January 21, 2025
FIND YOUR PHONE: Apple AirTag 4 Pack. #CommissionEarned
CULTURE CHANGE: Six Reasons That NFA Items Have Become Much More Popular.
BIDEN’S PARTING GIFTS:
If I take the current annualized run-rate deficit of about $3T per year and subtract the about $1T of run-rate interest payments, I get primary deficit of $2T. If I take the 2025 predicted US GDP of $28T, I get 7% of GDP primary deficit. That’s an implausibly large number on… pic.twitter.com/6v8Poc0YxW
— Ptuomov (@ptuomov) January 21, 2025
The Obama Cabal that ran the Biden White House really did a Third World number on our nation’s finances. Trump and the DOGE boys have their work cut out for them.
HEADS MUST ROLL: D.C. Gulag Holds J6 Prisoners Hostage Despite Trump’s Pardons.
READER FAVORITE: Hanes Men’s EcoSmart Fleece Hoodie Sweatshirt. #CommissionEarned
DECOUPLING: Drone Makers Looking to Steer Clear of China Fear Beijing’s Wrath.
China dominates the global market for the small, inexpensive drones that have transformed the world’s battlefields—and Beijing hasn’t been shy about keeping the industry under its thumb.
For U.S. companies, dependence on China has become untenable, particularly as Beijing shows it is willing to cut off their access to essential supplies.
In Taiwan, that spells opportunity. Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun, who heads a government program to develop the island’s drone sector, said in a recent interview that the development of a “democratic supply chain” starring Taiwan is an inevitability.
However, recent examples of Beijing punishing companies for their ties to Taiwan have made U.S. businesses cautious in their efforts to avoid China in the production of drones, an industry where commercial ambitions and national security intersect.
Beijing really doesn’t want Taiwan to become self-sufficient in drones.
DRAIN THE SWAMP: Trump Makes an Epic Move Against the Department of Justice. “In an executive order signed Monday evening, Trump has directed his own government to investigate the agency for its misconduct in the aftermath of the January 6th events.”
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Why taking fever-reducing meds and drinking fluids may not be the best way to treat flu and fever. Out: Rest in bed, drink plenty of fluids, and take Tylenol or NSAIDs to relieve aches and pains.
CDR SALAMANDER: Red Sea Experience: Don’t Let Others Ignore It.
When it comes to war at sea, we get few opportunities to see what works, what does not work. What we need more of, what we can do without. The last 15-months of experience in the Red Sea have been priceless, unscheduled range time.
The Europeans have learned that they need to work on their software integration and need [to] find some extra money for improvements to existing kit, but as the US Navy has done the bulk of the fighting—from Aegis software to proving that Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles are not boogeymen—we have a lot to leverage.
…
Look at those numbers again. What weapon system was used more than any other?The 5” gun.
We always need more shells. They aren’t sexy, they’re cheap compared to missiles, but we always need more.
THE REAL BIDEN SCANDAL: Running for a Second Term.
“They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.”
A similarly-timed article in the Guardian relayed an anecdote from political scientist Larry Sabato. A Democratic senator called Sabato in early 2024 and said, “You do realize, off the record, that Joe Biden is not going to be our nominee?” Sabato, stunned, says the senator then told him: “I just was at a meeting with him with several other senators and he couldn’t even function. We can’t run him.”
That senator tried to talking to the administration about it and “was punished, as several of them were. They gave him the cold shoulder for a while. The point is that a lot of people had figured it out but they didn’t care. I’m stunned that they got away with it.”
But we already knew from past reporting that some of this was going on. Over the summer, CNN reported that members of Biden’s Cabinet didn’t know much about his health because they were so rarely given the opportunity to see the president. An earlier piece in the New York Times reported that Biden’s staff had been stage-managing podcast interviews since 2022. And of course there was the early-July Wall Street Journal report that came under attack from the media and the president’s administration and allies yet turned out to be exactly right about Biden’s condition and the fact that he was essentially a part-time president. The Journal recounted a 2022 meeting abroad with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the president skipped, even though it was in the early evening, so he could go to bed. The chancellor and his aides didn’t know Biden was flaking on him until Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived and held the meeting in his stead. The president just simply didn’t show up.
The stand-in part of that is the key. Biden may not have been “presidenting” at various key moments, but someone was.
Now the best you can say for anyone who wasn’t a member of the Biden nuclear family is that perhaps they didn’t know the full extent of it either and were made to respond on the fly. But if Blinken knew in 2022 that the president couldn’t handle an early-evening meeting with Scholz, so did plenty of other people—and nobody said anything for two more years.
“I am struck by an observation that few others seem to have made about the Biden era: Nobody really ever got fired,” Jeffrey Blehar adds:
I remember that Donald Trump had only one good line during his first (and only) debate against Joe Biden — primarily because he needed do nothing else but remain functional while Biden melted like a wax candle beside him — and it was his point that Biden had never fired anyone for poor performance, not even once in a presidential term that all voters could agree was wrought with massive, avoidable, personally accountable failures. Why not? I flagged it back then (even amidst the chaos of Biden’s meltdown) because I felt that it subtly got to the point that Trump, in that debate, was not expecting to deal with: Biden’s presidency had been a sham from its very first day, a project managed by a group of advisers rather than an actual president, and that cabal couldn’t fire anyone who might reveal the secret.
It really boils down to that: We were stuck with the useless administration Biden announced on Day One, because, on Day One, Biden was already mentally unfit for office. His aides and family hid him, and every single person who accepted a berth working for this fraud of a team inevitably realized it (or came to realize it) as well. That’s why nobody could be fired or let go. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Remember when America’s entire transportation infrastructure, from plane to highway to rail, suddenly convulsed early in the term under Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who at one time happened to be secretly vacationing? Of course you don’t, because no disciplinary action was taken after that PR malfunction. Ask yourself why. The obvious answer is that a Buttigieg cashiered for political purposes would be a Buttigieg free to remark about how he suspected Biden to secretly be a mental vegetable. (Mayor Pete has ambitions, so perhaps he could be trusted to maintain omertà; how about Lloyd Austin?) That’s why they were all forgiven, I suspect. How nice it must have been to work in a presidential administration run with the same mindset as a failing Mafia enterprise, where you weren’t even expected to “produce numbers”; only loyalty to the secret of the dying don was required to keep your sinecure.
In the case of Buttigieg, it’s simply because we mere mortals simply can’t appreciate the infinite capacity of his “cathedral mind,” and the amount of time it will take to fully comprehend the genius of his time in office:
In an exit interview with Politico, Buttigieg blames this not on administrative failures, bureaucratic backlog, or voters’ prioritizing other things but rather on that pesky time-space continuum. “The nature of good policy and being politically rewarded for good policy is it doesn’t tend to happen — in the same way that an artist is not necessarily appreciated in their lifetime, a policy is rarely appreciated in the same political cycle where it happens, especially a good one.” Buttigieg implies Biden shares his frustration — but will also share in his ultimate vindication.
Or to put it another way:
TO BE FAIR, THEY ALSO KEEP THEIR OWN CITIZENS AWAY FROM TIKTOK: Elon Musk complains about China’s ban on X.
AS IF L.A. DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS ALREADY: Oregon arsonist, climate educator couple arrested for impersonating firefighters in LA.
An Oregon couple was arrested Sunday for impersonating firefighters in the area burned by the Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles, California, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times, citing law enforcement sources, identified the couple as Dustin Nehl, 31, and Jennifer Nehl, 44. Mr. Nehl’s social media accounts say he lives in Woodburn, Oregon; Mrs. Nehl’s say she lives in Jefferson or Scio, Oregon.
The couple allegedly drove a full-size firetruck emblazoned with “Roaring River Fire” into the recently burned area, claiming they were volunteer firefighters. Police were contacted when someone noticed the fire truck, which had California plates, did not look quite right, according to the Times. There is no “Roaring River Fire” in Oregon.
The Nehls combine a longstanding interest in fire, climate change and weather, according to media reports and the couples’ social media accounts.
Dustin Nehl was sentenced in 2016 to five years in prison and three years post-incarceration supervision for arson and possession of a destructive device related to damage caused in incidents from 2013 to 2016 to a country club and a water treatment facility in Woodburn, according to a contemporaneous report from The Woodburn Independent and The Oregonian.
The 21st century isn’t turning out as I had hoped.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Paxton Files One Last Lawsuit Against Biden For The Road. “As Joe Biden and his ruling cabal slunk out of the White House, Ken Paxton filed a final lawsuit against the regime’s executive regulatory overreach.”
In case anyone needs a refresher, here’s how much US armament Biden gave to the Taliban in 2021:
NOPE, NOT SICK OF ALL THE WINNING: Senate Passes Laken Riley Act With *12* Dem Votes in Big Trump Win.
“THE WOKETOPUS:” How Biden’s Administration Became a National Nightmare and What Trump Has to Do to Stop It From Happening Again.
Life in America has gotten worse because the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., kowtowed to the priorities of woke elites rather than focusing on the issues Americans truly care about. Biden celebrated drag queens at the White House, pushed “racial justice,” and directed billions in funding to climate activists while Americans struggled with inflation, crime, and the sense that things are falling apart at the border and across the world.
None of this is an accident. In fact, Biden revealed his hand when he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor—to George Soros, the man who launched and helped fund the soft-on-crime “rogue prosecutor” movement. Due to Soros’ advocacy, prosecutors across the country routinely ignore certain crimes, enabling lawlessness. Yet, Biden considered Soros an American hero because of his “philanthropy” to “strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.”
As with so many leftist platitudes, these terms mask the true nature of what Soros does with his money—and it is extremely charitable (if not downright mendacious) to call his efforts to transform society a form of “philanthropy.”
George Soros founded the Open Society Foundations, and its money fuels the broader engine of woke activist groups that advised the administrative state under Biden.
These activists support a constellation of liberal issues that I summarize with the term “woke,” from critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist in favor of whites and against blacks, a notion driving efforts for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”), to gender ideology (the notion that an internal sense of “gender identity” overrides biological sex), to climate alarmism (the belief that human burning of fossil fuels is destroying the earth), to a preference for technocratic government by experts rather than by elected representatives.
It is the height of hypocrisy when the Left screams about “democracy,” all the while supporting a bureaucratic apparatus that intentionally insulates the Mandarins who actually write the rules Americans must live by, protecting them from the people’s elected representatives.
Yet this preference for experts to call the shots—even after the public health experts repeatedly lied and attempted to silence debate during the COVID-19 pandemic—forms a centerpiece of the comprehensive worldview of woke activists. It explains why former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe would say, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
This ideology is deeply rooted in America’s elite institutions, from academia to Hollywood to corporate boardrooms. It reared its ugly head most strongly after the death of George Floyd in police custody in 2020, when the legacy media ignored or covered for Antifa riots, parents watched teachers pushing CRT on kids, and companies rushed to release diversity, equity, and inclusion statements.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Biden’s Crowning Legacy: 20% Bidenflation And The Economic Carnage Left Behind. Biden Holds a Unique Distinction Among the Last Five Presidents—Highest in Both Annualized Inflation Rate and Total Inflation.
THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN:
BREAKING: Harvard has settled two antisemitism lawsuits. Among other policies, Harvard will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association's definition of antisemitism and start an official partnership with a university in Israel.
I am not tired of winning. pic.twitter.com/t5dQiR7AjZ
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) January 21, 2025
What was Glenn saying yesterday about the preference cascade having cascaded?
HMM: PhD-Level AI Poised for Release Soon.
The tech world is bracing for the release of Ph.D.-level artificial intelligence that will be able to do complex human tasks, Axios reported Sunday.
The superagent breakthrough could happen in a matter of weeks and speculation is that it could be coming from OpenAI, according to the report. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is set to brief U.S. government officials on Jan. 30, Axios reported, adding that OpenAI staffers are “jazzed and spooked” by their progress.
The report comes days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI could replace mid-level software engineers as early as this year.
Skynet’s accountant smiles.
THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN: Trump Takes Office and Suddenly Putin Wants a ‘Lasting Peace’ With Ukraine.
TIMELY BOOK: From Ned Ryon, American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism. #CommissionEarned
AND SO BEGIN THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN: The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think.
There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.
That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.
It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.
“It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.”
Opening Twitter — X, whatever — to dissenting voices did more to check the Establishment’s power than any one other thing in this century that I can think of.
For progressives, including the staff at Vox, having to make their cases in a free exchange of ideas is dark, indeed.
