Posts Tagged ‘Mafia’

LinkSwarm for December 8, 2023

Friday, December 8th, 2023

Biden family corruption tops this week’s LinkSwarm (with a lot of links to go through), Juicy heads back to jail, and the Houthi’s tug on Superman’s cape.

  • Despite years of claiming that Hunter’s business was completely separate from that of Joe Biden, bank records show direct monthly payments from Hunter Biden’s corporation to Joe Biden.

    A corporation owned and controlled by Hunter Biden made several direct monthly payments to President Biden beginning in 2018, according to bank records released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

    The subpoenaed bank records obtained by National Review reveal Owasco PC established a monthly payment of $1,380 to President Biden beginning in September 2018. The committee says the payments establish a direct benefit Biden received from his family’s foreign business dealings, despite Biden’s claims that he has never benefitted from or been involved in his son’s ventures.

    “This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” House Oversight chairman James Comer says in a new video detailing the findings. “At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes.”

    Comer says the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”

    “As the Bidens received millions from foreign nationals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that were funded by his family’s business dealings,” the committee added in a press release.

    It was unclear based on the bank records how many monthly payments were made, but a source familiar with the committee’s probe said investigators had discovered at least three payments.

    Last week, the committee released an email from a bank money-laundering investigator who expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden.

    Biden received a $40,000 personal check from an account shared by his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in September 2017 — money that was marked as a “loan repayment.” The alleged repayment was sent after funds were filtered from Northern International Capital, a Chinese company affiliated with the Chinese energy firm CEFC, through several accounts related to Hunter Biden and eventually down to the personal account shared by James and Sara Biden.

    Northern International Capital sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and CEFC associate Gongwen Dong on August 8.

    On the same day, Hudson West III then sent $400,000 to Owasco, P.C., an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden. Six days later, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by James and Sara Biden. Sara Biden withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group on August 28 and then deposited the funds into her and her husband’s personal checking account later that day.

    On September 3, 2017, Sara Biden wrote a check to Joe Biden for $40,000.

    An unidentified bank investigator sent an email on June 26, 2018 to colleagues raising concerns about money sent from Hudson West III to Owasco P.C. The email said the $5 million in funds sent from Northern International Capital to Hudson West III were primarily used to fund 16 wire transfers totaling more than $2.9 million to Owasco PC. The wires were labeled as management fees and reimbursements.

  • Also, Joe Biden used aliases to exchange hundreds of emails with Hunter’s business partner.

    Joe Biden used several email aliases to regularly correspond with Hunter Biden’s business partner in recent years, including while he was serving as vice president, a GOP-controlled House committee leading the Republican impeachment inquiry revealed Tuesday.

    IRS whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley provided the eleven-page log of emails ahead of a closed-door hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. The document includes metadata associated with emails sent to and from Joe Biden’s alias email addresses from 2010 to 2019, though it does not include the content of those emails.

    In total, Joe Biden exchanged 327 emails with Hunter Biden’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, the founding partner and managing director of Hunter’s defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm. Fifty-four of those emails were sent directly to Schwerin, while the rest included other parties. Out of the 327 emails logged in the document, 291 were sent during Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency. Joe Biden’s email aliases included “robinware456,” “JRBware” and “RobertLPeters.”

    “Through months of testifying for hours and producing hundreds of pages of documentation, and just as many months of baseless attacks against them, their story has remained the same and their credibility intact. The same cannot be said for President Biden,” committee chairman Jason Smith (R., Mo.) said in a statement.

    “So far, our witnesses have produced over eleven-hundred pages of evidence, sat for 14 hours of closed-door testimony with counsel from the majority and minority on this committee, testified publicly before the Oversight Committee, and today, have provided us with new evidence.”

    Smith also emphasized that much of the email correspondence between Joe Biden and Schwerin occurred around the then-vice president’s June 2014 trip to Ukraine.

  • An IRS whistleblower says that Hunter Biden got $4.9 million from ‘sugar brother’ Kevin Morris.

    Hunter Biden received a whopping $4.9 million from Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris in a three-year period, according to an IRS agent who investigated the president’s son for alleged tax evasion.

    The revelation signifies a substantial increase in the known amount that Hunter, 53, got from his so-called “sugar brother” after the men reportedly met for the first time at a December 2019 campaign fundraiser.

    IRS agent Joseph Ziegler shared the jaw-dropping figure and additional documentation Tuesday with the House Ways and Means Committee in a follow-up appearance as House Republicans near an expected vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for his alleged role in his family’s foreign dealings.

    Prior reporting indicated Morris paid about $2 million in tax debts for Hunter and purchased some of his novice artworks.

    Morris’ motives for helping the first son financially and the authenticity of their friendship have been debated by Republicans.

    As part of his Tuesday testimony, Ziegler provided legislators an email showing that as early as Feb. 7, 2020 — two months after they met — Morris was contacting accountants on Hunter’s behalf and warning them to work quickly to avoid “considerable risk personally and politically.”

    Ziegler, who investigated Hunter’s taxes for five years before he was removed from the case this year, said the first son’s income from Morris — at least some of it deemed loans — resembled Hunter’s practice of trying to avoid paying taxes on other income by describing it as loans.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • And after the hundreds of stories of Hunter Biden’s corruption, and his key role in funneling foreign money into his father’s hands, Hunter has finally been indicted on nine criminal counts.
  • But the Department of Justice is blocking whistleblowers from testifying in the Hunter Biden probe, because of course they are.
  • Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen just can’t resist tugging on Superman’s cape.

    An American warship and several commercial ships faced attacks in the Red Sea on Sunday, the Pentagon said.

    “We’re aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available,” the Pentagon said.

    A U.S. official told the Associated Press the attack began around 10 a.m. in Sanaa, Yemen, and lasted five hours.

    Officials did not say where the attacks may have come from.

    Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have launched several attacks in the Red Sea in recent weeks and has launched drones and missiles toward Israel since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

  • You might have seen video of that house that exploded in Arlington, Virginia. The guy who owned it turned out to be a far left Chomsky-following whackadoodle.

  • Texas is suing the Biden Administration yet again, this time over imposing censorship.

    The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed a joint lawsuit, along with co-plaintiff media outlets The Daily Wire and The Federalist, against the U.S. Department of State, alleging the federal government both directly and indirectly violated the First Amendment rights of certain online news outlets by placing them on a censorship “blacklist.”

    According to the OAG, the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleges an office within the state department known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC) was used to “limit the reach and business viability of domestic news organizations by funding censorship technology and private censorship enterprises.”

    The stated purpose of the GEC is to lead the federal government’s effort to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda” and disinformation efforts that pose a risk to the United States or influence the government’s policies.

    However, the plaintiffs argue the GEC was weaponized to “violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.”

    In short, the lawsuit describes how the government created multiple censorship programs that worked to de-platform, shadowban, discredit, and demonize certain American media outlets.

    It argues that some of these mechanisms were not just surveillance tools for the government to monitor and identify potential propaganda and disinformation, but rather characterized the technology that had been developed as “tools of warfare” used to shape opinions and perceptions that had been “misappropriated and misdirected to be used at home against domestic political opponents and members of the American press with viewpoints conflicting with federal officials.”

    “Media Plaintiffs each face blacklisting, reduced advertising revenue, reduced potential growth, reputational damage, economic cancellation, reduced circulation of reporting and speech, and social media censorship — all as a direct result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct,” the lawsuit states.

    “I am proud to lead the fight to save Americans’ precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical federal government,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release announcing the lawsuit.

    “The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American. This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”

    “Those government-funded, government-promoted censorship technologies and enterprises targeted conservative media outlets, including The Daily Wire,” Ben Shapiro said in a video statement released regarding the lawsuit. Shapiro is the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire.

    “Their goal is to paint us as unreliable and therefore to push advertisers away from advertising on programs like this one, websites like The Daily Wire, websites like The Federalist, that is an ongoing problem that is being pushed by the state department,” he said.

  • California’s budget deficit swells to record $68 billion as tax revenues fall. And Gavin Newsom is the choice Democratic Party powerbrokers want to replace Biden with in 2024. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of California, San Francisco is back to being a drug addict infested shithole after Xi Jinping’s visit.
  • Back to jail for Juicy. Nate the Lawyer offers a good overview of the twists and turns of the case. I had forgotten that he had paid his “attackers” with a personal check…
  • The F-117 Nighthawk was retired in 2008. Or was it?
  • Belarus kicked out of the Red Cross for all sorts of misconduct by its head.

    the Belarus Red Cross Society is suspended from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

    The suspension is the result of noncompliance by the Belarus Red Cross with the request for the dismissal of Mr. Dimitry Shevtsov, Secretary General of the National Society. This follows the decision of the IFRC’s Governing Board of 3 October 2023 relating to the investigation into the allegations against Belarus Red Cross Secretary General for his statements, including on nuclear weapons and on the movement of children to Belarus, and his visit to Luhansk and Donetsk.

    The suspension means that the Belarus Red Cross loses its rights as a member of the IFRC. Any new funding to the Belarus Red Cross will also be suspended.

  • More than two hundred Italian mafia members sentenced to over 2,000 years in prison. Evidently all of them weren’t killed by Denzel Washington…
  • “Governor Greg Abbott is keeping the endorsements rolling, announcing his support for Marc LaHood for Texas House. LaHood, an attorney from San Antonio, is challenging State Rep. Steve Allison (R–San Antonio), who was elected to the House in 2018 to replace retiring House Speaker Joe Straus. Since then, Allison has consistently had one of the most liberal voting records among his Republican colleagues.”
  • North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum drops his longshot bid for the Republican Presidential nomination.
  • In Germany, being an illegal alien is evidently a get out of rape charges free card. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Colorado would like. To feed your fingertips. To the wolverines.

    No, not those Wolverines.

  • Brisbane Lord Mayor quits 2032 Olympic Games committee, including his rejection of $137 million for a temporary stadium.
  • “Florida Government Reveals Massive Disney Corruption Scheme.”

    The Walt Disney Co. effectively controlled the local government around the site of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for decades in what an extensive review by the state government calls “the most egregious exhibition of corporate cronyism in modern American history.”

    After Disney bought the land that would become its massive amusement park and resort, it received permission from the Florida Legislature and governor in 1967 to create a local government, the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

    From that time until Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Feb. 27 abolishing the Reedy Creek district, Disney heavily influenced the local government to its advantage, according to a new report Monday from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.

    The legislation signed into law by DeSantis, a Republican, transformed the Reedy Creek district into the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which aims to root out what critics see as Disney’s corrupt hold over the local government.

    In the report, a copy of which was provided early to The Daily Signal, the new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District claims that “Disney not just controlled the Reedy Creek Improvement District, but did so by effectively purchasing loyalty.”

    Although the Reedy Creek district was a separate entity from the Walt Disney Co., the district treated its employees as if they were Disney employees, sometimes referred to as “cast members,” and awarded them lavish perks unavailable to the general public.

    The new Florida government report used the expertise of George Mason University Professor Donald J. Kochan in governance; William Jennings at Delta Consulting Group in accounting; the consulting firm Kimley-Horn for engineering; and Public Resources Advisory Group Managing Director Wendell Gaertner for public finance.

    The report notes: “Disney effectively bribed RCID employees (and retirees, members of the [RCID] Board of Supervisors, and vendor VIPs) by showering them with company benefits and perks: millions of dollars’ worth of annual passes to theme parks worldwide, 40% discounts on cruises, free transferable single-use tickets during the holiday season, steep discount on merchandise, marked discounts on food and beverage, and access to non-public shopping reserved for Disney cast members (where merchandise was greatly discounted and items were made available that were otherwise not available for public purchase).”

  • A detailed look at the decline of The Disney Channel.
  • Alberto Fujimori leaves prison. Fujimori is both a corrupt felon and arguably Peru’s most successful and competent leader of the last 80 years…
  • Texas is in the college football playoff, along with Michigan, Washington and Alabama.
  • Jacksonville Jaguars employee embezzled $22 million over four years. That’s just over $1 million a win…
  • A look inside a car disassembly factory.
  • Roll on, roll off ships are both interesting and freaking huge.
  • “I Don’t Want My Skull Fractured By A Man,’ Says Bigoted Female Athlete.”
  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    LinkSwarm for June 9, 2023

    Friday, June 9th, 2023

    Welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Too much Facebook/Instagram/pedophile news, and not enough songs about buildings and food.

    

  • Funny how the indictment against Trump dropped just as evidence surfaced that Biden had taken $5 million in bribes from Bursima. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Thanks to “green energy,” there’s a good chance that more energy blackouts are coming this summer.

    Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts.

    That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

    According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer.

    This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.

    Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days.

    Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest?

    Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel plants from the grid.

    These plants are supposed to be replaced by renewables — wind and solar — but wind doesn’t work on windless days, and solar doesn’t keep your air conditioning running on steamy nights.

    The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.”

  • Institute for the Study of War: “Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.” Other sources are reporting modest Ukrainian gains.
  • Instagram is evidently home of a giant pedophile network.

    A comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory reveals that Meta-owned Instagram has been home to an organized and massive network of pedophiles.

    But what separates this case from most is that Instagram’s own algorithms were promoting pedophile content to other pedophiles, while the pedos themselves used coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza.

    Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

    The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.” -WSJ

    According to the researchers, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as “little slut for you.”

    Sellers of child porn often convey the child’s purported age, saying they are “on chapter 14,” or “age 31,” with an emoji of a reverse arrow.

  • Instagram can’t block pedophiles, but it can block the account of Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Remember: Opposing the corrupt Biden Cabal is a worse crime than pedophilia for vast swathes of our media elites… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Meta, they’re threatening to “pull news feeds on its platforms for California residents if the state legislature passes the Journalism Preservation Act.” That act “requires big tech companies to pay news outlets a journalism usage fee.” For once the pedo-coddlers are right: No one should be forced to subsidize failing social justice-infected newsrooms.
  • Speaking of pedophiles: “Itasca ISD Superintendent Michael Stevens arrested, charged with online solicitation of a minor.” Maybe parents wouldn’t worry so much about educators trying to screw their children if educators didn’t keep trying to screw their children.
  • This week in Democrats passing unconstitutional laws that strip citizens of rights: “llinois’s Gov. J. B. “Jumbo Burger” Pritzker signed himself a whale of a state law yesterday that went into effect IMMEDIATELY. And, immediately, restricted Illinois citizens from pursuing constitutional claims against their state government unless they filed the lawsuits in one of two, Democratic approved, state sanctioned, Democratic counties – Cook or Sangamon.” That’s a prima facie violation of the First Amendment “right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
  • Free New York City crack pipe vending machine cleaned out overnight. “Free crack pipe vending machine” sounds like the punchline to a Norm MacDonald joke from the 1990s, but it’s now evidently the policy of New York Democrats.
  • North Dakota’s Republican Governor is running for President. Burgum is evidently a billionaire after being an early investor in Great Plains Software, which was sold to Microsoft in 2001. The fact he’s close to Bill Gates doesn’t give me a lot of warm fuzzies, and Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved that rich-but-unknown outsiders shoveling money into a Presidential campaign costs you a lot of jack and earn you boatloads of squat. He’s a pretty decent public speaker, but in a blow-dried 80’s executive sense, and he sort of looks like if Richard Belzer had played the Michael Douglas role in Falling Down.
  • By contrast, Chris Sununu realized he had no business running for President. Good.
  • American Airlines has to ground more than 150 regional jets due to a pilot shortage.
  • I know nothing more than this. Evidently local media have ignored it as well:

  • Pitch Meeting for 2023 The Little Mermaid. “Life being better down where it’s wetter is tight!”
  • U.S. women’s soccer team loses 12-0 to fourth tier Welsh soccer club.
  • When life imitates Mythbusters.
  • “Due To High Crime, Mafia Closes Its Chicago Office.” “How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It’s insane!”
  • Joe Rogan Interviews Peter Zeihan (Part 2: China, Cartels and Drug Wars)

    Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

    Here’s Part 2 of my coverage of Joe Rogan’s interview with Peter Zeihan. (Part one is here.)

    First up, covering familiar ground for BattleSwarm readers, why China is screwed.

  • The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.

  • “The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
  • “We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
  • “Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
  • The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
  • “Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
  • “They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
    personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”

  • The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
  • “They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
  • “They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
  • “Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
  • “Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
  • “One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
  • Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”
  • Next: Why EVs are a disaster.

  • “All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
  • Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
    as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”

  • To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
  • Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
  • Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:

    There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.

    This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?

  • Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.

  • Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
  • “I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
  • “They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
  • “Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
  • “The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
  • “The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
  • “We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
  • “El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
  • “All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
    Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”

  • “Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
  • “Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
  • And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.
  • He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:

    Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.

    And he’s not a fan of Crypto:

    Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”

    Cuomo Casho Nomo

    Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

    Few political falls have been so swift and complete as that of former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. In 2020, Cuomo was being talked up as an emergency replacement for Sundown Joe Biden on the presidential ticket despite having forced Flu Manchu patients into nursing homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and signed a $5.1 million book deal to talk up the awesomeness of all his lockdowns and granny killing.

    Here at the burnt-end of 2021, Andrew Cuomo is not only disgraced and out of office over sexual abuse allegations, his brother Fredo has been purged from CNN, ostensibly over his own sex abuse scandal. Now ex-Governor Cuomo has been ordered to turn that sweet $5.1 million over to New York State.

    Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been ordered by the state’s ethics board to forfeit $5.1 million in profits next month from the memoir he published over the pandemic.

    In a near unanimous decision, a twelve to one vote, the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics passed a resolution demanding that Cuomo return his earnings from the book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This comes a month after the panel rescinded its prior approval giving the now disgraced governor permission to keep the book side hustle while he was still serving as governor of New York, confronting multiple scandals simultaneously.

    Over the summer and into the fall, the New York attorney general’s office launched a probe into Cuomo’s alleged abuse of state resources, including staff members, to draft and promote his book. During that criminal investigation, Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed the ethics panel for information related to the book deal. The JCOPE then reversed its approval for Cuomo’s to collect income from the book deal, paving the road for fines to be potentially imposed or profits to be recalled.

    According to the resolution, created by Republican commissioner David McNamara, the former governor “lacked the legal authority to engage in outside activity and receive compensation in regard to the book” since the panel rescinded its approval.

    While I had no intention of making this Louis Rossmann Week, he has such a wonderful plate of profane schadenfreude over this turn of evens that I’m embedding it here.

    How unpopular is Cuomo? Even former Gambino Family underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano said Cuomo’s granny-killing was beyond the pale. “I don’t give a f— who tells me to do that, whether it’s [former President] Trump, the president, the vice president, you, him, I would never do it…And I’m a badass. I’d never do it.”

    How bad do you have to suck to have a guy involved in 19 murders to think you’re scum?

    (And did you know that Gravano has his own YouTube channel and a podcast? His videos even have sponsors! Only in America…)

    Speaking of organized crime figures, Cuomo has clearly pissed off somebody deep in the Democratic Party power structure. I am very far indeed from the center of the New York Democratic Party, but there’s obviously something weird going on there. Having Letitia James take out Cuomo, only to drop out of the race to be his successor suggests someone beyond the public players made that call. Add that to the perfect table-run required to get Biden the nomination in 2020, the continued screwing of the Bernie Brigades, and the inexplicable rise of Pete Buttigieg, and it becomes very obvious that people very far indeed from the public figureheads of the Democratic Party are calling the shots from the shadows.

    Not that Cuomo didn’t have it coming. He did. He’s a scummy asshole. But he was just as big a scummy asshole in 2020, and the Democratic Machine pulled out all the stops propping him up as some sort of messianic paragon of COVID-fighting virtue. Now the same people have done a 180° and plunged the knives into him.

    The question is why.

    Geraldine Ferraro RIP

    Saturday, March 26th, 2011

    Former Walter Mondale Vice Presidential pick Geraldine Ferraro has died at age 75. If Mondale had not made this liberal New York congresswoman his running mate, her obituary would barely be a blip nationally. If the Ferraro pick was meant to attract lavish media praise and attention it succeeded; if it was meant to help him win electoral votes, it failed, as I doubt she was instrumental in winning Minnesota.

    But the main reason I bring up Ferraro’s death is to exhume an obvious instance of biased political reporting. In 1992, when Ferraro was running in a four-way Democratic primary race against left-wing favorite Elizabeth Holtzman, Al Sharpton and Robert Abrams for the Senate seat held by Republican Al D’Amato, The Village Voice published a piece called “Gerry and the Mob,” documenting the extensive ties between Ferraro’s husband John Zaccaro and organized crime, just a few weeks before the primary. In the course of doing so, The Village Voice revealed that they had all the information back when Mondale picked Ferraro as the Vice President, but had spiked the story because of the “historic” nature of her candidacy. Ferraro ended up losing a race she had been leading to Abrams, which made her so bitter she refused to campaign for Abrams, who ended up losing to D’Amato by 80,000 votes.

    So when it comes to the liberal media reporting news, reality is whatever benefits liberals. Keep this in mind every time you read a MSM piece on Obama, and wonder just what they know and refuse to reveal until Obama is safely out of office.