IT ADDS A LOT OF DEBT AND NOT MUCH SAVINGS: Is the Debt Deal Destined for Death?
Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 30, 2023
COLORADO: Liz Cheney booed at commencement speech.
Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney was booed and protested as she gave a commencement speech Sunday at her alma mater Colorado College — even though she condemned her GOP colleagues in her address.
While she received some applause and support, a contingent of students booed her and turned their chairs around so their backs faced her during her speech, apparently because the former Wyoming congresswoman is Republican, according to news reports.
“When Cheney was introduced — mostly to applause — about half the graduates turned their chairs 180 degrees and sat with their backs to the former Wyoming congresswoman for the entirety of her speech,” the Gazette reported.
The Daily Mail reported Cheney was booed by some grads despite the fact that she was a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump.
It’s almost as though she couldn’t buy new friends by turning her back on her old ones.
“THE LITTLE MERMAID”: What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Film’s Box Office Performance.
HEALTH: The Entire Transgender Craze Leads Back To One Group, And They’re Playing Hardball.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is stonewalling a judge’s subpoena of internal documents related to how the medical organization came up with its guidelines for gender confused minors.
WPATH, a leading advocate for child sex changes, was subpoenaed in March by a federal judge in Alabama after the organization’s guidelines were repeatedly referenced to argue against the state’s restrictions on sex changes for minors during a lawsuit. WPATH has attempted to quash the subpoena, which a judge denied in March. The court case challenges Alabama’s law banning sex changes for individuals under 19. While WPATH argued it was a non-party to the case, the U.S. District Court Judge Liles Burke said in a March ruling that the nature of its guidelines was of “crucial import in this litigation.”
“They’re just doing everything they possibly can to not release them,” Jay Richards, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller.
Read the whole thing.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Plenty of Blame to Go Around in Latest GOP Debt Deal Fizzle. “In the end, the debt ceiling gets raised, and the United States government continues to spend taxpayer money like a drunk Kennedy cousin in Rio for Carnival.”
JOANNE JACOBS: High school debate’s decline: No arguing allowed. “Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, is now a judge whose paradigm reads: ‘Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.'”
RED ON RED: Oregon Republican Party Embarks on Embarrassing Recall of Its RNC Representative. “A meeting will take place on June 3 to decide whether the members of the ORP will allow Yue to continue to represent Oregon at the Republican National Committee (RNC), or whether they will replace him. This follows the circulation of a recall petition that reads long on accusations, short on proof, and devoid of sanity.”
May 29, 2023
GO AWAY: Jersey Shore town to crack down on the ‘mere existence of any kind of alcohol’ on beach and boardwalk. “Those not abiding by the ordinance could walk off with a warning, a fine of up to $2,000 or potentially 90 days in jail.”
ROBERT SPENCER: Biden’s Handlers Think They Have a NATO Ally in Erdogan. But Erdogan Has Other Ideas. “To celebrate Erdogan’s victory, his followers gathered in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia mosque and screamed ‘Allahu akbar,’ which does not mean ‘God is great,’ as the Western establishment media routinely claims, but rather, ‘Allah is greater,’ that is, greater than your god. It is a declaration of supremacy with immense implications.”
SPACE: James Webb telescope discovers gargantuan geyser on Saturn’s moon, blasting water hundreds of miles into space. “Analysis revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia — organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life. It’s even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Smart People Are Working on Worsening the Nursing Shortage.
THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD: Portugal considers banning Huawei from national 5G networks.
IT’S HER UNOFFICIAL REELECTION KICKOFF: Gov. Hobbs Vetoes Election Integrity Reforms in Arizona.
HMM: Russia and China’s BRICS economic alliance will fail at countering the West.
Many of the countries now proposing the bric have common interests, not least a dislike of U.S. hegemony. But while the enemy of my enemy may be my friend, a successful BRICS needs more than that. It needs genuine aims, rules and commitment. No amount of backslapping and fist-pumping will change that.
India sees China as a strategic rival. It is aggressively positioning itself as a palatable alternative to China for manufacturing. Meanwhile, the skirmishes between India and China on the Tibetan plateau have turned more deadly. If China is promoting a BRICS concept as cover for Chinese hegemony, India is determined to use that same organization to block Chinese influence. Saudi Arabia and Iran feel the same way about each other.
South Africa is rapidly becoming a failed state. Its power crisis threatens value-added exports. How can the country possibly lead any alliance? Mexico? Every Mexican company I talk to tells me how it is expanding in the United States.
Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently lamented, “Every night, I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar.”
Simple answer: Brazilian mining giant Vale SA can sell iron ore to China in Chinese yuan, or renminbi (RMB), all it wants, but what would it do with those RMB afterwards? Vale’s debts are all in U.S. dollars. The heavy construction equipment the company uses is often built by Caterpillar Inc. or Japan’s Komatsu Ltd., so Vale needs dollars and yen to buy it. RMB is valueless for Vale’s operations in Sudbury or Sulawesi (part of Indonesia).
Meanwhile, China has bought considerable influence outside of BRICS via its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which invests in more than 150 countries. Why would China give that influence away to others via BRICS?
I’ll take our problems over theirs any day.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Memory-Holing of COVID False Narratives Picks Up Steam. “Tyrannical garden gnome and alleged physician Anthony Fauci repeatedly insists that he didn’t want anything shut down. Randi Weingarten — the most evil woman in America — swears that she and the cauldron-stirring teachers’ union she runs never tried to keep schools closed.”
REMEMBER, THE “A” IN “AI” STANDS FOR “ARTIFICIAL”: A lawyer used ChatGPT for legal filing. The chatbot cited nonexistent cases it just made up.
A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Texas High School Postpones Graduation When Only 5 Students Meet Graduation Requirements.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s mysterious space plane released an unidentified ‘object’ in orbit, US intelligence reveals. “Experts think the Chinese space plane is likely similar to the Boeing X-37B, a U.S. space plane that debuted in 2010. Kevin Pollpeter, a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, told Nature.com that the reveal of X-37B sparked concern within the Chinese government over the craft’s military potential. It’s possible that this spurred the country’s space program, which is closely tied to its military, to start developing its own version.”
THEY’RE CERTAINLY WOKE…: Dying Vice Launches ‘Queer Sports’ Series, Hastens Its Demise.