Scottish commentator Neil Oliver has noticed strangely coordinated messaging arising among rarefied strata of our global elites about the supposed perfidy of the unvaccinated all at the same time.
“Build back better,” “the unvaccinated aren’t citizens,” etc. all hymns from the same book. But who wrote the book?
Ted Cruz posted this classic Saturday Night Live skit to his Facebook page, and since I had been looking for an embeddable copy for a while, I’m passing the joy onto you:
For younger viewers: Yes, once upon a time, Saturday Night Live was willing to make fun of Democratic presidents…
Greetings, and welcome to the last LinkSwarm of 2021!
Remember how all those media pundits opined that 2021 couldn’t help but being better than 2020?
Yeah, not so much.
Assuming the official death tolls are accurate (probably not, but I doubt the methodology has changed from 2020 to 2021), there were approximately 375,000 deaths in the United States of America in 2020 from Flu Manchu. With some 821,000+ total deaths, more people have died this year than last year. So much for Joe Biden shutting down the virus…
Joe Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone has evidently dropped, but I haven’t watched it yet. Maybe Saturday.
Over the past year, DeSantis has emerged as one of the most articulate political spokesmen for the anti–critical race theory movement. His new policy agenda builds on successful anti-CRT legislation in other states but goes two steps further. First, it provides parents with a “private right of action,” which allows them to sue offending institutions for violations, gain information through legal discovery, and, if they win in the courts, collect attorney’s fees. Second, it tackles critical race theory in corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training programs, which, DeSantis says, sometimes promote racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and harassment, in violation of state civil rights laws.
At heart, the battle against critical race theory is a fight against entrenched bureaucracies that have used public institutions to promote their own racialist ideology. “This is an elite-driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities, and elites in corporate America, and they’re trying to shove it down the throats of the American people,” DeSantis said. “You’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
Following his speech, DeSantis invited me to address the crowd. I explained that the reason critical race theory has upset so many Americans is that it speaks to two deep reservoirs of human sentiment: citizens’ desire for self-government and parents’ desire to shape the moral and educational development of their children. Elite institutions have attempted to step between parent and child.
DeSantis has deftly positioned himself as a protector of middle-American families. One of the guest speakers, Lacaysha Howell, a biracial mother from Sarasota, said that left-wing teachers tried to persuade her daughter that the white side of their family was oppressive. Another speaker, Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban-American mother from the Miami area, said that left-wing indoctrination in schools reminded her of her father’s warnings about Communism in his native Cuba. Both believed that critical race theory was poison to the American Dream.
As they begin their next session in January, Florida legislators have the opportunity to craft the gold standard for “culture war” policy. The governor’s team has worked with a range of interested parties, including the Manhattan Institute, which has crafted model language for prohibiting racialist indoctrination and providing curriculum transparency to parents. The battle is ultimately about shaping public policy in accord with public values. “I think we have an ability [to] just draw a line in the sand and say, ‘That’s not the type of society that we want here in the state of Florida,’” said DeSantis yesterday. The stakes are high—and all eyes are on Florida to deliver.
(Previously.)
That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient.
Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests. pic.twitter.com/DvOzIr5JX8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2021
As usual, elite institutions — media, government, public health authorities — love to whine about the refusal of the public to trust their pronouncements, complaining people turn to other less credentialed and worthy sources.
But they *never* ask what they did to cause this.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2021
Texas is No. 1 among large states & 3rd among all states in recovering jobs lost during the pandemic.
That BLS report also shows that average hourly wages are rising faster in Texas than the U.S.
More Texans have a paycheck today than ever before. pic.twitter.com/rIpBc6Hea0
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) December 30, 2021
Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted four men on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in a scheme to rip off the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by submitting over 80 false applications for forgivable loans and writing checks to relatives and fictional employees, among other fraudulent activities.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release on December 15 that 29-year-old Hamza Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Khalid Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Abdul Fatani of Richmond, and 53-year-old Syed Ali of Sugar Land could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each count of wire fraud.
The indictments against them are the most recent in an apparent scheme that prosecutors say involved 15 defendants from Texas and Illinois, all of whom are accused of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The DOJ stated that Khalid Abbas, Fatani, Ali, and another defendant, Houston resident Amir Aqeel, 53, have been charged with money laundering in the superseding indictment. The money laundering counts carry potential sentences of up to 10 years.
Last year, a grand jury also indicted Aqeel on a charge of aggravated identity theft. The government accuses Aqeel of using stolen identities to apply for the PPP loans.
According to the DOJ, several of the accused have already pleaded guilty for their involvement, including Siddiq Azeemuddin, 42, of Naperville, Illinois, Richard Reuth, 58, of Spring, and Raheel Malik, 41, of Sugar Land, all of whom entered their pleas in October. Houston residents Abdul Farahshah, 70, Jesus Perez, 31, and Bijan Rajabi, 68, pleaded guilty in late November.
Rifat Bajwa, 53, of Richmond, Pardeep Basra, 52, of Houston, Mayer Misak, 41, of Cypress, and Mauricio Navia, 42, of Katy were also indicted last year on charges of participating in the conspiracy and committing wire fraud.
Why, it’s almost like just about all the defendants share some characteristic in common. If only I could put my finger on it…
The City of Austin’s director of the Office of Police Oversight (OPO), Farah Muscadin, abused her authority, a third-party arbitrator decided this week.
In a 31-page decision, Lynn Gomez, the arbitrator, ruled that Muscadin and the OPO violated Article 16 of the Austin Police Department’s employment contract that was negotiated in 2018. Article 16 governs the parameters of civilian oversight of the department, which progressive groups lobbied hard for during the labor standoff.
“Contrary to the city’s claim, Director Muscadin was not acting within the scope of her authority…[she] clearly was seeking to dictate some future outcome rather than simply making a recommendation as Art. 16 permits,” Gomez ruled.
“[T]he evidence and arguments raise[d] by the city indicate that the city does not consider itself or OPO bound by Article 16’s provisions.”
You may remember Muscadin from such hits as “I’m spending taxpayer money to push Critical Race Theory” and “defund APD and give the money to my radical leftwing cronies.” She should resign.
Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told a Senate hearing three weeks ago that Taiwan was “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defence of vital US interests”. In words strikingly similar to MacArthur’s, he emphasised the island’s location “at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of US allies and partners”.
This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan. In Beijing at least, the statement is being read as dropping all pretence that the US could acquiesce to a unification of Taiwan with China.
Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in China, believes that US strategic thinking regarding Taiwan has always followed the lines laid out by MacArthur.
Even after establishing diplomatic relations with China, the US “worked to ensure the continuation of a state of separation across the Taiwan Strait”, Wu said. “When we ask the US if they do not hope to see the unification of China, they deny that. But judging from the US’s concrete actions, it is clear that they indeed do not hope to see China unify. Ely Ratner has now said this out loud.”
In Washington, too, some observers think the testimony allows little conclusion other than that the US should not allow Taiwan to become part of China under any circumstances.
Hopefully true, but betting on Joe Biden’s stalwart fortitude is putting your hopes on an extremely weak horse…
*orders five* pic.twitter.com/8k6RF9Bil7
— Family Guy (@FamilyGuyonFOX) December 20, 2021
Ultimately The Matrix Regenerations fails on just about every level possible. It fails to properly honor the past by leaving it well enough alone. It fails to tell a compelling new story, or add new ideas to the world it created. It fails to establish interesting new characters, or take old ones in a new direction. It fails to surpass the spectacle, energy and originality of a 20 year old film. And most of all it fails to deliver a compelling reason for its own existence. The Matrix Retaliations is a film that never should have been made in the first place.
This satirical video is based on an undeniable truth: the bulk of mainstream corporate and billionaire money resides in and supports liberal-left, not right-wing, media. As the Dem Party became the preferred vehicle of oligarchs, their largesse goes to those urging votes for it. https://t.co/UpuF2ZuGxr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2021
Happy New Year, everyone!
77 year ago today, General George S. Patton’s 4th armored division relieved the siege of Bastogne.
Everyone who knows anything about The Battle of the Bulge knows about Bastogne, but here Nicholas Moran offers up five lesser known facts about the battle.
Merry Christmas, everyone! To celebrate, enjoy this video of Christmas package thieves getting bombed:
Yeah, another Louis Rossmann video, this one about the news that several Broadway shows are cancelling due to “breakthrough” Flu Manchu cases among their cast. This is despite all cast, crew and audience being required to be vaccinated. “It scares me is because it means that we do not have a path back to normal life.”
Maybe you won’t watch all 25 minutes of this, but it’s worth watching the first six minutes to see how ordinary Americans who were sympathetic to early coronavirus restrictions have lost all patience with endless Covid Theater.
“‘If it even saves one life’ is unsustainable for society.”
Rational people have already abandoned lunatic Flu Manchu restrictions, and it’s long been obvious that the vaccinated can spread the disease, but hard left Democratic Party elites continue to insist that lockdowns and mandates are the way to go, and that their unwavering insistence on these measures is a marker of their moral superiority over those that oppose them.
At this point, Flu Manchu virtue-signaling is a self-reinforcing loop. Democratic Party elites and their leftwing transnational allies see coercive measures as an invaluable tool for The Great Reset*, and time and time again they’ve proven that rules are for the little people, and that any restrictions imposed on ordinary Americans can be safely ignored by the nomenklatura. So too rank-and-file Democratic Party activists (at least the ones not actively burning down small businesses) seem to have embraced Covid Theater as one of the defining virtue signals of their lives. They have too much ego and self-love at stake to admit that their own sacrifices were all for nothing, and that those Bible-clinging Trump voters were right and they were wrong about living normal lives.
Now that it’s been proven time and time again that the fully vaccinated spread Mao Tse Lung, there’s no exit for them from the Flu Manchu Fearmongering Treadmill, no logical place where they can finally declare “enough!”
Expect Covid Theater lunacy to continue until the people pushing it are removed from power.
(Eighteen and a half minutes in, Rossmann also talks about Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities and the cost of being wrong. I haven’t read that particular Sowell, but he’s always worth reading.)
*Do I believe every part of The Great Reset/New World Order conspiracy theory? No. But there’s something there, some powerful, unspoken, anti-democratic agenda that explains why so many elites pursue so many coercive measures long after they’ve obviously become both unpopular and counter-productive given their ostensible goals.
If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, one recurring theme is that Nobel-prize winning leftwing economist and pundit Paul Krugman is always wrong. Back in the day, Larry Kudlow made a career pointing out Krugman’s errors, and you may remember such Krugman howlers as “the Internet is no more important than a fax machine” and “markets will never recover from Trump.”
Lately he’s been in the news for dismissing the idea that inflation is a problem.
Paul Krugman, May 7: “[Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen and I believe that the Fed can contain any inflationary risks.”
Paul Krugman, June 21: “For those paying closer attention to the flow of new information, inflation panic is, you know, so last week.”
Paul Krugman, July 23: “Overheating is still possible, and the Fed should keep its eye on that possibility. But the big numbers aren’t as scary as they seem.”
Paul Krugman, August 12: “Anxiety about the inflationary impact of public investment just doesn’t make sense if you work through the numbers.”
Paul Krugman, September 10: “Companies aren’t acting as if they expect lots of future inflation, where they can hike wages without losing competitive advantage. They’re acting, instead, as if they see current inflation as a blip.”
Paul Krugman, November 11: “So yes, that was an ugly inflation report, and we hope that future reports will look better. But people making knee-jerk comparisons with the 1970s and screaming about stagflation are looking at the wrong history. When you look at the right history, it tells you not to panic.”
The New York Times, this morning:
Inflation jumped to the highest level in nearly 40 years, fresh data released on Friday showed, as supply chain disruptions, rapid consumer demand and rising housing costs combined to fuel the strongest inflationary burst in a generation (emphasis added).
The rising costs spell trouble for officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House, who are trying to calibrate policy at a moment when the labor market has yet to completely heal from the pandemic, but the risk that price increases could become more lasting is increasing.
The Consumer Price Index climbed by 6.8 percent in the year through November, the data showed, the fastest pace since 1982.
One of the reasons inflation is such a serious problem right now is that we have an administration, a Fed, and a lot of ideologically or politically aligned economic elites who are wedded to the belief that inflation is not a serious problem.
Proving that some of the most basic facts of economic life for ordinary people elude some Nobel-prize winning economists, Krugman dismisses the idea that inflation hurts the poor worse than the rich.
Inflation redistributes from creditors to debtors — not exactly a burden on the bottom half of the income distribution 2/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 11, 2021
"Inflation especially hurts the poor" has truthiness — it sounds like it should be true. But I don't see either evidence or a mechanism 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 11, 2021
Hey, Mr. Super-Genius: A family of four just getting by on $1,500 is hurt a lot more when the price of milk rises by 80 cents a gallon and gasoline rises a dollar a gallon.
Here Louis Rossmann (who does something like two videos a day) expounds upon that theme:
Some of his complaints are more acute for New York City than the rest of the country, but he’s far more in touch with reality than Krugman seems to be.
So what does the Biden Administration plan to do about inflation? Easy. They’re going to redefine it away by removing commodity prices from the CPI.
Yes, I’m sure that will fool people…
The redpilling of Joe Rogan continues apace, and here are three video clips from his interview with independent journalist Matt Taibbi about things that just don’t add up.
First up: The obvious Fed false flag “Patriot Font” march.
Joe Rogan calls bullshit on the bizarre Patriot Front rally. pic.twitter.com/aw11u1BaeU
— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) December 8, 2021
“This is so stupid it hurts my feelings.”
Next up: Just how much Bill Gates has spent on influencing media.
Finally, how Trump broke the media’s brain.
Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi discuss how the legacy media blatantly distorts the facts to attack Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/k79LpRpfp4
— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) December 7, 2021
One correction to Rogan and Taibbi. The bias itself isn’t new. You could start to see the outlines of media bias against Republicans in the 1980s. However, Trump Derangement Syndrome made them drop even the pretense of objectivity.