Archive for 2022
December 1, 2022
LAW FIRM HOGAN LOVELLS: “We want our female lawyers to be able to talk about the Dobbs decision and abortion.”
Female Lawyer: “I like the Dobbs decision.”
Law Firm Hogan Lovells: You’re fired. “Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by attorney Robin Keller describing how she lost her job at a large law firm after daring to speak up in favor of the Dobbs decision. This didn’t happen at a general staff meeting but on a conference call explicitly held to allow staffers to discuss the decision.”
Also, the female lawyers who “lost their ability to breathe” upon hearing a contrary view aren’t fit to practice law, which requires that one breathe while engaging in argument with people who disagree.
CHINA’S BITE OF THE APPLE: Ever wonder why the Apple logo is missing a bite? Multiple possibilities have been tossed into the public forums over the years, but a recent discovery, according to Issues & Insights, just might explain it.
YOU F***** UP, YOU TRUSTED HIM: Biden’s Controversial Move Infuriates Rail Unions As Catastrophic Strike Looms: ‘Joe Biden Blew It.’
A SMALL VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH: UK ditches plan to censor legal speech.
FAKE NEWS, MISINFORMATION, CANCEL THEIR ACCOUNTS: FACT CHECK: IRS Watchdog Destroys Media Claim That Trump Ordered Audits of James Comey and Andrew McCabe.
EPIC HOLIDAY DEAL: EcoNour 27″ Aluminum Car Snow Scraper. #CommissionEarned
STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED: Wait… Is China Actually Doing the Smart Thing I Just Told Them to Do?
FOR THE WORSE, BASICALLY: How Magazines’ Advice to Parents Has Changed Over a Century.
A 1966 article in Good Housekeeping proposed a set of guidelines for children’s public autonomy as follows: “A six- to eight-year-old can be expected to follow simple routes to school, be able to find a telephone or report to a policeman if he is lost, and to know he must call home if he is going to be late. A nine- to eleven-year-old should be able to travel on public buses and streetcars, apply some simple first aid, and exercise reasonable judgment in many unfamiliar situations.”
In contrast, Rutherford notes that after about 1980, articles stopped focusing on the value of children’s independence and started focusing on the need to guard and monitor them. A prototypical example is a 2006 article in Good Housekeeping with the scary title, “Are You a Good Mother?” The article made it clear that the answer is “yes” if you closely watch and supervise your child pretty much all of the time.
Producing a generation of incompetent, insecure adults.
November 30, 2022
OPEN THREAD: Anything worth talking about today?
DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY: Hypocrisy alert: Democrats just chose an election denier as Pelosi’s successor.
AND OUR ELITES DO, TOO: Tyrants in Iran, China and Russia tremble at the power of the people.
And in Canada, we get this hypocrisy:
THE NEW SPACE RACE (CONT’D): China tests reusable rocket engine for the 1st time.
JIANG ZEMIN HAS DIED.
Related: Hu Jintao: The mysterious exit of China’s former leader from party congress.
BECAUSE COOK REGARDS THE CHINESE AS FRIENDS AND ELON MUSK AS AN ENEMY:
Related: Tim Cook Says He’s Ready To Pull Twitter From App Store Once President Xi Gives The Order. It’s satire. Or is it?
UPDATE: Apple’s cowardice on China reveals app store Twitter ban as pure hypocrisy. “Apple is willing to defend its market value by co-operating with, quite literally, the world’s most brutal regime in its efforts to crush a grassroots movement of protestors pushed to the breaking point. But allowing people to tweet things offensive to liberal pieties is worthy of its action?”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Cook denies Twitter threat.
FTX’S COLLAPSE WAS A CRIME, NOT AN ACCIDENT:
Executives at FTX reportedly received a total of $4.1 billion in loans from Alameda Research, including massive personal loans that were likely unsecured. As revealed by bankruptcy proceedings, Bankman-Fried received an incredible $1 billion in personal loans, as well as a $2.3 billion loan to an entity called Paper Bird in which he had 75% control. Director of Engineering Nishad Singh was given a loan of $543 million, while FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame received a $55 million personal loan.
The FTX situation has more smoking guns than a shooting range in Texas, but you might call this one the smoking bazooka – a glaringly obvious sign of criminal intent. It’s still unclear how the bulk of those personal loans were used, but clawing the expenditures back will likely be a major task for liquidators.
The loans to Paper Bird were arguably even more worrying because they appear to have fueled more structural fraud by creating yet another related third party to shuffle assets between. Forbes has posited that some of the Paper Bird funds may have gone to buy part of Binance’s stake in FTX, and Paper Bird also committed hundreds of millions of dollars to various outside investments.
That included many of the same venture capital funds that backed FTX. It will take time to sort out whether this financial incest constituted criminal fraud. But it certainly matches the broader pattern by which Bankman-Fried used secretive flows, leverage and funny money to deceptively prop up the value of various assets.
Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried Zooms into the New York Times‘ DealBook Summit, twitching away and telling the audience, “I’ve had a bad month,” much to their amusement:
Sam Bankman-Fried:
"I've had a bad month" pic.twitter.com/VMIza684uZ
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 30, 2022
On to Good Morning America and fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos tomorrow!
TOMORROW: Collapse of a crypto empire — @GStephanopoulos sits down with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to talk about what went wrong at the company in a one-on-one interview on @GMA. pic.twitter.com/M1svJISIwZ
— Good Morning America (@GMA) November 30, 2022
ROGER SIMON: Trapped by Apple—a Tale of the ‘Great Reset.’
Apparently, they are more upset with Elon Musk for trying to bring a modicum of transparency to Twitter, pulling their ads from his newly purchased platform and, according to Musk, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store.
Yet worse, in China, Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.
Meanwhile, Apple stock has lost some ground because these protests may be interfering with their iPhone production. Poor things. Further, according to Bloomberg, violent protests have erupted at Apple’s main iPhone plant in China. (Wasn’t Apple supposed to be leaving China for production? I guess not.)
Sadly, what’s going on isn’t surprising. Apple is acting in tandem with our administration, which also, not surprisingly, has stayed mostly mum about what’s going on in China and Iran. Freedom is of no interest to them.
Behind the Iran silence is, obviously, the three-letter word oil, for which President Joe Biden has only himself to blame for having seriously restricted our domestic supply for the most dubious of reasons.
As for China, Biden, we recall, is the man who insisted the Chinese—meaning the regime—were our friends, before he recanted that for electoral purposes. The true story of the Biden family and the Chinese communists, some of which must reside on Hunter’s laptop, is yet to be fully exposed.
What all this adds up to is Apple and the rest of Big Tech cooperating with the administration in the big lie that domestic terrorists (Trump, et al.) are the threat to democracy when they themselves are.
True democracy, whether manifest as a democratic republic or otherwise, has become an inconvenience for them in the march to globalism and the “Great Reset.”
When its guru Klaus Schwab said, “You will have nothing and you will be happy,” it’s not hard to imagine that he would exclude the iPhone or its equivalent implanted under our skin—“the better to track you with, my dear,” they might say in a modern version of a Disney classic.
Whatever their disagreements with Musk, “Elon Musk meets Tim Cook, says Apple never considered removing Twitter app,” according to CNBC.
THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN: ‘War on Christian Culture:’ UK Prosecutors Won’t Say If They Stand by Attack on Bible.
A Christian street preacher faced charges of violating the Public Order Act by engaging in “threatening,” “abusive,” and “insulting” speech in telling a lesbian couple that homosexuals will not “inherit the kingdom of heaven,” citing the Bible. In defending the case against him, a prosecutor wrote that “there are references in the bible [sic] which are simply no longer appropriate in modern society and which would be offensive if stated in public” (emphasis original).
The court dismissed the case against the preacher, John Dunn, because the lesbian couple declined to testify, but a prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service, the office of England’s government prosecutors, claimed before the trial that some Bible passages are “no longer appropriate in modern society.”
The next edition of Peter Hitchens’ book continues to write itself.
OUT ON A LIMB: Musk Confirms: Yes, Twitter Has Interfered in Elections.
Most infamously, Twitter banned any mention of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. By default, they also censored Joe Biden’s deep involvement and shady business dealings with foreign adversaries.
At the time platform executives, including then CEO Jack Dorsey, justified the multi-month banning of the account belonging to the New York Post — the nation’s oldest paper — whose reporters broke the laptop story in October 2020. They also banned White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany after she shared the story, along with countless others who did the same.
During testimony on Capitol Hill in 2021, Dorsey admitted the social media platform had no factual basis for censoring the story.
Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
I DON’T KNOW ABOUT ELON, BUT I’M GETTING $44 BILLION WORTH OF ENTERTAINMENT OUT OF THIS: Everyone seems to be all a-Twitter.
Most certainly, none of these organizations or individuals of a Leftist persuasion had ever expressed any of those same objections in all the previous years of Twitter’s outrageously heavy-handed, one-sided censorship/out-right election interference. This sudden concern is so confounding. As David wrote about this morning, the EU is SO incensed, they are threatening to ban the app. I can’t imagine why. John and Jazz have both recently told us about Musk’s efforts to clean the site of AntiFa accounts – I know he’s wiped a ton of child traffickers, as well – and begin the era of transparency he promised.
What’s not to love?
Oh, the Left. It’s had the opposite effect on their little pointy heads, and they seem to be in a frenzied panic.
Anything that threatens their power is treated as an affront to decency.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Is Preparing to Launch The World’s First Private Lunar Lander.
LOOKING FOR AN ARMISTICE: Yale law dean wants amends with conservative judges: report.
“POTENTIALLY 2022’s MOST CONSEQUENTIAL AMERICAN BOOK”: Okay, this counts as shameless self-promotion, but how often do relatively obscure academics like myself get praise like that from someone as prominent as George Will, in a column devoted to said obscure academic’s book, no less? Money quote:
This story-beyond-satire of government is recounted in Bernstein’s slender (185 pages) Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, potentially 2022’s most consequential American book. It reveals the rickety foundations of today’s identity politics. And because it is distilled in an amicus brief he filed for the Supreme Court as it considers racial preferences in college admissions. The brief demonstrates that such preferences depend on irrational classifications that mock their users’ intellectual and moral pretenses.