IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Florida man charged in Jan. 6 riot slams ‘double standards’ as ex-prosecutor makes bail in road rage stabbing.
Archive for 2023
September 29, 2023
OPEN BORDERS HAVE THEIR CONSEQUENCES: Sweden calls up the army to help deal with gang violence. “The violence and bombings in Sweden have had a major impact on the country’s politics. Last year, voters made the right-wing Sweden Democrats the 2nd biggest party in parliament and effectively made Kristersson, leader of a center-right party, the Prime Minister. . . . It’s worth noting that the connection between immigration and the current violence is not a right-wing fever dream. In fact, the figures are quite clear, though the former government and their media allies did their best to rule the question out of bounds. . . . The effort to hide the evidence that this was an immigrant wave failed and the government which tried to ignore the problem is now gone. Police officials estimate there are about 30,000 gang members nationwide who are contributing to the shootings and bombings.”
GOOD: The Supreme Court is about to rule on America’s most powerful, unaccountable federal agency. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America is an appeal of the Fifth Circuit’s unanimous holding that the CFPB’s use of the Federal Reserve System to fund its operations violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. That opinion declared that the agency’s ‘perpetual insulation from Congress’ appropriation power, including the express exemption from congressional review of its funding, renders’ it unaccountable ‘to Congress and, ultimately, to the people.'”
LOS ANGELES HATES POOR PEOPLE: As California Charter Schools Excel, Los Angeles’s Top Public District Makes It Harder To Attend Them. “The Los Angeles Unified School District voted Tuesday to overhaul its implementation of Proposition 39, a state law that compels California’s public districts to give charter schools access to their facilities. Under the district’s new measure, hundreds of district sites that charter schools could typically use to hold class will no longer be made available, thus forcing those schools to use locations that are farther away from where their attendees live. Given that Los Angeles’s charter schools typically attract students from low-income families who lack reliable sources of private transportation, the added commute could force students to ditch their charter school in favor of a more convenient district location.”
SOMEBODY LEND ME THEIR “SHOCKED FACE”, MINE IS WORN OUT: Just The News is reporting that even our own State Department says China continues to be a very very naughty boy:
“China’s government is investing in “unprecedented resources” in disinformation, surveillance and censorship tactics to influence the worldview of the country, according to a State Department report[…]The communist-run country faces international criticism for such issues as its record on human rights, unfair international trade practices, spying on other countries and not condemning Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
Of course, that didn’t stop the Bidens from accepting $260,000 in wire transfers originating from Beijing that listed Joe Biden’s Wilmington home as the beneficiary address when he was running for President.
Deluded apologists countered by saying “Hey, Hunter lived at Joe’s house in Wilmington. Nothing fishy there.”
Not so fast. Hunter Biden notes in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” that he was living in California at the time the wire transfers were made.
So there’s no evidence, right?
THAT’S NOT SO MANY: Adding 3,000 steps per day may lower blood pressure among older adults.
THIS DANGEROUS INDUSTRY NEEDS TO BE CLOSELY REGULATED SO THAT FEWER PEOPLE ARE EXPOSED TO THESE RISKS: UK study finds increased risk of depression and anxiety when in higher education.
JACOBINS IN TRAINING: My leftist peers tore down my ‘Free Speech, Even When You Hate To Hear It’ flyers.
BIG TECH VS. DEMOCRACY: Pro-Joe Biden bias is algorithm-deep: Google’s search-&-destroy agenda. “If anything changed the outcome of the 2020 election, it was Big Tech interference — and there’s nothing to say it won’t happen again in 2024.”
MOUNTAINS OF IT: No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Joe Biden? How About This?
OH, CANADA: Federal government looking to cut $1 billion from National Defence budget.
According to NATO’s latest annual report, Canada spent an estimated 1.3 per cent of its GDP on the military last year — well below the target. Coming out of the alliance’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, the Liberal government faced a storm of bad press and increased pressure from allies to step up its financial commitment.
How the planned cuts will affect Canada’s commitment to NATO is unclear. Germany also recently walked back its pledge to meet the two per cent target.
Meanwhile: Poland Becomes a Defense Colossus.
Poland was already spending 2.4% of GDP on defense by 2022, ranking third in NATO after the United States and Greece.
The government decided much more was required. In 2023, Poland estimates it will spend more than 4% GDP on defense, which would be the highest proportion in NATO, as well as the highest proportion of the budget spent on equipment (over 50%.)
As Europe’s sixth-largest economy, by far the largest on the Eastern Flank, these figures translate into very substantial increases in personnel and hardware.
The country plans to double its land forces to 300,000. Huge purchases from abroad include 366 Abrams tanks and 96 Apache helicopters from the United States; 980 K2 tanks and 648 self-propelled howitzers from South Korea; hundreds of US HIMARS rocket launchers; many more Patriot air defense systems; 22 UK-made air defense batteries and three UK-designed frigates; as well as 48 South Korean FA-50 combat aircraft from and 32 US F-35 aircraft, complementing its existing fleet of 48 F-16s.
Canada and Germany have no excuse.
Update: I forgot to add the sign, courtesy of CDR Salamander.
DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S FINEST MOMENT:
In February 2019, climate-advocacy group the Sunrise Movement — one of the most annoying activist organizations in existence — sicced a group of doe-eyed children on Feinstein, apparently expecting its juvenile proxies’ youthful exuberance and plucky charm to win the senator over to its side on support for the Green New Deal.
What it got instead was a master-class in public service. Instead of coddling the kids like many Democrats do, promising them they can have anything their hearts desire of public policy with nary a trade-off, Feinstein told them the truth.
“There’s reasons why I can’t, ’cause there’s no way to pay for it,” the California senator told the children, who clearly had never considered the argument that feasibility of legislation matters. “I don’t agree with what the resolution says,” she added. Feinstein went on to inform the kids, who seemed to have been put up to this in a shameful display of the progressive inclination to use American youth as political tools, that you actually need a majority of lawmakers to vote for a bill in order for it to reach the president’s desk. She didn’t mention this, but the president at the time was Donald Trump, who obviously would’ve vetoed a Green New Deal in any form.
Perhaps the best moment of the exchange came when one of the teens who barged into her office tried to impress upon Feinstein her obligation to do the bidding of those who voted her into office. After asking the girl’s age and learning she was 16 years old, Feinstein replied, “Well, you didn’t vote for me.”
One of the rare times a leftist objected to, as Thomas Sowell would say, a mascot of the anointed.
VICTORIA TAFT: So This Is How the ‘Impeach Joe Biden’ Inquiry Is Going for the Democrats. “Now, I recognize this so far reads like a Tourette’s induced poison pen letter, not of Aristotelian canon, but this is actually the Democrats’ playbook on how to energize their supporters in the please-don’t-impeach-old-Joe camp.”
BOOK OF THE DAY: 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. #CommissionEarned
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Fan who tried to bring emotional support alligator denied entry into Phillies game.
CHUCK ROSS: The Latest Hunter Biden Document Dump Is Littered With Bombshells. Here Are the Biggest.
A federal prosecutor on the Hunter Biden investigation ordered the FBI to remove references to then-candidate Joe Biden from a search warrant related to the probe.
In August 2020, FBI agents drafted a search warrant for the lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies that referenced the elder Biden as “Political Figure 1.” But assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf intervened to remove the reference to Biden on the grounds that it was outside the scope of the warrant.
“There should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here,” Wolf wrote in an email to FBI and IRS investigators.
The email adds to the growing evidence that the U.S. attorney’s office blocked investigators from pursuing leads related to the president. IRS investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler have claimed Wolf stymied several aspects of the investigation and tipped off Hunter Biden’s lawyers to a planned search of the first son’s storage unit in Virginia.
Wolf was removed from the prosecutorial team this year, for reasons yet to be explained.
Read the whole thing.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*** THINGS UP: America’s emergency oil reserve is at a 40-year low — and that could inflate oil prices, Goldman Sachs says.
America’s emergency oil stockpile has plunged to 40-year lows. The shrinking Strategic Petroleum Reserve is limiting Washington’s ability to shield consumers from the fallout of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive supply cuts, according to Goldman Sachs.
“At this point, US energy policy has fewer bullets left. It has less levers left in its policy toolkit,” Daan Struyven, head of oil research at Goldman Sachs, told CNN in a phone interview.
That’s one reason Goldman Sachs expects oil prices to stay high, averaging $100 a barrel this time next year. Triple-digit oil would boost already-high prices at the pump, worsening inflation and potentially influencing the 2024 race for the White House.
To cushion the blow from the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration has released vast amounts of oil from the SPR, the underground series of storage tanks along the Gulf Coast that contains emergency oil.
Industry veterans say that strategy helped mitigate the hit to consumers as gasoline prices plunged after hitting $5.02 a gallon in June 2022.
But the SPR, which acts as a rainy-day fund that presidents can tap during times of war or natural disaster, is down by about 270 million barrels over the past two years to the lowest level since August 1983.
Related:
🔸BIDEN ADMINISTRATION 5-YEAR OFF SHORE OIL PLAN TO BE RELEASED ON FRIDAY DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY SALES FOR 2024 – SOURCES
🔸U.S. 5 YEAR OIL LEASE PLAN WILL INCLUDE THE LOWEST LEASE SALES IN HISTORY – SOURCES
— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) September 28, 2023
Previously: Well, Biden Screwed Us Forever on Another Damn Thing. “The SPR is probably never going to be refilled, according to one expert, and maybe not even for the reason that first popped into your mind.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Ignore your professors,’ Jordan Peterson tells Buckley Institute crowd.
ABOUT THAT IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY: Democrats devoted the six+ hours of the hearing to mocking, insulting, and demagoguing allegations by Republicans of Biden family influence-peddling, based on $24 million paid by at least 23 foreign entities.