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Archive for 2023

May 3, 2023

TALES FROM THE SWAMPLAND: New Emails Prove Hunter Biden Was Selling Access to His Father.

LIZ WARREN ON ETHICS? LOL.

https://twitter.com/xenophonrocks/status/1653786707311853569

Plus:

ABOUT THOSE ‘SECOND CHANCE’ LAWS: Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding looks at the data on the results of one of the soft-on-crime crowds favorites, second chance laws. It’s not a pretty picture but it is one every American needs to know about.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Is this the U.S. Navy’s Dylan Mulvaney moment? Drag performer Harpy Daniels is Navy’s new ‘digital ambassador’ in bid to boost recruitment that’s set to fall short by 8,000.

IT WAS A CON JOB FROM THE START: The Secrets of Reedy Creek.

This Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — EPCOT for short — is not the Epcot park we know today, though the amusement park shares the idealized planned city’s (now nostalgic) futurism. The EPCOT that was never built was meant to be a real town — and for that to become realized, the Walt Disney Company needed the authority to develop and run a town. So, Florida granted Disney the right to do everything it needed to make that happen, including controlling zoning and regulations and offering public services. Walt Disney’s death is cited as the reason the city never came to be, but the Disney Company’s hold on zoning, regulations, and public services remained.

That’s Disney’s story, anyway. Richard Foglesong, a former professor at Rollins College and author of Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, says it’s a fabrication.

Disney’s self-governing district, with all its associated resorts and water parks and sports fields and shopping centers, eventually grew to an enormous size. And though it never developed any cities of the future, the area held on to its self-governing privileges.

While Foglesong was reporting his 2001 book, which traces Disney’s use of its government immunities and relationship with the surrounding area, he dug into Disney’s archives, poring over company documents and memos. Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could threaten Disney’s control of the land. If there were real residents, they would be able to elect a local government and establish the external control that Disney feared.

Looking at that two-page memo about the development plans, Foglesong recalled in an interview, he saw that “someone had written NO in inch-high letters.”

“I took that memo to the archivist in the Disney Archives, and I asked whose comments these were,” Foglesong said. “The archivist said, ‘That’s Walt Disney’s comment.’ Every place in the memo where the attorney referred to the property of real residents, Walt Disney had written, between the lines, ‘temporary residents/tourists.’ So, in this planning memo, Walt is telling the attorney, ‘We’re not going to build a place with residents.’ ”

Plus: “Technically, the towns of Buena Vista and Bay Lake, both of which sit within Disney’s self-governing district, do have permanent residents—which allows for some small degree of self-governance within the district. Both towns have a city council and elect a mayor. But the residents aren’t just random people. They’re long-term, management-level employees of the company. Too senior to be eligible for labor unions and too personally invested in the company to do anything counter to business interests, these residents are essentially Disney stand-ins. Disney can count on them to not do anything the company doesn’t want.”

AN INTERESTING HYPOTHETICAL: WHEN IS IT DOXXING? Stephen Green’s earlier post made me wonder, “How in the hell can these people complain, when they keep voting for legislators who openly plan to ruin the communities they represent?”

Amusingly, we constantly hear from the leftists who insist that Clarence Thomas is not really black, or Condoleezza Rice is not really a woman because they “legislate against their own interests.” At first blush, I find that appalling, because frankly, how does a well-off, white, Ivy-League editorialist get to wrestle self-determination away from someone else? It’s not just dehumanizing, it’s condescending and kind of…fascistic.

But here’s the hypothetical I would present to journalists and bloggers: We know from the public record that Oregon State Rep. Farrah Chaichi is the sponsor of the bill that essentially gives homeless people property rights over public spaces. That leads one to wonder if any of these homeless encampments are near Chaichi’s residence.

Aye, there’s the rub. I am not suggesting to anyone that they locate her residence and publicize it. But would it be “doxxing?” I have no doubt that if someone were to post her address or a picture of her home, they would be accused of “inciting harm” or “inviting violence.” That’s not a statement without merit, although the left are historically famous for doing just that, especially to judges who issue rulings with which the cybermob disagree. And that same mob often punches down much lower than just judges: News commentators like Tucker Carlson who are targeted for vilification have had their families confronted at their homes by Antifa nuts and others on the far left:

Some of you may remember the boneheaded move by The Westchester Journal News, who in 2012 published an interactive map listing names and addresses of licensed and registered gun owners. Although the paper eventually removed the post and apologized, by then it was too late. That map (and the names and addresses of perfectly law-abiding gun owners) is still floating around. The internet is forever.

But at what point does that residential information become important to telling the whole story? And can it be presented without raising security concerns? (As an aside, when I was at Bloomberg News, we did the same kind of story regarding guns, but at my direction our data only showed how many registered weapons were in a particular zip code: no names, no addresses.)

Should Chaichi’s residential address be sussed out and published? Would it be fairer or less offensive to simply describe the neighborhood in which she lives, and go look to see if there any homeless encampments nearby? Or is her address crucial to telling the story?

Discuss, I’ll go make coffee.

WEIRD HOW HE NEVER ADVOCATES CONFISCATING SECOND OR THIRD HOMES: Comrade Bernie Goes Full Commie, Wants Government to Steal ALL the Money You Make Over This Amount.

A BILLION HERE AND A BILLION THERE…: New York and California lost over $90 billion in income to low-tax states during Covid.

New data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that New York state lost $25 billion in adjusted gross income due to outmigration in 2021, on top of $20 billion lost in 2020. California reported a net loss of $29 billion in 2021, following a loss of $18 billion in 2020. Combined, the two states lost $92 billion across the two years.

The data shows that the income flight from high-tax states to low-tax states, which has been happening for years, picked up steam during Covid. The income losses for California and New York in 2021 were more than three-times their combined losses in 2019, before the pandemic took hold in the U.S.

Experts say that while the income migration from states likely slowed in 2022 and 2023 from the pandemic highs, higher-tax states will continue to see outflows of high earners, thanks in part to remote work and white-collar job growth in the sun belt.

“When we get the data for 2021-22 and 2023, the outflow is certain to have slowed to some extent,” said E.J. McMahon, founding senior fellow at the Empire Center, “which does not in my view, mean migration will have ceased to be a problem.”

People actually like freedom and low taxes but you’d never know it from the way around half or more of us vote.

THERE’S NOTHING MORE DIVERSE THAN A GROUP COMPOSED ENTIRELY OF STUDENTS OF COLOR! Pitt diversity office hosts ‘students of color’ graduation ceremony.

SKYNET FROWNS: Steve Wozniak, ‘AI Godfather’ and Apple Cofounder, Quits Google to Expose AI Dangers.

Correction: “An earlier version of this article identified Steve Wozniak as the “Godfather of AI” who left recently Google; in fact, it was Geoffrey Hinton. We regret the error.”

DUKE STUDENTS FEAR HEARING CONTRARY VIEWS, BEG GROWNUPS FOR PROTECTION: A group of students at Duke University released an open plea insisting that a professor with whom they disagreed be disinvited from a law school event.

Send them home to their parents and tell them not to come back until they are mature enough to attend college.

AN OVERTLY ANTI-CATHOLIC, BIGOTED ARTICLE BY TWO PROMINENT LAW PROFESSORS: Marci Hamilton and Leslie Griffin: How Did Six Conservative Catholics Become Supreme Court Justices Together? The underlying facts backing up the absurd notion that there has been a conspiracy to stock the Court with Catholics aren’t even accurate. Clarence Thomas was raised Catholic, but had left the church when he was nominated to the Supreme Court (he later returned). Neil Gorsuch was also raised Catholic, but seems to have been attending an Episcopal church as an adult. I thought this sort of crude anti-Catholic conspiracism had died out with JFK’s election… (And by the way, there is a simple explanation as to why conservative Justices have been disproportionately Catholic–they almost all went to Yale or Harvard, which is almost a prerequisite for appointment these days, and those schools graduate many more conservative Catholics than Protestants. For example, when I was in law school, the presidents of the Yale Federalist Society over three years were Catholic, Catholic, and (you guessed it), also Catholic.) The one exception to the Yale and Harvard rule, Amy Coney Barrett, became a conservative hero when Democrats attacked her Court of Appeals nomination because she was … Catholic.

HAVE A COKE, A SMILE, AND NOTHING ELSE: Learning from Bud Light? Coca-Cola Shareholders Shoot Down 3 Attempts to Turn the Company Fully Woke.

While Coca-Cola is hardly a paragon of conservative positions, the votes could well mean that even liberal-leaning corporations are seeing the costs to their bottom lines.

The vote generating most of the headlines nationally dealt with a proposal to study how individual states’ pro-life laws affect the company’s business — and potentially make decisions about “closure or expansion of operations” based on access to abortion.

It was defeated by nearly 87 percent of controlling shares, according to the proxy vote.

(Company votes aren’t based on a “one-person, one vote” as in an election, but on the percentage of shares that are owned by the voter.)

Another proposal, which demanded Coca-Cola audit itself to determine how its “corporate policies, practices, products, and services” affect non-whites, went down by a vote of just over 83 percent of controlling shares.