China has a new rule for the country’s hundreds of millions of young gamers: No online videogames during the school week, and one hour a day on Fridays, weekends and public holidays.
China on Monday issued strict new measures aimed at curbing what authorities describe as youth videogame addiction, which they blame for a host of societal ills, including distracting young people from school and family responsibilities.
The new regulation, unveiled by the National Press and Publication Administration, will ban minors, defined as those under 18 years of age, from playing online videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday. On the other three days of the week, and on public holidays, they will be only permitted to play between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.
The government announcement said all online videogames will be required to connect to an “anti-addiction” system operated by the National Press and Publication Administration. The regulation, which takes effect on Wednesday, will require all users to register using their real names and government-issued identification documents.
Other details of enforcement weren’t made public, and phone calls to the National Press and Publication Administration went unanswered after business hours on Monday.
Now I am very far indeed from Chinese teenagers, but if they’re anything like American teenagers, Japanese teenagers, British teenagers, South Korean teenagers, etc., Communist China has just promulgated a law destined to be the most widely violated in its history.
Banning video games for teenagers would be like banning rock and roll for teenagers in 1967, or banning TV for teenagers in 1976. You’re trying to eliminate an activity that pretty much every single one of their peers participates in to some degree or another. Moreover, it’s an activity available in every single device they own that accesses the Internet, be it computer, smart phone, tablet, etc. Anything that supports a browser has a built-in game platform.
It’s pretty hard to conceive of a Communist Party dictate so likely to be so widely ignored or breed discontent in the heart of young Chinese. Remember, the East German police cracking down on listeners of a 1987 rock concert in Berlin was widely viewed as a key catalysts for turning young East Germans actively against the Communist regime.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden’s Afghan debacle continues to top the news:
At least 90 people, including 13 American soldiers, were killed in in a bombing at an entrance to the Kabul airport.
Un-Fucking believable: “U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate.”
U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.
The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.
But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.
“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”
“French officials gave the Nazi occupiers a list of Parisian Jews they wanted to remain safe…”
It is becoming increasingly difficult to draw any conclusion other than that President Biden knowingly and willfully surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.
To be clear, this is different from concluding that Biden committed to a recklessly premature date for withdrawing all U.S. forces (which, practically speaking, would necessitate NATO’s departure, too) while being aware that the Taliban were capturing territory and that the Afghan security forces might be unable to hold them off over the ensuing months.
That would be bad, but not as damning as what I am deducing.
I now believe Biden long ago reasoned that the Taliban were going to take over the country inevitably and decided to treat them as the de facto government. Consistent with this — and with the progressive Democratic orientation that American military power is needlessly provocative, and that concessions are the preferred way to inspire rogues into good behavior — Biden determined back in the spring that he would set a firm deadline to pull our forces out, and then demonstrate to the Taliban that the deadline was real.
Snip.
Biden saw the Taliban as the regime in waiting, with whom his administration was energetically negotiating. If he proved to the Taliban that the U.S. really was leaving no matter what, then he figured the Taliban would allow — even facilitate — the evacuation of thousands of American civilian workers, contractors, and diplomatic personnel. Biden would pull out American troops and trust the Taliban, thus appeased, with the fate of the remaining Americans.
This is mind-boggling, but not the half of it. Biden was also effectively administering the coup de grace to the Afghan government, and not only by elevating the Taliban to the sole Afghan party with which his administration would negotiate the terms of the U.S. departure. Biden would also pull out in a manner that undermined the Afghan security forces’ capacity to fight the Taliban. After all, if U.S. troops and contractors continued providing technical and logistical support to the Afghan ground and air forces, the Taliban might interpret that as an American commitment to continue the war. Biden would make sure the jihadists had no cause for doubt.
In this, Biden had to know he would be leaving to the Taliban the fate of tens of thousands of Afghans who supported American combat, intelligence, training, and nation-building efforts over the last 20 years. Though many government officials, members of Congress, and influential commentators pleaded with the Biden administration to fast-track the visa process and evacuate the Afghans while American forces were still in control, Biden plainly rationalized that this could provoke the Taliban into retaliatory measures — potentially against Americans — that would put public pressure on him to maintain U.S. forces in the country. Biden’s priority was to withdraw them. Ergo, the Taliban — yes, that Taliban — would be trusted to deal benignly with America’s Afghan allies.
Read the piece for Andrew McCarthy’s reasoning behind this conclusion, including the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and evacuating Bagram in the dead of night. My only quibble with his analysis is that his working assumption that Biden is making the decisions of the Biden Administration. I rather doubt it…
“My phone is melting, and my inbox is jammed, from grown Afghan men pleading, crying to get out with their wives and children,” my reader begins:
All of them used to work for our company. They are engineers, electricians, lab technicians, urban planners, CAD drafters, surveyors, concrete masons, welders — all skilled technical and professional people who enjoyed what we would consider a solid middle-class life. Some went on to become lecturers at university. These aren’t herders and farmers — they are civilized, educated, middle class tradesman and professionals who trusted their government to maintain the safety and security of the nation. Their average age of the parents is late thirties. Their average family size is seven. The youngest child among them is 10 days old. Inside of a month, their lives are uprooted by bloodthirsty barbarians. They are hunted because they helped the Americans.
One of our families has been waiting in the Entry Control Point for four days straight – living in trash and filth, with no shelter, jammed among thousands of others. The parents know full well what awaits if they are fortunate to get out. They are willing to live the life of a refugee in a camp near a military installation. Essentially a one room United Nations Refugee Center shack, or group expeditionary tents, no indoor plumbing, no kitchen. They share public toilets and showers and live in a fenced compound in a sea of other shacks or tents surrounded by gravel — for at least 12-18 months while they wait for the State Department to process their visas. They are willing to walk away from their middle-class comforts and live in refugee camps for well over a year, possibly two, for the freedom and liberty of the United States. Amanullah asked me yesterday if I could get him to Mexico so he could walk to Texas so he wouldn’t have to live in a refugee camp. They know.
Don’t let anyone claim that Afghans who worked for America or international organizations will be fine.
“Here’s a kick in the gut,” my reader continues. “Fawad — not his real name — called me crying last night after midnight. His brother-in-law was killed by the Taliban earlier that day. He had worked for an American contractor in Zabul [a southern province considered part of the Taliban’s heartland]. He was beaten in the street and then shot in the head so the villagers could see.”
More of that California ballot fraud that doesn’t exist. “300 recall ballots, drugs, multiple driver’s licenses found in vehicle of passed out felon: Torrance police.” I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Random X. Felon wasn’t working for Larry Elder…
“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened,” the Court majority wrote in an unsigned opinion.
“Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion continued. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
David Gilbert is the father of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He had Chesa with his then-partner Kathy Boudin.
David Gilbert was also a member of the Weather Underground, the domestic terrorist group responsible for the 1981 Brink’s armored car robbery in New York.
Gilbert and Boudin dropped off infant Chesa with a babysitter before driving to the robbery.
The terrorists, with members of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and Black Liberation Army, robbed the truck and wounded guard Joe Trombino and killed his co-worker Peter Paige. Police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady died in the shootout.
A jury convicted Gilbert of three counts of second-degree murder and four counts of first-degree robbery.
Oh: They also took his Emmy away. The one they gave to him after we all knew he was a Granny-murderer…
My modest proposal was that the 3% of Republicans who never approved of President Trump should stop pretending that they were spokesmen for the 97% of Republicans who did. In the corporate media, where 97% of that 3% were keeping a high profile on cable news, the distortions became preposterous. This seemed to me elementary logic. But for the tiny group of delusional Never Trumpers, my modest proposal fell on them like a ton of bricks.
In the end, my essay ignited a kind of public war among conservative intellectuals that helped to bring down the neocons and the Never Trumpers in the media. Not only did the Weekly Standard shut down, but the National Review kicked out Jonah Goldberg, and the neocon’s peewee prince Bill Kristol went to work for Democrats – all in six months. How did that happen? They had no base of support outside of the Beltway, and they were in willful denial about their own unpopularity. This dynamic was obvious at all levels of media, but let’s take a high visibility example: the old panel at Fox New’s Special Report with Bret Baier. Now, Bret Baier is obviously a very quiet Never Trumper but if you stacked your daily panel with Stephen Hayes, A. B. Stoddard, and Jonah Goldberg and these were the “conservative” pundits you picked to defend President Trump’s policies then it’s obvious what Bret was doing.
A week or so after my essay appeared, I got a very short and shrill phone call from one of Bret’s staffers – who was a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, no less. When I picked up the call, she was angry and breathless and did not want to do small talk. She said: “You don’t know what you’ve done, you don’t understand the damage you’ve caused to this show.” I asked her to calm down, and be specific. She hung up instead.
This bizarre exchange piqued my interest enough to watch Bret Baier’s show that night, which was an emotion I rarely felt for Special Report. Sure enough, Bret Baier ended the episode with an odd little “farewell” segment to Stephen Hayes. The gist of it was that Hayes was suddenly taking “a one year vacation to Spain” with the family. My first thought was: who does a video farewell when they take a vacation? The whole thing was pure baloney. It was now perfectly clear why Bret’s hysterical staffer had called. Apparently my essay had been a crucial factor in getting Stephen Hayes kicked off TV. Someone over at corporate had finally looked at the piss poor ratings Bret was getting and the light bulb went off: no one wants to listen to Hayes anymore. That was certainly true. (A few months later, the sour puss A. B. Stoddard also disappeared from the Special Report show – this time without a video farewell.)
Hayes getting axed left me surprised. How was I to know that Fox executives could read? How was I to know that Baier and Hayes were roommates in college? Did Hayes sail to Spain on one of those idiotic cruises that he was always pushing on his subscribers? Jonah Goldberg had been taunting me from the pages of the National Review that the Never Trumpers were all doing fine – and then suddenly none of them were doing fine. In his video farewell, Hayes wanted everyone to know that he’d be back in a year, and that he was still the chief editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. Both of these statements actually turned out to be false.
Five months later, I got a call from an insider that all the employees at the Weekly Standard were being asked to prepare for the worst. Had anyone run with this story yet? No they hadn’t. Had it somehow fallen to me to be the first to announce the end of the celebrated neocon magazine where Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes had regularly taunted the American working class? Yes it had. The Lord had delivered them into my hands
Honestly, it was less of a murder than documenting a suicide…
Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, Current Affairs is the private kingdom of one man, in this case the dandy communist Nathan Robinson. For five years, Robinson has been all over Current Affairs like a cheap suit, while a small team of deluded volunteers has labored in his salt mine, generating content for the greater glory of the revolution, and their leader, the Potemkin page-turner. But even five-year plans go awry.
Lyta Gold, who was hired to generate ‘Amusements’, is not amused. Gold claims that when the staff attempted to form a workers’ co-operative, Robinson fired them all.
In an administration that sucks, Jen Psaki stands out for really sucking hard.
Speaking of sucking, here’s Spanish-language media omitting embarrassing information in their translation:
The most vivid example to date of how U.S. Latino media shields Biden from any accountability or scrutiny regarding the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan: NO ONE watching the Biden presser heard "INSTRUCTED". pic.twitter.com/cW1pZuFmMZ
“Texas Wins Preliminary Victory Against Biden Administration in Medicaid Lawsuit. The district court’s order temporarily suspends the Biden administration’s revocation of Texas Section 1115 Medicaid waiver.” The Biden Administration retroactively denied a waiver issued by the Trump Administration in an attempt to force ObamaCare down the state’s throat.
Texas election integrity law finally passes the Texas House, meaning Democrat’s quorum-busting stunts got them Jack and Squat.
Who should you back with your Go Fund Me money, Brett Butler or Spinal Tap’s Viv Savage? (I did toss a little money Brett’s way, as I knew her a little back in my standup comedy days…)
In a follow-up to this story, I emailed Dr. Dan Stock to ask him if he had references to the studies he mentioned in that video.
Today he replied and pointed me to this set of links up on his PureHealthMD website. And now I’m pointing them out to you.
Thus far I have only dipped my toe into them. I browsed the “N95 Respirators vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Among Health Care Personnel.” The disappointing conclusion was “Among outpatient HCP, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” So only do regular masks not work, even significantly better N95 masks don’t work…
I am far from an expert on Flu Manchu, but it’s obvious that a lot of the “official wisdom” about how to fight the virus is simply wrong. Lockdown states have not done any better (and frequently worse) than states which lifted their lockdowns earlier or never imposed them in the first place.
Here’s a doctor that says we’re doing everything wrong:
Coronavirus will not go away, because there are animal reservoirs.
“Why is a vaccine that is supposedly so effective having a breakout in the middle of the summer, when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that?”
“Antibody mediated viral enhancement.” I think Joe Rogan mentioned this.
“You cannot make these numbers better by doing any of the things you’re doing. Because that’s the nature of viral respiratory pathogens.”
“The CDC is giving you bad advice.”
How he’s been treating patients: “Vitamin D, ivermectin and Zinc.”
Previously infected get no benefit from vaccines, but suffer two to four times the side effects.
I’m not a doctor, but provide this as another data point for people to make up their own mind.
I tracked done an email address for Dr. Stock and asked if he had a handy list of the studies he references in the video above. I’ll let you know if I get a reply.
In just over two minutes, Joe Rogan articulates why America is special in world history, and why the Flu Manchu lockdown and tracking proposals are a threat to the historically exceptional freedoms Americans enjoy.
Dwight mentioned this story to me, and at first I thought it was a joke, but its apparently just another manifestation of The Crazy Years. “New Mexico Court Rules Gas Stations Liable for Selling Fuel to Drunk Drivers”:
Drunk driving is dangerous. The NHTSA says that someone is killed every 52 minutes due to a preventable crash where at least one party behind the wheel is intoxicated. Now, the New Mexico Supreme Court is looking to hold gas stations accountable for their role in knowingly allowing drunk drivers to hit the road.
Last week the court ruled 3-to-1 that gas stations have a “duty of care” to not allow individuals who are intoxicated to purchase fuel. In fact, the ruling goes as far as to edict that any gas station which knowingly permits drunk drivers to fuel up their vehicles can be held liable for any injuries caused by that person behind the wheel while they are intoxicated.
New Mexico is the second such state in the U.S. to publish a ruling which places the burden of responsibility on gas stations—Tennessee was the first. However, it’s important to note that there is no state law that explicitly prohibits the sale of gasoline to an intoxicated party in New Mexico. The court instead cited a fatal accident that occurred in 2011 where a gas station sold fuel to an intoxicated person who later got into an accident and killed the driver of the vehicle that was hit.
How are they going to prove the “knowingly” part when so many sales are pay-at-the-pump with a credit card these days?
This is part and parcel of the drive to disassociate people from blame for their own actions and failures and displace it to large faceless entities that the left must rail against (corporations, “white supremacy,” capitalism). The person responsible for a DUI is the person who drives drunk.
If you didn’t grow up in the 1970s, you probably don’t remember what the first bout of urban blight in America’s largest cities looked like. High crime, endemic corruption, failing city services and decaying infrastructure were some of the hallmarks. Though cities like Detroit and Baltimore never recovered, others bounced back thanks to the Reagan economic boom, tough-on-crime mayors, and Broken Window policing.
But thanks to the radical left, high taxes, lockdowns, antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, George Soros-backed DAs, and the Homeless Industrial Complex, urban blight is back with a vengeance:
Six Target stores in San Francisco are adjusting their times, opening hours later and closing hours earlier to try to curtail soaring theft.
They join Walgreens, which has closed 17 stores over five years in direct response to criminal activity. Last month, a video went viral of a hooded and masked man riding his bike into a San Francisco branch of the chain, loading a trash bag with merchandise, and riding back out — past a powerless security guard and two others filming on their phones.
Early Monday evening, at least nine men and women smashed cases and stripped shelves in San Francisco’s high-end Neiman Marcus store, fleeing with a fortune in designer handbags. The brazenness is out of control, is goaded on by the normalization of masks, and is directly enabled by district attorneys and other politicians.
The Golden City is joined by nearby Sacramento and Los Angeles, where retail crime has spiked, but across the country as district attorneys from Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas have declared they won’t defend citizens from theft, the story has gone much the same.
While it’s insane that crime is so severe and law enforcement so nonexistent in a prosperous city that businesses must close their doors early or shut them entirely, there’s more in store. Far more ominous than a sign of how bad things have gotten, darkened windows and shuttered doors reveal just how much worse things are going to get.
Snip.
More than 50 years later, over-credentialed activists and politicians once again say they know better, and tell us our neighborhoods will be more just and “equitable” if we don’t enforce laws. Now business owners are telling those politicians they’ll need to close their doors. Residents are left to feel the pain of both the crime and the closures. The boon of life and appreciation is suffocating.
Crime begets crime begets crime, and changes to enforcement and prosecution policies are entirely to blame. In nearby Oakland, where murder is up 90 percent in the past year and car-jackings up 88 percent while the city council continues to cut police, city leaders dismiss the surge in crime as “a bump in the road,” but for the people who live there, strive to work there, and try to not be murdered there, it’s more than that…
Rising crime is a direct threat to our towns, our neighborhoods, and our families. Already in great American cities, urban blight is setting in. We’ve down this path before for virtually the exact same bleeding-heart reasons, and we lived through the tremendous pain it brought. We cannot let it happen again — unless we do.
Things are particularly bad in San Francisco, where George Soros-backed DA George Gascon Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute shoplifters:
Here’s another, longer walk, showing more of the same, that businesses aren’t returning to NYC, despite which rents remain insanely high. They also pass a guy shooting up.
Not even Broadway is immune:
(By the way, here’s a video from the same guy talking about how impossible it is to get an NYC licensing authority to renew a license he had already paid for a year before, which finally got their attention.)
But it’s not just New York. Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and any other Democrat-run city that’s allowed antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting and graft to run rampant.
Democrats were allowed to run America’s big cities for decades because machine politics mostly worked well enough most of the time to meet the needs of most citizens. There was enough graft, cronyism and featherbedding to keep close party coalition partners happy while still providing a minimum baseline of services. But Social Justice appears to be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. No longer content with traditional levels of welfare state clientism, Social Justice demands that all city funding must flow through its sticky fingers, especially police funding that previously keep big American cities mostly safe and livable.
The security necessary to maintain life, liberty and property is the the most basic function of government. The Democratic Party’s need to replace police with social justice cadres is destroying the quality of life in big cities at the same time telework advances have made living in expensive cities unnecessary for vast swathes of American technology and service workers. With the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots that destroyed businesses built up over entire lifetimes and you have a recipe for increasing numbers of middle class Americans to flee cities Democratic polices have made unlivable.
To quote Ernest Hemingway:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “”I had a lot of friends.”
For “friends” read “cronies” (or “looters” if you prefer). Previously Democratic politicians were mostly content to take their piece of the action to keep the graft coming. That’s the “gradually” part. Social Justice Democrats want the entire pie, and they want it now, all of it, even if it means destroying American cities to do it.
They’re eagerly devouring America’s seed corn, hoping to bring down the entire system and replace it with their neo-Marxist rule.
That’s the “suddenly” portion.
The physical and human capital built up in American cities took innumerable lifetimes to build up, but Social Justice is destroying it all in the space of a few years.
Individuals and institutions were allowed to choose to align their investments with their values. They could sleep at night knowing that their capital was not supporting causes with which they disagreed, morally or politically. The only cost associated with this socially conscious undertaking was a hit to investment returns, which was inevitable but was accepted voluntarily as the price of peace of mind.
But these days, that’s simply not enough for the Big Sisters of Social Justice Warriorhood. Why make something voluntary when they can force it down your throat? Hence the push for Environmental Social Governance (ESG), a backdoor way to impose far-left values on corporations without having to deal with shareholders at all.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) is the biggest trend in finance and business. Index funds focused on sustainability oversee $250 billion of assets. Corporate leaders signaled their alignment with ESG when more than 180 CEOs signed the Business Roundtable statement on business purpose.
In contrast to the older ethical investment movement, which accepted that morally constrained investment strategies incur costs, ESG proponents claim that investors following ESG precepts earn higher risk-adjusted returns because companies with high ESG scores are lower-risk. Thus, their stock price will outperform, whereas those firms with low ESG scores are higher-risk, leading them to underperform.
This supposition conflicts with finance theory. Once lower risk is incorporated into a higher stock price, the stock will be more highly valued, but investors will have to be satisfied with lower expected returns. Unsurprisingly, claims of ESG outperformance are contradicted by studies.
Claims that ESG-favored stocks outperformed during the Covid-19 market meltdown disappear once other determinants of stock performance are controlled for. ESG factors were negatively associated with stock performance during the market recovery phase in the second quarter of 2020.
The corollary of the ESG thesis—that low-ESG-rated “sin stocks” are condemned to underperform the stock market—is decisively refuted by the data. When institutional investors “went underweight” by selling down their holdings in tobacco stocks, it made them cheaper for other investors to buy and make money, especially when they subsequently outperformed the market.
The profit opportunities that ESG creates for Wall Street, however, are clear. BlackRock charges 46 cents annually for every $100 invested in its iShares Global Clean Energy ETF and just 4 cents for its iShares fund linked to the S&P 500.
The Trump Department of Labor’s controversial rule on ESG in corporate retirement plans became final in October 2020. In effect, the rule calls Wall Street’s ESG bluff: “You claim ESG investing boosts investment returns net of costs; Show us on the basis of generally accepted investment theories.” Rather than use the Congressional Review Act to nullify this rule, the Biden Department of Labor says it won’t enforce it.
ESG is supposedly about the objective assessment of investment risk. The stated purpose of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a body supported and funded by Michael Bloomberg, is to provide a disclosure regime that better enables investors to assess risk, climate risk being a major one.
At the same time, the SASB aims to harness the power of capital markets for political ends. Just as the Covid pandemic was sweeping the globe, Bloomberg declared climate change the biggest threat to America and the world. “How do you replace dirty energy?” he asks. “Stop rewarding companies from making it.” ESG thus becomes politics pursued by other means.
Climate risk is primarily about the potential costs of future climate regulation, but the cookie-cutter climate disclosures required by ESG standard-setters are systematically misleading because they treat the world as a homogenous regulatory space. Climate regulations are made by states and vary from the stringent and unachievable in parts of Europe to the virtually nonexistent in many other parts of the world.
Requiring corporations to bind themselves to unilateral greenhouse-gas targets imposes a penalty in competing against companies less beholden to ESG ratings (the unlevel playing field). Forcing corporations to lose market share and shrink their operations constitutes a covert form of divestment. Shareholders lose for no climate gain.
Regulation by governments is not only more efficient but also possesses democratic legitimacy. Proponents claim that ESG is necessary to achieve inclusive capitalism, but political power wielded by a handful of billionaire Wall Street oligarchs provides a pretty good definition of insider capitalism.
The weaponization of finance by billionaire climate activists, foundations, and NGOs threatens to end capitalism as we know it by degrading its ability to function as an economic system that generates higher living standards. This usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic government invites a populist backlash.
The Real Clear Foundation report leans heavily on the environmental end of things, but ESG also has a strong Social Justice component, as this clip from Joe Rogan’s interview of VJ/Podcaster Adam Curry discusses:
ESG is yet another attempt to impose top-down wokeness by subterfuge on people and institutions that would never voluntarily agree to it.
This is a video about Sharks! More specifically, about Sharks! the art project, and about the war between conceptual artists and a London-area conservation planning bureaucracy:
Plus a side story about how The Guardian is garbage.
Gun owners in San Jose, California, will soon face a yearly tax and be required to carry additional insurance after their city council voted unanimously Tuesday evening to impose the new measures.
The forthcoming fee for gun ownership in the city has not yet been determined, but officials said that anyone found to be in noncompliance will have their weapons confiscated.
The city council’s aim is to try to recoup the cost of responding to gun incidents such as shootings and deaths. According to the Pacific Council on Research and Evaluation, which studied the issue and sent a representative to testify before the panel, gun-related incidents cost the city roughly $63 million every year in the way of paying for police officers, medics and other expenses, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Chief Justice John Marshall said that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and here the attempt is to destroy lawful gun ownership by imposing collective guilt on the law-abiding for the actions of the criminal and turning law-abiding gun owners into criminals for refusing to comply with an unconstitutional, punitive tax. The endgame, as always, complete civilian gun confiscation.
Next up: A tax on sober drivers to pay for the actions of drunk ones.
Meanwhile, in other California war against guns news, various challenges to various California gun law are pending an en-banc hearing on Duncan v Bonta. (Previously.)
