sent” me email asking for money. The response must have been underwhelming, because they stopped sending those a while back.
I realize campaigns need to do fundraising. But clearly carpet bombing people’s inboxes goes far past the point of diminishing returns.
So, I for one, am looking forward to not receiving a zillion emails from Herschel Walker from now on.
(Ironically, I received one today from John James via The Post Millennial, despite the runoff being over…)
I haven’t covered too much of the unrest in Iran, mainly because we’ve seen widespread Iranian protests fizzle out before (in 1999, 2003, 2009, 2011-12 (remember, Obama was far more interested in pursuing his crazy nuclear deal than in helping the Iranian people free themselves from the Mullahs)) up to the most recent protests.
But we finally have a sign that this time may be different, in that this is the first time the regime has (reportedly) offered concessions.
After a series of fiery protests, Iran is reportedly abolishing its morality police and may loosen requirements on wearing hijabs, the country’s attorney general confirmed on Saturday.
Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said at a press conference that the morality police have “nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished.”
This is not a small concession. The Mullah claim to being an Islamic State rests on implementing Koranic governance, including Shariah law governing personal behavior, of which the requirement that a woman wear a hajib is only the most visible. But even if true (and there are reports online stating that promises to eliminate the morality police, AKA the Guidance Patrol AKA the Gast-e Ersad, is in fact government disinformation to stop the protests), Iran still has plenty of other internal police organs to oppress its citizens with: the FARAJA (Law Enforcement Command of Islamic Republic of Iran), the PAVA (the intelligence subset of the former), the Basij (a paramilitary Islamic militia run as a subset of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards), etc.
“Of course, the judiciary continues to monitor behavioral actions,” he added. The Iranian authorities will consider whether to adjust the headscarf rules, the attorney general said in a statement.
Born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the religious force, charged with patrolling for and arresting women who violate the Islamic dress code, e.g., by not wearing a head covering or loose-fitting clothing, has existed outside of the judicial system, operated by law enforcement.
The mass unrest that has swept the country in recent months was triggered by the arrest of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran for not wearing the mandated hijab headscarf. After she was escorted to a police station, the woman went into a coma and later died in a hospital. While the official state account contends that Amini suffered a fatal heart attack, eyewitnesses claim that several security officers assaulted her in the police van following her detention.
Amini’s death fueled a wave of anti-regime rallies pressuring the theocracy to relax its restrictions. Mostly women and young adults, including many university students, have participated, urging an overhaul of the fundamentalist religious dictates. In a show of resistance, protesters have marched in the streets yelling slogans like “woman, life, freedom,” burned their hijabs, and cut their hair, the New York Times reported. Some protesters have called for the end of the Islamic Republic. In late November, an Iranian general acknowledged that more than 300 people have been killed in the ongoing demonstrations.
Many doubt that the Guidance Patrol has in fact been dissolved, or that it would actually make any difference if it was:
So it is a practice that can be discontinued but the police and Judiciary can still use many other ways to prosecute those not wearing Hijab
Still, even if the regime is only pretending to make concessions to the protesters, this is more than we’ve seen in previous protests, so the regime must obviously be rattled.
Protest coordinators and organizations continued issuing guidance on December 3 in preparation for the planned countrywide protests and strikes on December 5-7. The Hamedan Neighborhood Youth posted instructions on how to make hand-thrown explosives, Molotov cocktails, and pepper spray. The Karaj Neighborhood Youth and others published maps of planned protest locations. The Shiraz Neighborhood Youth advised citizens to prepare basic necessities and cash for themselves given the planned strikes.
Statements from the neighborhood youth groups portray a protest movement that is still trying to cohere and experimenting with different approaches. The Karaj group, among others, called for increasingly concentrated protests on each day from December 5 to 7. The Tehran group repeated on December 3 its calls for a different approach, in contrast. The Tehran group acknowledged ”differences of opinion” and insisted that citizens only strike on December 5 because security forces can more easily identify protesters and traverse city streets during strikes due to the reduced traffic. The Tehran group called for protests on December 6 and 7. This iteration within the protest movement is a natural step as it tries to coalesce and organize.
Alas, this hardly sounds like a well-oiled revolution ready to push the regime to collapse and step in when it does.
As in China and Venezuela, it takes a whole lot more than protests to bring down totalitarian regimes. I’d love to be proved wrong, but right now I very few signs that the Islamic regime is actually threatened.
Howdy! Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! I spent six days up in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, visiting relatives and buying some 180 books, some for myself and some to deal. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
We keep hearing that it’s impossible rig government unemployment statistics, but something funny is going on.
A superficial take of today’s jobs report would note that both jobs and earnings “blew past expectations, flying in the face of Fed rate hikes”, and while that is accurate at the headline level, it couldn’t be further from the truth if one actually digs a little deeper in today’s jobs numbers.
Recall that back in August, September, and October we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were surging and the number of multiple-jobholders soared.
Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but have become downright grotesque.
Consider the following: the closely followed Establishment survey came in above expectations at 263K, above the 200K expected – a record 7th consecutive beat vs expectations – and down modestly from last month’s upward revised 284K…
… numbers which confirm that at a time when virtually every major tech company is announcing mass layoffs…
… the BLS has a single, laser-focused political agenda – not to spoil the political climate at a time when Democrats just lost control of the House as somehow both construction (+20K) and manufacturing (+14K) added jobs according to the BLS, when even ADP now reports that these two sectors combined shed more than 100,000 workers in November.
Alas, there is only so much the Department of Labor can hide under the rug because when looking at the abovementioned gap between the Household and Establishment surveys which we have been pounding the table on since the summer, it just blew out by a whopping 401K as a result of the 263K increase in the number of nonfarm payrolls (tracked by the Household survey) offset by a perplexing plunge in the number of people actually employed which tumbled by 138K (tracked by Household survey). Furthermore, as shown in the next chart, since March the number of employed workers has declined on 4 of the past 8 months, while the much more gamed nonfarm payrolls (goalseeked by the Establishment survey) have been up every single month.
What is even more perplexing, is that despite the continued rise in nonfarm payrolls, the Household survey continues to telegraph growing weakness, and as of Nov 30, the gap that opened in March has since grown to a whopping 2.7 million “workers” which may or may not exist anywhere besides the spreadsheet model of some BLS (or is that BLM) political activist.”
A non-profit bankrolled by some of the nation’s largest corporations and left-wing billionaire George Soros is conducting a racial census of House and Senate staff as part of its effort to establish a “Bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Office,” according to internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were told by the researcher that the organization’s current data indicated they “may identify as white” and asked the staffers to update if the information was incorrect.
Information collected by the group will be used in its annual report that lobbies for “structural changes on Capitol Hill that would allow for more people of color to be hired in senior positions,” a previous report from the group states. That report is made possible in part by millions of dollars in donations to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies from Apple, Google, Meta, Pfizer, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, among dozens of other large corporations and nonprofits.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ survey is part of a broader trend by left-wing organizations to pressure workplaces and governments to increase affirmative action policies. Often couched in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” those policies have received criticism for coming at the expense of competence and offering advantages based on race instead of merit.
Rush was charged with a second-degree felony, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon family violence. An emergency protection order was issued against him, and he was soon back on the streets after making a $40,000 bond, KVUE reported.
“For $4,000, you can get out, go home, watch Netflix after trying to murder your ex-girlfriend — are you kidding me?” one of the customers said.
So in addition to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possible attempted murder, our super-genius lawyer also violated section 46.03 of the Texas penal code by carrying a gun into a bar. And he bonded out. For all that Democrats blather about “gun violence,” they don’t seem top treat gun felonies with any seriousness when they actually occur. Thanks, Soros-backed DA Jose Garza!
But it turns out that Rush didn’t just go go home to watch Netflix, as he was found dead on Thursday.
In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.
His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.
In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.
Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November.
Speaking of disinformation, CNN carries out more mass layoffs, including Chris Cillizza. Let’s have a moment of silences for his careerOK that’s enough.
Legal Insurrection conducts a 2024 presidential preference poll. Not surprisingly, DeSantis comes in first and Trump second. Nikki Haley third over Ted Cruz is a mild surprise. Greg Abbott ranked dead last, tied with Liz Chaney, is a much bigger one.
The combination of pretending to transition to a green energy future combined with dependence on Russian gas and the fallout of the Russo-Ukrainian War has Germany looking at some very tough choices:
“Europeans have chosen to largely remove natural gas from their industrial space, and so we are seeing huge amounts of industrial closures across the entire industrial space.”
“Natural gas isn’t just part of their electricity system, it’s part of their petrochemical system, which is what makes their manufacturing sector possible. So in shutting all this stuff down the Europeans are choosing, maybe not consciously, but they are choosing a general de-industrialization trend for the entire continent.”
“No one is making nitrogen-based fertilizer in Europe anymore. No one is smelting aluminum anymore. A lot of the steel foundries are shutting down.”
And so far it’s a relatively mild winter in Europe. Next year will be worse.
Zeihan talks about how Germany “fudges” some of it’s green energy pledges. (In a previous video he mentioned some bit of legerdemain where they don’t count fossil fuel baseload power that spins up to take over for solar at night.) So exactly what has Germany’s much-vaunted green energy programs accomplished? Not much.
In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050.
Sure, Germany hasn’t managed to transition away from fossil fuels, but they have managed to make their energy infrastructure expensive and unreliable…
Governor Ron DeSantis said in his victory speech that, not only did he win the Florida gubernatorial race, but he has also “rewritten the political map.” It is difficult to argue with that assessment. He beat Democrat Charlie Crist by 20 percentage points and flipped Democratic strongholds such as Miami-Dade County.
A particularly potent force in his campaign has been culture-war issues — battles DeSantis won by going on the offensive. “We fight the woke in the legislature,” he said in his speech. “We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”
As with Trump, DeSantis’s political aggressiveness wins him admirers. The tactics that some conservatives consider morally or philosophically dubious appear only to intensify his popularity.
In March, the Republican Florida legislature passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, preventing teachers from instructing kindergarten through third-grade students in gender identity and sexuality. “I would say when you oppose a parent’s rights and education bill, which prevents six-, seven-, eight-year-olds from having sexuality, gender ideology injected in their curriculum, you are the one that’s waging the culture war,” DeSantis said in defense of the bill. DeSantis also signed the Stop W.O.K.E. (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, preventing critical race theory from being promoted or advanced in schools and corporations.
When Walt Disney executives criticized the education law as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis retaliated by questioning whether the corporation’s 50-year-old “independent special district” status should go under “review” to ensure that it is “appropriately serving the public interest.” Charles C. W. Cooke warned about the dangers of this move. Yet, however short-sighted, it was undoubtedly effective culture-war politics. DeSantis’s enemies fell into the trap: Democrats revealed their hypocrisy by rushing to the defense of big business.
DeSantis has also won the PR fight on immigration. His morally dubious decision to fly asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard revealed Democrats’ hypocrisy. His hard line on immigration does not dampen support among Hispanics. According to a Telemundo/LX News poll, DeSantis had a 51 percent to 44 percent lead over Crist among Hispanic voters. A bilingual pollster who conducted the survey explained: “There are lots of Hispanic voters in this state who really like the governor’s style, this strongman who won’t back down.”
On transgenderism, DeSantis has been utterly fearless. He stated that, in children, most “dysphoria resolves itself by the time they become adults” and “it’s inappropriate to be doing basically what’s genital mutilation.” While other Republican states have tried to use legislation to stop gender experiments, DeSantis appointed a state medical board that banned doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, and gender-transition surgeries. This way, his enemies can’t claim that politicians are interfering in the medical profession. Rather, it’s medical professionals keeping politics out of health care.
FTX’s new CEO and liquidator, John Ray III, who also oversaw the unwinding and liquidation of Enron, admits that “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”
And just in case his shock at FTX’s fraud of epic proportions was not quite clear enough, he adds that “from compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
Snip.
Below we excerpt some of the most notable highlights from the affidavit, which we embed at the bottom of the post and which everyone should read to get a sense of just how massive Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud was.
I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.
Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include:
(a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses;
(b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”);
(c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Debtor Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”);
(d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.
Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the equity of any Silo.
Much, much more at the link, including an eye-dropping, deeply incriminating Twitter thread by founder Sam Bankman-Fried about the step-by-step decisions they made that weren’t really illegal because they had such good intentions.
BlackRock’s energetic focus on ESG investing is affecting its bottom line. The index fund’s performance is deteriorating, and risks are accumulating. In the face of this situation, UBS Wealth Management recently downgraded ratings for BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) by now listing it as a “Neutral” recommendation rather than a “Buy.” The bank also cut the target stock price to $585 from $700.
The new recommendations were made based entirely on BlackRock’s reckless ESG positioning. UBS says that stubborn insistence on this course could also trigger increased regulatory inspections and investor withdrawals.
Thus, the company pressuring countless firms to adopt more “woke” positions has suddenly found a boomerang coming in its direction. Investors and analysts are now telling BlackRock that ESG shenanigans are bad business and want it stopped.
Another one of those things that makes you go “Hmmmm“: “The Funeral Business Is Booming (And Not Because Of COVID)…We’re having to do at one point of time 20 percent more funerals which is unheard of…the third quarter of this year, we did 15% more calls than we did in the third quarter of 2019.”
Jay Leno is expected to make a full recovery after getting seriously burned in a gasoline fire from one of his many cars. Conan O’Brien should call him up and go “Jay, when I said ‘die in a fire,’ I meant it figuratively, not literally!”
“This was a close call,” said one Republican leader in Washington. “We were worried that we would achieve massive victories tonight, but we thankfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory to achieve a much more proper and sensible red trickle, like the proper gentlemen we are.”
