Dwight sent over the text of a firearms case decision in “ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS, Plaintiff, v. SMITH & WESSON BRANDS, INC.” etc., or Mexico v Smith & Wesson et. al. (“Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Inc.; Beretta USA Corp.; Century International Arms, Inc.; Colt’s Manufacturing Company, LLC; Glock, Inc.; Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc.; and Witmer Public Safety Group, Inc. d/b/a Interstate Arms.”)
The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for Massachusetts (because venue shopping) and the decision was handed down by Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV.
A U.S. federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against U.S. gun manufacturers arguing their commercial practices has led to bloodshed in Mexico.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor in Boston ruled Mexico’s claims did not overcome the broad protection provided to gun manufacturers by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act passed in 2005.
The law shields gun manufacturers from damages “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of a firearm.
Quoting the text of the decision itself (which does not yet appear to be online anywhere):
Unfortunately for the government of Mexico, all of its claims are either barred by federal law or fail for other reasons. The PLCAA unequivocally bars lawsuits seeking to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the acts of individuals using guns for their intended purpose. And while the statute contains several narrow exceptions, none are applicable here.
This Court does not have the authority to ignore an act of Congress. Nor is its proper role to devise stratagems to avoid statutory commands, even where the allegations of the complaint may evoke a sympathetic response. And while the Court has considerable sympathy for the people of Mexico, and none whatsoever for those who traffic guns to Mexican criminal organizations, it is duty-bound to follow the law.
Accordingly, and for the reasons set forth below, the motions
to dismiss will be granted.
Not a picture of Judge Saylor.
This, of course, is the proper outcome. Lawful American gun manufacturers can’t be held accountable for the misuse of their products, nor should they be made scapegoats for Mexico’s inability to control their own criminal cartels.
MEXICO CITY — A gang riot inside a border prison that left two inmates dead quickly spread to the streets of Ciudad Juarez where alleged gang members killed nine more people, including four employees of a radio station, security officials said Friday.
The surge in violence recalled a far more deadly period in Juarez more than a decade earlier. Mexico’s powerful drug cartels commonly use local gangs to defend their territory and carry out their vendettas.
The federal government’s security undersecretary, Ricardo Mejía Berdeja, said the violence started inside the state prison after 1 p.m. Thursday, when member of the Mexicles gang attacked members of the rival Chapos.
Two inmates were killed and 20 injured.
Then suspected gang members outside the prison began burning businesses and shooting up Ciudad Juarez.
“They attacked the civilian, innocent population like a sort of revenge,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said. “It wasn’t just the clash between two groups, but it got to the point in which they began to shoot civilians, innocent people. That is the most unfortunate thing in this affair.”
Mejía said four employees of MegaRadio who were broadcasting a live promotional event outside a business were killed in the shooting.
Chihuahua state Attorney General Roberto Fierro Duarte said that a boy wounded in a shooting at a convenience store died later at the hospital, two women were killed in a fire at another gas station convenience store and two other men were shot elsewhere in the city.
U.S. government employees in Tijuana, Mexico have been urged to shelter in place as the U.S. consulate warned of multiple vehicle fires, roadblocks and other incidents early on Saturday.
“The U.S. Consulate General Tijuana is aware of reports of multiple vehicle fires, roadblocks, and heavy police activity in Tijuana, Mexicali, Rosarito, Ensenada, and Tecate. U.S. government employees have been instructed to shelter in place until further notice,” the consulate’s official Twitter account said.
The consulate further advised U.S. citizens to avoid the area, seek shelter if in the area, inform their friends and families of their situation and monitor news reports for information.
Police arrested members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
The first suspect of having organized and ordered the narco-blockades yesterday, Friday, in Baja California is Javier Adrián Beltrán Cabrera, according to the first indications received by the intelligence areas integrated in the Coordination Table for Peace and Security, reported the weekly Zeta.
Beltrán Cabrera, also known as “El Javi”, “El Pedrito”, “El Pit” and “Puma”, was imprisoned in 2011 for possession of a weapon and was released.
According to Zeta’s publication, Beltran Cabrera is listed as the leader of a criminal cell called “Los Erres” that had served as hitmen for the Sinaloa Cartel, but in 2022 allied with the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG).
“El Puma” was being investigated as the mastermind of multiple murders committed in July and August in eastern Tijuana, but there is no arrest warrant for him.
Zeta reported that in four hours a total of 24 vehicles were set on fire in five of the seven municipalities of Baja California: Mexicali, Tecate, Ensenada, Tijuana and Rosarito.
Here’s video of a truck on fire in Tijuana:
As always, the twists and turns of the ever-present cartel war in Mexico remain seriously under-reported in American media. While calm for a while, Tijuana and Juarez flared up again as turned into hotspots for cartel violence over the last few years, and were ranked the second and third most violent cities in the world last year. (Indeed, seven of the ten most violent cities in the world were in Mexico, along with one each from South Africa, Brazil…and St. Louis. Thanks a lot, Kim Gardner.)
An administration interested in protecting the lives of Americans might clamp down on border security to prevent more cartel members from entering the country. That is not this administration. Their top goal still appears to be keeping the border wide open to get as many illegal aliens to cross over as they possibly can.
Instead of actual content, enjoy watching drivers attempting (and failing) to drive down the steep, rain-slick streets of the Paso Florentino in Mexico City.
Peter Zeihan is back with another provocative video (filmed at the Eisenhower Naval School) that suggests that China faces such massive problems that collapse may be imminent. “I see China with not just a demographic failure, but a failure of leadership, a failure of policy, an agricultural failure, and an energy failure, all at the same time. It is
entirely possible that this is the last year of the People’s Republic.”
Some of this (especially the demographic collapse) we’ve covered here before. Takeaways:
“China was already the fastest aging society in human history with the biggest sex imbalance. We already knew that their economic model would not match up with this demography this decade, we always knew that the economic collapse of China was coming.” And that was before we found China had over-counted their prime working age population by 100 million.
“I don’t see how China survives as a single political entity, much less a globally significant one. I don’t see how it survives this decade with these numbers, because this suggests that the Chinese population peaked back in 2003, and that Chinese economic efficiency probably peaked around the same time.”
Chinese labor is no longer cost-competitive with other Asian countries like Thailand or The Philippines, or Mexico. “This is the fastest labor [wage] appreciation in human history, including during the black death, including during all wars. So we’re looking at a 15-fold increase since 1999, [while] their labor effectiveness productivity is probably only increased by a factor of two, maybe three.”
“There is not an industrial process that is done in China that can’t be done in North America at a lower cost, because our labor is so much more productive, our energy is so much cheaper, our supply lines are so much shorter and you can produce stuff where people actually live.”
“The only reason we think of China as a major industrial player is because of the sunk cost of the preexisting industrial plant.”
“You don’t rebuild that somewhere else overnight. But it is happening. The United States is already in the process as its fastest industrialization, even faster than what we did during World War II.” That’s some mighty bold talk, but the U.S. population is roughly 2.5X larger than at the start of World War II.
“We probably need to double the size of our industrial plant in the next 5-10 years. That’ll be awkward, expensive, inflationary, but on the other side of it, we will have a far more insulated and secure supply chain system. The problem is just getting from here to there, and that is not a straight line.”
The Chinese plan has always been to let the Russians go first, just as a proof of concept. So their thinking was a fast war that conquers Taiwan in a matter of days, that imposes a done deal upon the world, and everyone just sucks it up and takes it, because China is too economically powerful to be challenged. And once you hold the territory, there’s no point in going to a broad scale war against the Chinese when it’s already happened. That’s always been their plan.
Oh my.
With the Russians, they have had every aspect of all of their planning for the last 40 years set on fire and burned to ash in less than a month. So number one it will not be a quick war, because Ukraine was one of the world’s less militarily competent countries in the first place…
I think this statement may have been true in 2014, but I don’t think it was true by the time Russia invaded. Ukraine professionalized and modernized their military with considerable help and guidance from western militaries, and developed a competent officer and NCO core (partially thanks to experience with the low-intensity conflict in Donbas).
…and they’re still holding out against the Russians. Taiwan has been preparing for this war since 1955. Taiwan has a moat. Taiwan has a nuclear program that started in 1974, so if we have a two-month accumulation of Chinese forces getting ready to push, the Taiwanese will see it because this is the only national security question that they pay any attention to, and they will make a nuclear device. And so the only way that the Chinese can even make an attempt on Taiwan is to text all of their soldiers at the same time and just say everyone get to the coast take a fishing boat with your buddies and start moving on Taiwan. They know it is going to cost them a million troops just to get there.
I find this scenario unlikely, and even less likely to succeed.
“Now they know from Ukraine that it’s not going to be a pushover. [Taiwan] is mountainous, it’s forested as opposed to Ukraine, which is flat and open.”
Then there are the sanctions:
Russia has many flaws, but they’re a massive producer of food and energy products. If you put the sanctions that we have put against Russia onto China, oh my. China imports 85% of their energy, 85% of that from the Persian Gulf, and they import 85% of inputs that are necessary to grow their food. So you would have an industrial collapse, a civilizational breakdown, and mass famine within six months, and then you would probably lose a half a billion Chinese over the course of the next year to famine.
Again, I think this is overstated, as there would be enough countries willing to break sanctions, and enough radical actions China could take (conquer Mongolia and parts of Siberia for farming, throw off all Pacific fishing limits, etc.) to avoid the worst case famine scenario. Not that they wouldn’t be in a world of hurt…
The one that has scared the Chinese the most are the boycotts. BP and Halliburton didn’t have to leave, they weren’t doing anything that was sanctioned, but the super majors and the oil services firms and countless other firms left on a moral imperative prompted by individual shareholders and consumers. And in China, the idea that the average Joe or Jane can influence policy is so antithetical to their mindset that they had no idea this was even possible, much less it was going to happen. So everything that the Chinese have based their system and their strategic policy on for the last 30 years has been proven in the last two months to be utterly wrong.”
My judgement of Zeihan’s analysis is that he’s more right than wrong, but has a tendency to overstate his case. Still, a worldwide inflationary spiral and energy shortage is the sort of thing that’s likely to destabilize a lot of governments worldwide, and China’s economy is built on more smoke and mirrors than most.
Time to do a report on a war theater where heavily armored vehicles shoot it out with each other in city streets: Mexico.
(You were thinking Ukraine? Probably an update on that next week.)
Cartel violence waxes and wanes, and regular readers know that the cartels are heavily armed. Even so, it may come as a shock to many that Mexican drug cartels have their own “tanks” (AKA “Monstruo”), i.e. up-armored civilian vehicles more accurately described as technicals or armored cars.
Mexico’s Guardia Nacional in Jalisco have captured a homemade ‘narco tank’ thought to be used by one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.
The officials shared the news to Twitter after it was found in the area of Jalisco on 12 April.
According to the Mexican police, the vehicle was harbouring 2,000 rounds of ammunition.
In Texas, we call that “a good start.”
The heavy metal plated vehicle is thought to be owned by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion [CJNG], who operate in the area, as reported by The Star.
Painted green to blend in with surroundings, the tank is heavily armoured, with protective metal casing around the driver’s sider.
Publication Borderland Beat noted that the tank was discovered while being transported inside of a trailer.
The trailer limitation is probably why it seems unusually narrow.
En #Jalisco, la #GuardiaNacional aseguró un vehículo con blindaje artesanal y alrededor de dos mil cartuchos útiles que fueron localizados al interior de un tractocamión, como resultado de los recorridos para inhibir hechos delictivos en el municipio de Jamay. pic.twitter.com/jLgKnf5eqh
Here’s a video covering various captured cartel narco tanks (though the voice-over isn’t the best).
Here’s a shorter video from several years ago showing various monstruos, mainly from the 2010-2011 timeframe.
This video shows still more footage, including (about 1:50 in) modern CJNG vehicles that not only look more professionally constructed, but have red-blue flashing lights and a cartel logo on the side, which does rather suggest they’re not trying to keep a low profile. Also includes combat footage of CJNG blowing away Northeast Cartel (CDN) rivals through their own gunholes.
Here’s a tweet that shows video of two other captured Nueva Generacion vehicles in 2019:
"Elements of the Mexican Army, seized several armored vehicles in a workshop allegedly used by members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The events took place in the municipality of Tuxpan, in the state of Jalisco."
I had no intention of posting another Peter Zeihan video so quickly after Is China Screwed?, but it’s also been a good long while since I did a Texas vs. California update, so let’s tuck in to this video:
Takeaways:
Texas doesn’t attract foreign investment.
Instead, Texas lures development and projects from other states with target tax breaks. “You can stay in Illinois and pay 20% tax or come to Texas, where we’ll give you a 20 year deferment and you’ll pay no tax.” (This is a bit overstated; some companies get those sweeteners, but for most Texas locales simply offer sounder fundamentals.)
“Everything is inexpensive. It’s where the food comes from, it’s where the energy comes from. The land is cheap. Mexico is right next door. It’s got the major port in Houston. It’s a financial center, it’s an energy center, it’s a manufacturing center, it’s a processing era. It’s all of those things.”
As global trade becomes more difficult, Texas moves up the value-added chain with more processed and refined goods. Lots of incentive for all sorts of manufacturers to relocate to Texas to take advantage of these intermediate products.
“Say what you will about the Donald Trump Administration, the renegotiation of NAFTA was a brilliant call, it was probably overdue by 15 years.” More North American content, especially from Texas and Mexico.
“Texas trades nearly as much with Mexico as the rest of the country combined.” Huge for automotive, but also electronics and aerospace.
Labor shortages: “Texas is just hoovering up people from across the entire country.”
“People are moving to the West, the Southwest and the South. Texas is right in the middle of that. It has the cheapest land and the cheapest power and the cheapest food.”
Biggest success story for the next 30 years: Houston. “It has it’s finger in each and every one of those pies. It works with the Mexicans, it’s in the energy sector, it’s its own financial link. It’s on the highway system that links on the East coast. It’s good at moving large pieces of metal around, so it’s getting into heavy equipment, it’s already in automotive. It has everything.”
My caveat: Not everything. It doesn’t have much of a software base outside the oil industry and a few related verticals, and it doesn’t have any semiconductor fabs (both of which the Austin and Dallas areas have in considerable depth).
Plus: Third largest metro in the country.
“Everything you hear about California when it comes to regulation and cost is true.”
All the good land has been grabbed. Maybe growth on the fringes of LA.
“The same urbanization and depopulation push that hit Europeans 60 years ago hit Mexico 25 years ago.”
“California is looking at decades of depopulation moving forward. Not catastrophic and not rapid.”
“I see Oregon and Washington as the next California, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
Things are better the other side of the mountains (Yakima, WA, and Bend, OR). Also Tri-Cities (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland), WA.
“The same thing that’s happening in the United States with the retirement of the baby boomers is happening in the wider world. But what is unique about the American baby boomers is that they actually had kids. So we’ve got the Millennials, which are a large generation that are providing a lot of consumption and ballast. That doesn’t exist in most of the rest of the world.”
And the rest of the world is screwed. “You’re looking at general economic degradation on a broad scale that we haven’t seen in well over a century and a half.”
Solution for the rest of the world is printing currency. Thus massive capital flight to more stable locations. “Nine cases out of ten that safer place is the United States.”
This all seems to excerpted from his book The End of the World Is Just The Beginning. As with some of his other videos, I think he’s identified some real concerns, but overstates his case (and the nearness of an imminent global trade collapse rather than some retrenchment). Irrational things can go on a whole lot longer than you might think they would be able to…
Hunter Biden’s laptop takes another turn in the news cycle, Democrat-connected sex offenders are popping up everywhere, a killer camel, and the return of Florida Man. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
And virtual no Russo-Ukrainian War news, since I did that yesterday.
I would say that everyone outside of the Democratic Media Complex knew that two years ago, but of course, more than half the Democratic Media Complex knew that as well and simply lied about it to get Biden elected.
Got to say this treat aged pretty well.
1. The Hunter Biden laptop story was true. 2. The story implicated Joe Biden in global pay-for-play graft from countries like Russia, China and Ukraine. 3. The #DemocraticMediaComplex suppressed the story because they wanted Biden to win.
The Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo has been transformed into a warzone after the arrest of a top cartel boss. Burning vehicles littered the streets, and heavy gunfighting was reported causing the U.S. consulate to go on lockdown and the U.S. border crossing to be temporarily shut down on Monday.
The chaos erupted late Sunday when Juan Gerardo Trevino, or “El Huevo,” the leader of one faction of the Northeast Cartel, the successor group to the Zetas Cartel, was arrested. He is also a U.S. citizen, a Mexican government official told Reuters. Trevino is on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) list of most wanted cartel members.
Trevino faces a U.S. extradition order for drug trafficking and money laundering.
In response to the arrest, cartel members hijacked and burned vehicles and attacked law enforcement and military personnel.
“During the night of Sunday, there were shootings, burning of trucks, and a grenade attack on the U.S. consulate,” Mexican newspaper El Occidental said.
On Monday, Nuevo Laredo Mayor Carmen Lilia Canturosas warned citizens in the border town to take cover.
The woke want to destroy science. “The giant plan to track diversity in research journals. Efforts to chart and reduce bias in scholarly publishing will ask authors, reviewers and editors to disclose their race or ethnicity.” Translation: Science is not sufficiently biased in favor of our political goals.
According to the latest Winston Group poll, voters still believe Democrats want to defund the police by a 48%-34% margin.
“In terms of what is the position of the Democratic Party, voters tend to believe that Democrats want to defund the police, ” pollsters David Winston and Myra Miller explain. “Among groups outside the Democratic Party, Hispanics believe this is what Democrats want (49%-32%), as do suburban voters (45%-36%). Independents believe this slightly at 41%-33%, but especially conservative independents (61%-20%).”
Despite the efforts to distance themselves from the movement, some in the Democratic Party still openly support defunding the police, which means that the public will continue to believe Democrats still embrace the radical Black Lives Matter. movement, not police.
Federal Reserve raises interest rates .25%, bringing it to .5%. Remember, in order to kill the last bout of inflation, Paul Volker hiked rates up to 20%. There’s a lot more pain ahead…and given the huge amount of quantitative easing centrals banks have done, and the extensive budget deficits most of the governments in the developed world are running, 20% may not be enough.
Researcher Kyle Becker produced in-depth, acclaimed portrait of just how much money Anthony Fauci was making. Result: Forbes fired him. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
The electorate is increasingly pessimistic about the direction in which President Biden and Democrats are steering the country and feel that the party’s priorities do not align with their own.”
What’s the solution?
The pollsters advise that if Democrats want to have “a fighting chance in the midterms – as well as a shot at holding on to the presidency in 2024,” that they need to embark on a “broader course correction back to the center,” and show voters that they are focused on solving quality-of-life issues.
In short, Democrats need to reject their progressive wing and its embrace of big government spending and identity politics.
Indeed, a majority of voters (54 percent) — including 56 percent of independents — explicitly say that they want Biden and Democrats to move closer to the center and embrace more moderate policies versus embracing more liberal policies (18 percent) or staying where they are politically (13 percent).
Most voters (61 percent) also agree that Biden and Democrats are “out of touch with hardworking Americans” and “have been so focused on catering to the far-left wing of the party that they’re ignoring Americans’ day to day concerns” such as “rising prices” and “combatting violent crime.” -The Hill
The top issue for voters is inflation – which sits at its highest level in 40 years – according to 51% of respondents, followed by the economy and job creation (32%). Yet, just 16% of voters believe the economy is Biden’s main focus, and trust Republicans over Democrats to manage it (47% vs. 41%) and control inflation (48% vs. 36%).
Voters also see Biden and Democrats as weak on crime (56%) – perhaps due to four years of Democrats pushing ‘defund the police’ under Trump, while our sitting Vice President raised bail money for BLM rioters.
Speaking of groomers: “Clinton-Connected Haiti Pastor Indicted For Child Sexual Abuse & Assault…The United States is charging pastor Corrigan Clay with child sex abuse after “engaging in illicit sexual conduct” with a Haitian orphan he adopted…Corrigan is the co-founder of the non-profit charity “Apparent Project”, which is a Clinton-connected group selling jewelry, clothing and art made by Haitian orphans.”
Speaking of Democrats being soft on sex offenders, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley uncovers why Biden Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson deserves to be rejected:
Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker. She’s been advocating for it since law school. This goes beyond “soft on crime.” I’m concerned that this a record that endangers our children
With the Nickel market shuttered after a Chinese stainless steel tycoon was caught with a historic, potentially fatal $8 billion margin call hanging over its head, today the London Metal Exchange announced that it will reopen its nickel market on Wednesday, more than a week after it was closed last Monday, after the Chinese company at the center of the epic short squeeze was bailed out by a consortium of banks led by JPMorgan which is also the largest counterparty to the short (for a detailed breakdown read “The 18 Minutes of Trading Chaos That Broke the Nickel Market”) .
Trading in nickel will resume after Xiang Guangda, whose massive short position equivalent to approximately 150,000 tons of nickel, sent shockwaves across the commodity market last week, announced a standstill with his banks to avoid further margin calls as Bloomberg first reported earlier. Xiang’s Tsingshan Group had been in discussions with banks led by JPMorgan about a loan facility to backstop his short position and said Monday that talks on the funding would continue during the standstill period. As a reminder, Xiang is JPMorgan’s largest counterparty, and owes Jamie Dimon several billion, money which the largest US bank would not receive unless it bailed out the Chinese firm.
If you owe the bank $100,000, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $8 billion, the bank has a problem…
Category: Extremely unexpected horrifying headlines: Petting zoo camel kills two. Not in the zoo, fortunately, as Humpy had busted out of the joint and was on the lam… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Last week on Thanksgiving vacation, I had to put my Mac through a reboot cycle and lost the zillions of open Firefox Windows. So you may find this week’s LinkSwarm relatively (some might say “mercifully”) brief.
Hunter Biden was pulling down a hefty $10 million a year to spread Chinese influence:
A damning new report claims that Hunter Biden helped expand Chinese influence in America in a $10 million a year agreement and an $80,000 diamond.
In her new book, Laptop from Hell, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, describes Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese-linked energy consortium, called CEFC.
Based on hundreds of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop which he left in a Delaware repair shop in April 2019, and transcripts of messages from WhatsApp, she claims that the Biden family offered their services to CEFC to help expand its business around the world.
In exchange, Devine writes, Hunter Biden received $10 million a year for three years, and a diamond worth at least $80,000.
And, by an amazing coincidence, the Biden Administration is super soft on China.
Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.
“To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”
In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
“It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”
Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office. Through most of 2020, Biden insisted that he was the tough one on China and that the Trump administration only offered “a colossal gap between tough talk and weak action.”
Biden, at a Democratic debate on February 25, 2020, said: “I had spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader by the time we left office. This is a guy who doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug who in fact, has a million Uyghurs in reconstruction camps, meaning concentration camps.”
Biden, writing in Foreign Affairs last spring, said: “Companies must act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere. . . . The United States does need to get tough with China.”
Biden, speaking at the U.S. State Department on February 4, said: “We’ll also take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”
And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.
Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.
Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Snip.
Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”
As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.
It’s not that the Biden administration is doing nothing — an upcoming “democracy summit” invited Taiwan but not China, there have been prohibitions on U.S. investment in particular Chinese companies, and a dozen Chinese companies have been blacklisted for helping the Chinese army with quantum computing.
But these are small-ball gestures while the Chinese government sends 18 fighter jets plus five nuclear-capable H-6 bombers into Taiwanese air-defense zone at one time, Beijing wipes out the last of Hong Kong’s opposition, and the Genocide Games go on with full U.S. corporate sponsorship. We’re attempting minor and symbolic moves while Xi Jinping is attempting big and consequential ones to maximize his leverage over the rest of the world.
In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.
Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.
But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.
More:
The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.
But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”
The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”
How did progressives, who claim to be evidence-based, ever get so committed to Housing First? “Malcolm Gladwell’s [2006 New Yorker article] “Million Dollar Murray,” really helped popularize this idea,” the person said. “But it was based on an anecdote of one person. It works for who it works for but is not scalable. [Governor] Gavin [Newsom] made a mistake [as San Francisco’s Mayor 2004-2011] which was that we stopped investing in shelter. But that’s because all the best minds were saying, ‘This is what’s going to work.’”
One of the claims made by defenders of the open drug scenes is that people who live in them are mostly locals who were priced out of their homes and apartments and decided to pitch a tent on the street. In San Fransicko, I cite a significant body of evidence to show that this is false, and that many people come to San Francisco from around the U.S. for the city’s unusually high cash welfare benefits, free housing, and tolerance of open drug scenes.
The insider agreed. “People come here because they think they can. It’s bullshit that ‘Only 30 percent [of homeless] are from out of town.’ At least 20,000 homeless people come through town every year. Talk to the people on the street. There’s no way 70 percent of the homeless are from here. I would guess it’s fewer than 50 percent. Ask them the name of their high school and they guess, ‘Washington? The one around the corner?’ But you can’t even talk about that without being called a fascist.”
A top adviser and chief spokeswoman for Harris, Symone Sanders, is set to resign from her position by the end of the year, a White House official said Wednesday. It’s one of several high-level departures in the vice president’s office since she was sworn in earlier this year.
Peter Velz, the vice president’s director of press operations, is leaving the office in the coming weeks, along with Vincent Evans, deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, according to reports. Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director, is also stepping down. Advance staffers departed over the summer, soon after a trip to Guatemala where Harris drew criticism for a biting response to a question over when she intended to visit the southern U.S. border.
A source familiar with Harris’s office woes quipped that the defections must be “completely unrelated to reading stories where they are blamed for everything.”
“This is the same story that gets played out again and again — it’s always the vague ‘staffing,’” this person said. “I don’t think there are a ton of staff, present and former, that would rush to defend the way the office is run.”
What percentage of requested water are California farms getting next year? Try 0%.
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw brings the wood to Ron Klain:
Let’s follow up that kudo for Crenshaw with some serious criticism: He was one of 80 Republicans (along with Rep. John Carter, my own representative) to vote in favor of a federal vaccine database. He can swear up and down it’s not going to be used for vaccine passports, but we’ve seen worldwide governments use coercive tools with even less legal justification.
When it comes to arguments on the new Supreme Court abortion case, you can smell the panic.
Real life frequently has symbolism more heavy-handed than fiction. “Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary will close at the end of the 2022-2023.” (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Just got back from Texas and sad to report that the entire state is suffering from the Freedom Variant. Symptoms may include: enjoying your life, breathing fresh air, and not being a paranoid, righteous douchebag.
Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called “social justice.” (Or, in the Biden administration’s parlance, “equity.”)
It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it. According to a very solid case built by an exhaustive Chicago police investigation, Smollett pretended to be the victim of a violent racist and anti-gay assault because he wanted more fame and thus more money.
What better way to achieve that goal than to feed into the enduring myth that minorities in America are suppressed at every turn, even targeted for violence by whites? White men in particular, and, as of 2016, even better if they’re Trump supporters.
Police charged that Smollett offered to pay two brothers he was acquainted with about $2,000 each to act out an attack on the actor in the dead of a Chicago winter night. The siblings, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, told investigators that Smollett had given them $100 to buy masks, a red hat, and a rope that would be fashioned into a kind of noose for the staged attack. The Osundairos were instructed to confront Smollett on a sidewalk, slightly rough him up, and then disappear.
The setup preceeded a previous stunt, wherein Smollett mailed himself a threatening letter that said, “You will d[ie] black fag,” accompanied by an illustration of a hangman. Police said Smollett’s failure to garner any significant national attention from the letter is what led him to fake the assault.
“…This announcement today recognizes that ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” then-police superintendent Eddie Johnson said in late February, after his department probed the events from the night of the incident. He said Smollett was mostly motivated by seeking a salary increase for his role on “Empire.”
That was the conclusion of law enforcement after spending more than $100,000 taxpayer dollars on an investigation to piece together surveillance video, eye-witness testimony, and data gathering that led them to believe Smollett had lied about everything.
But in all fairness, who could blame him? This is what our entire culture is teaching now— that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.
Lucrative opportunities present themselves quickly for those who sell themselves as oppressed and aggrieved. And for Smollett, it worked! Nobody knew who he was before he claimed to have been physically confronted and called the n-word and the f-word by white male Trump supporters. Thereafter, everyone knew who he was.
He was written about in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. A-list celebrities, TV hosts and political leaders expressed their solidarity.
Smaller than a LinkSwarm, here’s a list of foreign hot spots that we might want to pay more attention to than we are right now. And by “we,” I mean “The U.S. Department of State,” which seems to be run by feckless, corrupt Obama Administration retreads. So I doubt they’re up to the task.
Here goes nothing:
Cartel gunmen stormed as prison in Tula, Hidalgo, central Mexico and broke out Pueblos Unidos cartel leader Jose Artemio “El Michoacano” and “La Rabia” Maldonado Mejia, plus his brother and a whole bunch of gunmen. Cartel violence in Mexico is nothing new, but the brazenness of the jailbreak suggests continued weakness on the part of the criminal justice system.
Remember how our chattering classes got their knickers in a knot over Marine La Pen? Well, Eric Zemmour, reportedly a self-styled Gaullist and (get this) Bonapartist just declared he’s running for President of France.
PARIS — Éric Zemmour, a polarizing far-right writer and television star, announced on Tuesday that he was running for French president in elections next year, ending months of speculation over a bid that upended the race before he had even made it official.
Mr. Zemmour, 63, is a longtime conservative journalist who rose to prominence over the past decade, using prime-time television and best-selling books to expound on his view that France was in steep decline because of Islam, immigration and leftist identity politics, themes he returned to in his announcement.
“It is no longer time to reform France but to save it,” Mr. Zemmour said in a video with dramatic overtones that was published on social media, conjuring images of an idealized France and then warning about outside forces that threatened to destroy it.
He has fashioned himself as a Donald J. Trump-style provocateur lobbing politically incorrect bombs at the French elite establishment — saying, for instance, that the law should require parents to give their children “traditional” French names — and rewriting some of the worst episodes from France’s past. He has been charged with inciting racial or religious hatred several times over his comments, and twice convicted and fined.
Mr. Zemmour spoke over 1950s footage full of men in hats and vintage Citroën cars, contrasted with recent clips of crowded subways, crumbling churches, burning cars and violent clashes with the police.
“You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” Mr. Zemmour said, reading from notes at a desk in front of old bookshelves in a way that seemed intent on replicating Charles de Gaulle’s posture when he issued a call to arms against Nazi Germany from London in June 1940.
Mr. Zemmour said he was running “to prevent our children and our grandchildren from experiencing barbarity, to prevent our daughters from being veiled and our sons from being subdued.”
He accused elites — journalists, politicians, judges, European technocrats — of failing France, which he said was represented by a long list of illustrious men and women, including Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Napoleon.
“We will not be replaced,” added Mr. Zemmour, who has espoused the theory of a “great replacement” of white people in France by Muslim immigrants.
Oh, he’s also bigger on Russians than Americans. Which seems strange for a Bonapartist, given that whole “invasion of Russia” thing.
Given the notorious unreliability of our media in reporting on any figure considered even mildly right of center, it’s hard to tell whether Zemmour is indeed a radical extremist, a conservative populist, or something in-between. We’ll find out if he’s a real Bonapartist if he invades Germany and crowns himself Emperor. As a pre-TDS National Review once said about Jean Le Pen, “we have no frog in this fight.”
Minutes before President Tayyip Erdogan delivered a speech renouncing high interest rates once again, the Turkish central bank said it was selling dollars to support the lira. The bank has $25 billion of net reserves as of November, down from $28 billion the month before. But that includes another $48 billion of swaps from local banks, without which reserves are firmly in negative territory.
It’s a flawed bid to support Erdogan’s ultra-loose monetary policy, which has caused the lira to fall more than 40% versus the dollar this year. Propping up the currency might slow Turkey’s descent into hyperinflation, but the country’s pot of dollars risks running out. The bank sold some $128 billion to steady the lira in 2019-2020 and still had to hike rates. When net reserves were at $28 billion in August 2020, it took just five months to run them down to $11 billion – the lowest since at least 2003. The lower reserves fall, the more likely another depreciation becomes.
I’m not an international economic expert, but usually you raise interest rates to stem inflation. The timeless meme protocols call for posting this:
Iranian border guards clashed with Taliban forces along the Iran-Afghanistan border on Wednesday after the Taliban opened fire on Iranian farmers, according to reports.
Local journalist Reza Khaasteh shared unverified video of the scene on Twitter, which appeared to show Iranian soldiers using heavy artillery to push back against the Taliban militants.
Khaasteh tweeted that the Taliban managed to capture several Iranian border posts; however, other reports citing unnamed sources claimed that was false.
OK, the Mullahs and the Taliban is maybe less of a “worry” story and more of a “sit back and watch the fireworks” one…
Greetings, and welcome to a Saturday LinkSwarm! To get this out, even a day late, I’ve tossed all the Virginia Governor’s race/Louden County news into a separate post, hopefully on tap for tomorrow.
One of President Biden’s first acts on immigration is to suspend investigations, arrests, and deportations of most criminal aliens for the next 100 days. In a memo titled “Review of and Interim Revision to Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Policies and Procedures”, sent on Wednesday to all immigration agency heads, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske announced the deportation freeze and new enforcement priorities that go into effect now. The memo imposes restrictions on immigration enforcement actions that are even tighter than those adopted (with disastrous results) by the Obama administration, and make the country a sanctuary not only for criminal aliens, but all who are here in defiance of our laws.
According to the memo, virtually all removals will stop for 100 days. In addition, only the following categories of illegal aliens will be subject to removal as of February 1, 2020:
National security threats — those who have been involved in or are suspected of involvement in terrorism, or who are otherwise deemed a threat;
Recent illegal border crossers — those who have arrived illegally after November 1, 2020; and
Aggravated felons — those who are currently incarcerated for an aggravated felony conviction and who are determined to be a threat to public safety.
If you’re any other kind of illegal alien felon, Democrats evidently want you here, victimizing Americans.
In practice, this means that ICE must release criminal aliens and others in custody who are not covered in these definitions. This will include aliens convicted of domestic violence, sex offenses, drunk driving, theft causing loss of less than $10,000, vehicular homicide, an infinite number of misdemeanor crimes, and much more. It means that when USCIS refuses green cards or other benefits because the applications were fraudulent, that unqualified applicant will be able to stay anyway. It means that in the next 100 days, if a local police officer arrests a previously deported gang member, even one with a serious criminal history, for a new crime that is not an aggravated felony, ICE will not be able to take action to remove that gang member again.
“Joe Biden to Ban Cash Bail for Violent Criminals — in the Interest of ‘Equity.'” There’s no end to the number of other people’s dead bodies social justice warriors are willing to step over on their way to utopia…
San Francisco prosecutors quit, and District Attorney Chesa Boudin faces a second recall effort over failure to prosecute crimes.
Walgreens closed 22 stores in San Francisco where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.
A couple of readers asked “Why just San Francisco?” if it was California Proposition 47 that put the $950 limit on nonviolent misdemeanors.
The answer is total lack of enforcement in San Francisco.
Please note San Francisco DA faces second recall effort as residents ‘fed up’ with progressive ‘zero consequence’ policies.
A second recall effort launched against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin demonstrates how residents are “fed up” with his progressive policies, as his push to reduce jail funding and refusal to prosecute repeat offenders ensures the streets remain marred with open-air drug dealing and violent crime now stretching into the suburbs, a leader of the prominent local police union tells Fox News.
Last week, the first Republican-backed recall effort fell just 1,714 signatures short of the 51,325 required to trigger a special election to bring the question of ousting Boudin before voters. Now a second recall effort is being organized, which Boudin brushed off Monday night as proof that his so-called successes in reducing incarceration has “angered the billionaire class.”
But it’s his progressive approach that’s actually hurting average San Franciscans, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya tells Fox News, as Boudin’s “swiftest revolving door in criminal justice” sends the message to offenders that there are no consequences for their actions.
Snip.
Prosecutors Brooke Jenkins and Don Du Bain told KNTV they have stepped down from their posts in San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office due to his lack of commitment to prosecuting crimes.
“Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend,” Jenkins said in the interview. “Being an African American and Latino woman, I would wholeheartedly agree that the criminal justice system needs a lot of work, but when you are a district attorney, your job is to have balance.”
Du Bain added that he believed Boudin “disregards the laws that he doesn’t like, and he disregards the court decisions that he doesn’t like to impose his own version of what he believes is just – and that’s not the job of the district attorney.”
The Chinese private equity fund in which John Kerry holds a $1 million stake is not only invested in a tech company blacklisted for human rights abuses but is also a major shareholder in a solar panel company linked to labor abuses of the Uyghurs.
Last December, that private equity fund, Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P., purchased a 6 percent stake in LONGi Green Energy, a Chinese solar panel manufacturer, making it the company’s second largest shareholder.
LONGi has come under fire from human rights groups and U.S. lawmakers for sourcing many of its raw materials from companies suspected of using forced labor in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where the government has cracked down on the Uyghur population and other ethnic minorities.
Hillhouse is also a major funder of a tech company tied to the Chinese government’s surveillance of the Uyghurs, as first reported by the Washington Free Beacon last week. News of that investment led Republican senators to call on Biden to fire Kerry over ethics concerns. Further insight into Hillhouse’s holdings is likely to increase scrutiny of Kerry’s finances and raise questions about whether he is using his role as climate envoy to block regulations on Chinese solar panel imports. While Kerry has acknowledged that many solar panels are produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, he has also indicated resistance to additional financial restrictions or penalties on these goods.
So Kerry is working the China grift and the green grift at the same time. No wonder he couldn’t resist…
Speaking of which: China produces more CO2 than the U.S., India, Russia and Japan combined. “China’s emissions are so vast that its biggest companies, few of which are household names, create more pollution than entire nations. China Baowu, the world’s top steelmaker, put more CO2 into the atmosphere last year than Pakistan.”
Manchin and Sinema continue to terrorize democrats by daring to doing what their constituents want rather than doing the Holy Will Of The Party.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are the gruesome twosome. They may have different reasons behind their opposition to the $3.5 trillion spending package, dubbed human infrastructure, that Democrats want to pass via the reconciliation process, but the results are the same. The far-left can’t get everything they want—which has infuriated them to no end. They don’t like the price tag. They don’t like the ethos behind it. They don’t like the tax structures. The tax on billionaires is out due to Manchin’s opposition. Sinema isn’t moving on hiking corporate taxes. Now, paid family leave has been nixed and most of the climate change provisions are gone too. Manchin and Sinema are the angels of death for the far-Left. It’s not hard to figure out why. These two will do what they think is best for the constituents of their respective states. Period. This has been known about Manchin for years, and he’s not afraid to lose re-election. If that’s the case, he will happily take his houseboat and go home. Sinema is the same with regards to Arizona. She’s there to serve them. Not Chuck Schumer, not the liberal media, not the hordes of illegal alien activists who harass her in the bathroom. And polling shows that voters in West Virginia and Arizona aren’t too keen on the $3.5 trillion bill
If you haven’t been following the situation on Capitol Hill — and it’s in so much flux that it’s almost impossible to stay completely up to date — I’ll give you a brief rundown before we get to that odor.
“Build Back Better” is Biden’s slogan for a massive expansion of welfare, spending, regulation, the likes of which we haven’t seen since LBJ’s Not-So-Great Society. Massive change on slender majorities is not a good idea, either politically or for the nation’s social fabric, but Dems gotta Dem.
BBB comes in two parts.
The first is a $1.2 trillion-with-a-T “infrastructure” bill that doesn’t contain much actual infrastructure spending, but is nonetheless supported by enough Republicans to almost guarantee its passage. (We’ll get back to the “almost” momentarily, so stick a pin in that.)
The second is another, even larger bill so absurd that its contents fall under comic sci-fi writer Douglas Adams’ “bistromathics.” There have been several versions of this bill, ranging in price from the current “compromise” bill costing $1.8 trillion (so they say) to the original Bernie Sanders (CPUSA-Vermont Oblast) version weighing in at $3.5 trillion (but actually $5 trillion).
No one knows what any version would actually cost. My friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser heard from a Senate aide on Thursday that the current bill is 2,500 pages, has no table of contents, and we probably won’t know what’s in it even if it does pass.
This brings us to a defining concept of bistromathics, recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. So if Democrats claim the bill costs precisely $1,790,238,032,455, then you can be sure it costs some figure exactly not that (but higher).
But they can’t get any version passed, because the hard left keeps demanding more and more radical proposals Democratic leadership can’t deliver.
Authorities in Denver have ordered the arrest of Steve Bachar, a longtime Clinton operative and “socially responsible” investor who has been charged with felony theft and securities fraud. The former co-chair of the Clinton Global Initiative is also under investigation for unrelated allegations that he mishandled millions of dollars allocated for personal protective equipment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bachar is accused of stealing as much as $1 million and lying to an investor “in connection with the offer, sale or purchase of a security,” according to the criminal complaint filed by the Denver district attorney’s office. The crimes are alleged to have occurred between October 2017 and August 2018. The former Clinton operative told the Denver Post the criminal charges were “outrageous, unfounded, and false,” and he looks forward to letting “the facts come to light.”
Bachar, who served as White House advance lead and in the Treasury Department under former president Bill Clinton before joining the Clinton Global Initiative, also served on the national finance committee for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016 and as an adviser to former governor John Hickenlooper (D., Colo.). His private sector career as a corporate attorney and cofounder of Empowerment Capital Management was focused on “socially responsible investing.”
This is not the first time the socially responsible investor has been accused of serious wrongdoing. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bachar allegedly pocketed nearly $2 million from health care companies that believed they were purchasing life-saving personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns.
According to a lawsuit filed by a Denver-based health care company, Bachar agreed to sell them 4,200 cases of N95 masks for $2.4 million in April 2020 but never delivered the masks and did not return their initial payment of $604,000. Over the summer, Bachar was ordered to pay nearly $4.5 million to the companies he allegedly defrauded but has yet to comply with the civil judgments against him.
Speaking of corrupt Democratic crime families, former New York Governor has been charged charged with sex cri-cri-cri-crime.
With the obligatory Eurythmics video
(I actually own their 1984 soundtrack, but “Sexcrime” isn’t nearly as good as “Doubleplusgood.”)
While the administration begs overseas adversaries to ramp up oil production with jobs and development to the benefit of foreign citizens, Americans remain handicapped by Democrats’ zealous animosity towards fossil fuel extraction on domestic land.
Underneath the tundra surface of Alaska’s North Slope sits an estimated 4.3 t0 11.8 billion barrels of untouched recoverable oil located within the flat wetland boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Then-President Donald Trump opened ANWR’s 1.6 million acres of the 19.6 million-acre refuge for drilling in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with leases approved since then now in jeopardy under the new administration.
Biden has been yanking permits and demanding new environmental assessments in an effort to cancel projects altogether. Last week, the Interior Department tossed out the analysis completed under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), long held as the gold standard of assessing environmental impacts, and ordered a new supplemental review for leases in the Arctic refuge two months after they were suspended.
Racine County Sheriff’s Department investigators have presented evidence that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) committed felony election fraud by telling nursing home staffers to violate state law and fill out ballots on behalf of nursing home residents who were unable to themselves.
During a news conference Thursday, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said WEC commissioners and staff who prohibited legally-required special voting deputies from entering nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead told nursing home staff members to assist residents in voting committed a Class I felony, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of three years, six months in prison and $10,000 in fines.
I missed this for my Texas Critical Race Theory fight roundup: “Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School is Brewing Division.” “Over the last year, teachers and staff at a North Texas school have been going against the district and teaching racist propaganda, creating division among students, parents, and staff. Under the supervision of teachers, students are leading the charge in this growing division Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School has been experiencing since the previous school year.”
Portugal’s six-year experiment with leftwing “anti-austerity” government will end this week in a political crisis leading to early elections unless António Costa, the socialist prime minister, can strike a last-minute budget deal with the radical left.
The anti-capitalist Left Bloc (BE) and old-guard Communist party (PCP) have vowed to withhold crucial support in a budget vote on Wednesday unless the minority Socialist party (PS) government makes further concessions in a bill already seen as the most leftwing in recent history.
“They are asking the impossible and I can’t see the PS giving way,” said Francisco Seixas da Costa, a political commentator and former secretary of state for European affairs. “The pact has exhausted its possibilities and the BE and PCP can see no further advantage in co-operating with the government.”
Costa has offered a €40 increase in the national minimum wage to €705 a month and a €700m increase in investment in the national health service, alongside higher old-age pensions and public sector wages. The BE and PCP are pushing for bigger increases in these areas as well as labour reforms that the government fears would clash with EU rules.
After offering hope to struggling centre-left parties across Europe and inspiring neighbouring Spain’s mainstream socialists to follow a similar path, Portugal’s broad left pact is foundering over the smaller parties’ dissatisfaction with their peripheral role, and the limits of EU policy.
If the budget is defeated, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-right president, has said he will immediately dissolve parliament and call a general election two years ahead of schedule. Costa, meanwhile, has stated he would remain in office at the head of a caretaker government until the ballot was held, probably in January.
This has been all over everywhere this week, but it still angries up my blood: Fauci Funded ‘Cruel’ Puppy Experiments Where Sand Flies ‘Eat Them Alive’; Vocal Cords Severed.”
No less than four versions of “Let’s Go Brandon” are in the iTunes top 10.
Iran has announced that the country’s energy infrastructure was hit by a massive cyberattack on Tuesday, which left state subsidized gas stations across the country out of commission, resulting in very long lines of cars observed waiting to fill up in many towns and cities.
The timing is interesting given it happened near the two year anniversary mark of deadly nationwide protests following serious gas shortages and price hikes in the fall of 2019. The ‘activist’ nature of the hack is further revealed in that Iranian media is reporting that a message showed up in national computer systems that were hacked that addressed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the words, “where is the gas?”
By nearly every measure Americans are more generous with their money and time than anyone — including Europeans.
Indeed, American charitable giving exceeds the entire GDP of most European countries.
According to the Almanac of American Philanthropy, Americans donate around seven times as much as continental Europeans to charitable causes per capita. Per person, even after adjusting for differences in household income, Americans donate twice as much of their income as the Dutch, three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans, and ten times that of Italians.
