If by “the World” you mean “the EU,” then the answer is “maybe a little bit“:
In a historic shift, the European Union has imposed sanctions against Communist China for the first time in more than thirty years. Brussels froze Chinese assets and sanctioned four senior Chinese officials for their role in human rights violations inside China — the first measure of its kind since the end of the Cold War.
“The move from Brussels represents the first punitive measure against Beijing since the arms embargo that the then-twelve member states imposed in 1989 on Communist China due to the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square,” the French TV network Euronews reported.
The Associated Press reported the details of the EU sanctions:
The EU targeted four senior officials in Xinjiang. The sanctions involve a freeze on the officials’ assets and a ban on them traveling in the bloc. European citizens and companies are not permitted to provide them with financial assistance.
The 27-nation bloc also froze the assets of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau, which it describes as a “state-owned economic and paramilitary organization” that runs Xinjiang and controls its economy.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the measures were part of “intensive diplomacy” by the U.K, the United States, Canada and the 27-nation EU to force action amid mounting evidence about serious rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim people.
The Reuters news agency described the significance of the EU measures: “While mainly symbolic, the EU sanctions mark a significant hardening in the bloc’s policy towards China, which Brussels long regarded as a benign trading partner but now views as a systematic abuser of basic rights and freedoms.”
Those sanctions are so anemic that they make an actual slap on the wrist look like a knockout punch from a in-his-prime Mike Tyson. Anemic though they were, the United States, the UK and Canada joined in:
In coordination with the newly announced European Union sanctions on select Beijing officials for the alleged ongoing major crackdown on Muslim Uighurs, the Biden administration has hit Beijing with its own punitive sanctions, setting tensions further on edge just two days after the conclusion of the fiery Alaska summit.
The US sanctions target two top Chinese officials for “serious human rights abuses” against Uighur minorities concentrated in northwest Xinjiang province. Along with the EU, the sanctions were coordinated with Canada and the United Kingdom, which rolled out with similarly targeted sanctions that included additional individuals, according to a Treasury Department statement.
“Chinese authorities will continue to face consequences as long as atrocities occur in Xinjiang,” Treasury’s Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control Andrea M. Gacki said…
“Treasury is committed to promoting accountability for the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention and torture, against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities,” she added. The statement identified the following individuals that fall under the new US action:
The US designated Wang Junzheng, the Secretary of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and Chen Mingguo, Director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.
“These individuals are designated pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13818, which builds upon and implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and targets perpetrators of serious human rights abuse and corruption,” the Treasury Department added.
The UK government meanwhile said of the coordinated actions in a statement: “Acting together sends the clearest possible signal that the international community is united in its condemnation of China’s human rights violations in Xinjiang and the need for Beijing to end its discriminatory and oppressive practices in the region.”
Such small, targeted sanctions are basically one step up from the dreaded Strongly Worded Letter, and will not hurt China nearly as badly as the Trump Administration’s trade sanctions or the designation that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous. Nor did The Hague’s ruling against China on its South China Sea territorial claims seem to have any perceivable effect on its actions.
But these declarations at least start to get the bureaucratic wheels rolling. The Magnitsky Act designation is treated with real ire by foreign government, so presumably some actual consequences (however slight) might result.
But stronger medicine is required to deter China from its many criminal enterprises, and no one in the international community seems to know what might actually deter them. Or the gumption to pursue them.
The US State Department’s former lead investigator who oversaw the COVID-19 task force into the origins of the virus believes SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and may have been the product of bioweapons research, according to Fox News.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” David Asher – now a senior fellow at the Hudson institute – told Fox News in an interview, adding: “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”
Asher has long been a “follow the money” guy who has worked on some of the most classified intelligence investigations for the State Department and Treasury under both Democratic and Republican administrations. He led the team that uncovered the international nuclear procurement network run by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, AQ Khan, and uncovered key parts of North Korea’s secret uranium enrichment. He believes the Chinese Communist Party has been involved in a massive cover-up during the past 14 months. -Fox News
“And if you believe, as I do, that this might have been a weapons vector gone awry, not deliberately released, but in development and then somehow leaked, this has turned out to be the greatest weapon in history,” Asher told a Hudson Institute panel discussing the origins of the pandemic. “You’ve taken out 15 to 20 percent of global GDP. You’ve killed millions of people. The Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economies roared back to being number one in the entire G20.”
According to Asher – who interfaced with the Chinese government as the State Department’s lead representative during the 2003 SARS outbreak – the CCP’s behavior surrounding COVID-19 reminds him of criminal investigations he’s overseen.
“Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all the hallmarks of guilt are associated with this. And the fact that the initial cluster of victims surrounded the very institute that was doing the highly dangerous, if not dubious research is significant,” he said.
One wonders who it was that first gave the MSM their marching orders: “Never say ‘China virus!’ Never say that it might have come from the giant viral lab researching coronavirus in the same city it originated in!” The fact that they continue to label this very logical inference a “conspiracy theory” after Trump has left the White House suggests a desperate need to please China among our so-called media elites.
What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office? Well, there’s putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him. There’s telling the American people that their kids can’t go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something. There’s another war in the Middle East. Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.
His administration had someone named “Ducklo” who was mean to women. He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women. And Neera Tanden’s confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.
If this is normalcy, what’s a freak show look like?
Are you * voters starting to feel a bit of buyer’s remorse? Let me ask it another way. Everybody enjoying your $2,000 check? Oh well. On the upside, they impeached Trump…and failed. Again, after sucking up two weeks of the Senate’s calendar. So, what do you have to show for yourself, * voters?
The massive coronavirus relief bill racing through Congress provides substantial new health-insurance subsidies to upper-income households. A 60-year-old couple with two kids making $200,000 would receive a subsidy of $12,000. In some parts of the country where premiums are high, families with incomes exceeding half a million dollars will qualify for thousands of dollars in subsidies to buy an ObamaCare plan. In contrast, a family of four making $40,000 receives an added benefit of just $1,600.
It also includes 25 weeks of paid leave for bureaucrats with children in closed schools. Meanwhile, parents with closed schools held hostage to teacher’s union who aren’t bureaucrats can drop dead.
Newly minted as a committeeman, Madigan was sent to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a delegate representing Daley’s interests. He voted for the most constricting “pension protection” clause in the nation, which guaranteed government-employee unions benefits the government couldn’t afford in exchange for their backing of the Democratic machine, tying the state to an anchor of massive debt in perpetuity. He also voted for changes in the property-tax system that would later make him a millionaire through his law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, which specialized in appealing the tax assessments of the most valuable real estate in the Midwest and skimming off the reductions granted by political allies who heard the firm’s appeals.
Later that year, Madigan was elected state representative for the 22nd House District of Illinois. He would go on to be reelected 25 times, eventually being elevated to House speaker after he was made gerrymanderer-in-chief following the 1980 Census. The redistricting process had been expected to hurt Democrats badly, but Madigan’s cartographical cunning staved off a political bloodbath and earned him the title of “political wizard” from the Chicago Tribune. Many representatives now owed their seats to his pen, and they elected him speaker in 1983.
For all but two of the next 38 years, he would hold the speaker’s gavel, wielding parliamentary rules that gave him more power than any other legislative leader in the country. His one-man rule was finally merged with the party power structure in 1998, when he became chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois. This made him a one-stop shop for special interests looking to pass or kill legislation. Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility provider, last year was forced to pay a $200 million fine for attempting to bribe Madigan by providing no-work contracts and other perks to the speaker’s inner circle. Though he denied wrongdoing, the scandal ultimately hastened his downfall.
The wreckage of Madigan’s decades-long reign is obvious. When he became speaker in 1983, Illinois had a perfect credit rating. Since 2013, it’s had the worst credit rating in the nation, just one notch above junk. The reason is that while Daley built his political army with federal money, Madigan built his with state money, specifically state debt. Political foot soldiers owed generous pensions, early retirements, and other perks to the speaker’s protection. His fingerprints are on nearly every bill that enhanced state pension benefits, borrowed money to cover their costs, or shorted contributions to the systems to avoid difficult choices over the course of his 50 years in power.
The result of all those unsustainable promises is the most severe public-pension crisis in U.S. history, one with far-reaching implications for Illinois government. Since 2000, the state has cut spending on child welfare and other programs that help those in need by one-third after adjusting for inflation. Over the same time, spending on pensions and pension debt has increased 501 percent. The same story plays out at the local level, as Illinoisans are saddled with property-tax bills on par with their mortgages — bills that sap home equity out of once-prosperous Black communities, particularly — in exchange for sub-par services that get worse each year.
If you haven’t read New York magazine’s interview with David Schor, an Obama campaign veteran and liberal data analyst, it’s worth your time.
His post-mortem of the 2020 election shows how Democrats have increasingly become a party of college-educated whites, whose hard-left views aren’t fully shared by the black and Hispanic communities they claim to champion. His findings echo the concerns of older progressive analysts such as John Judis.
Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, Schor finds, Democrats gained 7 percent among white college grads, but lost 2 percent of African Americans and 8 to 9 percent of Latinos, as well as about 5 percent of Asian Americans.
Socialism and “defund the police” were the chief reasons, Schor says: “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”
Even on immigration, “If you look at, for example, decriminalizing border crossings, that’s not something that a majority of Hispanic voters support,” Schor says.
Speaking of Biden nominations in trouble, Xavier “I Hate Nuns” Becerra’s nomination is no slam dunk either.
When I saw a headline on a deadly crash involving an SUV carrying 25 people, I went “Obviously it must have been full of illegal aliens.” Well, guess what?
In a just world not plagued by a fake and corrupt media, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) would be on the edge of resigning his office today, not over a handful of times he allegedly got aggressive with women, but over his sociopathic executive order that required nursing homes to accept patients still infected with the coronavirus.
That, after all, is the real scandal here, the true scandal, an act so monstrous Cuomo knew he had to cover it up, which he did by falsely blaming the order on the Trump administration and then lying about just how many seniors died as a result.
But instead of being pressured to resign over that, he’s being hit with perfectly-timed allegations of sexual misconduct, two involving former staffers, one involving a complete stranger he met at a wedding.
As these things go, while his alleged behavior is inappropriate (especially in the workplace), it’s nothing compared to the credible allegations against His Fraudulency Joe Biden, which involve a full-blown sexual assault allegation. Biden got away with much, much worse, so…
So what’s going on? Why is America’s corrupt media not at all interested in some 15,000 dead senior citizens while they tar and feather Cuomo over the allegations he made three left-wing women uncomfortable?
The answer is obvious…
Four other Democrat governors issued the same sociopathic nursing home order as Cuomo. Four other Democrats ordered infected coronavirus patients be admitted into nursing home facilities where 1) the most vulnerable live, and 2) they’re not set up to handle an infectious virus.
What this means is that if the corrupt media were to do the right thing (like that will ever happen) and go after Cuomo over his deadly nursing home policy, it would open a Pandora’s Box against these four Democrat governors and the Democrat party as a whole, which is something our fake media will never do.
Democrats must be protected at all costs, even if the cost is thousands and thousands of lives.
So welcoming was the Kennedy clan that the exes of either sex stayed on as friends. Andrew put a stop to that. For Kerry, that meant no more former boyfriends, not even those whom the Kennedys regarded as family. That was the word, and Andrew was dead serious about it. The new rule reinforced the doubts the family had had about Andrew from the start: he wasn’t fun; he didn’t get fun. He was, to put it mildly, a spoilsport. Unlike the Kennedys, too, he didn’t mask his ambition with charm, and no one, not even his in-laws, would stand in his way. And, as Andrew’s star at HUD rose, he seemed increasingly to regard those in-laws with disdain.
He hated the gatherings in Hyannis; he always felt like the odd man out. The joshing around, the freewheeling talks—Andrew was just too tightly wound to join in. One night, as was typical, the family began singing songs, each member singing a favorite. “The Kennedys are terrible singers, but it’s one of the great joys,” explained Douglas Kennedy. “One time Joe [Jr.] is up there, and he sings ‘Danny Boy,’ and everyone is happy about it. Except Andrew. He’s on the couch with his arms folded, looking disgusted by the whole thing. Everyone is calling for someone else to sing a song. ‘Andrew, you sing,’ someone says. But he says, ‘No, I’m not Irish.’ So someone else says, ‘Sing something Italian.’ Andrew still won’t, so I sing ‘Volare.’”
Andrew stopped going to Hyannis at one point, a family member recalled. But he made sure to be with the clan at any gathering covered by the media. Early on, the family noticed that at every visit to Arlington Cemetery to honor their father or uncle, Andrew situated himself just so. “He would always find the exact perfect place to stand so he could be in the newspaper the next day,” recalled a relative. “So if that meant grabbing [Ethel’s] hand and walking to the grave, or standing next to John or Caroline, he would get himself in the frame. That was his whole thrust.”
[Kenneth Pollack’s Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness] identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.
The education system in Arab societies drilled in these values to the point that they became central to soldiers’ behavior. “Typical Arab educational practices relentlessly inculcated the values, preferences, and preferred behavior—the culture—of the wider society,” Pollack writes.
Pollack also explains that Arab military programs are modeled on the educational methods of the larger society, reinforcing certain patterns of behavior and conditioning soldiers to act and think in “ways that reflect the values and priorities of the dominant culture.”
I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.
Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.
Sad news: Austin-based movie theater chain The Alamo Drafthouse has filed for Chapter 11. That’s reorganization, so most theaters will stay open. A good thing, too, since I’ll probably see Godzilla vs. Kong there…
Papa Johns founder John Schnatter vindicated. Laundry Service “the branding company hired which was hired by Papa John’s to improve its image, was caught on a ‘hot mic’ brainstorming ways in which it could use comments made by Schnatter to damage his image.”
It’s also possible every guy they showed this too to get feedback was terrified he’d get fired for sexual harassment if he mentioned it looked like a money shot in a porn video.
"I have always put my own money into #tailsofjoy. For years, every time a dog walked by, my husband would say, 'There goes our beach house'."-@ElayneBoosler
Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business analyzed the plan and found that the massive spending splurge—which costs roughly $13,260 per federal taxpayer—would only cause a “slight uptick” in economic growth in 2021. The analysts warned that this minor boost would just be “instant gratification,” and that the skyrocketing government debt caused by the blowout legislation would undermine any gains in the medium-to-long term.
“The existence of the debt saps the rest of the economy,” Wharton analyst Efraim Berkovich said. “When the government is running budget deficits, the money that could have gone to productive investment is redirected.”
“Effectively, what we’re doing is taking money from [some] people and giving it to other people for consumption purposes,” he continued. “That has value for social safety nets and redistributive benefits, but longer-term, you’re taking away from the capital that we need to grow our economy in the future.”
Biden’s costly plan would explode the national debt. This, per Wharton, would lead to a “crowding out” effect over the coming years as more loan money is taken away from productive business/private sector investments and instead consumed by government debt.
So the Biden Administration hit an Iranian-backed militia stronghold in Syria in retaliation for attacks on Americans. I know we’re supposed to compare Warmonger Biden to Peacemaker Trump for the cognitive dissonance luls, but this is similar to President Trump’s missile strike on a Syrian chemical weapon faculty in April of his first year in office. I’m sure there’s plenty of Biden foreign policy stupidity ahead to rail against, but in this case it’s not significantly different from Trump policy.
A surprising body of research links increases in the minimum wage to increases in criminal offending by those most likely to lose jobs as a result of the wage hike. One analysis concluded that raising the federal minimum to $15 could create crime costs of up to $2.5 billion—a bill that would be borne disproportionately by the very people whom the wage hike is meant to help.
The minimum wage’s economic trade-offs are well known. It raises the take-home pay of some, while causing others—particularly teens, young adults, and less-skilled workers—to lose their jobs. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a $15 minimum would boost 17 million workers’ earnings by 11.8 percent, on average, but would also cost from 1 million to 3 million jobs.
Higher wages could make working more appealing than illegal activity for some. For others, put out of work by the hike, losing a job heightens the risk that they will go on to commit both property and violent crimes. After all, the people most likely to feel the economic downsides of a minimum-wage hike, in the form of lost jobs—the young—are also among those most likely to commit such crimes. Youths aged 16 to 24 make up just 12 percent of the population but were 23 percent of those arrested as of 2019; they account for a full third of those making less than $15 an hour. The CBO estimated that 16- to 19-year-olds alone would account for half of the job lost if the minimum wage reaches $15.
In one paper from last year, researchers evaluated decades of data to consider the relationship between minimum-wage hikes and crime among 16- to 24-year-olds, finding that the wage hikes tend to correlate with increased property crimes, particularly larcenies—a sign that some unemployed people decide to earn their keep through theft rather than finding another job. Minimum-wage hikes also lead to increases in disorderly-conduct arrests, indicating an increase in loitering and other idleness among teens and young adults. Based on this data, the researchers estimate that hiking the minimum to $15 would lead to an additional 423,000 property crimes, creating the aforementioned $2.5 billion in damages.
Along with price increases, employers may reduce hours, and Belman and Wolfson note that “[i]t has long been suggested that employers may respond to minimum wage increases by reducing spending on training, fringe benefits and working conditions valued by employees.”
Another important finding is that employers often respond to higher mandated wages by replacing low wage workers with those who have more education, skills and experience which make them more productive. This adjustment may have little effect on the observable employment numbers, but the effect is devastating for those who are replaced. Employers can be forced to pay higher wages, but they can’t be forced to hire or retain employees whose contributions don’t match the higher wage.
Some studies (see Clemens 2019) suggest that the pace of job creation slows when mandated wages rise. The increases also accelerate automation, which reduces the number of entry-level jobs and further penalizes those whom the increases are meant to help. In coming years, the combined effect of substitution, slower job creation, and accelerated automation is likely to be a growing core of workers, many of whom are young and poorly educated, who are unemployed and unemployable.
Social activists and progressive editorial boards now regard the minimum wage as another welfare program that can reduce the costs of programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and can reduce inequality. But the minimum wage is very poorly targeted for these purposes. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that “roughly 40 percent of workers directly affected by the $15 option in 2025 would be members of families with incomes more than three times the federal poverty level.” If the goal is to aid low-wage households, rather than teenagers and other part-time workers in middle-income and affluent families, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would be far more effective, because it is designed to aid the working poor.
History will record Covid-induced lockdowns as the product of pseudoscientific ideology, manifestations of an unprecedented mass hysteria and drummed-up fear.
When Sweden strayed from the herd of nations hellbent on lockdown, it suffered intense vilification. The modellers who agitated for lockdown as a profoundly necessary step opined that veering from the mainstream playbook would see Sweden suffer some 100,000 excess deaths, double its normal annual death toll. Daily articles, notably in The Guardian, berated the country or the murder that would surely ensue if it didn’t rejoin the herd.
A lot was riding on this. In taking up the lockdown baton from China, the world was conducting a dangerous experiment. That experiment involved tearing up the public health policy guidelines for respiratory virus epidemics of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the US’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and many others.
These guidelines were the results of a century of evidence and deliberation that was summarily ignored when the virus arrived. Detailed statements of principle governed the evidential processes required to revise them. These too were ignored.
The basis for all of this was the assurance of the WHO’s Bruce Aylward that China’s lockdown had contained its epidemic. This in turn was based on speculation that everyone was susceptible to Covid-19 and that, without lockdown, exponential growth of disease and death was inevitable.
Snip.
But Sweden did not lock down, becoming the one of the most alluring control experiments the world has ever seen. And it did not suffer 100,000 excess deaths. Not even close. Instead, this is what happened:
Whether you are a lockdown fan drawing trend lines that suggest Sweden had 8000 excess deaths or a skeptic concluding there were none because of a build-up of very susceptible people from an abnormally low death rate in 2019, this reality dealt a devastating blow to the lockdown theory and the models used to justify lockdown.
Covid-19, it turned out, was not only far less deadly than modellers had predicted, but they couldn’t credit this to the lockdowns they’d promoted. Sweden clearly showed that failure to lock down did not constitute genocide.
The favorite hobby of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Joe Biden’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, is targeting Little Sisters of the Poor. He “chose to pursue this litigation even though it is completely meritless; even though it would, if successful, punish nuns who simply want to carry out their calling to care for the indigent elderly; and even though only ideological zealots intolerant of moral views different from their own can take any pleasure in its continuation.” Every knee must bend.
Massive explosion rocks Cameron, Texas (about 75 miles northeast of Austin) after a train collided with 18-wheeler. Fortunately there were no injuries.
Biden’s energy plans are bad for our national security, economy, public health, and overall quality of life. But the American people’s ingenuity and creativity — and the very nature of how our planet and energy systems work — mean all is not lost.
Under Biden’s attempts to “phase out” natural gas, petroleum, and coal, the prices we pay for energy will go up.
This should be no surprise to Biden and his political allies, since costs have soared everywhere “going green” has been tried. Californians are paying 30% more for electricity than they did 10 years ago. In Denmark, where wind energy became a priority in the mid-1990s, prices have more than doubled.
Because everything we do, from the moment our alarms go off every morning to when we turn off the lights at night, depends on energy, these higher prices will be a heavy burden for American families. Expensive energy means producing, marketing, transporting, and selling goods and services will also become more expensive, creating less a ripple effect than a tidal wave.
The rising cost of living will hurt the poor the most. Low-income Americans already spend a higher percentage of their paychecks on electricity and gas, and they have less disposable income to afford higher prices for necessities.
Coupled with the tax increases that would be needed to further subsidize unreliable wind and solar energy, Biden’s plans would cripple the poor and even put their health in jeopardy.
An equally critical consequence of moving away from fossil fuels is the destabilization of our national security. Since becoming the world’s dominant energy producer and a net energy exporter, America has a stronger influence in global negotiations and advancing the cause of freedom.
Thanks in large part to America’s growing influence over OPEC and Russia, multiple Middle Eastern nations have committed to normalizing relations with Israel, an unprecedented development National Review described as “something suspiciously resembling peace.” It’s the reason President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.
America used to go to war over energy, but now we’re actively loosening the grip of unstable, totalitarian countries not just on oil markets, but on the global balance of power. This is good news for Americans, who benefit from a safe and peaceful nation, and also for the entire world.
Sounds like the entire union should be fired, then.
"Teacher's Unions: We won't let your kids go back to school, but we will make sure the guy jacking off in front of Middle Schoolers can't be fired!" pic.twitter.com/Fkbqlv7bG5
If you wanted to get your hands on Gwyenth Paltrow’s $95 vibrator, you’re too late; it’s sold out. The way that woman creates ridiculous overpriced crap that gets everyone talking about what ridiculous overpriced crap it is, which then makes said ridiculous overpriced crap sell out almost immediately, makes me think she’s actually some sort of marketing genius…
“We just wanted to give our viewers a heads-up that the show contains jokes, comedy, laughter, and free speech,” said a Disney spokesperson. “It feels very dated nowadays, since the show is packed full of problematic things like jokes, innovation, and quality. It’s like, come on, people, this is 2021, not the Dark Ages!”
If you or I can’t sleep at night, we might read a book or waste time on the Internet. When Colin Furze can’t sleep at night, he makes a hydraulic powered shark head.
Truth:
While I don’t know how to be “less white,” I do know how to drink less coke
Regular readers know that Austin has been climbing out of a once in a century winter storm that froze our roads and wrecked our power grid. Right now it’s still 19°F, but it’s supposed to warm up to a balmy 39°F this afternoon…
Could be worse: ERCOT says that their quick thinking to impose rotating blackouts prevented the physical destruction of the Texas Interconnect Grid. That may even be true, but it’s sort of like a teenager saying “Thanks to my quick thinking, I only managed to burn down the garage and not the entire house!”
Passage of this bill this year would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”
But for the fact that he’s president — given his track record of having been wrong on every defense and foreign policy issue for almost five decades — it would be easy to ignore his assessment of China. This is a man who said in 2019, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Despite the difficulty of being wrong on both occasions Biden managed it.
Focus for a moment on what he said about the conversation with Xi. It is natural that China would be spending billions on transportation given the size of the country and the billions who inhabit it. Whether it is true that China is spending billions on climate change is another matter. It has, for decades, been spending billions on coal-fired electricity generation plants and has only recently made noises about reducing pollution.
But “climate change” is probably the last priority for China while it is spending far greater sums on its military and cyberwar capabilities. Xi was clearly trying to gull Biden into some sort of race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we could strangle our economy while China doesn’t do the same to its own. China may well be trying to reduce pollution — Beijing is infamous for its barely breathable brown air — but how much it is really doing remains to be seen.
Biden apparently wants to be known as the “climate change president.” If Xi can increase Biden’s desire to make climate change his top priority for legislation and regulation (which seems altogether likely in any event) China will be greatly advantaged by Biden’s concomitant reductions in spending on the U.S. military and intelligence communities.
To say that Biden is soft on China only proves the speaker’s command of the obvious.
What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company – which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood’s orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit – was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood’s own investors against the company’s predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.
The #mainstreetrevolution is a myth. Zero commissions and gamified apps were designed to feed flows to the two most influential WS trading houses. A few HFs got hurt, but if retail is moving toward more trading and away from fundamentals, WS owns that game. #Stonks by design. https://t.co/Y4raF0jiM3
— Cassandra (@michaeljburry) February 9, 2021
Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it’s because Robinhood’s back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.
SpaceX wants to bring fast satellite broadband internet to the world — and in particular, to internet users in far-flung, rural locations, where download speeds are low and prices are high.
One of the first places in America to get SpaceX Starlink service was Alaska, the state with the lowest population density in the country — just one person per square mile. The company next extended service into Canada (population density: three people per square mile), followed last month by service in the UK — a big jump in concentration, with 650 people per square mile. (Even in the UK, there are plenty of isolated locations where internet service is expensive, slow — or both).
SpaceX’s globe-spanning satellite constellation should be capable of providing 100 megabit-per-second internet service to anywhere by the end of this year. You can expect that a lot of countries, no matter how urbanized they are (or not), will be lining up to sign up for Starlink service. And the more countries Starlink signs up as customers, the better the prospects for the SpaceX subsidiary’s promised IPO.
One country that most definitely does not want Starlink, however, is Russia.
Snip.
As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.
Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030.
Those numbers alone tell you Sphere will never be built, Starlink or no Starlink. Russia is a profoundly broke and profoundly broken country. Sphere is just the sort of prestige project Putin loves to announce to much fanfare, national greatness vaporware that either never gets built or else creeps out into the real world years (or even decades) late and in much-reduced form, like only ordering 100 T-14 Armata tanks.
Iranian fuel tanker convoy to Afghanistan goes boom.
The media want you to know that it’s Trump’s fault they couldn’t investigate such trivial scandals as Lincoln Project pedophiles, because how would they have time when Orange Man Bad?
Speaking of the Lincoln Project, founder Rick Wilson managed to pay off his mortgage early just as the John Weaver pedophilia scandal was breaking. How fortuitous!
Back in The Before Time, The Long Long Ago, newspapers actually defended free speech.
Back in 1977, the New York Times maintained that as long as Nazis did not engage in any illegality, they were “entitled” to the protection of the law, and then put the onus of maintaining peace on the Skokie residents:
The argument that they will provoke violence simply by appearing on the streets of Skokie only emphasizes the obligation of the police to keep the peace—and gives an opportunity the people of Skokie to demonstrate their respect for the law.
These days, the Times board will chase you out of the building for allowing anyone to voice an opinion that chafes against the brittle sensitivities of its writers. The paper employs full-time speech monitors to vet wrongthink.
The cancel mob comes for Baen Books. Book editors and writers kindly tell them to get stuffed.
Special for Black History Month:
Here are the names of the 200+ slaves owned by Kamala Harris’ ancestor Hamilton Brown in Jamaica in 1817. One of the largest planters in Jamaica, Brown now has a town named after him, Brown’s Town pic.twitter.com/6QnBpEQyez
Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg told employees they need to “inflict pain” on Apple because Apple won’t let Facebook steal every single bit of personal data from Apple devices.
“Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist.” “A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an ‘inherently racist practice.’ The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.” How many fingers, Winston?
A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome. pic.twitter.com/3HInc2qKb9
“Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives.” “‘Here are the adjectives I identify with,’ Becker put on social media. ‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me. It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,’ Becker later explained. ‘Like “creepy,” “weird,” or “off-putting.” That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.'”
The US Army’s main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, is about to receive a new multipurpose super tank round that can breach concrete walls, pulverize obstacles, and destroy bunkers, according to Forbes.
The Advanced Multi-Purpose, or AMP, is specially designed for the M1 Abrams to replace the rapidly aging inventory of tank munitions.
The new round is long overdue as tank crews on the modern battlefields in the Middle East have been confronted by new evolving threats.
Unlike the M829 depleted uranium round, which can punch through almost anything – it tends to have difficulties blowing up vehicles or houses, as it just zips right through those types of targets. The new AMP can destroy everything the M829 cannot.
Well, duh. The M829 is an APFSDS round, a kinetic kill anti-tank munition that does its damage via spawling and hydrodynamic shock effects. It’s not designed to breach buildings. For that you’d probably fire a M830A1 HEAT round. But that too is designed for maximum effect vs. armor rather than concrete.
“The AMP adds an important new capability. The existing canister round is only for short-range use with a maximum reach of about 500 meters. This makes it useless for dealing with one of the biggest threats to tanks, infantry equipped with anti-tank guided missiles like the Russian-made AT-14 Kornet, used in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. When used in airburst mode, the AMP can target groups of personnel at ranges of up to 2,000 meters: even if it does not disable a missile team, the round is likely to distract them enough so that they are not able to keep a missile on course.”
Another important new capability is breaching walls. Currently, making a breach an infantry assault requires engineers to get next to the wall and emplace explosives. Three rounds of AMP will create a thirty-by-fifty-inch hole clean through a double-thickness reinforced concrete wall, big enough for troops to advance through. This includes cutting through the steel reinforcement bars, and breaching can be carried out from several hundred meters away,” said Forbes.
Forbes described the new round has “three different fusing options” for blowing up different targets.
“With Point Detonation, the round explodes on contact with the target — this mode will make it effective against targets like light armored vehicles. Set to Point Detonation-Delay, the round does not explode immediately on contact – this is the mode used against obstacles and bunkers, as it gives enough time to penetrate deeply into concrete or other material before exploding. In the Airburst mode, the round explodes at a pre-set height above the ground, spraying the area below with tungsten shrapnel – this is the antipersonnel mode,” said Forbes.
On Jan. 30, China North Industries Group Corporation announced on state-owned television that Type 15 (also known as ZTQ-15) lightweight battle tank entered service with the Xinjiang Military Command of the People’s Liberation Army Ground Force (PLAGF).
China Central Television (CCTV) said an undisclosed number of Type 15s were delivered to a PLAGF regiment in Xinjiang. CCTV broadcaster said it was “the first lightweight tank to join the military command.”
The Xinjiang mention is interesting. I’ve long wondered if China’s brutal treatment of the Uighers would provoke an indigenous revolt. Maybe it already has?
The broadcaster said the Type 15s are outfitted with special oxygen equipment to allow the tanks to operate at high altitudes.
Janes said no confirmation on how many Type 15s were deployed, but it appears these new tanks will significantly increase PLAGF’s combat capabilities in the region.
The Type 15 was announced in 2018, but now they’re making it out into the field. It evidently has a 105mm rifled main gun.
The Army recently started its light tank prototype assessment, according to Jane’s. Part of the vehicle assessment phase will rely on solider input, and tanker crews will be able to put the MPF prototypes through their paces themselves, as well as contribute feedback in order to improve platform characteristics.
The Army is specific in what it wants the Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle to accomplish, specifying that the MPF must be able to “neutralize enemy prepared positions and bunkers and defeat heavy machine guns and armored vehicle threats during offensive operations or when conducting defensive operations against attacking enemies.”
Though the Army’s light tank project would be a radical departure from steadily increasing main battle tank weight, it would not be the first time Army leadership opted for a smaller, more mobile armored platform. In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the United States developed the M551 Sheridan light tank, a dedicated armored reconnaissance/airborne assault vehicle.
Snip.
Two companies have submitted prototypes to the Army: BAE Systems, and General Dynamics Land Systems division.
BAE Systems has the advantage of drawing upon and updating their M8 Armored Gun System, a mid-1990s project that attempted to serve as an air-mobile light tank for American airborne troops. BAE’s bid appears to carry over some features of the M8 project, including a 105mm main gun, possibly with an autoloader, and with more modern armor features that the company claims offers equal protection as their “highly survivable” Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle.
On the other hand, General Dynamics benefits from extensive tank design and manufacture experience, as the company builds the venerable M1 Abrams main battle tank. Their bid is based on GD’s AJAX armored fighting vehicle and features a modified version of the Abrams turret. This could indicate a desire to retain the Abrams’ larger 120mm main gun, despite housing it on the smaller MPF platform. Lastly, GD claims that their light tank would benefit from a high-performance diesel engine that would afford a high power to weight ratio.
The return of the light tank is an interesting development, since most nations have opted for infantry fighting vehicles (remember, Bradleys were able to take out T-72s in Desert Storm) or wheeled combat vehicles like the Stryker or Mowag Piranha for similar roles. But if you were looking for a good use case for light tanks, a guerilla war in Xinjiang or the Chinese-Indian border probably fits the bill.
Speaking of which, China and India have evidently agreed to pull their troops back from the disputed border region. (Previously.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday handed over the indigenously developed Arjun Main Battle Tank (MK-1A) to the Indian Army at a ceremony in Chennai. The army will get 118 units of the Main Battle Tank, indigenously designed, developed and manufactured by CVRDE and DRDO along with 15 academic institutions, eight labs and several MSMEs.
The Arjun Main Battle Tank project was initiated by DRDO in 1972 with the Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (CVRDE) as its lead laboratory. The objective was to create a “state-of-the-art tank with superior fire power, high mobility, and excellent protection”. During the development, the CVRDE achieved breakthroughs in the engine, transmission, hydropneumatic suspension, hull and turret as well as the gun control system. Mass production began in 1996 at the Indian Ordnance Factory’s production facility in Avadi, Tamil Nadu.
The Arjun tanks stand out for their ‘Fin Stabilised Armour Piercing Discarding Sabot (FSAPDS)’ ammunition and 120-mm calibre rifled gun. It also has a computer-controlled integrated fire control system with stabilised sighting that works in all lighting conditions. The secondary weapons include a co-axial 7.62-mm machine gun for anti-personnel and a 12.7-mm machine gun for anti-aircraft and ground targets.
The MK-1A is about ten tons heavier than its predecessor, which probably indicates upgraded Kanchan composite armor, the exact thickness of which seems to be classified. It also appears to have some new sloped armor panels (possibly reactive) to the front of the turret:
Which is probably a good thing, since its predecessor had a really boxy turret:
William J. Burns, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for director of the CIA, is president of a think tank that has received up to $2 million from a Chinese businessman as well as from a think tank with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Burns also invited nearly a dozen congressional staffers to attend a junket to China, where they met with a communist party operative and a president of a Chinese front group.
Burns, who was paid $540,580 last year as president of Carnegie, will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing likely to be held this month. He has been president of Carnegie since March 2015.
During Burns’ tenure at Carnegie, a businessman named Zhang Yichen joined the think tank’s board of trustees.
“We are very fortunate to have Zhang Yichen on our board,” Burns, a former deputy secretary of state, said in a statement in October 2016. “I look forward to working with him to make Carnegie an even finer institution.”
Zhang, the CEO of CITIC Consulting, a China-based investment firm, donated between $500,000 and $999,999 to Carnegie from July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2018, according to Carnegie’s website. He gave between $250,000 and $549,999 in the 2020 fiscal year, according to Carnegie’s 2020 annual report.
Zhang is a member of two organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party, according to his biography at CITIC Capital: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the Center for China and Globalization.
Can you imagine any Cold War president nominating a CIA director who worked for a think tank that took Soviet money? “Sure, Hubert J. Kissup’s Detente Institute took money from the Young Communist League, but you should confirm him because he’s a swell guy!”
Notice how quickly our garbage elites went from “Ivanaka Trump sells clothing in Russia! This is a huge conflict of interest!” to “CIA director bringing in a half million dollars in Communist Chinese money at his last gig? Nothing to see here! Move along, pleb!”
George Shultz, who served as Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan for six years, died yesterday at age 100.
Reagan assumed the presidency at a time when the existence of the Soviet Union and its domination of eastern Europe was regarded as an immutable fact of world politics. Taking office after Alexander Haig, Shultz helped implement Reagan’s vision of containing and rolling back communism across the globe. From supporting Solidarity in Poland, to backing anticommunist rebels in Reagan Doctrine countries like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, to the liberation of Grenada, to deploying intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe, to a hundred other policies, the Reagan Administration pressed Soviet communism in ways that would eventually force not only the liberation of Eastern Europe, but the demise of the Soviet Union itself. Shultz would play a key role in keeping American allies onboard with the program, and eventually in negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that would lead to the end of the Cold War.
Compared to Haig, Shultz was a low-key, drama-free professional who skillfully kept a wide variety of western governments broadly aligned with American goals, and for that he deserves credit. That he was wrong about much outside the Cold War (the gold standard, carbon taxes, and Brexit, to name but three) should not take away from his central achievement. With James A. Baker III, Secretary of State under Bush 41 (who largely followed the policies laid down under Reagan), Shultz presided over the most successful period of post-World War II diplomacy in American history, and his achievements were far more lasting than those under flashier Secretaries of State like Henry Kissinger or Colin Powell.
There’s nothing more tiresome than hackneyed references to The Matrix, except for the constant propaganda we’re hosed down with by the Establishment and its media lackeys about how everything is groovy in our totally free, free enterprise paradise of freedom and happiness and more freedom. Some of us have been woke for a while, having realized the undeniable truth that the system is rigged for the benefit of a garbage ruling class, whose sole accomplishment is to perpetuate a paradigm in which they maintain power and prestige by controlling institutions they didn’t create or build. Instead, they are cultural trust fund babies, the equivalent of third generation Kennedy brats with substance issues who got into power by getting into the right schools and modeling the right SJW attitudes. These oligarch overseers rely on us to toil in their figurative fields while they sit on their figurative porches, sipping locally-sourced figurative mint juleps.
I say burn it all down and rebuild America into what it is supposed to be, that is, what they tell us it is when they lie to us.
I’m not alone. We’re primed for some conservative anarchy. The normals’ resistance cannot be quelled; the revolution will be Telegrammed. Everyone’s gobbling up red pills, the one medication our incompetent Establishment is fully capable of distributing efficiently and effectively. You drop one and you see the Matrix. You see the lie. You see that it’s all rigged.
Snip.
I mentioned GameStop and these ladies not only knew what it was, but they cheered the armchair day trader anarchists. And they booed the hedge funders.
Rich Orange County Republicans booed the hedge funders.
And they booed Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, with one exception, Nikki! Haley too. The ones who had heard of the Bulwark booed it as well, so there were like three of those.
Populists in pearls, fully red pilled and woke as hell. They saw how the Establishment has been lying to them. They realized that they were never really members of the ruling caste despite their sweet rides and bank accounts. They were allowed its material trappings, but they were excluded from the real power, the power to govern themselves.
They have more in common with the Keystone pipeline worker John Kerry wants to go make solar panels – which seems unrealistic, since his Chi Com collaborators make them all – than with the rich and truly powerful elite.
People are getting woke – the red pill is socio-political anti-Ambien because it keeps you from falling back asleep and not seeing that everything is rigged.
They see how the ruling caste allows you this little band of autonomy, and how you are allowed some leeway to improve your material life, but the instant you try to assert power that threatens the status quo, the Matrix kicks in and its immune system reacts to snuff you out.
That was the revelation of the GameStop Revolution. You’re allowed to put your money into Wall Street and they might let you take some pennies out, but if you try to go big and play at the same level as the anointed, oh no. You don’t get to. The system shuts you down – literally. You can’t buy the hot stock. Does that apply to the hedge fund guys? You think they can’t play after you’ve been sidelined? Come on. It’s blatant market manipulation, but Wall Street owns the Asterisk Administration – Treasury Secretary & Lord High Protector of the Masters of the Universe Janet Yellin took nearly a million bucks to “speak” to the lever-pullers behind the RobinHood app – and the Administration owns the SEC, and do you think it will investigate the hedge funders who changed the rules? No, but look for FBI SWAT teams to be hitting the basements where the Reddit rebels live. That is, right after they bust more conservative meme guys for illegal memes.
Now, in perhaps the most chilling move yet from the new administration, the newly minted Defense Secretary [Lloyd Austin] plans to direct a military-wide stand down, reportedly to address “extremism” within the ranks.
Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.
“The intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon’s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,” Kirby said. “He wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.”
Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said.
We have gone in a few short months from President Donald Trump preventing “critical race theory” dogma from being imposed on federal employees to the possibility that the armed services will have to apologize for their privilege.
it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders — a tactic candidate Biden condemned.
On almost every issue — open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees — Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support.
When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.
But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.
Now they — and the country — are in a revolutionary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best — Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.
Statues continue to fall. Names change.
The iconic dates, origins and nature of America itself continue to be attacked to meet leftist demands. And still, it is not enough for the new McCarthyites.
Social media are banning tens of thousands. Silicon Valley and Wall Street monopolies go after smaller upstart opponents.
A wrong word destroys a lifelong career. Formerly sane pundits now call for curtailing the First Amendment. Thousands of federal troops blanket a now-militarized Washington, D.C.
If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.
Biden has not been above water a single time in the Approval Index rating. This index is the difference between how many likely voters strongly approve and how many strongly disapprove. Total approval has hit 50% once so far…
This result is astonishing when you think about it. President Biden has the full weight of nearly every corporate media outlet, tech company, and cultural institution behind him. They have been drooling all over themselves to convince us this is a return to unifying normalcy. After all, his favorite ice cream is chocolate chip, and his two German Shepherds just love their new digs. So normal. So unifying.
While other Republican legislators complain and pontificate about Twitter, Facebook and Google’s interference in our elections and censoring of conservative voices, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on the tech giants.
DeSantis is proposing legislation that asks the Florida state legislature to impose stiff fines – up to $100,000 per day – on tech companies that “deplatform” political candidates running for office in his state. Candidates like, for instance, Donald Trump.
Calling the tech giants “enforcers of preferred narratives” whose interests are “not in the public interest,” DeSantis, a Republican, wants to “ensure the protection of the people and their rights.” His proposed bill would allow individuals and the Florida attorney general to sue firms that violate newly established safeguards against privacy violations and censorship.
DeSantis also suggested that other activities, such as colluding to ban people or companies from payment platforms or from cloud services, could also be outlawed.
Presuming that the popular governor can get his measure passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, it could become a template for the other 23 GOP-led states. It could, in effect, be the beginning of a revolt against the unacceptable dominance and manipulation of our nation’s discourse by Big Tech.
Here’s my game plan for how Trump can make Trump and America great again.
First, Trump must become the kingmaker of the GOP. The Trump Army is 74 million strong. The Republican Party belongs to Trump. He should remake the party in his image.
In some ways, his defeat was empowering. As president, Trump couldn’t get rid of RINOS and never-Trumpers, because he needed their votes. But from the outside, he can remake the party, elect allies and end the careers of the GOP traitors who stabbed him in the back. Are you listening, Rep. Liz Cheney?
Trump should recruit, endorse and campaign for Trump Republicans in each GOP primary where they’re running against RINOS, never-Trumpers and backstabbers. Seventy-four million Trump voters will vote for his chosen candidates in GOP primaries. By 2022, the GOP will be 100% remade in Trump’s image.
Secondly, Trump should spend the next four years fixing voter fraud at the state level. Trump should recruit his billionaire buddies to put up hundreds of millions to attack this problem. Trump’s goal should be to reform election law in just the handful of states that cost him the election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.
If Trump spends his time, money and focus on reforming election laws in those six states, the GOP will be back in business in 2022 and 2024.
Thirdly, Trump needs to raise billions from his billionaire backers to build TMN: Trump Media Network. That should include a national cable TV network; a national talk radio network; a new version of Drudge Report (called Trump Report); and conservative versions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Conservatives will never again have to depend on the mainstream media or Silicon Valley to broadcast their news and opinions.
Only Trump has the money, brand and fundraising ability to change the media and social media landscape like this. And think of the amazing bonus: Not only will 74 million Trump voters have permanent places to communicate but if we all move away from mainstream media and social media, they will collapse. Trump will cripple his enemies and put many of them out of business.
However, I’m not a fan of Root and others idea of Trump running for the House.
Bryan Proffitt, “the Vice President of North Carolina’s largest teachers’ association is a self-avowed Marxist activist linked to Liberation Road – a ‘revolutionary socialist‘ group that follows the teachings of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong.” Sounds like a good reason to put your children in a private school. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Biden Administration hates private space ventures and pulled permission from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to fly. Punishment for Musk supporting the GameStop squeeze? Either way, it’s blow to American space capabilities and a boon for Chinese domination of space. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“Joe Biden put me out of business by suspending new oil and gas leases and drilling permits. I am a petroleum geologist and generate drilling prospects in the Rocky Mountains on federal lands. I worked six years to get a prospect ready to drill and Biden just illegally broke the terms of the lease, killing the deal.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
International law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday they had dismantled a criminal hacking scheme used to steal billions of dollars from businesses and private citizens worldwide.
Police in six European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, completed a joint operation to take control of Internet servers used to run and control a malware network known as “Emotet,” authorities said in a statement.
“Emotet is currently seen as the most dangerous malware globally,” Germany’s BKA federal police agency said in a statement. “The smashing of the Emotet infrastructure is a significant blow against international organised Internet crime.”
At one point, it was estimated that the losses accumulated by GameStop short-sellers approached $5 billion. Melvin Capital, the now-notorious hedge fund with the huge GameStop short position, eventually required an infusion of $2.75 billion in cash from an even larger hedge fund to cover its possession and remain solvent.
And that’s when the Wall Street empire struck back. Suddenly, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, which purports to be a Wall Street regulator but instead operates as little more than a Wall and Broad soothsayer to a public skeptical of Wall Street’s power, weighed in and intimated that it might investigate or even shut down the trading of GameStop stock to prevent the price from getting even higher.
Then the Wall Street-backed trading apps and the Wall Street brokerages joined in, announcing they would no longer allow their users and retail investors to buy GameStop stock. The result? When you can no longer buy a stock, its price can only go in one direction: down.
The whole saga has spawned a mini-industry of commentary on trading, markets, Wall Street, hedge funds, regulation, efficient markets theory, and who knows what else. Hedge funds are bad! No, hedge funds are good! Markets are efficient vehicles for asset price discovery! No, we need strict regulation to prevent mob-incited runs on banks!
They all miss the point. What’s happening right now has nothing to do with hedge funds or free markets or pricing theory or any of that. What’s happening right now is another front in the major war taking place in institutions and countries across the world: It’s the elite versus the populists.
Wall Street has a long, storied history of viciously crushing short-sellers. It’s something of a local pastime. Just ask David Einhorn, who wrote an entire book on the industry’s efforts to destroy him for the crime of shorting the stock of a bank that was covering up the fact that a huge chunk of its loans were garbage and would never be paid back. The GameStop saga isn’t about the benefits, or evils, of short-sellers.
The real story is how “retail investors” — the industry term for regular people who day trade now and then or have a small brokerage account for retirement or to buy stocks every now and again for fun — figured out how to take down a financial leviathan. It’s not that Wall Street dislikes retail investors, it’s that Wall Street views them as little more than commission factories for the big brokerage houses.
Those rubes don’t know anything. They’re not sophisticated. They don’t have the credentials or pedigrees of the geniuses who simultaneously destroyed the housing market and economy in 2008. And they certainly don’t have the power to move markets.
It’s Wall Street’s job to move markets. It’s Wall Street’s job to tell people which stocks and bonds to buy, which conveniently just happen to be the same assets that the mega-banks are desperate to get off their balance sheets.
A bunch of trash, mortgage-backed securities based on mortgages that will clearly never get paid back? Just put them all in the same garbage bag, claim they couldn’t all possibly start to rot at once, and then demand that the ratings agencies whose salaries you pay stamp them not as trash, but as pure gold. Then, when magically all those bags of garbage start to stink to high heaven, why, then it’s time to demand that the federal government — funded by those retail investor rubes who will probably lose their jobs and homes and savings because of those bags of Wall Street’s garbage — bail every last one of them out.
See, retail investors don’t move markets. Until they do. Which, in the case of the Redditors bidding up GameStop stock, they did. And that cannot be tolerated. The whole GameStop saga isn’t about finance or politics. It’s David vs. Goliath, the have-nots vs. the haves, the underdog vs. the heavy favorite with the best talent and training and equipment money can buy. It is a perfect microcosm of the war between the populists and the elites, the individuals vs. the institutions, the people vs. the powerful.
A bunch of internet randos found a way to take financial advantage of a company that had backed itself into a corner. They banded together, executed the strategy, and made bank. They used the exact same rules and systems that Wall Street has used for decades to screw individual investors out of their money.
That was the Redditors’ real crime. Because that’s not allowed. You are not allowed to use the same set of rules for your own advantage.
The rules here are simple: Heads Wall Street wins, tails you lose. The institutions set the rules, not you. The elite, not the populace, will determine what is allowed and what isn’t.
Former President Donald Trump is not interested in forming a third party and pledges to remain involved in Republican politics. Suck it, Lincoln Project. (And by “it” I mean “your complete irrelevance” and not “the genitalia of teenage boys”…)
The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.
The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do — and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.
Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history.
The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.
Perhaps those critics failed to understand Mr. Trump’s assault on democracy because they had carried out a similar sort of assault in 2016-18, with the support of the federal bureaucracy and the nation’s political and cultural elite. I’m referring to the Russia scare: the belief that Mr. Trump won only because his campaign “colluded” with agents of Moscow, and that his election in 2016 was therefore illegitimate. The theory made sense only if you couldn’t grasp the obvious reasons for Mr. Trump’s victory, namely that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and that Obama-era progressivism had become sufficiently unpopular in the Midwest to throw the election to the nationalist candidate. Somehow it was easier for smart and accomplished people to believe that a TV celebrity and political neophyte with attention-deficit issues had entered into a diabolically ingenious pact with a foreign dictator in which the dictator helped him pick up just enough votes in the states he needed to win.
It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians. America’s best minds and most influential leaders had spent more than two years obsessing over an idiotic conspiracy theory.
This spectacular failure of the expert class would have been impossible without the willing support of a credulous news media. That Mr. Trump won the presidency largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.
Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true. The repeal of “net neutrality,” an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn’t). The administration built “cages” in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn’t). The president praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people” (he didn’t). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie). In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump’s fictitious claims about the election. Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.
America’s foreign-policy elite didn’t perform appreciably better. For decades, they had insisted that peace between Israel and the Arab world was impossible without a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem. It was an axiom, no longer up for debate. Mr. Trump followed through on a promise long made but not kept by the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Foreign-policy experts the world over predicted hellish payback from the Arab world, but the recognition went forward, the U.S. Embassy moved, and the payback consisted of a day’s worth of inconsequential protests.
Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco announced they would establish formal relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia may do the same. The foreign-policy clerisy, having been wrong about the central question of global diplomacy for the past four decades, predictably ignored these achievements.
In the few short days following the collapse of President Donald Trump’s attempts to bring evidence of electoral fraud to the attention of the state legislatures and the courts—not to mention the calamitous events of Jan. 6—the ascendant left has moved swiftly to capitalize on what has proved a stunning propaganda victory for them and neutralize their enemies on the right.
Forget the looting, burning, and general civil unrest at the hands of BLM and Antifa in cities across America last summer—for which next to no one has yet been punished, and which was widely cheered by both the mainstream media and Democrat politicians up to and including Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. That’s all ancient history now, replaced by the “insurrection,” the “armed riot” at the Capitol, the “worst attack on Washington” since the War of 1812, when the British burned the capital and the White House.
Of course, it was not. Unrecalled by the born-yesterday media, for example, is the 1954 attack by four Puerto Rican separatists on the House of Representatives, during which some 30 shots were fired and five congressmen were wounded; the terrorists were later pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Also forgotten: the bombings of the Capitol building and the Pentagon in the 1970s by the radical leftists of the Weather Underground, led by Barack Obama’s buddy William Ayers.
George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything’s a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t. But now you insert yourself in the middle and say that the absolute… fact is that everything that I’m saying is a lie…. Let’s talk about the specifics of it. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of absentee votes had only the name on them and no address. Historically those were thrown out, this time they weren’t. They made special accommodations because they said, oh, it’s a pandemic and people forgot what their address was. So they changed the law after the fact. That is wrong, that’s unconstitutional. And I plan on spending the next two years going around state to state and fixing these problems and I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say, there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud. No, let’s have an open debate. It’s a free country.
The global semiconductor shortage is still slamming the auto industry. Tempted to do a separate “explainer” post about how the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry and how hard it is to add capacity.
The order, which is the first the governor has signed since October and the first non-coronavirus related order since the pandemic began last year, directs agencies “to use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action that threatens the continued strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”
“Each state agency should work to identify potential litigation, notice-and-comment opportunities, and any other means of preventing federal overreach within the law,” it states.
“And when they do that,” added Abbott during the press conference, “that will arm Texas to be prepared to fight back.”
The governor called the order “a homework assignment for every state agency in Texas.”
It will be swell to see democrats squander tens of millions of dollars on a race they can’t win yet again…
“State Rep. Bryan Slaton filed an amendment saying that the Legislature should bring a vote to the floor to abolish abortion before it votes to ceremonially change the names of highways or bridges.”
Netflix goes full social justice warrior, inks deal with Ibram X. Kendi. If you didn’t cancel your subscription over Cuties, now would be a good time to do so. (Hat tip: Blog reader David Rainwater.)
Proof that letting biological men compete in women’s sports is a bad idea. Top male high school athletes routinely beat female Olympians.
The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic.
It first opened in 1566 and moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private halls that make up the University of Oxford.
“Until the San Francisco Unified School District board stripped Dianne Feinstein’s name from one of its public schools, we were unaware of the Senator’s service to the Confederacy.”
On one side of the fight are the hedge fund managers. These guys are good-hearted regular folks living out the American dream by manipulating markets so that companies will fail and they can buy another desperately needed yacht.
On the other side are a bunch of Cheeto-stained Redditors who are dangerously manipulating markets to try to make money. These guys obviously weren’t informed that the stock market was only for rich people to make money. They’re probably Nazis and alt-righters too.
“Biden All-Female Communications Team Won’t Tell Nation What’s Wrong, Nation Should Already Know.” “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, OK!?” said Jen Psaki in her first press conference as a part of Biden’s team. “Why would you think I’m not fine? Ugh… if you have to ask, I’m not going to tell you.”
