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Politics & Religion / Restaurant Apocalypse
« on: Today at 08:51:06 PM »
A good time to be out of the food service buz:
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/a-restaurant-apocalypse-is-starting
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/a-restaurant-apocalypse-is-starting
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Science, Culture, & Humanities / Cell Phone Companies Sell Customer Location Data
« on: Today at 06:03:57 PM »
This is galling. I try to lock down all my devices re location data; not sure how effective this is is your cellphone company sells your data:
FCC Fines Major U.S. Wireless Carriers for Selling Customer Location Data
FCC fines wireless carriers $200M
•Krebs on Security / by BrianKrebs / Apr 29, 2024 at 5:06 PM
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers — including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — for illegally sharing access to customers’ location information without consent.
The fines mark the culmination of a more than four-year investigation into the actions of the major carriers. In February 2020, the FCC put all four wireless providers on notice that their practices of sharing access to customer location data were likely violating the law.
The FCC said it found the carriers each sold access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators,’ who then resold access to the information to third-party location-based service providers.
“In doing so, each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained,” an FCC statement on the action reads. “This initial failure was compounded when, after becoming aware that their safeguards were ineffective, the carriers continued to sell access to location information without taking reasonable measures to protect it from unauthorized access.”
The FCC’s findings against AT&T, for example, show that AT&T sold customer location data directly or indirectly to at least 88 third-party entities. The FCC found Verizon sold access to customer location data (indirectly or directly) to 67 third-party entities. Location data for Sprint customers found its way to 86 third-party entities, and to 75 third-parties in the case of T-Mobile customers.
The commission said it took action after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to the FCC detailing how a company called Securus Technologies had been selling location data on customers of virtually any major mobile provider to law enforcement officials.
That same month, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that LocationSmart — a data aggregation firm working with the major wireless carriers — had a free, unsecured demo of its service online that anyone could abuse to find the near-exact location of virtually any mobile phone in North America.
The carriers promised to “wind down” location data sharing agreements with third-party companies. But in 2019, reporting at Vice.com showed that little had changed, detailing how reporters were able to locate a test phone after paying $300 to a bounty hunter who simply bought the data through a little-known third-party service.
Sen. Wyden said no one who signed up for a cell plan thought they were giving permission for their phone company to sell a detailed record of their movements to anyone with a credit card.
“I applaud the FCC for following through on my investigation and holding these companies accountable for putting customers’ lives and privacy at risk,” Wyden said in a statement today.
The FCC fined Sprint and T-Mobile $12 million and $80 million respectively. AT&T was fined more than $57 million, while Verizon received a $47 million penalty. Still, these fines represent a tiny fraction of each carrier’s annual revenues. For example, $47 million is less than one percent of Verizon’s total wireless service revenue in 2023, which was nearly $77 billion.
The fine amounts vary because they were calculated based in part on the number of days that the carriers continued sharing customer location data after being notified that doing so was illegal (the agency also considered the number of active third-party location data sharing agreements). The FCC notes that AT&T and Verizon each took more than 320 days from the publication of the Times story to wind down their data sharing agreements; T-Mobile took 275 days; Sprint kept sharing customer location data for 386 days.
Update, 6:25 p.m. ET: Clarified that the FCC launched its investigation at the request of Sen. Wyden.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/fcc-fines-major-u-s-wireless-carriers-for-selling-customer-location-data/
FCC Fines Major U.S. Wireless Carriers for Selling Customer Location Data
FCC fines wireless carriers $200M
•Krebs on Security / by BrianKrebs / Apr 29, 2024 at 5:06 PM
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers — including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — for illegally sharing access to customers’ location information without consent.
The fines mark the culmination of a more than four-year investigation into the actions of the major carriers. In February 2020, the FCC put all four wireless providers on notice that their practices of sharing access to customer location data were likely violating the law.
The FCC said it found the carriers each sold access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators,’ who then resold access to the information to third-party location-based service providers.
“In doing so, each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained,” an FCC statement on the action reads. “This initial failure was compounded when, after becoming aware that their safeguards were ineffective, the carriers continued to sell access to location information without taking reasonable measures to protect it from unauthorized access.”
The FCC’s findings against AT&T, for example, show that AT&T sold customer location data directly or indirectly to at least 88 third-party entities. The FCC found Verizon sold access to customer location data (indirectly or directly) to 67 third-party entities. Location data for Sprint customers found its way to 86 third-party entities, and to 75 third-parties in the case of T-Mobile customers.
The commission said it took action after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to the FCC detailing how a company called Securus Technologies had been selling location data on customers of virtually any major mobile provider to law enforcement officials.
That same month, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that LocationSmart — a data aggregation firm working with the major wireless carriers — had a free, unsecured demo of its service online that anyone could abuse to find the near-exact location of virtually any mobile phone in North America.
The carriers promised to “wind down” location data sharing agreements with third-party companies. But in 2019, reporting at Vice.com showed that little had changed, detailing how reporters were able to locate a test phone after paying $300 to a bounty hunter who simply bought the data through a little-known third-party service.
Sen. Wyden said no one who signed up for a cell plan thought they were giving permission for their phone company to sell a detailed record of their movements to anyone with a credit card.
“I applaud the FCC for following through on my investigation and holding these companies accountable for putting customers’ lives and privacy at risk,” Wyden said in a statement today.
The FCC fined Sprint and T-Mobile $12 million and $80 million respectively. AT&T was fined more than $57 million, while Verizon received a $47 million penalty. Still, these fines represent a tiny fraction of each carrier’s annual revenues. For example, $47 million is less than one percent of Verizon’s total wireless service revenue in 2023, which was nearly $77 billion.
The fine amounts vary because they were calculated based in part on the number of days that the carriers continued sharing customer location data after being notified that doing so was illegal (the agency also considered the number of active third-party location data sharing agreements). The FCC notes that AT&T and Verizon each took more than 320 days from the publication of the Times story to wind down their data sharing agreements; T-Mobile took 275 days; Sprint kept sharing customer location data for 386 days.
Update, 6:25 p.m. ET: Clarified that the FCC launched its investigation at the request of Sen. Wyden.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/fcc-fines-major-u-s-wireless-carriers-for-selling-customer-location-data/
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Science, Culture, & Humanities / Can’t Judge a Book by Its Putative Author
« on: Today at 04:54:14 PM »
Probably not the sort of book related info this thread is meant to contain, but….
Many years ago spouse 1.0, eldest child (then a toddler), and I testified before a congressional committee, where I learned just how freaking stage managed that testimony is. Can’t let any aardvarks appear at the dog and pony show, don’tcha know? Anyhoo, this piece makes clear that congressional testimony ethos is also embraced by the putative authors of sundry supposed perspective of DC insiders published as books:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/13/jen-psaki-got-caught-repeating-this-whopper-of-a-lie-in-her-new-book-n4928992
Many years ago spouse 1.0, eldest child (then a toddler), and I testified before a congressional committee, where I learned just how freaking stage managed that testimony is. Can’t let any aardvarks appear at the dog and pony show, don’tcha know? Anyhoo, this piece makes clear that congressional testimony ethos is also embraced by the putative authors of sundry supposed perspective of DC insiders published as books:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/13/jen-psaki-got-caught-repeating-this-whopper-of-a-lie-in-her-new-book-n4928992
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Politics & Religion / China’s Growth Slowing
« on: Today at 04:34:15 PM »
China’s economy is headed for a ‘dead-end,’ and Beijing won’t do anything to stop it, scholar says
BYJASON MA
May 11, 2024 at 5:47 PM EDT
Xi Jinping holds umbrella
Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting France on Tuesday.
MATTHIEU RONDEL—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
China’s leadership is relying on an export surge to revive slumping growth, but those policies won’t extract the world’s second largest economy from the malaise that it’s in, a top China watcher said.
Anne Stevenson-Yang, cofounder of J Capital Research and the author of Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy, pointed to failures by Beijing in an op-ed in the New York Times on Saturday.
“Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and undelivered promises of reform have created a dead-end Chinese economy of weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth,” she wrote. “The only way that China’s leaders can see to pull themselves out of this hole is to fall back on pumping out exports.”
The result will be more tension with China’s trade partners as cheap manufactured goods continue to flood markets, while the Chinese people will turn gloomier, causing the government to get more repressive, Stevenson-Yang predicted.
The root cause of China’s economic problems is the Communist Party’s excessive control, which isn’t going away, while its strategies that focus on adding more industrial capacity are counterproductive, she said.
Most economists have recommended that Chinese leaders loosen their grip on the private sector and promote more consumption, which would entail reforming the government—”and that is unacceptable,” she added.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests represented an opportunity to liberalize the government in response to the growing private sector that emerged from economic reforms started a decade earlier. But that would’ve weakened the Communist Party’s power, Stevenson-Yang pointed out.
“Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy,” she said.
In the decades that followed, China’s investment-driven growth sought to pacify the people, while its cheap exports kept prices lower in the West. Meanwhile, debt piled up throughout China, and new infrastructure and housing sat underutilized.
Now, President Xi Jinping is running out of policy options, Stevenson-Yang warned, as Chinese consumers refuse to boost spending, and China’s trade partners put up more barriers to its exports. In fact, the Biden administration is poised to impose severe tariffs on a range of Chinese goods. Innovation won’t come to the rescue either, as China’s economy still relies mostly on replicating existing technologies, she added.
“All of this means that the ‘reform and opening’ era, which has transformed China and captivated the world since it began in the late 1970s, has ended with a whimper,” she concluded. “Mao Zedong once said that in an uncertain world, the Chinese must ‘Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.’ That sort of siege mentality is coming back.”
China’s slowing growth, real estate crisis, high youth unemployment, and U.S. restrictions on key technologies have led to predictions of a so-called lost decade of stagnation. Pointing to China’s aging population, veteran strategist Ed Yardeni last year said the country could become “the world’s largest nursing home.”
But a top China expert warned last month against such pessimism, saying it could lead the U.S. to grow complacent.
“While its growth has slowed in recent years, China is likely to expand at twice the rate of the United States in the years ahead,” wrote Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Foreign Affairs
https://fortune.com/2024/05/11/china-economy-outlook-dead-end-exports-manufacturing-trade/
BYJASON MA
May 11, 2024 at 5:47 PM EDT
Xi Jinping holds umbrella
Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting France on Tuesday.
MATTHIEU RONDEL—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
China’s leadership is relying on an export surge to revive slumping growth, but those policies won’t extract the world’s second largest economy from the malaise that it’s in, a top China watcher said.
Anne Stevenson-Yang, cofounder of J Capital Research and the author of Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy, pointed to failures by Beijing in an op-ed in the New York Times on Saturday.
“Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and undelivered promises of reform have created a dead-end Chinese economy of weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth,” she wrote. “The only way that China’s leaders can see to pull themselves out of this hole is to fall back on pumping out exports.”
The result will be more tension with China’s trade partners as cheap manufactured goods continue to flood markets, while the Chinese people will turn gloomier, causing the government to get more repressive, Stevenson-Yang predicted.
The root cause of China’s economic problems is the Communist Party’s excessive control, which isn’t going away, while its strategies that focus on adding more industrial capacity are counterproductive, she said.
Most economists have recommended that Chinese leaders loosen their grip on the private sector and promote more consumption, which would entail reforming the government—”and that is unacceptable,” she added.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests represented an opportunity to liberalize the government in response to the growing private sector that emerged from economic reforms started a decade earlier. But that would’ve weakened the Communist Party’s power, Stevenson-Yang pointed out.
“Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy,” she said.
In the decades that followed, China’s investment-driven growth sought to pacify the people, while its cheap exports kept prices lower in the West. Meanwhile, debt piled up throughout China, and new infrastructure and housing sat underutilized.
Now, President Xi Jinping is running out of policy options, Stevenson-Yang warned, as Chinese consumers refuse to boost spending, and China’s trade partners put up more barriers to its exports. In fact, the Biden administration is poised to impose severe tariffs on a range of Chinese goods. Innovation won’t come to the rescue either, as China’s economy still relies mostly on replicating existing technologies, she added.
“All of this means that the ‘reform and opening’ era, which has transformed China and captivated the world since it began in the late 1970s, has ended with a whimper,” she concluded. “Mao Zedong once said that in an uncertain world, the Chinese must ‘Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.’ That sort of siege mentality is coming back.”
China’s slowing growth, real estate crisis, high youth unemployment, and U.S. restrictions on key technologies have led to predictions of a so-called lost decade of stagnation. Pointing to China’s aging population, veteran strategist Ed Yardeni last year said the country could become “the world’s largest nursing home.”
But a top China expert warned last month against such pessimism, saying it could lead the U.S. to grow complacent.
“While its growth has slowed in recent years, China is likely to expand at twice the rate of the United States in the years ahead,” wrote Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Foreign Affairs
https://fortune.com/2024/05/11/china-economy-outlook-dead-end-exports-manufacturing-trade/
6
Science, Culture, & Humanities / AI Learns to Lie
« on: Today at 04:28:12 PM »
Given the penchant of so many to vigorously grasp whatever twaddle the MSM vends, the thought of AI embracing convenient fictions does more than give pause:
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-deceives-humans-2024-5
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-deceives-humans-2024-5
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Politics & Religion / Inflation: The Gift that Keeps Giving
« on: Today at 04:17:06 PM »
The Biden admin sure if fond of self-inflicted wounds, with inflation caused by proliferate spending serving as a case in point:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/13/how-dare-you-consumers-believe-their-own-lyin-eyes-instead-of-bls-gimmicks-n4928995
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/13/how-dare-you-consumers-believe-their-own-lyin-eyes-instead-of-bls-gimmicks-n4928995
8
Politics & Religion / Big Buck in Servicing Illegal Immigrant
« on: Today at 02:36:03 PM »
NGO are raking it in handling illegals for the Feds:
Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis
Federal funding has turned the business of resettling migrant children into a goldmine for a handful of NGOs—and their top executives.
By Madeleine Rowley
May 12, 2024
While the border crisis has become a major liability for President Biden, threatening his reelection chances, it’s become a huge boon to a group of nonprofits getting rich off government contracts.
Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California.
And with the recent massive influx of unaccompanied children—a record 130,000 in 2022, the last year for which there are official stats—the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs.
“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”
The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million.
Some of the services NGOs provide are eyebrow-raising. For example, Endeavors uses taxpayer funds to offer migrant children “pet therapy,” “horticulture therapy,” and music therapy. In 2021 alone, Endeavors paid Christy Merrell, a music therapist, $533,000. An internal Endeavors PowerPoint obtained by America First Legal, an outfit founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, showed that the nonprofit conducted 1,656 “people-plant interactions” and 287 pet therapy sessions between April 2021 and March 2023.
Endeavors’ 2022 federal disclosure form also shows that it paid $5 million to a company to provide fill-in doctors and nurses, $4.6 million for “consulting services,” $1.4 million to attend conferences, and $700,000 on lobbyists. In 2021, the NGO shelled out $8 million to hotel management company Esperanto Developments to house migrants in their hotels. Endeavors, which gets 99.6 percent of its revenue from the government according to federal disclosure forms, declined to comment to The Free Press.
The Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, funds the nonprofits through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, and its budget has swelled over the years—from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $6.3 billion in 2023. The ORR is expected to spend at least $7.3 billion this year—almost all of which will be funneled to NGOs and other contractors.
When asked about the funding increase during a January media event, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the chief executive of Global Refuge said, “We’ve grown because the need has grown.” The nonprofit did not make Vignarajah available for an interview.
But while it’s true the number of migrants has exploded in recent years, critics say these enormous federal grants far exceed the current need. The facilities themselves are generally owned by private companies and are leased to the NGOs, which house the unaccompanied minors and attempt to unite them with family members or, if that’s not possible, people who will take care of them—their so-called sponsors. The ORR does not publicly list the specific number of shelters it funds in its efforts to house migrants, a business The New York Times once described as “lucrative” and “secretive.”
While some NGOs have long had operations at the border, “what is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that researches the effect of government immigration policies and describes its bias as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.”
Consider Global Refuge, based in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2018, according to its federal disclosure form, the Baltimore-based nonprofit had $50 million in revenue. By 2022, its revenue totaled $207 million—$180 million of which came from the government. That year, $82 million was spent on housing unaccompanied children. Global Refuge also granted $45 million to an organization that facilitates adoptions as well as resettling migrant children.
Now Global Refuge employs over 550 people nationwide, and CEO Vignarajah said in January that the nonprofit plans to expand to at least 700 staffers by the end of 2024.
Vignarajah, a former policy director for Michelle Obama when she was first lady, took the top job at Global Refuge in February 2019 after she lost her bid to be elected governor of Maryland. She has since become one of the most prominent advocates for migrants crossing the southern border, appearing frequently on MSNBC and other media as an immigration advocate. Her incoming salary was $244,000, but just three years later, her compensation more than doubled to $520,000.
In 2019, Global Refuge housed 2,591 unaccompanied children while spending $30 million. Three years later, the NGO reported that it housed 1,443 unaccompanied children at a cost of $82.5 million—almost half the number of migrants for more than double the money.
In a statement to The Free Press, Global Refuge spokesperson Timothy Young said that while in care, “Unaccompanied children attend six hours of daily education and participate in recreational activities, both at the education site and within the community.”
The man with the $1 million salary is Dr. Anselmo Villarreal, who became CEO of Southwest Key Programs, headquartered in Austin, Texas, in 2021. (Villarreal took a drop in pay compared to his predecessor, Southwest Key founder Juan Sanchez, who paid himself an eye-popping $3.5 million in 2018.)
Despite a number of scandals in the recent past, including misuse of federal funds and several instances of employees sexually abusing some of the children in its care, Southwest Key continues to operate—and rake in big government checks. In 2020, the year of Covid-19, its government grant was $391 million; by 2022, its contract was nearly $790 million.
Southwest Key’s federal disclosure forms show that in 2022, six executives in addition to Villarreal made more than $400,000, including its chief strategist ($800,000), its head of operations ($700,000) and its top HR executive ($535,000). Its total payroll in 2022 was $465 million.
Endeavors, Inc., based in San Antonio, Texas, is run by Chip Fulghum. Formerly the chief financial officer of the Department of Homeland Security, he signed on as Endeavors’ chief operating officer in 2019 and was promoted to CEO this year.
In 2022, Fulghum was paid almost $600,000, while the compensation for Endeavors’ then-CEO, Jon Allman, was $700,000. Endeavors’ payroll went from $20 million in 2018 to a whopping $150 million in 2022, with seven other executives earning more than $300,000.
Perhaps the most shocking figure was the size of Endeavors’s 2022 contract with the government: a staggering $1.3 billion, by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border. (In 2023, Endeavors’ government funds shrank to $324 million because the shelter was closed for six months. Endeavors says this was because the beds were not needed, the border crisis notwithstanding.)
Despite these astronomical sums, the Unaccompanied Children Program is fraught with problems and suffers from a general lack of oversight. Because so many unaccompanied youths are crossing the border, sources who worked at a temporary Emergency Intake Site in 2021 said the ORR pressured case managers to move children out within two weeks in order to prepare for the next wave of unaccompanied children.
In 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis empaneled a grand jury to conduct an investigation, which showed how the ORR continually loosened its safety protocols so children could be connected to sponsors more quickly—and with less due diligence. The same report revealed that because there’s often no documentation to prove a migrant’s age at the time Border Patrol processes them, 105 adults were discovered posing as unaccompanied children in 2021. One of them, a 24-year-old Honduran male who said he was 17, was charged with murdering his sponsor in Jacksonville, Florida.
“We used to have DNA testing to make sure we had these family units,” Chris Clem, a recently retired Border Patrol officer, told The Free Press. But since the border crisis, the ORR has abandoned DNA testing, according to congressional testimony by the General Accountability Office. In 2021, ORR revised its rules so that public records checks for other adults living in a prospective sponsor’s home were no longer mandatory.
Tara Rodas, a government employee who was temporarily detailed to work at the California Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake shelter in 2021, told The Free Press she also uncovered evidence of fraud within the sponsorship system. “Most of the sponsors have no legal presence in the U.S. I don’t know if I saw one U.S. ID,” said Rodas. “There were no criminal investigators at the site, and there was no access to see if sponsors had committed crimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.”
Last October, the ORR published a series of proposed changes to its regulations in the Federal Register that will effectively codify the more relaxed standards. The new regulations, which will go into effect in July, will allow background checks and verifying the validity of a sponsor’s identity—but wouldn’t require them.
“It is mind-boggling that ORR has not seen fit to adjust the policies for (unaccompanied children) placements, except to make them more lenient,” Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies told The Free Press. “They could do a much better job, but they only want to streamline the process and make the releases even easier.” The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to emailed questions from The Free Press.
Deborah White, another federal employee temporarily detailed to the Pomona Fairplex facility in 2021, told The Free Press: “Ultimately, the responsibility is on the government. But the oversight is obviously not adequate—from the contracting to the care of the children to the vetting of the sponsors. All of it is inadequate. The government blames the contractor and the contractor blames the government, and no one is held accountable.”
Maddie Rowley is an investigative reporter. Follow her on X @Maddie_Rowley. And read Peter Savodnik’s piece, “A Report from the Southern Border: ‘We Want Biden to Win.’”
https://www.thefp.com/p/nonprofits-make-billions-off-migrant-children?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis
Federal funding has turned the business of resettling migrant children into a goldmine for a handful of NGOs—and their top executives.
By Madeleine Rowley
May 12, 2024
While the border crisis has become a major liability for President Biden, threatening his reelection chances, it’s become a huge boon to a group of nonprofits getting rich off government contracts.
Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California.
And with the recent massive influx of unaccompanied children—a record 130,000 in 2022, the last year for which there are official stats—the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs.
“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”
The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million.
Some of the services NGOs provide are eyebrow-raising. For example, Endeavors uses taxpayer funds to offer migrant children “pet therapy,” “horticulture therapy,” and music therapy. In 2021 alone, Endeavors paid Christy Merrell, a music therapist, $533,000. An internal Endeavors PowerPoint obtained by America First Legal, an outfit founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, showed that the nonprofit conducted 1,656 “people-plant interactions” and 287 pet therapy sessions between April 2021 and March 2023.
Endeavors’ 2022 federal disclosure form also shows that it paid $5 million to a company to provide fill-in doctors and nurses, $4.6 million for “consulting services,” $1.4 million to attend conferences, and $700,000 on lobbyists. In 2021, the NGO shelled out $8 million to hotel management company Esperanto Developments to house migrants in their hotels. Endeavors, which gets 99.6 percent of its revenue from the government according to federal disclosure forms, declined to comment to The Free Press.
The Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, funds the nonprofits through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, and its budget has swelled over the years—from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $6.3 billion in 2023. The ORR is expected to spend at least $7.3 billion this year—almost all of which will be funneled to NGOs and other contractors.
When asked about the funding increase during a January media event, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the chief executive of Global Refuge said, “We’ve grown because the need has grown.” The nonprofit did not make Vignarajah available for an interview.
But while it’s true the number of migrants has exploded in recent years, critics say these enormous federal grants far exceed the current need. The facilities themselves are generally owned by private companies and are leased to the NGOs, which house the unaccompanied minors and attempt to unite them with family members or, if that’s not possible, people who will take care of them—their so-called sponsors. The ORR does not publicly list the specific number of shelters it funds in its efforts to house migrants, a business The New York Times once described as “lucrative” and “secretive.”
While some NGOs have long had operations at the border, “what is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that researches the effect of government immigration policies and describes its bias as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.”
Consider Global Refuge, based in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2018, according to its federal disclosure form, the Baltimore-based nonprofit had $50 million in revenue. By 2022, its revenue totaled $207 million—$180 million of which came from the government. That year, $82 million was spent on housing unaccompanied children. Global Refuge also granted $45 million to an organization that facilitates adoptions as well as resettling migrant children.
Now Global Refuge employs over 550 people nationwide, and CEO Vignarajah said in January that the nonprofit plans to expand to at least 700 staffers by the end of 2024.
Vignarajah, a former policy director for Michelle Obama when she was first lady, took the top job at Global Refuge in February 2019 after she lost her bid to be elected governor of Maryland. She has since become one of the most prominent advocates for migrants crossing the southern border, appearing frequently on MSNBC and other media as an immigration advocate. Her incoming salary was $244,000, but just three years later, her compensation more than doubled to $520,000.
In 2019, Global Refuge housed 2,591 unaccompanied children while spending $30 million. Three years later, the NGO reported that it housed 1,443 unaccompanied children at a cost of $82.5 million—almost half the number of migrants for more than double the money.
In a statement to The Free Press, Global Refuge spokesperson Timothy Young said that while in care, “Unaccompanied children attend six hours of daily education and participate in recreational activities, both at the education site and within the community.”
The man with the $1 million salary is Dr. Anselmo Villarreal, who became CEO of Southwest Key Programs, headquartered in Austin, Texas, in 2021. (Villarreal took a drop in pay compared to his predecessor, Southwest Key founder Juan Sanchez, who paid himself an eye-popping $3.5 million in 2018.)
Despite a number of scandals in the recent past, including misuse of federal funds and several instances of employees sexually abusing some of the children in its care, Southwest Key continues to operate—and rake in big government checks. In 2020, the year of Covid-19, its government grant was $391 million; by 2022, its contract was nearly $790 million.
Southwest Key’s federal disclosure forms show that in 2022, six executives in addition to Villarreal made more than $400,000, including its chief strategist ($800,000), its head of operations ($700,000) and its top HR executive ($535,000). Its total payroll in 2022 was $465 million.
Endeavors, Inc., based in San Antonio, Texas, is run by Chip Fulghum. Formerly the chief financial officer of the Department of Homeland Security, he signed on as Endeavors’ chief operating officer in 2019 and was promoted to CEO this year.
In 2022, Fulghum was paid almost $600,000, while the compensation for Endeavors’ then-CEO, Jon Allman, was $700,000. Endeavors’ payroll went from $20 million in 2018 to a whopping $150 million in 2022, with seven other executives earning more than $300,000.
Perhaps the most shocking figure was the size of Endeavors’s 2022 contract with the government: a staggering $1.3 billion, by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border. (In 2023, Endeavors’ government funds shrank to $324 million because the shelter was closed for six months. Endeavors says this was because the beds were not needed, the border crisis notwithstanding.)
Despite these astronomical sums, the Unaccompanied Children Program is fraught with problems and suffers from a general lack of oversight. Because so many unaccompanied youths are crossing the border, sources who worked at a temporary Emergency Intake Site in 2021 said the ORR pressured case managers to move children out within two weeks in order to prepare for the next wave of unaccompanied children.
In 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis empaneled a grand jury to conduct an investigation, which showed how the ORR continually loosened its safety protocols so children could be connected to sponsors more quickly—and with less due diligence. The same report revealed that because there’s often no documentation to prove a migrant’s age at the time Border Patrol processes them, 105 adults were discovered posing as unaccompanied children in 2021. One of them, a 24-year-old Honduran male who said he was 17, was charged with murdering his sponsor in Jacksonville, Florida.
“We used to have DNA testing to make sure we had these family units,” Chris Clem, a recently retired Border Patrol officer, told The Free Press. But since the border crisis, the ORR has abandoned DNA testing, according to congressional testimony by the General Accountability Office. In 2021, ORR revised its rules so that public records checks for other adults living in a prospective sponsor’s home were no longer mandatory.
Tara Rodas, a government employee who was temporarily detailed to work at the California Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake shelter in 2021, told The Free Press she also uncovered evidence of fraud within the sponsorship system. “Most of the sponsors have no legal presence in the U.S. I don’t know if I saw one U.S. ID,” said Rodas. “There were no criminal investigators at the site, and there was no access to see if sponsors had committed crimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.”
Last October, the ORR published a series of proposed changes to its regulations in the Federal Register that will effectively codify the more relaxed standards. The new regulations, which will go into effect in July, will allow background checks and verifying the validity of a sponsor’s identity—but wouldn’t require them.
“It is mind-boggling that ORR has not seen fit to adjust the policies for (unaccompanied children) placements, except to make them more lenient,” Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies told The Free Press. “They could do a much better job, but they only want to streamline the process and make the releases even easier.” The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to emailed questions from The Free Press.
Deborah White, another federal employee temporarily detailed to the Pomona Fairplex facility in 2021, told The Free Press: “Ultimately, the responsibility is on the government. But the oversight is obviously not adequate—from the contracting to the care of the children to the vetting of the sponsors. All of it is inadequate. The government blames the contractor and the contractor blames the government, and no one is held accountable.”
Maddie Rowley is an investigative reporter. Follow her on X @Maddie_Rowley. And read Peter Savodnik’s piece, “A Report from the Southern Border: ‘We Want Biden to Win.’”
https://www.thefp.com/p/nonprofits-make-billions-off-migrant-children?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
9
Politics & Religion / VDH Catalogs Trump’s Persecutions
« on: Today at 02:19:12 PM »
A fine compendium if nothing else:
Presidential Persecutions
What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
By Victor Davis Hanson
May 13, 2024
None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.
These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.
As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.
The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share various embarrassments.
Suspension of statutes of limitations: Carroll and Bragg could only go to court through the legal gymnastics of enlisting sympathetic judges and legislators to change or amend the law to suspend the statute of limitations as a veritable bill of attainder to go after Trump.
Violations of the Bill of Rights: In the Bragg case, Judge Merchan’s selective and asymmetrical gag order likely violates the First Amendment (prohibiting “abridging the freedom of speech”). Bragg violated the Sixth Amendment by denying Trump the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”. Judge Engoron, in the juryless James case, violated the Eighth Amendment (“nor excessive fines imposed”) in assessing Donald Trump an unheard of $354 million fine for supposedly overstating the value of real estate collateral for loans, while violating the Sixth Amendment as well (“the accused shall enjoy the right … to trial by an impartial jury”). The FBI likely violated the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”) by raiding Trump’s private residence, seizing his papers and effects (many of them private), and then lying about its own shenanigans of rearranging the seized classified files to incriminate Trump.
The invention of crimes: The indictments of Bragg, James, Willis, and Smith had no prior precedents. These cases will likely never be seen again. Bragg bootstrapped a federal campaign violation allegation onto a state crime. Yet still, he has never explained exactly how Trump violated any particular law.
No one had ever been tried in New York for allegedly inflating real estate assets to obtain a loan from banks, whose auditors had reviewed favorably the applicant’s assets. Thus, the lending agencies issued the loans, profited from the interest, were paid back in full and on time, and had no complaint against the borrower, Trump. Nonetheless, James indicted Trump and convicted him of a non-crime without a victim, due the New York combination of a politicized left-wing Manhattan judge, prosecutor, and juror.
No local prosecutor until Willis had ever indicted a presidential candidate for calling up a registrar and complaining about the balloting or alleging that some votes cast were not yet counted, followed up by an additional request to find supposedly missing ballots. If such criminalization was the norm, a local Florida prosecutor in 2000 could have indicted both the Bush and Gore campaigns.
Prior to Smith’s federal indictment, all disagreements with presidents about the classification and removal of their private papers were handled administratively, not criminally, much less inaugurated by a staged, performance-art FBI swat-like raid on an ex-president’s residence.
Equal justice?: These indictments are asymmetrical, hounding Trump when other prominent left-wing politicians have been far greater violators of the same alleged crimes and yet were given exemptions. Special prosecutor Robert Hur found Biden culpable for removing classified files for far longer, in more places, in less secure circumstances, and without the presidential authority to declassify them. Yet Biden was not indicted on the Orwellian excuse that he, as president, was so mentally challenged no jury would convict such an amnesiac and debilitated defendant (who otherwise apparently can exercise the office of President of the United States.)
Tara Reade was as believable or unbelievable as E. Jean Carroll. Far poorer, and without Carroll’s New York elite connections, Reade alleged that Senator Joe Biden sexually assaulted her at about the same time as the Carroll claim. Yet Reade was written off as a nut, ostracized, and felt to have opportunistically piggy-banked on the #MeToo movement.
James and her predecessors were aware of hundreds of New York City developers who submitted loan applications with property assessment at odds with those of initial bank appraisals. She knows the solution is that either the bank’s sophisticated auditors refuse the loan or the disagreement is deemed not sufficient enough to sacrifice profit-making by offering a loan that will likely be timely paid back.
Willis knows that Stacey Abrams, in her own state, claimed herself the winner of the 2018 gubernatorial race (she lost by over 50,000 votes). Abrams then declared that the actual winner, current governor Brian Kemp, was and is an illegitimate governor. She further sued to overturn the election in the manner that Jill Stein had tried to overthrow the 2016 presidential election.
In a similar fashion of election denialism, Democratically-funded ad campaigns and sycophantic celebrities hit the airways in 2016 to flip the electors to become “faithless,” thus renouncing their constitutional duties to reflect their own states’ tallies and instead voting according to the national popular vote.
Bragg knows that Hillary Clinton was fined over $100,000 for 2016 campaign violations after she hid the nature of her illegal payments to foreign national Christopher Steele to collect dirt on her opponent Donald Trump. Barack Obama was fined—five years post facto!—by the same Federal Election Commission a whopping $375,000 for improperly reporting nearly $2 million in 2008 campaign donations. In neither case did a federal prosecutor, much less a local district attorney, seek to criminalize what was customarily considered an administrative or civil violation of federal law.
Bias: Never has an ex-president and leading presidential candidate been targeted with promises of indictment by candidates running for state and local offices. Yet that is precisely what Bragg, James, and Willis have done, fueling their campaigns for offices by promising to find ways to go after Donald Trump and subsequently raising money from such boasts.
Willis’s paramour, fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, met with the White House counsel’s office. One of Bragg’s prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, left his prestigious job as a senior federal prosecutor in the Biden DOJ temporarily to work on contract with Bragg’s Manhattan office to go after Trump.
Jack Smith was appointed by the Biden Department of Justice; his left-wing filmmaker spouse helped to produce a puff-piece documentary on Michelle Obama.
The judge in the Bragg case, Juan Merchan, donated to the 2020 Biden campaign. So did one of the lead prosecutors, Susan Hoffinger, who gave generously to Biden in 2020. Merchan’s own daughter, Loren, has made a small fortune as a Democratic campaign consultant, having guided her left-wing clients’ fundraising efforts to the tune of $90 million.
Given these egregious violations of the law, abject political bias, conflicts of interest, asymmetrical application of the law, and manipulations of the statutes of limitations, the public has slowly grown incensed. They rightly conclude that the lawfare is a left-wing coordinated effort to destroy candidate Trump by exhausting him physically and psychologically in five separate cases at the height of the campaign season, bankrupting him with what will likely be $1 billion in legal fees and fines, silencing him with gag orders, defaming him with salacious and sensational but irrelevant court testimonies, and keeping him off the campaign trail.
And now? The sheer preposterousness has resulted in two unexpected developments. One, the more the left tries to subvert the legal system to emasculate Trump, the more the latter wins popularity, especially in traditionally non-Republican constituencies, even as Biden slumps in the polls. And two, the four criminal cases are starting to fall apart because of their sheer ridiculousness and abject bias.
Will and her boyfriend, prosecutor Wade, likely lied under oath about both their covert romantic relationship and the money that fueled their global junketeering. A Georgia state appellate court is reviewing Willis’ suitability to continue the prosecution. One might ask, “How can a prosecutor who lied under oath while trying a case retain any credibility?” Whatever the state court’s findings, a state appellate or federal court will eventually exonerate Trump. No other prosecutor or jurisdiction would likely take over Willis’s tainted indictment.
Smith’s indictment is in limbo, largely because: 1) in unusual and partisan fashion, he sought to rush the prosecution to coincide with the 2024 campaign; 2) the Supreme Court is determining to what extent a president either has immunity or can be hauled into court by a special prosecutor appointed by the opposition party; and 3) his office lied to the court about the condition of the Trump files they found at his residence, collected, and then took possession of—in a fashion that was intended to prejudice the case in the government’s favor.
Bragg’s gambit of putting Stormy Daniels on the stand to offer irrelevant but lurid testimony to hurt candidate Trump may have backfired, given she proved unstable, narcissistic, unreliable, hateful, and promised to break the law and refuse a legally ordered payment to Trump after losing a defamation case against him. Convicted felon and liar Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness, has already hit the internet trying to get rich and will have less credibility.
James’s civil conviction of Trump and massive fine (originally $450 million with interest) may also be overturned on appeal, given it violates Eight-Amendment protection from “unusual punishment” (“bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed”), in addition to the selective prosecution of Trump where there is no criminal act and no victim.
So what will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
One, we have entered new territory. There will soon be hundreds of local and state prosecutors who feel they have now been given license in election years to go after national presidential candidates for political advantage, both local and national.
Two, conservatives are in a dilemma: whether to restore deterrence by boomeranging the left’s extra-legal effort to ruin a candidate and president or to refrain from what would be a descent into third-world, tit-for-tat criminalization of politics.
Three, the persecution of Trump, coupled with the derelict candidacy of Joe Biden, threatens to erode the traditional base of the Democratic Party and redefine politics in terms of class rather than race. Minorities are beginning to empathize with the gagged, railroaded, and victimized Trump while distancing themselves from the victimizers, who are using their “privilege” to warp the law on behalf of a bullying president.
Four, the U.S. has lost a great deal of credibility abroad due to the erosion of what was once seen as the greatest system of jurisprudence in the world. No longer.
Enemies like China and Russia now boast that America’s new political prosecutions are similar to their own systems, or even more egregious, and will welcome us into their own customs of bastardized justice.
Latin-American, African, and Asian dictators are delighted that the U.S. has lost the moral authority to lecture them on the need for a disinterested and independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Our democratic allies in Europe and Asia are increasingly disturbed that the instability and unlawfulness apparent in the current lawfare put into question the reliability of the United States and its adherence to a rules-based order—whether at home or aboard.
Any president who would sic the justice system on his opponent might be equally vindictive and lawless to his allies abroad.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/13/the-fall-of-the-house-of-presidential-persecutions/
Presidential Persecutions
What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
By Victor Davis Hanson
May 13, 2024
None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.
These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.
As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.
The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share various embarrassments.
Suspension of statutes of limitations: Carroll and Bragg could only go to court through the legal gymnastics of enlisting sympathetic judges and legislators to change or amend the law to suspend the statute of limitations as a veritable bill of attainder to go after Trump.
Violations of the Bill of Rights: In the Bragg case, Judge Merchan’s selective and asymmetrical gag order likely violates the First Amendment (prohibiting “abridging the freedom of speech”). Bragg violated the Sixth Amendment by denying Trump the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”. Judge Engoron, in the juryless James case, violated the Eighth Amendment (“nor excessive fines imposed”) in assessing Donald Trump an unheard of $354 million fine for supposedly overstating the value of real estate collateral for loans, while violating the Sixth Amendment as well (“the accused shall enjoy the right … to trial by an impartial jury”). The FBI likely violated the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”) by raiding Trump’s private residence, seizing his papers and effects (many of them private), and then lying about its own shenanigans of rearranging the seized classified files to incriminate Trump.
The invention of crimes: The indictments of Bragg, James, Willis, and Smith had no prior precedents. These cases will likely never be seen again. Bragg bootstrapped a federal campaign violation allegation onto a state crime. Yet still, he has never explained exactly how Trump violated any particular law.
No one had ever been tried in New York for allegedly inflating real estate assets to obtain a loan from banks, whose auditors had reviewed favorably the applicant’s assets. Thus, the lending agencies issued the loans, profited from the interest, were paid back in full and on time, and had no complaint against the borrower, Trump. Nonetheless, James indicted Trump and convicted him of a non-crime without a victim, due the New York combination of a politicized left-wing Manhattan judge, prosecutor, and juror.
No local prosecutor until Willis had ever indicted a presidential candidate for calling up a registrar and complaining about the balloting or alleging that some votes cast were not yet counted, followed up by an additional request to find supposedly missing ballots. If such criminalization was the norm, a local Florida prosecutor in 2000 could have indicted both the Bush and Gore campaigns.
Prior to Smith’s federal indictment, all disagreements with presidents about the classification and removal of their private papers were handled administratively, not criminally, much less inaugurated by a staged, performance-art FBI swat-like raid on an ex-president’s residence.
Equal justice?: These indictments are asymmetrical, hounding Trump when other prominent left-wing politicians have been far greater violators of the same alleged crimes and yet were given exemptions. Special prosecutor Robert Hur found Biden culpable for removing classified files for far longer, in more places, in less secure circumstances, and without the presidential authority to declassify them. Yet Biden was not indicted on the Orwellian excuse that he, as president, was so mentally challenged no jury would convict such an amnesiac and debilitated defendant (who otherwise apparently can exercise the office of President of the United States.)
Tara Reade was as believable or unbelievable as E. Jean Carroll. Far poorer, and without Carroll’s New York elite connections, Reade alleged that Senator Joe Biden sexually assaulted her at about the same time as the Carroll claim. Yet Reade was written off as a nut, ostracized, and felt to have opportunistically piggy-banked on the #MeToo movement.
James and her predecessors were aware of hundreds of New York City developers who submitted loan applications with property assessment at odds with those of initial bank appraisals. She knows the solution is that either the bank’s sophisticated auditors refuse the loan or the disagreement is deemed not sufficient enough to sacrifice profit-making by offering a loan that will likely be timely paid back.
Willis knows that Stacey Abrams, in her own state, claimed herself the winner of the 2018 gubernatorial race (she lost by over 50,000 votes). Abrams then declared that the actual winner, current governor Brian Kemp, was and is an illegitimate governor. She further sued to overturn the election in the manner that Jill Stein had tried to overthrow the 2016 presidential election.
In a similar fashion of election denialism, Democratically-funded ad campaigns and sycophantic celebrities hit the airways in 2016 to flip the electors to become “faithless,” thus renouncing their constitutional duties to reflect their own states’ tallies and instead voting according to the national popular vote.
Bragg knows that Hillary Clinton was fined over $100,000 for 2016 campaign violations after she hid the nature of her illegal payments to foreign national Christopher Steele to collect dirt on her opponent Donald Trump. Barack Obama was fined—five years post facto!—by the same Federal Election Commission a whopping $375,000 for improperly reporting nearly $2 million in 2008 campaign donations. In neither case did a federal prosecutor, much less a local district attorney, seek to criminalize what was customarily considered an administrative or civil violation of federal law.
Bias: Never has an ex-president and leading presidential candidate been targeted with promises of indictment by candidates running for state and local offices. Yet that is precisely what Bragg, James, and Willis have done, fueling their campaigns for offices by promising to find ways to go after Donald Trump and subsequently raising money from such boasts.
Willis’s paramour, fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, met with the White House counsel’s office. One of Bragg’s prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, left his prestigious job as a senior federal prosecutor in the Biden DOJ temporarily to work on contract with Bragg’s Manhattan office to go after Trump.
Jack Smith was appointed by the Biden Department of Justice; his left-wing filmmaker spouse helped to produce a puff-piece documentary on Michelle Obama.
The judge in the Bragg case, Juan Merchan, donated to the 2020 Biden campaign. So did one of the lead prosecutors, Susan Hoffinger, who gave generously to Biden in 2020. Merchan’s own daughter, Loren, has made a small fortune as a Democratic campaign consultant, having guided her left-wing clients’ fundraising efforts to the tune of $90 million.
Given these egregious violations of the law, abject political bias, conflicts of interest, asymmetrical application of the law, and manipulations of the statutes of limitations, the public has slowly grown incensed. They rightly conclude that the lawfare is a left-wing coordinated effort to destroy candidate Trump by exhausting him physically and psychologically in five separate cases at the height of the campaign season, bankrupting him with what will likely be $1 billion in legal fees and fines, silencing him with gag orders, defaming him with salacious and sensational but irrelevant court testimonies, and keeping him off the campaign trail.
And now? The sheer preposterousness has resulted in two unexpected developments. One, the more the left tries to subvert the legal system to emasculate Trump, the more the latter wins popularity, especially in traditionally non-Republican constituencies, even as Biden slumps in the polls. And two, the four criminal cases are starting to fall apart because of their sheer ridiculousness and abject bias.
Will and her boyfriend, prosecutor Wade, likely lied under oath about both their covert romantic relationship and the money that fueled their global junketeering. A Georgia state appellate court is reviewing Willis’ suitability to continue the prosecution. One might ask, “How can a prosecutor who lied under oath while trying a case retain any credibility?” Whatever the state court’s findings, a state appellate or federal court will eventually exonerate Trump. No other prosecutor or jurisdiction would likely take over Willis’s tainted indictment.
Smith’s indictment is in limbo, largely because: 1) in unusual and partisan fashion, he sought to rush the prosecution to coincide with the 2024 campaign; 2) the Supreme Court is determining to what extent a president either has immunity or can be hauled into court by a special prosecutor appointed by the opposition party; and 3) his office lied to the court about the condition of the Trump files they found at his residence, collected, and then took possession of—in a fashion that was intended to prejudice the case in the government’s favor.
Bragg’s gambit of putting Stormy Daniels on the stand to offer irrelevant but lurid testimony to hurt candidate Trump may have backfired, given she proved unstable, narcissistic, unreliable, hateful, and promised to break the law and refuse a legally ordered payment to Trump after losing a defamation case against him. Convicted felon and liar Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness, has already hit the internet trying to get rich and will have less credibility.
James’s civil conviction of Trump and massive fine (originally $450 million with interest) may also be overturned on appeal, given it violates Eight-Amendment protection from “unusual punishment” (“bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed”), in addition to the selective prosecution of Trump where there is no criminal act and no victim.
So what will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
One, we have entered new territory. There will soon be hundreds of local and state prosecutors who feel they have now been given license in election years to go after national presidential candidates for political advantage, both local and national.
Two, conservatives are in a dilemma: whether to restore deterrence by boomeranging the left’s extra-legal effort to ruin a candidate and president or to refrain from what would be a descent into third-world, tit-for-tat criminalization of politics.
Three, the persecution of Trump, coupled with the derelict candidacy of Joe Biden, threatens to erode the traditional base of the Democratic Party and redefine politics in terms of class rather than race. Minorities are beginning to empathize with the gagged, railroaded, and victimized Trump while distancing themselves from the victimizers, who are using their “privilege” to warp the law on behalf of a bullying president.
Four, the U.S. has lost a great deal of credibility abroad due to the erosion of what was once seen as the greatest system of jurisprudence in the world. No longer.
Enemies like China and Russia now boast that America’s new political prosecutions are similar to their own systems, or even more egregious, and will welcome us into their own customs of bastardized justice.
Latin-American, African, and Asian dictators are delighted that the U.S. has lost the moral authority to lecture them on the need for a disinterested and independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Our democratic allies in Europe and Asia are increasingly disturbed that the instability and unlawfulness apparent in the current lawfare put into question the reliability of the United States and its adherence to a rules-based order—whether at home or aboard.
Any president who would sic the justice system on his opponent might be equally vindictive and lawless to his allies abroad.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/13/the-fall-of-the-house-of-presidential-persecutions/
10
Politics & Religion / The Swamp’s Rising Tide
« on: Today at 01:49:16 PM »
This certainly appears to bolster the “legislating by regulation” argument. As such perhaps a court can find these numerous proffered regs unlawful in a similar broad spectrum manner:
Confronting A Surge In Costly Federal Rules
Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. Contributor May 13, 2024
As of Monday, May 13, there have been 1,148 rules and regulations finalized among the 41,830 pages published to date in the 2024 Federal Register.
Page tallies of over 800 per day have suddenly become routine. Last week’s 4,225 pages represented nearly double 2024’s weekly pace so far.
At any given moment several thousand rules and regulations populate the production process. There are several flavors of “significant” rules, the costliest subset of which consists of rules the Biden administration deems “Section 3(f)1 Significant” (S3F1).
The significance of significance: Rooted in a Clinton-era executive order which until recently showcased $100 million “economically significant” rules, the S3F1 designation under Biden now instead refers to rules attaining a threshold of $200 million in annual economic effects. Now, lesser rules costing “only” $100 million or deemed significant due to certain other non-cost characteristics can fly under the radar.
This is a “significant” development to coin a term since, in a January 2024 compilation, I inventoried fully 232 S3F1 work-in-process rules in the pre-rule, proposed and final stages. The implication of Biden’s threshold change is that there are likely more costly rules in the pipeline below $200 million but above the old $100 million threshold that do not get the attention they deserve.
In any event, this is an election year, and the January inventory was intended to remind Congress that many of these high-impact rules would be rushed to completion in the Federal Register in order to outrace a looming summer deadline beyond which they become vulnerable to Congressional Review Act (CRA) “resolutions of disapproval” (RODs) overturning them in 2025, should Biden not secure re-election.
As summarized by George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center:
"The CRA's lookback provision gives Congress an additional chance to review rules issued in the period starting 60 working days before the end of a session of Congress through the beginning of the subsequent session of Congress.
Rules issued during the lookback period are treated as if they were published in the Federal Register and reported to Congress on the 15th working day of the subsequent session of Congress"
And sure enough, to avoid that prospect, some of the flagged S3F1 rules have landed in rapid succession in recent weeks’ editions of the inflated Federal Register. Some in Congress are introducing resolutions of disapproval anyway, knowing full well these attempts will be vetoed by Biden. Rules garnering media attention as evidence of Biden “Trump-proofing” his agenda include:
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure rule;
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) "Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles." This is the rule seen as the vehicle, no pun intended, to effectuate Biden’s EV mandates;
EPA’s Reconsideration of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter;
The Department of Labor’s “Standard for Determining Joint Employer Status” as well as its “Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act;
The Federal Communications Commission’s “Prevention and Elimination of Digital Discrimination”’;
The Department of Energy’s “Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Furnaces”;
Resolutions of disapproval for other rules such as the Federal Trade Commission’s highly controversial rule prohibiting non-compete agreements would surprise no one, but the FTC rule is and those to follow would likewise be safe if the administration issues them quickly. Already during the Biden era the 117th and 118th Congresses each passed several RODs; but other than early ones overturning Trump-era actions, Biden has vetoed these. (Incidentally, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the American Action Forum, and the George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center among others track CRA resolutions.)
It’s the weight, not the flow (sometimes): Biden's executive actions in 2024 are notable not for the high numbers of executive orders and memoranda that characterized his first year, nor paradoxically even for an abnormally high number of rules.
Instead, Biden's recent activity is characterized by highly costly and transformative nature of rules fat enough to produce the aforementioned record-level Federal Register page counts. The all-time record was Obama’s 95,894 in 2016; the second highest count was Biden’s own 89,368 in 2023. At the current clip, however, the 2024 Federal Register will top 100,000 pages, taking us closer to the million-pages-per-decade warned of in recent editions of Ten Thousand Commandments.
The Limits of RODs: Clearly things have to align just so to roll back rules using the Congressional Review Act. The CRA has undone fewer than two dozen rules since its enactment in 1996. Most of those occurred under Trump, whose administration overturned too-late Obama rules. Biden’s team, who also overturned late-issued Trump deregulatory actions in precisely that fashion, has clearly learned the game and is ensuring that the largest of rules are landing in the Federal Register now to keep them protected from RODs.
Given the circumstances, one lesson for House and Senate leadership, if they anticipate 119th Congress majorities and a Republican president, would be to minimize legislative days for the remainder of 2024 to maximize backward chronological reach to capture more of these rules on the current Biden glide path. That is, a new Congress would want to stretch that 60-day lookback as far back in time as possible.
Members of Congress ought not despair at the futility of vacating all of Biden’s pet rules recently finalized. There remain, as the January inventory implies, a lot more rules on the 2024 legislative calendar potentially vulnerable to overturn in the 119th Congress in 2025 as they’re not all likely to beat the deadline. And of the rules that remain unfinalized, a new administration can just freeze and withdraw them.
Monitoring the broader “significant” subset: Additional S3F1 major and otherwise significant rules (as well as routine and non-significant ones) naturally have come into play since the January snapshot, likely including ones limbo-ing in just under the cost threshold. While Biden’s $200 million rules garner the most attention, it is important that policymakers not forget that the CRA itself still highlights the larger subset of $100 million rules, defining them in statute as “major” and requiring preparation of a formal albeit brief report on them by the Government Accountability Office.
The subset of the final rules deemed broadly “significant” under E.O. 12,866 during recent years is presented below. Biden had 289 significant final rules in 2023. While that was down from 375 in 2021, the significant rules subset under Biden appears to be tracking upward in both relative and absolute terms, destined to meet and exceed Obama levels.
Projecting the 155 as of today (May 13) implies 422 significant rules by the end of the year. Granted, that could decelerate after summertime, when large rules would be vulnerable to overturn should Biden not secure reelection. On the other hand, there is also a tendency of outgoing presidents to push through a number of midnight rules during their final lame-duck weeks, knowing some of it will stick given the sheer volume.
Standouts in the chart above are Obama’s final year of 486, when the Federal Register cracked its all time page record. Trump’s 2020 tally of 436 is a big one too; but many of those rules were deregulatory in intent—rolling back some of Obama—as part of the one-in, two-out campaign of the era. The Trump low of 199 in 2018 corresponds to the lowest total rule count since the National Archives began presenting rule counts in the 1970s; in 2018 there were fewer than 3,000 rules issued for the first and only time.
Significant rule counts bear close watching by Congress. Recognizing that overlap occurs in transition years, Barack Obama’s eight years brought 3,037 significant rules, for an annual average of 380. Donald Trump’s four years brought 1,121 significant rules, for an annual average of “only” 280 with a chunk of those deregulatory. Joe Biden’s first three years brought 932 significant rules for an average of 311 but that average appears to be ticking upward in 2024 if the chart holds.
Clearly the CRA can’t do it all: The job of Congress now is to pursue regulatory reforms that can have an effect regardless of what transpires with resolutions of disapproval this year. Many CRAs will be exercises in futility if there is no change in administration and if the GOP does not control both houses. But regardless of what happens in that respect, the sheer flow of significant rules requires addressing by more comprehensive means such as regulatory budgeting, sunsetting and a bipartisan commission to chop rules, and most importantly, dialing back on the hefty laws like the CARES Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act that are the engines of much of the fat new rulemaking.
As for the CRA, while it did represent one of the most important affirmations of congressional accountabiltiy for rulemaking, it has never been quite the right tool; that tool will be legislation instead assuring that no major or controversial rule can be effective unless Congress votes to affirm it, as opposed to the current situation requiring Congress to get up on its hind legs to block odious ones. The current version of such a law is called “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny,” or REINS Act; but a better moniker was the predecessor Congressional Responsibility Act, and the acronym could stay the same.
For now, and in preparation, Congress needs to keep a close eye on the flow of significant rules.
https://apple.news/AhLFH4p-nTzKutGErTpcPkg
Confronting A Surge In Costly Federal Rules
Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. Contributor May 13, 2024
As of Monday, May 13, there have been 1,148 rules and regulations finalized among the 41,830 pages published to date in the 2024 Federal Register.
Page tallies of over 800 per day have suddenly become routine. Last week’s 4,225 pages represented nearly double 2024’s weekly pace so far.
At any given moment several thousand rules and regulations populate the production process. There are several flavors of “significant” rules, the costliest subset of which consists of rules the Biden administration deems “Section 3(f)1 Significant” (S3F1).
The significance of significance: Rooted in a Clinton-era executive order which until recently showcased $100 million “economically significant” rules, the S3F1 designation under Biden now instead refers to rules attaining a threshold of $200 million in annual economic effects. Now, lesser rules costing “only” $100 million or deemed significant due to certain other non-cost characteristics can fly under the radar.
This is a “significant” development to coin a term since, in a January 2024 compilation, I inventoried fully 232 S3F1 work-in-process rules in the pre-rule, proposed and final stages. The implication of Biden’s threshold change is that there are likely more costly rules in the pipeline below $200 million but above the old $100 million threshold that do not get the attention they deserve.
In any event, this is an election year, and the January inventory was intended to remind Congress that many of these high-impact rules would be rushed to completion in the Federal Register in order to outrace a looming summer deadline beyond which they become vulnerable to Congressional Review Act (CRA) “resolutions of disapproval” (RODs) overturning them in 2025, should Biden not secure re-election.
As summarized by George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center:
"The CRA's lookback provision gives Congress an additional chance to review rules issued in the period starting 60 working days before the end of a session of Congress through the beginning of the subsequent session of Congress.
Rules issued during the lookback period are treated as if they were published in the Federal Register and reported to Congress on the 15th working day of the subsequent session of Congress"
And sure enough, to avoid that prospect, some of the flagged S3F1 rules have landed in rapid succession in recent weeks’ editions of the inflated Federal Register. Some in Congress are introducing resolutions of disapproval anyway, knowing full well these attempts will be vetoed by Biden. Rules garnering media attention as evidence of Biden “Trump-proofing” his agenda include:
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure rule;
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) "Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles." This is the rule seen as the vehicle, no pun intended, to effectuate Biden’s EV mandates;
EPA’s Reconsideration of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter;
The Department of Labor’s “Standard for Determining Joint Employer Status” as well as its “Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act;
The Federal Communications Commission’s “Prevention and Elimination of Digital Discrimination”’;
The Department of Energy’s “Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Furnaces”;
Resolutions of disapproval for other rules such as the Federal Trade Commission’s highly controversial rule prohibiting non-compete agreements would surprise no one, but the FTC rule is and those to follow would likewise be safe if the administration issues them quickly. Already during the Biden era the 117th and 118th Congresses each passed several RODs; but other than early ones overturning Trump-era actions, Biden has vetoed these. (Incidentally, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the American Action Forum, and the George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center among others track CRA resolutions.)
It’s the weight, not the flow (sometimes): Biden's executive actions in 2024 are notable not for the high numbers of executive orders and memoranda that characterized his first year, nor paradoxically even for an abnormally high number of rules.
Instead, Biden's recent activity is characterized by highly costly and transformative nature of rules fat enough to produce the aforementioned record-level Federal Register page counts. The all-time record was Obama’s 95,894 in 2016; the second highest count was Biden’s own 89,368 in 2023. At the current clip, however, the 2024 Federal Register will top 100,000 pages, taking us closer to the million-pages-per-decade warned of in recent editions of Ten Thousand Commandments.
The Limits of RODs: Clearly things have to align just so to roll back rules using the Congressional Review Act. The CRA has undone fewer than two dozen rules since its enactment in 1996. Most of those occurred under Trump, whose administration overturned too-late Obama rules. Biden’s team, who also overturned late-issued Trump deregulatory actions in precisely that fashion, has clearly learned the game and is ensuring that the largest of rules are landing in the Federal Register now to keep them protected from RODs.
Given the circumstances, one lesson for House and Senate leadership, if they anticipate 119th Congress majorities and a Republican president, would be to minimize legislative days for the remainder of 2024 to maximize backward chronological reach to capture more of these rules on the current Biden glide path. That is, a new Congress would want to stretch that 60-day lookback as far back in time as possible.
Members of Congress ought not despair at the futility of vacating all of Biden’s pet rules recently finalized. There remain, as the January inventory implies, a lot more rules on the 2024 legislative calendar potentially vulnerable to overturn in the 119th Congress in 2025 as they’re not all likely to beat the deadline. And of the rules that remain unfinalized, a new administration can just freeze and withdraw them.
Monitoring the broader “significant” subset: Additional S3F1 major and otherwise significant rules (as well as routine and non-significant ones) naturally have come into play since the January snapshot, likely including ones limbo-ing in just under the cost threshold. While Biden’s $200 million rules garner the most attention, it is important that policymakers not forget that the CRA itself still highlights the larger subset of $100 million rules, defining them in statute as “major” and requiring preparation of a formal albeit brief report on them by the Government Accountability Office.
The subset of the final rules deemed broadly “significant” under E.O. 12,866 during recent years is presented below. Biden had 289 significant final rules in 2023. While that was down from 375 in 2021, the significant rules subset under Biden appears to be tracking upward in both relative and absolute terms, destined to meet and exceed Obama levels.
Projecting the 155 as of today (May 13) implies 422 significant rules by the end of the year. Granted, that could decelerate after summertime, when large rules would be vulnerable to overturn should Biden not secure reelection. On the other hand, there is also a tendency of outgoing presidents to push through a number of midnight rules during their final lame-duck weeks, knowing some of it will stick given the sheer volume.
Standouts in the chart above are Obama’s final year of 486, when the Federal Register cracked its all time page record. Trump’s 2020 tally of 436 is a big one too; but many of those rules were deregulatory in intent—rolling back some of Obama—as part of the one-in, two-out campaign of the era. The Trump low of 199 in 2018 corresponds to the lowest total rule count since the National Archives began presenting rule counts in the 1970s; in 2018 there were fewer than 3,000 rules issued for the first and only time.
Significant rule counts bear close watching by Congress. Recognizing that overlap occurs in transition years, Barack Obama’s eight years brought 3,037 significant rules, for an annual average of 380. Donald Trump’s four years brought 1,121 significant rules, for an annual average of “only” 280 with a chunk of those deregulatory. Joe Biden’s first three years brought 932 significant rules for an average of 311 but that average appears to be ticking upward in 2024 if the chart holds.
Clearly the CRA can’t do it all: The job of Congress now is to pursue regulatory reforms that can have an effect regardless of what transpires with resolutions of disapproval this year. Many CRAs will be exercises in futility if there is no change in administration and if the GOP does not control both houses. But regardless of what happens in that respect, the sheer flow of significant rules requires addressing by more comprehensive means such as regulatory budgeting, sunsetting and a bipartisan commission to chop rules, and most importantly, dialing back on the hefty laws like the CARES Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act that are the engines of much of the fat new rulemaking.
As for the CRA, while it did represent one of the most important affirmations of congressional accountabiltiy for rulemaking, it has never been quite the right tool; that tool will be legislation instead assuring that no major or controversial rule can be effective unless Congress votes to affirm it, as opposed to the current situation requiring Congress to get up on its hind legs to block odious ones. The current version of such a law is called “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny,” or REINS Act; but a better moniker was the predecessor Congressional Responsibility Act, and the acronym could stay the same.
For now, and in preparation, Congress needs to keep a close eye on the flow of significant rules.
https://apple.news/AhLFH4p-nTzKutGErTpcPkg
11
Politics & Religion / Cuba on Campus
« on: Today at 01:42:09 PM »
What a surprise: Cuban-trained activists are involved in leading the campus protest at Columbia, and likely elsewhere:
How Cuba Fuels the Campus Protests
Some of the ‘outside agitators’ against Israel are Havana’s fellow travelers
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
There’s a dog-bites-man quality to the news reports that recent campus chaos in support of Hamas is the work of well-funded revolutionary groups out to destabilize the U.S. Even less surprising is the charge that “outside agitators,” as New York Mayor Eric Adams has termed these groups, share an ideology with the Cuban military dictatorship—and in some cases have attained practical support from Havana.
On the other hand, the American public needs to be reminded that the Cuban regime has for 65 years nursed bitter opposition to the U.S. Constitution and American freedom. And that for decades it has spent enormous resources burrowing into America’s educational, diplomatic and political circles in an effort to topple our democratic republic.
This truth was obscured during the Obama administration, when Ben Rhodes—struggling creative writer turned national-security guru—shaped U.S. policy to profess that Cuba is no longer a threat. Who can forget the photograph—iconic for the American left—of Raúl Castro raising the arm of a limp-wristed President Obama in 2016?
Cuba is still run by angry, envious tyrants who excel at only one thing: destruction. Having achieved that goal at home and made themselves rich in the process, they toil endlessly to expand their reach. Columbia University is merely one more destination on their revolutionary map.
As Mr. Adams explained on “CBS Mornings” on May 1, “It was clear we had to take appropriate actions when our intelligence division identified those who were professionals, well-trained.” The mayor probably knows a lot more about those professionals and their training than he’s letting on. None of it is good.
A vocal advocate of the recent hate-ins in New York is Manolo De Los Santos. The New York Post describes the 35-year-old as “the leader and de facto mouthpiece for the People’s Forum, a radical anti-Israel group that encouraged the takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University.”
Born in the Dominican Republic, Mr. De Los Santos moved to the U.S. at 5 but seems to have spent time in Cuba beginning in 2006. In May 2023, Mr. De Los Santos tweeted a photo of himself with Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz Canel on the island. He wrote that he was “leaving Cuba after 10 days learning with its people” and with Mr. Diaz-Canel. “Young people in the U.S. have great tasks ahead of them,” he explained. In September 2023, Mr. De Los Santos was photographed with the Cuban dictator in New York during the week of the U.N. General Assembly meeting. “Welcome dear comrade!” Mr. De Los Santos tweeted.
It isn’t clear if Mr. De Los Santos was on the Columbia campus. But hours before pro-Hamas activists took over Hamilton Hall, he gave a rousing speech to a volunteer meeting at the People’s Forum offices in Manhattan, where he “urged the group to ‘give Joe Biden a hot summer’ and ‘make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country,’ ” according to the Washington Free Beacon, which said it attended the meeting by Zoom. “Breakout sessions” that followed, the website said, “focused on organizing new methods of ‘resistance.’ ”
On May 7 Mr. De Los Santos was detained by the New York City Police Department for his role in a traffic-blocking march. It wasn’t his first brush with the law. The Post has reported that he was also arrested by the NYPD on Jan. 27 during a day of pro-Hamas activism.
Mr. De Los Santos is a political entrepreneur who has made a career out of activism. He claims concern for Palestinians. But he’s fine with the Cuban police state, which is holding more than 1,000 political prisoners—including performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantará and musician Maykel Osorbo—and starving its people by prohibiting farmers’ markets and the ownership of boats for fishing. He blames U.S. policy for Cuban suffering.
There’s nothing special about Mr. De Los Santos. Since 1969 Cuba has been using the U.S.-based Venceremos Brigade to build teams of Americans willing to infiltrate, spy and indoctrinate in the name of the revolution. The solidarity group recruits sympathizers and brings them to Cuba to turn them against their own government. It identifies those most ripe for leadership and teaches them how to run a communist underground back home. Venceremos graduates return to work in the U.S.
In a 2014 unclassified report, “Cuban Intelligence Targeting of Academia,” the FBI said that schools, colleges, universities and research institutes are “a fertile environment” for foreign intelligence. “The Cuban intelligence services,” it added, “are known to actively target the U.S. academic world for the purposes of recruiting agents, in order to both obtain useful information and conduct influence activities.”
Cuba wants to do the U.S. harm. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
https://apple.news/AqyDUKgbtRdW7ldEiJYlsdQ
How Cuba Fuels the Campus Protests
Some of the ‘outside agitators’ against Israel are Havana’s fellow travelers
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
There’s a dog-bites-man quality to the news reports that recent campus chaos in support of Hamas is the work of well-funded revolutionary groups out to destabilize the U.S. Even less surprising is the charge that “outside agitators,” as New York Mayor Eric Adams has termed these groups, share an ideology with the Cuban military dictatorship—and in some cases have attained practical support from Havana.
On the other hand, the American public needs to be reminded that the Cuban regime has for 65 years nursed bitter opposition to the U.S. Constitution and American freedom. And that for decades it has spent enormous resources burrowing into America’s educational, diplomatic and political circles in an effort to topple our democratic republic.
This truth was obscured during the Obama administration, when Ben Rhodes—struggling creative writer turned national-security guru—shaped U.S. policy to profess that Cuba is no longer a threat. Who can forget the photograph—iconic for the American left—of Raúl Castro raising the arm of a limp-wristed President Obama in 2016?
Cuba is still run by angry, envious tyrants who excel at only one thing: destruction. Having achieved that goal at home and made themselves rich in the process, they toil endlessly to expand their reach. Columbia University is merely one more destination on their revolutionary map.
As Mr. Adams explained on “CBS Mornings” on May 1, “It was clear we had to take appropriate actions when our intelligence division identified those who were professionals, well-trained.” The mayor probably knows a lot more about those professionals and their training than he’s letting on. None of it is good.
A vocal advocate of the recent hate-ins in New York is Manolo De Los Santos. The New York Post describes the 35-year-old as “the leader and de facto mouthpiece for the People’s Forum, a radical anti-Israel group that encouraged the takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University.”
Born in the Dominican Republic, Mr. De Los Santos moved to the U.S. at 5 but seems to have spent time in Cuba beginning in 2006. In May 2023, Mr. De Los Santos tweeted a photo of himself with Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz Canel on the island. He wrote that he was “leaving Cuba after 10 days learning with its people” and with Mr. Diaz-Canel. “Young people in the U.S. have great tasks ahead of them,” he explained. In September 2023, Mr. De Los Santos was photographed with the Cuban dictator in New York during the week of the U.N. General Assembly meeting. “Welcome dear comrade!” Mr. De Los Santos tweeted.
It isn’t clear if Mr. De Los Santos was on the Columbia campus. But hours before pro-Hamas activists took over Hamilton Hall, he gave a rousing speech to a volunteer meeting at the People’s Forum offices in Manhattan, where he “urged the group to ‘give Joe Biden a hot summer’ and ‘make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country,’ ” according to the Washington Free Beacon, which said it attended the meeting by Zoom. “Breakout sessions” that followed, the website said, “focused on organizing new methods of ‘resistance.’ ”
On May 7 Mr. De Los Santos was detained by the New York City Police Department for his role in a traffic-blocking march. It wasn’t his first brush with the law. The Post has reported that he was also arrested by the NYPD on Jan. 27 during a day of pro-Hamas activism.
Mr. De Los Santos is a political entrepreneur who has made a career out of activism. He claims concern for Palestinians. But he’s fine with the Cuban police state, which is holding more than 1,000 political prisoners—including performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantará and musician Maykel Osorbo—and starving its people by prohibiting farmers’ markets and the ownership of boats for fishing. He blames U.S. policy for Cuban suffering.
There’s nothing special about Mr. De Los Santos. Since 1969 Cuba has been using the U.S.-based Venceremos Brigade to build teams of Americans willing to infiltrate, spy and indoctrinate in the name of the revolution. The solidarity group recruits sympathizers and brings them to Cuba to turn them against their own government. It identifies those most ripe for leadership and teaches them how to run a communist underground back home. Venceremos graduates return to work in the U.S.
In a 2014 unclassified report, “Cuban Intelligence Targeting of Academia,” the FBI said that schools, colleges, universities and research institutes are “a fertile environment” for foreign intelligence. “The Cuban intelligence services,” it added, “are known to actively target the U.S. academic world for the purposes of recruiting agents, in order to both obtain useful information and conduct influence activities.”
Cuba wants to do the U.S. harm. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
https://apple.news/AqyDUKgbtRdW7ldEiJYlsdQ
12
Politics & Religion / “Inform, but Not Prescribe”
« on: Today at 01:24:53 PM »
Well this is refreshing to see:
TODAY
More Honest Climate Science?
By James Freeman
Maybe scientific journals are ready to move past the era of politicized pronouncements.
Follow the WSJ in Apple News
A plague of our age is the abuse of scientific credentials to advance political ideologies. But maybe there’s hope that establishment scientific journals will now chart a different path. Giving cause for fresh hope is Nature magazine’s publication of a comment by Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge, who writes on the importance of distinguishing scientific discovery from political advocacy:
… I am foremost concerned by an increasing number of climate scientists becoming climate activists, because scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies. Like in any academic case, the quest for objectivity must also account for all aspects of global climate change research. While I have no problem with scholars taking public positions on climate issues, I see potential conflicts when scholars use information selectively or over-attribute problems to anthropogenic warming, and thus politicise climate and environmental change. Without self-critique and a diversity of viewpoints, scientists will ultimately harm the credibility of their research and possibly cause a wider public, political and economic backlash.
Likewise, I am worried about activists who pretend to be scientists, as this can be a misleading form of instrumentalization. In fact, there is just a thin line between the use and misuse of scientific certainty and uncertainty, and there is evidence for strategic and selective communication of scientific information for climate action. (Non-)specialist activists often adopt scientific arguments as a source of moral legitimation for their movements, which can be radical and destructive rather than rational and constructive. Unrestricted faith in scientific knowledge is, however, problematic because science is neither entitled to absolute truth nor ethical authority. The notion of science to be explanatory rather than exploratory is a naïve overestimation that can fuel the complex field of global climate change to become a dogmatic ersatz religion for the wider public. It is also utterly irrational if activists ask to “follow the science” if there is no single direction. Again, even a clear-cut case like anthropogenically-induced global climate change does not justify the deviation from long-lasting scientific standards, which have distinguished the academic world from socio-economic and political spheres.
Even scientists convinced that human activity is warming the planet should be careful to acknowledge the limits of current knowledge. Mr. Büntgen continues:
… I find it misleading when prominent organisations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest summary for policymakers, tend to overstate scientific understanding of the rate of recent anthropogenic warming relative to the range of past natural temperature variability over 2000 and even 125,000 years. The quality and quantity of available climate proxy records are merely too low to allow for a robust comparison of the observed annual temperature extremes in the 21st century against reconstructed long-term climate means of the Holocene and before. Like all science, climate science is tentative and fallible. This universal caveat emphasises the need for more research to reliably contextualise anthropogenic warming and better understand the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate system at different spatiotemporal scales. Along these lines, I agree that the IPCC would benefit from a stronger involvement in economic research, and that its neutral reports should inform but not prescribe climate policy.
Ensuring honest research is the most important reason to separate scientific investigation from policy-making. But there are other compelling reasons, especially when it comes to the study of the climate. Even if one believes pessimistic scenarios on the course of world temperatures, it does not immediately follow that the most costly responses currently recommended by activists will be the most sensible and effective.
https://apple.news/Acq5amdEYSM-pYk7yQjcfDQ
TODAY
More Honest Climate Science?
By James Freeman
Maybe scientific journals are ready to move past the era of politicized pronouncements.
Follow the WSJ in Apple News
A plague of our age is the abuse of scientific credentials to advance political ideologies. But maybe there’s hope that establishment scientific journals will now chart a different path. Giving cause for fresh hope is Nature magazine’s publication of a comment by Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge, who writes on the importance of distinguishing scientific discovery from political advocacy:
… I am foremost concerned by an increasing number of climate scientists becoming climate activists, because scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies. Like in any academic case, the quest for objectivity must also account for all aspects of global climate change research. While I have no problem with scholars taking public positions on climate issues, I see potential conflicts when scholars use information selectively or over-attribute problems to anthropogenic warming, and thus politicise climate and environmental change. Without self-critique and a diversity of viewpoints, scientists will ultimately harm the credibility of their research and possibly cause a wider public, political and economic backlash.
Likewise, I am worried about activists who pretend to be scientists, as this can be a misleading form of instrumentalization. In fact, there is just a thin line between the use and misuse of scientific certainty and uncertainty, and there is evidence for strategic and selective communication of scientific information for climate action. (Non-)specialist activists often adopt scientific arguments as a source of moral legitimation for their movements, which can be radical and destructive rather than rational and constructive. Unrestricted faith in scientific knowledge is, however, problematic because science is neither entitled to absolute truth nor ethical authority. The notion of science to be explanatory rather than exploratory is a naïve overestimation that can fuel the complex field of global climate change to become a dogmatic ersatz religion for the wider public. It is also utterly irrational if activists ask to “follow the science” if there is no single direction. Again, even a clear-cut case like anthropogenically-induced global climate change does not justify the deviation from long-lasting scientific standards, which have distinguished the academic world from socio-economic and political spheres.
Even scientists convinced that human activity is warming the planet should be careful to acknowledge the limits of current knowledge. Mr. Büntgen continues:
… I find it misleading when prominent organisations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest summary for policymakers, tend to overstate scientific understanding of the rate of recent anthropogenic warming relative to the range of past natural temperature variability over 2000 and even 125,000 years. The quality and quantity of available climate proxy records are merely too low to allow for a robust comparison of the observed annual temperature extremes in the 21st century against reconstructed long-term climate means of the Holocene and before. Like all science, climate science is tentative and fallible. This universal caveat emphasises the need for more research to reliably contextualise anthropogenic warming and better understand the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate system at different spatiotemporal scales. Along these lines, I agree that the IPCC would benefit from a stronger involvement in economic research, and that its neutral reports should inform but not prescribe climate policy.
Ensuring honest research is the most important reason to separate scientific investigation from policy-making. But there are other compelling reasons, especially when it comes to the study of the climate. Even if one believes pessimistic scenarios on the course of world temperatures, it does not immediately follow that the most costly responses currently recommended by activists will be the most sensible and effective.
https://apple.news/Acq5amdEYSM-pYk7yQjcfDQ
13
Politics & Religion / What’s it Mean when your Case Depends on Cohen’s Testimony?
« on: Today at 12:41:39 PM »
Cohen can’t save the absurd Bragg case:
https://fiscal.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Printing-Contracts.pdf
https://fiscal.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Printing-Contracts.pdf
14
Politics & Religion / The Old Gray Hag Gives Captain Obvious a Smooch
« on: May 12, 2024, 06:49:03 PM »
NYT gingerly connects cancel culture to current campus protests:
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/05/11/ny-times-editorial-board-cancel-culture-created-the-campus-crisis-n3788219
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/05/11/ny-times-editorial-board-cancel-culture-created-the-campus-crisis-n3788219
16
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Education ROI by Sundry Metrics
« on: May 12, 2024, 04:24:25 PM »
Very interesting piece with all sorts of wicked cool interactive graphs exploring the ROI of various degrees, both grad and undergrad. Suffice to say there is a lot out there with a poor ROI, with the feds funding a lot of that bad decision making. Know someone heading to college? Share this with ‘em:
https://freopp.org/does-college-pay-off-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis-563b9cb6ddc5
https://freopp.org/does-college-pay-off-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis-563b9cb6ddc5
17
Politics & Religion / Kudos for Cannon
« on: May 12, 2024, 03:44:55 PM »
Contrary to the MSM, she is the embodiment of the rule of law:
Judge Aileen Cannon is a Heroine
The Volokh Conspiracy / by Steven Calabresi / May 11, 2024 at 1:15 AM
[She is scheduled on June 21st to hear oral argument on whether special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed]
The liberal news media is full of false stories about how Judge Aileen Cannon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has delayed former President Donald Trump's trial unnecessarily for allegedly mishandling classified documents. But, in fact, the Biden Administration and its Attorney General, Merrick Garland, are themselves to blame for the current delay. Special Counsel Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States, but in fact he holds no such office. Smith is a mere employee of the Department of Justice, and he lacks the power to initiate prosecutions. Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 585 U.S. __ (2018) holds that only officers of the United States can take actions that affect the life, liberty, and property of citizens.
Judge Cannon has asked for oral argument on June 21, 2024 on former President Donald Trump's motion to dismiss Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment on the ground that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to his current job because he is not an inferior officer. Washington, D.C. super-lawyer, Gene Schaerr, has filed an amicus brief in United States v. Trump on behalf of former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey, as well as me and Professor Gary Lawson, arguing that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to be an inferior officer, and Judge Cannon has asked Gene Schaerr to participate in the oral argument, which he has agreed to do.
The Appointment Clause of Article II, Section 2 provides that: "the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments." Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States appointed by the Head of the Justice Department, but he is instead a mere employee.
We argue in our amicus brief that Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General as the Head of a Department the power to appoint inferior officers even though Congress has explicitly vested that power in the Heads of the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Agriculture. The only power, which Congress has given to the Attorney General is the power to make a sitting U.S. Attorney a Special Counsel with jurisdiction to prosecute cases nationwide and outside his or her home district. Thus, the Delaware U.S. Attorney, David C. Weiss, currently has nationwide jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden as a Special Counsel, and this appointment is completely constitutional. Similarly, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, was quite legitimately given nationwide jurisdiction to prosecute former Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in Washington, D.C. Fitzgerald got Libby convicted and sentenced to time in jail.
Jack Smith, however, was a private citizen, and not a sitting U.S. Attorney, when Attorney General Merrick Garland named him to be the Special Counsel who would investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. Smith's appointment as an inferior officer was thus unconstitutional, and therefore the cases against former President Donald Trump, which Smith is prosecuting in Florida and in Washington D.C. must be dismissed. Again, Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General the power to appoint inferior officers
The 92 U.S. Attorneys are all superior officers who must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. This requirement of Senate confirmation of U.S. Attorneys has been a part of our law since the Judiciary Act of 1789—i.e. for 235 years. It is, to say the least, implausible that Congress would require Senate confirmation of the U.S. Attorney for Wyoming but not of a Special Counsel who is prosecuting a former and possibly future President in both Florida and Washington, D.C.
Senators have deliberately decided not to give Attorneys General the power to appoint inferior officers with power to initiate a prosecution because they want to have a say in the confirmation process over who can prosecute cases in their home states. If the Attorney General has the power to appoint prosecutors without Senate confirmation think of what he might do with that power in corrupt places like Cook Country, Illinois or New Orleans, Louisiana. No wonder the Senate grants to the Heads of four other Cabinet Departments the power to appoint inferior officers while denying that power to the Attorney General.
Former Attorney General Robert Jackson said in a December 1, 1940 speech at the Conference of U.S. Attorneys that:
"It would probably be within the range of that exaggeration permitted in Washington to say that assembled in this room is one of the most powerful peace-time forces known to our country. The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen's friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst. ***
Because of this immense power to strike at citizens, not with mere individual strength, but with all the force of government itself, the post of federal district attorney from the very beginning has been safeguarded by presidential appointment, requiring confirmation of the senate of the United States. You are thus required to win an expression of confidence in your character by both the legislative and the executive branches of the government before assuming the responsibilities of a federal prosecutor."
Thank God Judge Cannon has scheduled oral argument on President Trump's motion to dismiss Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump for misuse of classified documents by a Justice Department employee who has not been nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The judge should dismiss Smith's case, and the Eleventh Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court should affirm that dismissal.
If, at that point, Attorney General Garland still wants Trump's alleged misuse of classified documents investigated, as did not happen with former Obama Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, then Attorney General Garland should follow the law and ask one of the 92 sitting, Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys to conduct any investigation that occurs. Attorney General Garland's failure to follow the law and the Constitution is a national disgrace. Judge Cannon should get a national round of applause.
The post Judge Aileen Cannon is a Heroine appeared first on Reason.com.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/11/judge-aileen-cannon-is-a-heroine/
Judge Aileen Cannon is a Heroine
The Volokh Conspiracy / by Steven Calabresi / May 11, 2024 at 1:15 AM
[She is scheduled on June 21st to hear oral argument on whether special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed]
The liberal news media is full of false stories about how Judge Aileen Cannon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has delayed former President Donald Trump's trial unnecessarily for allegedly mishandling classified documents. But, in fact, the Biden Administration and its Attorney General, Merrick Garland, are themselves to blame for the current delay. Special Counsel Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States, but in fact he holds no such office. Smith is a mere employee of the Department of Justice, and he lacks the power to initiate prosecutions. Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 585 U.S. __ (2018) holds that only officers of the United States can take actions that affect the life, liberty, and property of citizens.
Judge Cannon has asked for oral argument on June 21, 2024 on former President Donald Trump's motion to dismiss Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment on the ground that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to his current job because he is not an inferior officer. Washington, D.C. super-lawyer, Gene Schaerr, has filed an amicus brief in United States v. Trump on behalf of former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey, as well as me and Professor Gary Lawson, arguing that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to be an inferior officer, and Judge Cannon has asked Gene Schaerr to participate in the oral argument, which he has agreed to do.
The Appointment Clause of Article II, Section 2 provides that: "the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments." Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States appointed by the Head of the Justice Department, but he is instead a mere employee.
We argue in our amicus brief that Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General as the Head of a Department the power to appoint inferior officers even though Congress has explicitly vested that power in the Heads of the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Agriculture. The only power, which Congress has given to the Attorney General is the power to make a sitting U.S. Attorney a Special Counsel with jurisdiction to prosecute cases nationwide and outside his or her home district. Thus, the Delaware U.S. Attorney, David C. Weiss, currently has nationwide jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden as a Special Counsel, and this appointment is completely constitutional. Similarly, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, was quite legitimately given nationwide jurisdiction to prosecute former Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in Washington, D.C. Fitzgerald got Libby convicted and sentenced to time in jail.
Jack Smith, however, was a private citizen, and not a sitting U.S. Attorney, when Attorney General Merrick Garland named him to be the Special Counsel who would investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. Smith's appointment as an inferior officer was thus unconstitutional, and therefore the cases against former President Donald Trump, which Smith is prosecuting in Florida and in Washington D.C. must be dismissed. Again, Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General the power to appoint inferior officers
The 92 U.S. Attorneys are all superior officers who must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. This requirement of Senate confirmation of U.S. Attorneys has been a part of our law since the Judiciary Act of 1789—i.e. for 235 years. It is, to say the least, implausible that Congress would require Senate confirmation of the U.S. Attorney for Wyoming but not of a Special Counsel who is prosecuting a former and possibly future President in both Florida and Washington, D.C.
Senators have deliberately decided not to give Attorneys General the power to appoint inferior officers with power to initiate a prosecution because they want to have a say in the confirmation process over who can prosecute cases in their home states. If the Attorney General has the power to appoint prosecutors without Senate confirmation think of what he might do with that power in corrupt places like Cook Country, Illinois or New Orleans, Louisiana. No wonder the Senate grants to the Heads of four other Cabinet Departments the power to appoint inferior officers while denying that power to the Attorney General.
Former Attorney General Robert Jackson said in a December 1, 1940 speech at the Conference of U.S. Attorneys that:
"It would probably be within the range of that exaggeration permitted in Washington to say that assembled in this room is one of the most powerful peace-time forces known to our country. The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen's friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst. ***
Because of this immense power to strike at citizens, not with mere individual strength, but with all the force of government itself, the post of federal district attorney from the very beginning has been safeguarded by presidential appointment, requiring confirmation of the senate of the United States. You are thus required to win an expression of confidence in your character by both the legislative and the executive branches of the government before assuming the responsibilities of a federal prosecutor."
Thank God Judge Cannon has scheduled oral argument on President Trump's motion to dismiss Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump for misuse of classified documents by a Justice Department employee who has not been nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The judge should dismiss Smith's case, and the Eleventh Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court should affirm that dismissal.
If, at that point, Attorney General Garland still wants Trump's alleged misuse of classified documents investigated, as did not happen with former Obama Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, then Attorney General Garland should follow the law and ask one of the 92 sitting, Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys to conduct any investigation that occurs. Attorney General Garland's failure to follow the law and the Constitution is a national disgrace. Judge Cannon should get a national round of applause.
The post Judge Aileen Cannon is a Heroine appeared first on Reason.com.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/11/judge-aileen-cannon-is-a-heroine/
18
Politics & Religion / Pelosi Makes Populism a Dirty Word
« on: May 12, 2024, 03:38:36 PM »
Pelosi shows the true colors of the “Progressive” left:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/oxford-union-debate-winston-marshall-demolishes-pelosis-argument-that-voters-are-the-problem-with-democracy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oxford-union-debate-winston-marshall-demolishes-pelosis-argument-that-voters-are-the-problem-with-democracy
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/oxford-union-debate-winston-marshall-demolishes-pelosis-argument-that-voters-are-the-problem-with-democracy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oxford-union-debate-winston-marshall-demolishes-pelosis-argument-that-voters-are-the-problem-with-democracy
19
Politics & Religion / Lawfare Tables Turning?
« on: May 12, 2024, 12:12:51 PM »
Will Judge Cannon hold Jack Smith to the sorts of standards Smith is seeking to hold Trump to?
Judge Cannon Puts Jack Smith on Trial
While vacating Donald Trump's trial date, Cannon set an aggressive hearing schedule over the next several weeks that will turn the tables on Smith and the Department of Justice.
JULIE KELLY
MAY 10, 2024
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon may have just indefinitely postponed Donald Trump’s espionage and obstruction trial but that doesn’t mean her federal courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida will lie dormant over the next few months.
Declassified with Julie Kelly is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
In officially vacating the existing May 20 trial date—an impossibility considering the defendant will be in a Manhattan courtroom for the foreseeable future—Cannon declined to set another date, calling it “imprudent” at this stage of the process. She noted a “myriad” of unresolved matters in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 42-count indictment against the former president and his two co-defendants, Mar-a-Lago employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Olivera, for willfully retaining national defense information and attempting to impede the government’s investigation.
Cannon, however, did schedule a number of proceedings that could be considered a way to put the Department of Justice on trial. In a stunning turn of events, Cannon, appointed by Donald Trump in 2020, is poised to make Smith a defendant of sorts.
Over the next several weeks, prosecutors will be forced to publicly counter defense motions that accuse the DOJ of selective and vindictive prosecution; insist the appointment of Smith is illegal; and claim that several parties, including Joe Biden’s White House, colluded behind the scenes as early as May 2021 to concoct the unprecedented case.
Her hearing schedule represents a broader spilling of bad blood between Cannon and the DOJ dating back to September 2022, when Cannon took the courageous step of appointing a special master, or third party, to vet the all of the evidence seized by the FBI during the armed raid of Mar-a-Lago the month before.
Noting at the time the prosecution’s suspected leaks to the news media and the mishandling of evidence in the early stages of the investigation—in addition to what she called the need for “public trust” in the case—Cannon granted Trump’s request for the special master.
Although the 11th Circuit Court overturned her order a few months later on grounds she did not have proper jurisdiction, Cannon now is exonerated amid disclosures by Smith in a May 3 brief that evidence has been mishandled and key documents possibly misplaced. “[There] are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans (taken right after the raid),” Smith’s team revealed, referring to 34 boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago.
Smith also revealed that in some instances, sheets of paper that FBI investigators used to replace classified records within a box do not match. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Smith wrote.
In other words, the government officials prosecuting Trump with mishandling top-secret files--mishandled top-secret files.
Trump Off the Hook for Now, Smith Goes on Defense
Even more problematic is Smith’s confession that his lead prosecutor, Jay Bratt, misrepresented to Cannon the existing condition of the boxes. During an April hearing, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied that they were with “the exception that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”
Smith admitted in a footnote that Bratt’s statement was “inconsistent” with the facts, which could prompt Trump’s counsel to seek a contempt of court charge.
But that might be the least of Smith’s concerns right now. Cannon’s aggressive hearing schedule will put Smith and the entire Justice Department on the hot seat—and the timing could not be worse; with the other criminal trials against Trump in Washington and Fulton County imploding, all eyes are focused on southern Florida.
A bit of background before turning to the pending schedule. After months of what can only be described as harassment by the National Archives, including Obama-appointed archivist David Ferriero, throughout 2021 to demand the return of alleged government records, Trump gave 15 boxes of papers to the archives in January 2022.
Archive officials immediately claimed they found material with “classified markings” among the boxes’ contents. That prompted for the first time ever the archives sending a criminal referral to the DOJ in February 2022. Smith indicted Trump and Nauta in June 2023; the following month, Smith added De Olivera and additional charges in a superseding indictment.
But defense attorneys now have evidence that disputes Smith’s course of events and the number of officials involved in the case. In January, the defense filed a motion asking Cannon to consider numerous agencies including the archives, the Biden White House, top DOJ officials, and the FBI as part of the prosecution team.
“New evidence, obtained via requests pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act reveals that politically motivated operatives in the Biden Administration and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) began this crusade against President Trump in 2021,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “The FOIA releases, coupled with other evidence…reflect close participation in the investigation by NARA and Biden Administration components such as the White House Counsel’s Office, as well as senior officials at DOJ and FBI. These revelations are disturbing but not surprising.”
Hundreds of pages of exhibits show emails and meetings between archive officials and Biden’s general counsel’s office throughout the second half of 2021. Gary Stern, the archives general counsel, further disclosed in an August 2021 email that he had had “informal” talks with unidentified DOJ officials to seek advice on how to prepare a criminal referral against Trump for refusing to turn over government records.
Smith, naturally, denies the allegations, claiming defense attorneys were advancing “speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”
Both sides will have the chance to duke it out next month.
Over the course of three days during the last week of June, per Cannon’s new schedule, Smith and the defense will participate in an extended hearing to debate evidence of collusion. Not only do the proceedings pose a risk to Smith’s case based on prior pleadings to the court but proof of correspondence and meetings contradicts public claims by Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland that the investigation was independent of the White House.
First Public Vetting of Smith’s Potentially Illegal Appointment
Smith also will have to defend himself before the court during a June 21 hearing related to the potential unlawfulness of his appointment as special counsel. Citing an amicus brief filed by former Attorney General Edwin Meese before the Supreme Court earlier this year—Meese said that “Jack Smith does not have authority to conduct the underlying prosecution [because] those actions can be taken only by persons properly appointed as federal officers to properly created federal offices”—Trump also argues that “Jack Smith lacks the authority to prosecute this action.”
The controversy represents dicey territory for Smith; in fact, during oral arguments at SCOTUS last month on the question of presidential immunity, Justice Clarence Thomas asked Trump’s attorney whether they “challenge[d] the appointment of special counsel” in the matter, signaling the court may consider the amici brief in its final decision.
Smith has not yet responded to the hearing timetable; his media allies, however, continue to demand Cannon’s recusal.
But both Smith and his allies know Cannon has the upper hand. And it appears, at least for the time being, she plans to use it as a hammer against the DOJ.
https://www.declassified.live/p/judge-cannon-puts-jack-smith-on-trial?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Judge Cannon Puts Jack Smith on Trial
While vacating Donald Trump's trial date, Cannon set an aggressive hearing schedule over the next several weeks that will turn the tables on Smith and the Department of Justice.
JULIE KELLY
MAY 10, 2024
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon may have just indefinitely postponed Donald Trump’s espionage and obstruction trial but that doesn’t mean her federal courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida will lie dormant over the next few months.
Declassified with Julie Kelly is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
In officially vacating the existing May 20 trial date—an impossibility considering the defendant will be in a Manhattan courtroom for the foreseeable future—Cannon declined to set another date, calling it “imprudent” at this stage of the process. She noted a “myriad” of unresolved matters in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 42-count indictment against the former president and his two co-defendants, Mar-a-Lago employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Olivera, for willfully retaining national defense information and attempting to impede the government’s investigation.
Cannon, however, did schedule a number of proceedings that could be considered a way to put the Department of Justice on trial. In a stunning turn of events, Cannon, appointed by Donald Trump in 2020, is poised to make Smith a defendant of sorts.
Over the next several weeks, prosecutors will be forced to publicly counter defense motions that accuse the DOJ of selective and vindictive prosecution; insist the appointment of Smith is illegal; and claim that several parties, including Joe Biden’s White House, colluded behind the scenes as early as May 2021 to concoct the unprecedented case.
Her hearing schedule represents a broader spilling of bad blood between Cannon and the DOJ dating back to September 2022, when Cannon took the courageous step of appointing a special master, or third party, to vet the all of the evidence seized by the FBI during the armed raid of Mar-a-Lago the month before.
Noting at the time the prosecution’s suspected leaks to the news media and the mishandling of evidence in the early stages of the investigation—in addition to what she called the need for “public trust” in the case—Cannon granted Trump’s request for the special master.
Although the 11th Circuit Court overturned her order a few months later on grounds she did not have proper jurisdiction, Cannon now is exonerated amid disclosures by Smith in a May 3 brief that evidence has been mishandled and key documents possibly misplaced. “[There] are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans (taken right after the raid),” Smith’s team revealed, referring to 34 boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago.
Smith also revealed that in some instances, sheets of paper that FBI investigators used to replace classified records within a box do not match. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Smith wrote.
In other words, the government officials prosecuting Trump with mishandling top-secret files--mishandled top-secret files.
Trump Off the Hook for Now, Smith Goes on Defense
Even more problematic is Smith’s confession that his lead prosecutor, Jay Bratt, misrepresented to Cannon the existing condition of the boxes. During an April hearing, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied that they were with “the exception that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”
Smith admitted in a footnote that Bratt’s statement was “inconsistent” with the facts, which could prompt Trump’s counsel to seek a contempt of court charge.
But that might be the least of Smith’s concerns right now. Cannon’s aggressive hearing schedule will put Smith and the entire Justice Department on the hot seat—and the timing could not be worse; with the other criminal trials against Trump in Washington and Fulton County imploding, all eyes are focused on southern Florida.
A bit of background before turning to the pending schedule. After months of what can only be described as harassment by the National Archives, including Obama-appointed archivist David Ferriero, throughout 2021 to demand the return of alleged government records, Trump gave 15 boxes of papers to the archives in January 2022.
Archive officials immediately claimed they found material with “classified markings” among the boxes’ contents. That prompted for the first time ever the archives sending a criminal referral to the DOJ in February 2022. Smith indicted Trump and Nauta in June 2023; the following month, Smith added De Olivera and additional charges in a superseding indictment.
But defense attorneys now have evidence that disputes Smith’s course of events and the number of officials involved in the case. In January, the defense filed a motion asking Cannon to consider numerous agencies including the archives, the Biden White House, top DOJ officials, and the FBI as part of the prosecution team.
“New evidence, obtained via requests pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act reveals that politically motivated operatives in the Biden Administration and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) began this crusade against President Trump in 2021,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “The FOIA releases, coupled with other evidence…reflect close participation in the investigation by NARA and Biden Administration components such as the White House Counsel’s Office, as well as senior officials at DOJ and FBI. These revelations are disturbing but not surprising.”
Hundreds of pages of exhibits show emails and meetings between archive officials and Biden’s general counsel’s office throughout the second half of 2021. Gary Stern, the archives general counsel, further disclosed in an August 2021 email that he had had “informal” talks with unidentified DOJ officials to seek advice on how to prepare a criminal referral against Trump for refusing to turn over government records.
Smith, naturally, denies the allegations, claiming defense attorneys were advancing “speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”
Both sides will have the chance to duke it out next month.
Over the course of three days during the last week of June, per Cannon’s new schedule, Smith and the defense will participate in an extended hearing to debate evidence of collusion. Not only do the proceedings pose a risk to Smith’s case based on prior pleadings to the court but proof of correspondence and meetings contradicts public claims by Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland that the investigation was independent of the White House.
First Public Vetting of Smith’s Potentially Illegal Appointment
Smith also will have to defend himself before the court during a June 21 hearing related to the potential unlawfulness of his appointment as special counsel. Citing an amicus brief filed by former Attorney General Edwin Meese before the Supreme Court earlier this year—Meese said that “Jack Smith does not have authority to conduct the underlying prosecution [because] those actions can be taken only by persons properly appointed as federal officers to properly created federal offices”—Trump also argues that “Jack Smith lacks the authority to prosecute this action.”
The controversy represents dicey territory for Smith; in fact, during oral arguments at SCOTUS last month on the question of presidential immunity, Justice Clarence Thomas asked Trump’s attorney whether they “challenge[d] the appointment of special counsel” in the matter, signaling the court may consider the amici brief in its final decision.
Smith has not yet responded to the hearing timetable; his media allies, however, continue to demand Cannon’s recusal.
But both Smith and his allies know Cannon has the upper hand. And it appears, at least for the time being, she plans to use it as a hammer against the DOJ.
https://www.declassified.live/p/judge-cannon-puts-jack-smith-on-trial?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
20
Politics & Religion / Fox in the Henhouse; jihadi at NSC
« on: May 12, 2024, 11:28:00 AM »
Biden senior director at the National Security Council has jihadist links and indeed posed in Palestinian garb while enrolled at Georgetown.
https://x.com/CarolineGlick/status/1789370455712760109
https://x.com/CarolineGlick/status/1789370455712760109
21
Politics & Religion / Once They Were Vikings, Now They're "Manginas"
« on: May 10, 2024, 09:11:21 AM »22
Science, Culture, & Humanities / When Fire & Rescue Sits Back & Watches You Burn
« on: May 09, 2024, 04:39:53 PM »
A potpourri of bad news for the EV biz, with this tacit admission fire and rescue may have to leave you to cook in your juices for fear of explosion induced by the lithium battery.
As if that’s not enough, this week the fire and rescue experts in NSW are warning in the politest possible way, that they might have to do a “tactical disengagement” of a car accident victim, which means leaving them to die in an EV fire if the battery looks likely to explode. They say that first responders need more training, as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is that they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognize when they have to abandon the rescue.
&
The whole piece is worth reading:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/ev-hell-continues-crash-victims-might-have-to-be-left-to-die-hertz-dumps-another-10000-cars-tesla-sacks-whole-charging-team/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ev-hell-continues-crash-victims-might-have-to-be-left-to-die-hertz-dumps-another-10000-cars-tesla-sacks-whole-charging-team
As if that’s not enough, this week the fire and rescue experts in NSW are warning in the politest possible way, that they might have to do a “tactical disengagement” of a car accident victim, which means leaving them to die in an EV fire if the battery looks likely to explode. They say that first responders need more training, as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is that they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognize when they have to abandon the rescue.
&
The whole piece is worth reading:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/ev-hell-continues-crash-victims-might-have-to-be-left-to-die-hertz-dumps-another-10000-cars-tesla-sacks-whole-charging-team/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ev-hell-continues-crash-victims-might-have-to-be-left-to-die-hertz-dumps-another-10000-cars-tesla-sacks-whole-charging-team
23
Politics & Religion / They Ain’t Banking on Net Zero No More
« on: May 09, 2024, 04:27:20 PM »
Our former moral banking superiors are backpedaling where the foisted carbon fetish is concerned. Is a change of heart occurring, or is this inspired by antitrust fears?
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/jp-morgan-blackrock-drop-out-of-climate-banker-cabal-and-admit-the-net-zero-transition-is-delayed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jp-morgan-blackrock-drop-out-of-climate-banker-cabal-and-admit-the-net-zero-transition-is-delayed
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/jp-morgan-blackrock-drop-out-of-climate-banker-cabal-and-admit-the-net-zero-transition-is-delayed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jp-morgan-blackrock-drop-out-of-climate-banker-cabal-and-admit-the-net-zero-transition-is-delayed
24
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Wind Turbines: The More there are, the Worse they Work
« on: May 09, 2024, 04:18:20 PM »
Turns out proximate wind turbines pirate energy from those downstream … up to 25 miles away:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/wind-turbines-could-steal-as-much-as-38-of-the-power-off-turbines-downwind-and-even-from-ones-50-kilometers-away/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wind-turbines-could-steal-as-much-as-38-of-the-power-off-turbines-downwind-and-even-from-ones-50-kilometers-away
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/wind-turbines-could-steal-as-much-as-38-of-the-power-off-turbines-downwind-and-even-from-ones-50-kilometers-away/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wind-turbines-could-steal-as-much-as-38-of-the-power-off-turbines-downwind-and-even-from-ones-50-kilometers-away
25
Science, Culture, & Humanities / The Ratchet Effect & the TSA
« on: May 09, 2024, 03:55:01 PM »
Just another bloated agency unable to work effectively due to political sensitivities and bureaucratic buffoonery.
TSA Failure
The Beacon / by Randall G. Holcombe / May 2, 2024 at 9:35 PM
I’ll admit up front that one reason I’m writing this is that I am a disgruntled TSA customer. My tax dollars pay for the “service” I get from the TSA, and I’m not happy with the service. I don’t want to have to take off my shoes as a prerequisite for boarding an airliner. Travelers from European airports don’t have to and don’t seem more at risk because of it. I’ve been harassed by TSA employees that I’m sure fit the definition of sexual assault. Also, I’ve missed more than one flight because the TSA lines were backed up. (OK, I’ve missed a total of two, but that’s still too many.) If you are happy with the service you get from TSA, feel free to add a comment.
The TSA was established to prevent terrorists from boarding commercial aircraft preventing a repeat of September 11, 2001. Public policy is always aimed at preventing past crises rather than future threats. It’s an example of the ratchet effect popularized by Robert Higgs. When a crisis occurs, the government ratchets up in response, and once the crisis has passed, it doesn’t ratchet back down to its former level.
A repeat of September 11 is very unlikely because once that threat is revealed, passengers are motivated to take action to stop it rather than sit passively as the government previously told them to do. That’s why the fourth hijacked airliner on September 11 didn’t make it to the terrorists’ destination. People learn fast when their lives are at stake.
TSA has been around now for two decades, and it has yet to uncover any terrorists trying to board aircraft. (Yes, I’ve heard the argument that they are not trying because TSA is there to deter them.)
What prompted me to write today is a series of recent articles reporting on Americans who have been detained in Turks and Caicos for trying to board aircraft while carrying ammunition. Some of those stories are here, here, and here.
I’ll set aside whether those who have been detained are being threatened with too severe a punishment for what they claim are innocent mistakes to focus on the fact (noted in the news coverage) that those people carried that same ammunition through the US TSA checkpoints to board their flights to Turks and Caicos.
You’ve heard stories about TSA failures to detect illegal materials when the system has been tested. Why can screening at Turks and Caicos detect illegal material that screening in the US cannot?
One problem is TSA’s “one size fits all” screening. (The existence of Pre-Check makes it two sizes fit all.) We’re using way too many resources to screen people who are very unlikely to be terrorists, which dilutes the resources we use to screen those who are more likely threats.
Had TSA been doing its job, those people caught with ammunition at Turks and Caicos would not have been able to get that ammunition out of the US. I think the TSA excessively screens most people, but that’s its mandate, and in this case, it failed, not just once but multiple times.
The post TSA Failure appeared first on The Beacon.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/05/02/tsa-failure/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tsa-failure
TSA Failure
The Beacon / by Randall G. Holcombe / May 2, 2024 at 9:35 PM
I’ll admit up front that one reason I’m writing this is that I am a disgruntled TSA customer. My tax dollars pay for the “service” I get from the TSA, and I’m not happy with the service. I don’t want to have to take off my shoes as a prerequisite for boarding an airliner. Travelers from European airports don’t have to and don’t seem more at risk because of it. I’ve been harassed by TSA employees that I’m sure fit the definition of sexual assault. Also, I’ve missed more than one flight because the TSA lines were backed up. (OK, I’ve missed a total of two, but that’s still too many.) If you are happy with the service you get from TSA, feel free to add a comment.
The TSA was established to prevent terrorists from boarding commercial aircraft preventing a repeat of September 11, 2001. Public policy is always aimed at preventing past crises rather than future threats. It’s an example of the ratchet effect popularized by Robert Higgs. When a crisis occurs, the government ratchets up in response, and once the crisis has passed, it doesn’t ratchet back down to its former level.
A repeat of September 11 is very unlikely because once that threat is revealed, passengers are motivated to take action to stop it rather than sit passively as the government previously told them to do. That’s why the fourth hijacked airliner on September 11 didn’t make it to the terrorists’ destination. People learn fast when their lives are at stake.
TSA has been around now for two decades, and it has yet to uncover any terrorists trying to board aircraft. (Yes, I’ve heard the argument that they are not trying because TSA is there to deter them.)
What prompted me to write today is a series of recent articles reporting on Americans who have been detained in Turks and Caicos for trying to board aircraft while carrying ammunition. Some of those stories are here, here, and here.
I’ll set aside whether those who have been detained are being threatened with too severe a punishment for what they claim are innocent mistakes to focus on the fact (noted in the news coverage) that those people carried that same ammunition through the US TSA checkpoints to board their flights to Turks and Caicos.
You’ve heard stories about TSA failures to detect illegal materials when the system has been tested. Why can screening at Turks and Caicos detect illegal material that screening in the US cannot?
One problem is TSA’s “one size fits all” screening. (The existence of Pre-Check makes it two sizes fit all.) We’re using way too many resources to screen people who are very unlikely to be terrorists, which dilutes the resources we use to screen those who are more likely threats.
Had TSA been doing its job, those people caught with ammunition at Turks and Caicos would not have been able to get that ammunition out of the US. I think the TSA excessively screens most people, but that’s its mandate, and in this case, it failed, not just once but multiple times.
The post TSA Failure appeared first on The Beacon.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/05/02/tsa-failure/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tsa-failure
26
Politics & Religion / National Debt Becoming the Largest Budget Line Item
« on: May 09, 2024, 03:25:03 PM »
2nd post. Jeepers, if you spend more than you earn by a significant margin, at some point your interest payment subsumes all. Who knew, besides everyone with a modicum of fiscal integrity.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/04/16/interest-on-national-debt/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interest-on-national-debt
https://blog.independent.org/2024/04/16/interest-on-national-debt/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interest-on-national-debt
27
Politics & Religion / Biden Takes a Hit on Unemployment
« on: May 09, 2024, 02:49:15 PM »
What’s that you say? Bidenomics doesn’t work and you have the stats to prove it?
https://www.westernjournal.com/weekly-jobless-claims-unexpectedly-shoot-worrisome-level/
Perhaps it’s time for an employment thread?
https://www.westernjournal.com/weekly-jobless-claims-unexpectedly-shoot-worrisome-level/
Perhaps it’s time for an employment thread?
28
Politics & Religion / Contrary to Predictions, Argentina’s Sky has Yet to Fall
« on: May 09, 2024, 02:43:27 PM »
If only this sort of wrecking ball could be swung here:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/09/milei-is-absolutely-killing-it-in-argentina-n4928888
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/09/milei-is-absolutely-killing-it-in-argentina-n4928888
29
Politics & Religion / Newsom’s Fast Food Folly Comes Home to Roost
« on: May 09, 2024, 02:31:32 PM »
10K jobs lost since $20/hr wage mandated:
California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall
April 26, 2024
By LEE E. OHANIAN
California Governor / Flickr
Also published in California on Your Mind Wed. April 24, 2024
Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California Assembly Bill 1287 into law, which includes a $20 per hour minimum wage for fast-food workers and a fast-food regulatory council which has the authority to raise the industry’s minimum wage annually. But between last fall and January, California fast-food restaurants cut about 9,500 jobs, representing a 1.3 percent change from September 2023. Total private employment in California declined just 0.2 percent during the same period, which makes it tempting to conclude that many of those lost fast-food jobs resulted from the higher labor costs employers would need to pay.
More fast-food job losses are coming as the new minimum wage took effect earlier this month. This includes losses at Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza which are in the process of firing nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box announced that they will speed up the use of robotics, including robots that make salsa and cook fried foods.
Fast food prices are up since the law took effect on April 1. In less than one month, Wendy’s increased prices by 8 percent, Chipotle’s prices have increased by 7.5 percent, and Starbucks prices are up by 7 percent. McDonald's has announced it will be raising prices, and many other fast-food franchises have announced hiring freezes.
California now has the highest-priced fast food in the country, but there is an obvious limit to how much further prices can climb. “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals,” noted Scott Rodrick, a Northern California McDonald’s franchisee.
It is nothing short of bizarre that California would choose to specify a substantially higher minimum wage for its fast-food industry, which tends to hire workers who are much younger than other industries, which have a minimum wage of about $16 per hour. About 30 percent of fast-food workers are teens, and another 30 percent are between twenty and twenty-four years old. With 60 percent of its workforce twenty-four or younger, the fast-food industry stands in sharp contrast to the other industries, in which only about 13 percent of workers are that young.
Young workers have less experience than older workers and are still in the process of building skills, both of which tend to limit the amount of value that young workers can create for an employer. Young workers are also expensive from a human resources standpoint, because they require significant training and because they tend to move in and out of employment frequently, reflecting school schedules. Annual worker turnover in the fast-food industry exceeds 100 percent, which raises employer recruiting and training costs significantly.
Fast-food employers have few alternatives to a $20 minimum wage other than cutting their workforces or raising prices, as fast-food profit margins are slim, averaging 5‒8 percent. Labor advocates typically argue for the need of a “living wage” when it comes to the pay of less-skilled workers. But this ignores the fact that many of those workers are part time, and it also ignores the fact that fast-food owners and their investors must receive adequate compensation for their time and capital. Living wages can mean no wages, which is what has happened for over 9,500 California fast-food workers since last September.
The genesis of the new law is one of the uglier pieces of legislation to have come out of Sacramento. Minimum wage and “living wage” laws almost always are tied to unions, because they typically provide exemptions for workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement. This one is no exception. For over a decade the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) tried to unionize fast-food workers, but failed, despite spending $100 million in the process.
The union then turned to its legislative friends in Sacramento to create a new law in which a regulatory council, which would of course be dominated by union representatives, would regulate wages and working conditions in the fast-food industry, unless of course the restaurant agreed to collective bargaining. The Legislature passed this law, Assembly Bill 1228, in 2022, and Newsom signed it, but it was so onerous that the industry gathered enough signatures to put the law in front of voters in a 2024 ballot referendum. Legislators panicked, knowing that voters would likely overturn the law. A new bill, AB 1287, was crafted that substantially weakened the regulatory authority of the fast-food council, and the industry agreed to remove the ballot referendum.
But the ugliness of the new law doesn’t stop there. The 2023 law includes a strange exemption from the $20 wage for fast-food restaurants that bake their own bread and sell it as a stand-alone item. Why? According to several sources familiar with the bill’s negotiations, the exemption was included to satisfy Newsom, because one of his political donors, Greg Flynn, owns several California Panera Bread franchises, which bake their own bread and sell it as a stand-alone item.
After this exemption came to light in the national media in February, Newsom responded to allegations that the bakery exemption reflected a political payoff for his donor as outrageous, but he provided no other explanation for why such a one-off exemption was provided, and he still hasn’t. Newsom received more criticism in the media when it was reported that a restaurant he partially owns near Lake Tahoe posted a job listing for a table busser at $16 an hour. With a $37 pasta dish and a $67 steak dinner on the menu, the restaurant doesn’t qualify as fast food, so it is not required to pay the $20 minimum wage. And while Newsom is not involved in managing his businesses since becoming governor, many still find it tone-deaf that the spirit of the legislation that he is so proud of is not being followed by his family business.
The $16-per-hour job posting in Newsom’s restaurant is informative regarding the market price of restaurant service workers. The restaurant is not paying more because it doesn't need to. It can find qualified applicants at $4 less per hour than the fast-food minimum wage, even in Lake Tahoe, which is a high cost-of-living area.
The job will be filled in Newsom’s restaurant, and perhaps it has already been filled. But there are over 9,500 California jobs that no longer exist because they can’t pay what Newsom’s restaurant is paying. And that is the saddest bit of this ugly new law.
LEE E. OHANIAN is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Professor of Economics and Director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919
California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall
April 26, 2024
By LEE E. OHANIAN
California Governor / Flickr
Also published in California on Your Mind Wed. April 24, 2024
Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California Assembly Bill 1287 into law, which includes a $20 per hour minimum wage for fast-food workers and a fast-food regulatory council which has the authority to raise the industry’s minimum wage annually. But between last fall and January, California fast-food restaurants cut about 9,500 jobs, representing a 1.3 percent change from September 2023. Total private employment in California declined just 0.2 percent during the same period, which makes it tempting to conclude that many of those lost fast-food jobs resulted from the higher labor costs employers would need to pay.
More fast-food job losses are coming as the new minimum wage took effect earlier this month. This includes losses at Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza which are in the process of firing nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box announced that they will speed up the use of robotics, including robots that make salsa and cook fried foods.
Fast food prices are up since the law took effect on April 1. In less than one month, Wendy’s increased prices by 8 percent, Chipotle’s prices have increased by 7.5 percent, and Starbucks prices are up by 7 percent. McDonald's has announced it will be raising prices, and many other fast-food franchises have announced hiring freezes.
California now has the highest-priced fast food in the country, but there is an obvious limit to how much further prices can climb. “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals,” noted Scott Rodrick, a Northern California McDonald’s franchisee.
It is nothing short of bizarre that California would choose to specify a substantially higher minimum wage for its fast-food industry, which tends to hire workers who are much younger than other industries, which have a minimum wage of about $16 per hour. About 30 percent of fast-food workers are teens, and another 30 percent are between twenty and twenty-four years old. With 60 percent of its workforce twenty-four or younger, the fast-food industry stands in sharp contrast to the other industries, in which only about 13 percent of workers are that young.
Young workers have less experience than older workers and are still in the process of building skills, both of which tend to limit the amount of value that young workers can create for an employer. Young workers are also expensive from a human resources standpoint, because they require significant training and because they tend to move in and out of employment frequently, reflecting school schedules. Annual worker turnover in the fast-food industry exceeds 100 percent, which raises employer recruiting and training costs significantly.
Fast-food employers have few alternatives to a $20 minimum wage other than cutting their workforces or raising prices, as fast-food profit margins are slim, averaging 5‒8 percent. Labor advocates typically argue for the need of a “living wage” when it comes to the pay of less-skilled workers. But this ignores the fact that many of those workers are part time, and it also ignores the fact that fast-food owners and their investors must receive adequate compensation for their time and capital. Living wages can mean no wages, which is what has happened for over 9,500 California fast-food workers since last September.
The genesis of the new law is one of the uglier pieces of legislation to have come out of Sacramento. Minimum wage and “living wage” laws almost always are tied to unions, because they typically provide exemptions for workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement. This one is no exception. For over a decade the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) tried to unionize fast-food workers, but failed, despite spending $100 million in the process.
The union then turned to its legislative friends in Sacramento to create a new law in which a regulatory council, which would of course be dominated by union representatives, would regulate wages and working conditions in the fast-food industry, unless of course the restaurant agreed to collective bargaining. The Legislature passed this law, Assembly Bill 1228, in 2022, and Newsom signed it, but it was so onerous that the industry gathered enough signatures to put the law in front of voters in a 2024 ballot referendum. Legislators panicked, knowing that voters would likely overturn the law. A new bill, AB 1287, was crafted that substantially weakened the regulatory authority of the fast-food council, and the industry agreed to remove the ballot referendum.
But the ugliness of the new law doesn’t stop there. The 2023 law includes a strange exemption from the $20 wage for fast-food restaurants that bake their own bread and sell it as a stand-alone item. Why? According to several sources familiar with the bill’s negotiations, the exemption was included to satisfy Newsom, because one of his political donors, Greg Flynn, owns several California Panera Bread franchises, which bake their own bread and sell it as a stand-alone item.
After this exemption came to light in the national media in February, Newsom responded to allegations that the bakery exemption reflected a political payoff for his donor as outrageous, but he provided no other explanation for why such a one-off exemption was provided, and he still hasn’t. Newsom received more criticism in the media when it was reported that a restaurant he partially owns near Lake Tahoe posted a job listing for a table busser at $16 an hour. With a $37 pasta dish and a $67 steak dinner on the menu, the restaurant doesn’t qualify as fast food, so it is not required to pay the $20 minimum wage. And while Newsom is not involved in managing his businesses since becoming governor, many still find it tone-deaf that the spirit of the legislation that he is so proud of is not being followed by his family business.
The $16-per-hour job posting in Newsom’s restaurant is informative regarding the market price of restaurant service workers. The restaurant is not paying more because it doesn't need to. It can find qualified applicants at $4 less per hour than the fast-food minimum wage, even in Lake Tahoe, which is a high cost-of-living area.
The job will be filled in Newsom’s restaurant, and perhaps it has already been filled. But there are over 9,500 California jobs that no longer exist because they can’t pay what Newsom’s restaurant is paying. And that is the saddest bit of this ugly new law.
LEE E. OHANIAN is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Professor of Economics and Director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919
30
Politics & Religion / Q: What’s the Best Way to Deal with Attention Whores?
« on: May 09, 2024, 02:21:01 PM »31
Politics & Religion / The Fed: Enablers of Budget Overspending & Associated Idiocy
« on: May 09, 2024, 02:03:00 PM »32
Politics & Religion / High School Student Suspended for Using Term “Illegal Aliens”
« on: May 08, 2024, 07:52:47 PM »
More specifically, when assigned to use the term “alien,” this student sought to clarify whether the ”space” or “illegal” type were the subject of the assignment:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/north-carolina-student-sues-school-board-assistant-principal-after-suspension-for-saying-illegal-alien/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=north-carolina-student-sues-school-board-assistant-principal-after-suspension-for-saying-illegal-alien
Hopefully a significant award to this kid as a result of his suit will send the message that this type of foolishness is best avoided.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/north-carolina-student-sues-school-board-assistant-principal-after-suspension-for-saying-illegal-alien/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=north-carolina-student-sues-school-board-assistant-principal-after-suspension-for-saying-illegal-alien
Hopefully a significant award to this kid as a result of his suit will send the message that this type of foolishness is best avoided.
33
Politics & Religion / The OS of the “Centrist” West’s Tipping Point?
« on: May 08, 2024, 06:36:19 PM »
Samizdata quote of the day – the toppling of the woke authoritarians
Wokeism. Climate extremism. Kindly authoritarianism. This is now the operating system of Western, ‘centrist’ politics. Take Joe Biden, America’s somnambulant president. At the 2020 election, even anti-woke liberals insisted this scion of the old Democratic establishment – a man so old he can’t even be slurred as a Boomer (he’s actually Silent Generation) – was the man to return America to normality, before the BLM riots and MAGA mania. ‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden’, declared a piece in the Atlantic, arguing that Trump is to the culture war what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, fueling the woke extremes. That take has aged like milk. On his first day in office, Biden signed sweeping Executive Orders on ‘racial equity’ and gender ideology. He later tried to apportion Covid relief on the basis of race. He’s a Net Zero zealot. He has allowed the justice system to be weaponised against his opponents. He invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, FFS. Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ has been so successful millions of Americans are starting to wonder if Donald Trump might actually be the saner choice.
https://www.samizdata.net/2024/05/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-the-toppling-of-the-woke-authoritarians/
Wokeism. Climate extremism. Kindly authoritarianism. This is now the operating system of Western, ‘centrist’ politics. Take Joe Biden, America’s somnambulant president. At the 2020 election, even anti-woke liberals insisted this scion of the old Democratic establishment – a man so old he can’t even be slurred as a Boomer (he’s actually Silent Generation) – was the man to return America to normality, before the BLM riots and MAGA mania. ‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden’, declared a piece in the Atlantic, arguing that Trump is to the culture war what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, fueling the woke extremes. That take has aged like milk. On his first day in office, Biden signed sweeping Executive Orders on ‘racial equity’ and gender ideology. He later tried to apportion Covid relief on the basis of race. He’s a Net Zero zealot. He has allowed the justice system to be weaponised against his opponents. He invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, FFS. Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ has been so successful millions of Americans are starting to wonder if Donald Trump might actually be the saner choice.
https://www.samizdata.net/2024/05/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-the-toppling-of-the-woke-authoritarians/
34
Politics & Religion / Follow the Foul Money
« on: May 08, 2024, 06:19:17 PM »
The ed biz has sold its soul buckets of dinar:
OpenTheBooks Substack
$10 Million To Harvard, Brown And Others Flowed From The “State Of Palestine”
Troubling grants and contracts classified in the federal database funded anti-Israel curriculums, professorships, and tuition.
ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI
MAY 08, 2024
In February 2020, Brown University, an Ivy League school with a tax advantaged $6.5 billion endowment, negotiated a $643,000 gift from a foundation located within the “State of Palestine” to create a new Palestinian professorship within its Center for Middle East Studies.
However, “Palestine,” as a nation, does not exist.
Neither the U.S. State Department nor the United Nations recognize Palestine as a country. The “State of Palestine” is a political fiction that provides cover for numerous terror organizations funded by Iran and others.
American universities taking six-figure foreign funding from an area of the world dominated by terrorists raises all kinds of questions.
For example, codified into the law of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is the gruesome practice of “pay for slay” – paying pensions to the families of dead terrorists who killed Jews. More than 10 percent of the PA’s budget pays these murder incentives / benefits.
At Brown, the foreign gift established, “…support for a Professorship in Palestinian Studies within Middle East Studies.” The “first chair of its kind dedicated to this field of study.” An anti-Israel professor named Beshara Doumani was tapped as the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies.
Soon after his appointment at Brown, Dr. Doumani was given permission also to simultaneously head Birzeit University in the West Bank for two years.
The Birzeit campus is a hotbed of radicalism. Members of the Hamas-affiliated “Islamic Bloc” have won most seats on its student council over the past two years.
Days after Hamas slaughtered and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians, Birzeit University’s Union of Professors and Employees said:
“2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives.”
Brown is not the only top school getting funds from Palestinian organizations, or with ties to Birzeit. According to federal disclosures, Harvard University received $1.6 million from entities within the “State of Palestine.”
Harvard’s grants were not restricted – so federal records have no description of how funds were to be spent. Harvard, unhelpfully, refused to comment.
Harvard’s activities with Birzeit University are not related to the $1.6 million foreign gift, but they still raise questions about Birzeit's ideology impacting Harvard students.
One project, through Harvard’s famous François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, works with Birzeit University to use:
“a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement. This framework involves surfacing, examining, and working to dismantle power dynamics and structures that perpetuate inequities in knowledge production and dissemination between Global North and Global South institutions.”
A member of Palestine program’s leadership team provides a prime example of how anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment flourish under the umbrella of “decolonialism.”
Bram Wispelwey, the leader team member, teachers a course called, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”
It uses “case studies from the United States, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel...[to] elucidate universal and particular elements of settler colonial societies while drawing causal chains to their perpetual outcomes: poorer health for indigenous and other non-settler (“arrivant”) communities.”
Funds originating in the West Bank not only may be radicalizing American students but are also educating “Palestinians” with American university resources.
Some $7.3 million went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), located in the city of Indiana, Pennsylvania, as part of a restricted contract. Not only entities from the “State of Palestine” contributed $6.4 million, but something from a self-described area of the “Palestinian Territory, Occupied” sent $900,000.
Most of these contracts funded “payment of tuition and fees for students from Palestine. Funds are also utilized to pay for educational related expenses incurred by the university for these students through their enrollment in this program.”
IUP is connected directly with the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority through its business PhD and MBA programs, offered in association with the Arab American University, the first private university there.
A spokesperson said "IUP has received instructional agreement income for providing educational programs at various international locations, including one in Palestine, since 2014."
The American people are disturbed by the civil unrest playing out on the campuses universities nationwide. They know these major schools are underwritten by billions of dollars in federal grants, contracts, subsidized tuition, and practically non-existent taxes on massive endowments.
In fact, several of America’s most elite institutions are more federal contractor than educator. They receive more dollars from taxpayers for federal contracts and grants than they collect on undergraduate student tuition.
But as the “Palestinian” funding shows, foreign influences fund these universities as well. Our auditors found that since 1986, $44 billion in foreign contracts and grants were disclosed by colleges and universities under Section 117 of the Higher Education Reporting Act. That is more than one billion dollars per year.
Such funding raises alarms about foreign influence over American universities. During the Trump Administration, then-U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos forced disclosure of foreign gifts and grants.
Secretary Devos trained a white-hot spotlight on the Confucius Institutes, funded by Communist China, as alleged outposts for Chinese espionage.
Since 1986, China had given $2.8 billion to American colleges and universities. But shortly after being exposed, China retreated and closed up these “cultural learning and language” institutes.
Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com discovered that the gifts to U.S. higher education from four Middle East countries – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Kuwait – dwarf the dollars that came from China.
In fact, a staggering $10.3 billion – or $1 of every $4 in foreign gifts and grants over the last 40 years – comes from these four: Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), UAE ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($860 million).
Now we know that entities in non-existent areas such as the “State of Palestine” or “Palestinian territory, occupied” are also providing funds.
Has foreign funding of some of our nation’s most prestigious universities fueled civil unrest? That is an open question. But as graduations are cancelled, Jewish students are threatened, and campuses are trashed with “encampments” across the country, it is painfully clear that the American taxpayer is getting shortchanged.
OpenTheBooks Substack
$10 Million To Harvard, Brown And Others Flowed From The “State Of Palestine”
Troubling grants and contracts classified in the federal database funded anti-Israel curriculums, professorships, and tuition.
ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI
MAY 08, 2024
In February 2020, Brown University, an Ivy League school with a tax advantaged $6.5 billion endowment, negotiated a $643,000 gift from a foundation located within the “State of Palestine” to create a new Palestinian professorship within its Center for Middle East Studies.
However, “Palestine,” as a nation, does not exist.
Neither the U.S. State Department nor the United Nations recognize Palestine as a country. The “State of Palestine” is a political fiction that provides cover for numerous terror organizations funded by Iran and others.
American universities taking six-figure foreign funding from an area of the world dominated by terrorists raises all kinds of questions.
For example, codified into the law of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is the gruesome practice of “pay for slay” – paying pensions to the families of dead terrorists who killed Jews. More than 10 percent of the PA’s budget pays these murder incentives / benefits.
At Brown, the foreign gift established, “…support for a Professorship in Palestinian Studies within Middle East Studies.” The “first chair of its kind dedicated to this field of study.” An anti-Israel professor named Beshara Doumani was tapped as the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies.
Soon after his appointment at Brown, Dr. Doumani was given permission also to simultaneously head Birzeit University in the West Bank for two years.
The Birzeit campus is a hotbed of radicalism. Members of the Hamas-affiliated “Islamic Bloc” have won most seats on its student council over the past two years.
Days after Hamas slaughtered and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians, Birzeit University’s Union of Professors and Employees said:
“2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives.”
Brown is not the only top school getting funds from Palestinian organizations, or with ties to Birzeit. According to federal disclosures, Harvard University received $1.6 million from entities within the “State of Palestine.”
Harvard’s grants were not restricted – so federal records have no description of how funds were to be spent. Harvard, unhelpfully, refused to comment.
Harvard’s activities with Birzeit University are not related to the $1.6 million foreign gift, but they still raise questions about Birzeit's ideology impacting Harvard students.
One project, through Harvard’s famous François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, works with Birzeit University to use:
“a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement. This framework involves surfacing, examining, and working to dismantle power dynamics and structures that perpetuate inequities in knowledge production and dissemination between Global North and Global South institutions.”
A member of Palestine program’s leadership team provides a prime example of how anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment flourish under the umbrella of “decolonialism.”
Bram Wispelwey, the leader team member, teachers a course called, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”
It uses “case studies from the United States, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel...[to] elucidate universal and particular elements of settler colonial societies while drawing causal chains to their perpetual outcomes: poorer health for indigenous and other non-settler (“arrivant”) communities.”
Funds originating in the West Bank not only may be radicalizing American students but are also educating “Palestinians” with American university resources.
Some $7.3 million went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), located in the city of Indiana, Pennsylvania, as part of a restricted contract. Not only entities from the “State of Palestine” contributed $6.4 million, but something from a self-described area of the “Palestinian Territory, Occupied” sent $900,000.
Most of these contracts funded “payment of tuition and fees for students from Palestine. Funds are also utilized to pay for educational related expenses incurred by the university for these students through their enrollment in this program.”
IUP is connected directly with the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority through its business PhD and MBA programs, offered in association with the Arab American University, the first private university there.
A spokesperson said "IUP has received instructional agreement income for providing educational programs at various international locations, including one in Palestine, since 2014."
The American people are disturbed by the civil unrest playing out on the campuses universities nationwide. They know these major schools are underwritten by billions of dollars in federal grants, contracts, subsidized tuition, and practically non-existent taxes on massive endowments.
In fact, several of America’s most elite institutions are more federal contractor than educator. They receive more dollars from taxpayers for federal contracts and grants than they collect on undergraduate student tuition.
But as the “Palestinian” funding shows, foreign influences fund these universities as well. Our auditors found that since 1986, $44 billion in foreign contracts and grants were disclosed by colleges and universities under Section 117 of the Higher Education Reporting Act. That is more than one billion dollars per year.
Such funding raises alarms about foreign influence over American universities. During the Trump Administration, then-U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos forced disclosure of foreign gifts and grants.
Secretary Devos trained a white-hot spotlight on the Confucius Institutes, funded by Communist China, as alleged outposts for Chinese espionage.
Since 1986, China had given $2.8 billion to American colleges and universities. But shortly after being exposed, China retreated and closed up these “cultural learning and language” institutes.
Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com discovered that the gifts to U.S. higher education from four Middle East countries – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Kuwait – dwarf the dollars that came from China.
In fact, a staggering $10.3 billion – or $1 of every $4 in foreign gifts and grants over the last 40 years – comes from these four: Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), UAE ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($860 million).
Now we know that entities in non-existent areas such as the “State of Palestine” or “Palestinian territory, occupied” are also providing funds.
Has foreign funding of some of our nation’s most prestigious universities fueled civil unrest? That is an open question. But as graduations are cancelled, Jewish students are threatened, and campuses are trashed with “encampments” across the country, it is painfully clear that the American taxpayer is getting shortchanged.
35
Politics & Religion / American Jews: Stay Tuned In to this Pogrom?
« on: May 08, 2024, 04:12:03 PM »
A fine essay contemplating the implications of current anti-Semitic spasms occurring in America:
Is the Writing on the Wall for America's Jews?
Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on to Jews around us? But it’s our responsibility to stay.
Anti-Semitic graffiti on the Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine on October 31, 2018 in Irvine, California. Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images.
RUTH R. WISSE
AUG. 8 2022
About Ruth
Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.
Ruth Wisse's column is made possible by the generosity of Rob Friedman.
KEEP UP WITH MOSAIC'S COVERAGE OF ISRAEL'S WAR WITH HAMAS HERE
I did not think anything in American Jewish life could surprise me—until an Upper East Side neighbor said to me recently that his daughter, who had moved to Israel a dozen years ago, “was the first to see the handwriting on the wall.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know that you’re an optimist about America,” he responded. “But at a certain point, Jews have been driven from every place where they’ve settled.”
I was stunned. “You don’t mean she thought Jews were so endangered that it was time to leave America as they’ve been leaving France and Russia?”
Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on?
A few weeks later, unable to get this conversation out of my mind, I shared it with a professional adviser, another Jew in our neighborhood, who was similarly amused by my reaction. “Did you see the man who just left my office?” he asked. “One of the top lawyers in his field. That’s just what he was telling me he’d been hearing from some of his clients.”
Had I really fallen so far behind on a subject I’ve been tracking for decades? Everything about the upsurge of anti-Jewish politics in the United States troubles me: the role of universities, media, and cultural elites in abetting anti-Zionism, the successor and incorporator of anti-Semitism; the organization of grievance brigades against the allegedly privileged Jews; the ease with which the Arab and Islamist war against the Jewish people has found a home on the left; the electability of known anti-Semites to government; the lone shooters who choose Jews for their targets; the underreported street attacks on visible Jews; and the timidity and stupidity of some American Jewish spokesmen in response to all this aggression.
It wasn’t the escalation of anti-Jewish activity that surprised me, but the idea that it’s therefore time for Jews to give up on America altogether.
Let me try to make this as clear as I can. Aliyah, the voluntary move of Jews to Israel, is an honorable Jewish imperative. The Jews’ return to their homeland—“to build and be rebuilt by it”—is one of the most hopeful developments in the history of civilization. No attempts to sully Israel’s reputation can lessen the magnitude of that achievement.
On a more mundane level, just as some Israelis may wish to live in the United States, some American Jews may prefer to live in Israel. A young Israeli relative of mine once illustrated the concept of Americans who successively “ascend and descend” from Israel in a picture of two muscular shleppers hauling boxes up the stairs for an Israeli-owned moving company. He intended to puncture the ideal of aliyah by focusing on some of its grimier real-life particulars. Yet, though the ideological urgency of that ideal may have waned over the decades, the summon of Jews to Zion will never cease.
In any case, moving to Israel does not necessarily imply seeing the “handwriting on the wall”—a potent phrase with its own heavy Jewish associations. In the biblical book of Daniel, the Jews are in exile, surviving by their wits at the whim of their Babylonian conquerors. Daniel, who had prophesied accurately for King Nebuchadnezzar, interprets the mysterious phrase on the wall—MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN—to the king’s successor Belshazzar: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. . . . You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
In its context, this was to be the punishment specifically for the Babylonians’ having desecrated the items taken from the Temple in Jerusalem. In the broader historical context, an augury of civilizational doom has indeed repeatedly correlated with damage or danger to the Jews.
Millennia of evidence support this link between political durability and treatment of the Jews. Because of the way Jews have lived among the nations, as a self-defined, high-functioning minority without independent means of self-defense, they fared differently in accordance with whether societies welcomed or resented their presence. It is no mere cliché to call Jews “canaries in the coal mine”; societies that organized against the Jews were indeed defeated, or crumbled from within. Conversely, toleration of the Jews demonstrated cultural and political qualities of openness and poise that translated into extended achievement.
The United States is a case in point of the latter disposition. When Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to George Washington in 1790 asking for religious freedom for Jews, he, too, invoked the book of Daniel:
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits. . . . With pleasure we reflect on those days—those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, shielded Your head in the day of battle—and we rejoice to think that the same Spirit who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel, enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest upon you. . . . [emphasis added]
Associating Washington not with the fate of Belshazzar but with the deliverance of Daniel, Seixas asserted that the Jews, hitherto deprived of the “invaluable rights of free citizens,” felt all the more grateful to the Almighty for a government of the people that gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Indeed, Washington’s reply to the rabbi included these same phrases, going one step farther to repudiate mere toleration “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Jews were henceforth to know that citizenship was their right. Welcome to the Land of the Free.
Flash forward to the 1960s, when Jews were both agents and beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement that finally extended the legal promise of America to all of its citizens. Jews meant it when we sang Woody Guthrie’s anthem, “This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California to the New York Island/ From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me.” We meant it when we belted out Irving Berlin’s anthem: “God bless America, land that I love/ Stand beside her and guide her/ Through the night with the light from above.” American Jews have been no doomsaying Daniels at Belshazzar’s feast but equal partners in this great experiment, and we bear our share of responsibility—no more and no less—for the Republic whose benefits we reap. If America fails us, it fails itself, but the failure is equally ours.
With that in mind, it was interesting to watch the conservative media figure Ben Shapiro greeted recently in Tel Aviv by a crowd that roared its approval when the interviewer pressed him on his readiness to make aliyah. Shapiro, a religious Jew, Zionist, and American patriot, held nothing back in his appreciation of and thankfulness for Israel, but said that since the “fundamental principles of the United States are good and worth upholding,” Jews could continue to live there as one of the places where they can do “the most good.” In the celebratory moment it really did seem that the American and the Israelis together actually compounded the security of the world, and as a loyal American Shapiro was right to praise his country of citizenship. Yet anyone listening to him back in Florida might be forgiven for wondering whether he might not be about to hedge his bets. In Israel, on the most serious questions of the day, the center holds, perhaps better than it has since 1948. Back in America, Jews are more nervous than ever, and they are not the only ones spreading alarm.
Some of the most thoughtful and articulate Americans have trouble holding back their anger. About the universities, Roger Kimball writes:
All the old liberal virtues—disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit and not by some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota—all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture.
For his part, Victor Davis Hanson, scrolling through the actions of the present administration, sees “the rapid destruction of most wisdom as we once knew it.” In short, although the cultural battle is still being waged, some warriors have already begun to speak in the language of defeat.
Jews have been taught that though the task is not ours to finish, neither are we free to desist from it. In this most consequential struggle, our experience is instructive, and we are duty-bound to share with our fellow Americans the secrets of our creative survival. The primary Jewish obligation through the millennia since the granting of the law at Sinai has been to maintain and secure our constitution, the Torah: the “tree of life to those who cling to it.”
American Jews may be an ethnic group, born into a people, but the Jewish way of life can be perpetuated only by a rigorous education that starts in infancy and continues throughout a lifetime; on a larger scale, a similar responsibility for the American way of life devolves upon alarmed Jews and non-Jews alike. To ensure that no one takes for granted their civilizing structure, Jews have ceaselessly conserved, transmitted, and reinforced the teachings of their tradition. How can we lately have allowed some of our own to forget, shunt aside, or repudiate their Jewish legacy? How can we have let our fellow Americans become so careless about conserving theirs?
A second Jewish insight, gained belatedly and at greater cost than any people has ever paid, is never to underestimate the will of those who rise to destroy us. Having reclaimed its national sovereignty after millennia under foreign occupation, the modern Jewish state is acquiring the skills, developing the strategies, and above all, building the stamina needed to protect its citizens in the millennia to come. Sadly, democracies with no incentive to aggress against others become the easiest target for aggressors—including aggressors from within—who claim or seek to destroy what others have built. May the people with the poorest record of self-defense in history inspire the world’s still strongest nation before it is too late.
By all means, my Jewish neighbors who are feeling the full brunt of the general rot in the particular form of attacks against them and the Jewish homeland must warn against the self-destruction that accompanies anti-Jewish behavior. But they and the rest of us must also do everything possible to preserve the exceptionalism that is America. In the fateful parable that continues to sound through the ages, we are both Daniel and, here, part of Babylon. It, too, is our responsibility.
https://archive.ph/ox6Fl
Is the Writing on the Wall for America's Jews?
Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on to Jews around us? But it’s our responsibility to stay.
Anti-Semitic graffiti on the Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine on October 31, 2018 in Irvine, California. Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images.
RUTH R. WISSE
AUG. 8 2022
About Ruth
Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.
Ruth Wisse's column is made possible by the generosity of Rob Friedman.
KEEP UP WITH MOSAIC'S COVERAGE OF ISRAEL'S WAR WITH HAMAS HERE
I did not think anything in American Jewish life could surprise me—until an Upper East Side neighbor said to me recently that his daughter, who had moved to Israel a dozen years ago, “was the first to see the handwriting on the wall.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know that you’re an optimist about America,” he responded. “But at a certain point, Jews have been driven from every place where they’ve settled.”
I was stunned. “You don’t mean she thought Jews were so endangered that it was time to leave America as they’ve been leaving France and Russia?”
Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on?
A few weeks later, unable to get this conversation out of my mind, I shared it with a professional adviser, another Jew in our neighborhood, who was similarly amused by my reaction. “Did you see the man who just left my office?” he asked. “One of the top lawyers in his field. That’s just what he was telling me he’d been hearing from some of his clients.”
Had I really fallen so far behind on a subject I’ve been tracking for decades? Everything about the upsurge of anti-Jewish politics in the United States troubles me: the role of universities, media, and cultural elites in abetting anti-Zionism, the successor and incorporator of anti-Semitism; the organization of grievance brigades against the allegedly privileged Jews; the ease with which the Arab and Islamist war against the Jewish people has found a home on the left; the electability of known anti-Semites to government; the lone shooters who choose Jews for their targets; the underreported street attacks on visible Jews; and the timidity and stupidity of some American Jewish spokesmen in response to all this aggression.
It wasn’t the escalation of anti-Jewish activity that surprised me, but the idea that it’s therefore time for Jews to give up on America altogether.
Let me try to make this as clear as I can. Aliyah, the voluntary move of Jews to Israel, is an honorable Jewish imperative. The Jews’ return to their homeland—“to build and be rebuilt by it”—is one of the most hopeful developments in the history of civilization. No attempts to sully Israel’s reputation can lessen the magnitude of that achievement.
On a more mundane level, just as some Israelis may wish to live in the United States, some American Jews may prefer to live in Israel. A young Israeli relative of mine once illustrated the concept of Americans who successively “ascend and descend” from Israel in a picture of two muscular shleppers hauling boxes up the stairs for an Israeli-owned moving company. He intended to puncture the ideal of aliyah by focusing on some of its grimier real-life particulars. Yet, though the ideological urgency of that ideal may have waned over the decades, the summon of Jews to Zion will never cease.
In any case, moving to Israel does not necessarily imply seeing the “handwriting on the wall”—a potent phrase with its own heavy Jewish associations. In the biblical book of Daniel, the Jews are in exile, surviving by their wits at the whim of their Babylonian conquerors. Daniel, who had prophesied accurately for King Nebuchadnezzar, interprets the mysterious phrase on the wall—MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN—to the king’s successor Belshazzar: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. . . . You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
In its context, this was to be the punishment specifically for the Babylonians’ having desecrated the items taken from the Temple in Jerusalem. In the broader historical context, an augury of civilizational doom has indeed repeatedly correlated with damage or danger to the Jews.
Millennia of evidence support this link between political durability and treatment of the Jews. Because of the way Jews have lived among the nations, as a self-defined, high-functioning minority without independent means of self-defense, they fared differently in accordance with whether societies welcomed or resented their presence. It is no mere cliché to call Jews “canaries in the coal mine”; societies that organized against the Jews were indeed defeated, or crumbled from within. Conversely, toleration of the Jews demonstrated cultural and political qualities of openness and poise that translated into extended achievement.
The United States is a case in point of the latter disposition. When Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to George Washington in 1790 asking for religious freedom for Jews, he, too, invoked the book of Daniel:
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits. . . . With pleasure we reflect on those days—those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, shielded Your head in the day of battle—and we rejoice to think that the same Spirit who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel, enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest upon you. . . . [emphasis added]
Associating Washington not with the fate of Belshazzar but with the deliverance of Daniel, Seixas asserted that the Jews, hitherto deprived of the “invaluable rights of free citizens,” felt all the more grateful to the Almighty for a government of the people that gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Indeed, Washington’s reply to the rabbi included these same phrases, going one step farther to repudiate mere toleration “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Jews were henceforth to know that citizenship was their right. Welcome to the Land of the Free.
Flash forward to the 1960s, when Jews were both agents and beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement that finally extended the legal promise of America to all of its citizens. Jews meant it when we sang Woody Guthrie’s anthem, “This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California to the New York Island/ From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me.” We meant it when we belted out Irving Berlin’s anthem: “God bless America, land that I love/ Stand beside her and guide her/ Through the night with the light from above.” American Jews have been no doomsaying Daniels at Belshazzar’s feast but equal partners in this great experiment, and we bear our share of responsibility—no more and no less—for the Republic whose benefits we reap. If America fails us, it fails itself, but the failure is equally ours.
With that in mind, it was interesting to watch the conservative media figure Ben Shapiro greeted recently in Tel Aviv by a crowd that roared its approval when the interviewer pressed him on his readiness to make aliyah. Shapiro, a religious Jew, Zionist, and American patriot, held nothing back in his appreciation of and thankfulness for Israel, but said that since the “fundamental principles of the United States are good and worth upholding,” Jews could continue to live there as one of the places where they can do “the most good.” In the celebratory moment it really did seem that the American and the Israelis together actually compounded the security of the world, and as a loyal American Shapiro was right to praise his country of citizenship. Yet anyone listening to him back in Florida might be forgiven for wondering whether he might not be about to hedge his bets. In Israel, on the most serious questions of the day, the center holds, perhaps better than it has since 1948. Back in America, Jews are more nervous than ever, and they are not the only ones spreading alarm.
Some of the most thoughtful and articulate Americans have trouble holding back their anger. About the universities, Roger Kimball writes:
All the old liberal virtues—disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit and not by some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota—all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture.
For his part, Victor Davis Hanson, scrolling through the actions of the present administration, sees “the rapid destruction of most wisdom as we once knew it.” In short, although the cultural battle is still being waged, some warriors have already begun to speak in the language of defeat.
Jews have been taught that though the task is not ours to finish, neither are we free to desist from it. In this most consequential struggle, our experience is instructive, and we are duty-bound to share with our fellow Americans the secrets of our creative survival. The primary Jewish obligation through the millennia since the granting of the law at Sinai has been to maintain and secure our constitution, the Torah: the “tree of life to those who cling to it.”
American Jews may be an ethnic group, born into a people, but the Jewish way of life can be perpetuated only by a rigorous education that starts in infancy and continues throughout a lifetime; on a larger scale, a similar responsibility for the American way of life devolves upon alarmed Jews and non-Jews alike. To ensure that no one takes for granted their civilizing structure, Jews have ceaselessly conserved, transmitted, and reinforced the teachings of their tradition. How can we lately have allowed some of our own to forget, shunt aside, or repudiate their Jewish legacy? How can we have let our fellow Americans become so careless about conserving theirs?
A second Jewish insight, gained belatedly and at greater cost than any people has ever paid, is never to underestimate the will of those who rise to destroy us. Having reclaimed its national sovereignty after millennia under foreign occupation, the modern Jewish state is acquiring the skills, developing the strategies, and above all, building the stamina needed to protect its citizens in the millennia to come. Sadly, democracies with no incentive to aggress against others become the easiest target for aggressors—including aggressors from within—who claim or seek to destroy what others have built. May the people with the poorest record of self-defense in history inspire the world’s still strongest nation before it is too late.
By all means, my Jewish neighbors who are feeling the full brunt of the general rot in the particular form of attacks against them and the Jewish homeland must warn against the self-destruction that accompanies anti-Jewish behavior. But they and the rest of us must also do everything possible to preserve the exceptionalism that is America. In the fateful parable that continues to sound through the ages, we are both Daniel and, here, part of Babylon. It, too, is our responsibility.
https://archive.ph/ox6Fl
36
Politics & Religion / A Diet Coke Fever Dream
« on: May 08, 2024, 10:42:35 AM »
America needs college presidents/administrators willing to take stands like this:
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/from-the-desk-of-president-john-habidacus?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/from-the-desk-of-president-john-habidacus?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
37
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Re: Privacy, Big Brother (State and Corporate) and the 4th & 9th Amendments
« on: May 08, 2024, 09:57:09 AM »
I've long wondered how many of thes apps/utilities/social media platforms have spooks lurking about the backend:
Christopher F. Rufo
Signal’s Katherine Maher Problem
Is the integrity of the encrypted-messaging application compromised by its chairman of the board?
/ Eye on the News / The Social Order, Technology and Innovation
May 06 2024
/ Share
The encrypted-messaging service Signal is the application of choice for dissenters around the world. The app has been downloaded by more than 100 million users and boasts high-profile endorsements from NSA leaker Edward Snowden and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. Signal has created the perception that its users, including political dissidents, can communicate with one another without fear of government interception or persecution.
But the insider history of Signal raises questions about the app’s origins and its relationship with government—in particular, with the American intelligence apparatus. Such a relationship would be troubling, given how much we have learned, in recent years, about extensive efforts to control and censor information undertaken by technology companies, sometimes in tandem with American government officials.
First, the origin story. The technology behind Signal, which operates as a nonprofit foundation, was initially funded, in part, through a $3 million grant from the government-sponsored Open Technology Fund (OTF), which was spun off from Radio Free Asia, originally established as an anti-Communist information service during the Cold War. OTF funded Signal to provide “encrypted mobile communication tools” to “Internet freedom defenders globally.”
Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals”—including by empowering “activists [and] parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn’t like.” Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.
The other potential problem is the Signal Foundation’s current chairman of the board, Katherine Maher, who started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change. During the Arab Spring period, for instance, Maher ran digital-communications initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute, a largely government-funded organization that works in concert with American foreign policy campaigns. Maher cultivated relationships with online dissidents and used American technologies to advance the interests of U.S.-supported Color Revolutions abroad.
Maher then became CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016, and, earlier this year, was named CEO of National Public Radio. At Wikipedia, Maher became a campaigner against “disinformation” and admitted to coordinating online censorship “through conversations with government.” She openly endorsed removing alleged “fascists,” including President Trump, from digital platforms, and described the First Amendment as “the number one challenge” to eliminating “bad information.”
According to the insider, a woman named Meredith Whittaker, who became president of the Signal Foundation in 2022, recruited Maher to become board chair because of their mutual connections to OTF, where Maher also serves as an advisor, and to nonprofits such as Access Now, which “defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world,” including in the Middle East and North Africa. Whittaker, like Maher, is highly ideological. She previously worked in a high position at Google and organized left-wing campaigns within the company, culminating in the 2018 “Google Walkout,” which demanded MeToo-style sexual harassment policies and the hiring of a chief diversity officer.
So what does all this mean for American users—including conservative dissidents—who believe that Signal is a secure application for communication? It means that they should be cautious. “Maher’s presence on the board of Signal is alarming,” says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. “It makes sense that a Color Revolutionary like Maher would have interest in Signal as a secure means of communicating,” he says, but her past support for censorship and apparent intelligence connections raise doubts about Signal’s trustworthiness. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework, agrees, saying that it had “suddenly become materially harder” to trust the Signal Foundation under Maher’s board leadership.
For those who believe in a free and open Internet, Maher’s Signal role should be a flashing warning sign. As she once explained, she abandoned the mission of a free and open Internet at Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a “white male Westernized construct” and “did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” The better path, in her view, is managed opinion, using, alternately, censorship and promotion of dissent—depending on context and goal—as the essential methods.
We’re entering a dangerous period in political technology, and Maher is in the thick of it. Under her ideology, “Internet freedom” is a tactic, not a principle, and “fighting disinformation” means speech suppression, including here at home. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem
Christopher F. Rufo
Signal’s Katherine Maher Problem
Is the integrity of the encrypted-messaging application compromised by its chairman of the board?
/ Eye on the News / The Social Order, Technology and Innovation
May 06 2024
/ Share
The encrypted-messaging service Signal is the application of choice for dissenters around the world. The app has been downloaded by more than 100 million users and boasts high-profile endorsements from NSA leaker Edward Snowden and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. Signal has created the perception that its users, including political dissidents, can communicate with one another without fear of government interception or persecution.
But the insider history of Signal raises questions about the app’s origins and its relationship with government—in particular, with the American intelligence apparatus. Such a relationship would be troubling, given how much we have learned, in recent years, about extensive efforts to control and censor information undertaken by technology companies, sometimes in tandem with American government officials.
First, the origin story. The technology behind Signal, which operates as a nonprofit foundation, was initially funded, in part, through a $3 million grant from the government-sponsored Open Technology Fund (OTF), which was spun off from Radio Free Asia, originally established as an anti-Communist information service during the Cold War. OTF funded Signal to provide “encrypted mobile communication tools” to “Internet freedom defenders globally.”
Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals”—including by empowering “activists [and] parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn’t like.” Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.
The other potential problem is the Signal Foundation’s current chairman of the board, Katherine Maher, who started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change. During the Arab Spring period, for instance, Maher ran digital-communications initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute, a largely government-funded organization that works in concert with American foreign policy campaigns. Maher cultivated relationships with online dissidents and used American technologies to advance the interests of U.S.-supported Color Revolutions abroad.
Maher then became CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016, and, earlier this year, was named CEO of National Public Radio. At Wikipedia, Maher became a campaigner against “disinformation” and admitted to coordinating online censorship “through conversations with government.” She openly endorsed removing alleged “fascists,” including President Trump, from digital platforms, and described the First Amendment as “the number one challenge” to eliminating “bad information.”
According to the insider, a woman named Meredith Whittaker, who became president of the Signal Foundation in 2022, recruited Maher to become board chair because of their mutual connections to OTF, where Maher also serves as an advisor, and to nonprofits such as Access Now, which “defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world,” including in the Middle East and North Africa. Whittaker, like Maher, is highly ideological. She previously worked in a high position at Google and organized left-wing campaigns within the company, culminating in the 2018 “Google Walkout,” which demanded MeToo-style sexual harassment policies and the hiring of a chief diversity officer.
So what does all this mean for American users—including conservative dissidents—who believe that Signal is a secure application for communication? It means that they should be cautious. “Maher’s presence on the board of Signal is alarming,” says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. “It makes sense that a Color Revolutionary like Maher would have interest in Signal as a secure means of communicating,” he says, but her past support for censorship and apparent intelligence connections raise doubts about Signal’s trustworthiness. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework, agrees, saying that it had “suddenly become materially harder” to trust the Signal Foundation under Maher’s board leadership.
For those who believe in a free and open Internet, Maher’s Signal role should be a flashing warning sign. As she once explained, she abandoned the mission of a free and open Internet at Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a “white male Westernized construct” and “did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” The better path, in her view, is managed opinion, using, alternately, censorship and promotion of dissent—depending on context and goal—as the essential methods.
We’re entering a dangerous period in political technology, and Maher is in the thick of it. Under her ideology, “Internet freedom” is a tactic, not a principle, and “fighting disinformation” means speech suppression, including here at home. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem
38
Politics & Religion / Wilford Bromley, Where Are You Now that We Need You?
« on: May 08, 2024, 09:42:03 AM »
When it rains, it pours. Third post.
A significant point this blogger makes involves the FBI under Hoover being set up for political control and grandstanding, rather than investigating crime, an antecendant coming into its own these days:
Trump Triumphing Over Evil
The Raid on Mar-A-Lago likely gets him re-elected. (By the way, today's poll is terrific.)
MAY 08, 2024
“Come sundown, there’s gonna be two things true that ain’t true now. One is the United States Department of Justice is goin’ to know what in the good Christ is goin’ on around here. And the other is I’m gonna have someone’s ass in my briefcase.” Wilford Brimley as Wells in Absence of Malice.
In the movie, DOJ lawyers tried to pressure Paul Newman’s character into testifying by leaking lies about him to the press. Newman uses his wit to get the investigators investigated as Washington sends in a grown-up, played by Wilford Brimley, to clean up the mess.
America needs you, Wilford Brimley. Wilford, won’t you please come home.
But there are no grown-ups left in Washington. The FBI and the rest of the government feed a steady stream of lies to a Washington press corps that believes it is doing the work of Edward R. Murrow when it is really Ralph Wiggums saying, “I’m helping.”
For four years, the press flogged the dead piñata of the Russian hoax. The press promoted the Mueller investigation as if the former FBI director were Eliot Ness going after Al Capone. The Jeff Bezos Washington Post, NYT, AP, the networks and the cable news stations all praised Bobby Sox Mueller.
Carl Cannon, executive editor of RealClearPolitics, stood almost alone in reminding the public how Mueller and his successor at the FBI, Jimmy the Weasel Comey, botched their first big case after 9/11.
Cannon wrote, “They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure.”
It was an inside job. A government researcher sent the anthrax letters. Clouseau and Clueless nabbed the wrong researcher.
Cannon wrote, “Despite the jihadist slogans accompanying the mailed anthrax, it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or any foreign element; the FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins; the reason is that they had quickly obsessed on an innocent man named Steven Hatfill; the bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was targeted by an anthrax-laced letter) and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources — a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put her conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill.
“In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters — including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI).”
Eventually, evidence cleared Hatfill and Ivins killed himself. Taxpayers paid Hatfill $5.82 million — hush money — to cover the asses of Mueller and Comey.
Everyone in DC knew this when the Russian hoax investigation began but ignored it to praise Mueller and promote him as the savior of the republic who would get Donald Trump for a crime that not only did he not commit but it didn’t exist!
For months on end, the press passed along lie after lie as Mueller fed their fantasies of the 2016 election being all a fantasy. The press rewarded Mueller with reports about the walls closing in and a dam about to break. Two years and $24 million later, Mueller found nothing because there was nothing to find.
No one in the press apologized. The media went on to the next nonsense — the impeachment of a president because he asked Zelensky to see about investigating corruption by Hunter Biden. Investigating a political opponent is something only done in a banana republic.
We know now, buddy. Boy, do we know.
The press thought it hit the jackpot with the January 6 actually peaceful protest inside the Capitol. Thousands of innocents face bogus charges approved by the kangaroo courts of DC but this horseshit opera isn’t over until the fat ladies and gentlemen of the Supreme Court sing their song.
Which brings me to Mar-A-Lago.
In the summer of 2022, an FBI SWAT team raided Donald Trump’s home.
30 agents spent 9 hours rifling through his stuff. They confiscated 100,000 items and claimed 100 of them were classified material that Trump should not have.
That means 99.9% of the stuff the FBI took the agents had no business taking. They stole it. The full list of items taken is here. The items seized included 1,693 newspapers and news clippings. Having a clipping of a recipe from a newspaper can land you in jail as a national security law violator but being secretary of state and sending 33,000 emails full of State secrets to foreign donors to your fake charity does not.
I was blogging at the time. I wrote on September 5, 2022:
J. Edgar Hoover set the FBI up not to necessarily solve crimes but to garner publicity and get the goods on the politicians in Washington.
The tradition continues today. The FBI used facial recognition technology to hunt down and harass Trump supporters who dared protest at the Capitol.
This raid is all too typical. They did the same thing to Richard Jewell 26 years ago when they tried to frame him for the Atlanta Olympics bombing. He was a hero who saved hundreds of lives and the FBI treated him like shit.
The president is only the latest to suffer from the bureau bullies. The list of items confiscated shows the biggest threat to domestic tranquility is spelled F-B-I.
By the way, taxpayers had to pay hush money to Jewell to cover up the FBI’s persecution of the man. I can list many more examples including Ruby Ridge. I won’t because I need the space to look at the Raid at Mar-A-Lago, which is about to get its Happily Ever After.
Fox reported the judge on Tuesday postponed the trial indefinitely. This came after chief witch hunter Jack R. Smith admitted on Friday that he tampered with evidence.
The Fox story said, “Smith and federal prosecutors admitted in a court filing that documents seized during the raid on Mar-a-Lago are no longer in their original order and sequence.
“‘There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,’ Smith’s filing states.
“The prosecutors had previously told the court that the documents were ‘in their original, intact form as seized.’”
I am not a lawyer but it looks like the judge must dismiss the case with prejudice because of this tampering. How can anyone trust the FBI when it claims this paper or that document was at Mar-A-Lago when they raided the place? Jack S lying to the court should result in an investigation. Perhaps the various Bars that the Jack S is a member of should issue sanctions against him.
The contamination of the evidence also should moot the indictments in DC but again, I am no lawyer.
After the judge postponed this trainwreck indefinitely, Julie Kelly of Real Clear Investigations tweeted:
You will see tonight outrage by legal “experts” about Judge Cannon vacating trial date and refusing to set a new one. They will again accuse her of being in the tank for Trump and demand Jack Smith seek her recusal.
At the same time, these frauds will refuse to cover all of the new developments related to DOJ tampering with evidence, misrepresenting the condition of the evidence to the court, doctored evidence, and perhaps even missing/misplaced documents.
Keep in mind — Jack Smith is the one who decided to bring this unprecedented indictment in June 2023 then add a superseding indictment on the case a month later. He then handed down the DC indictment in August 2023--Judge Chutkan leapfrogged over Cannon's initial date and set a March 4 trial date, further delaying proceedings in Florida.
Smith forced the defendants to comply with CIPA, which are stringent rules related to handling/sharing of classified materials in such cases.
His team foot-dragged discovery and failed to set up a secure location for months where defense could view classified discovery evidence.
Cannon has held numerous sealed and public hearings over the past several months as well as addressed multiple competing motions for dismissal of the case.
We know why Jack S wants a delay because he knew all along he has no case and this is all for show like the Mueller investigation was. Jack S should have his ass in a briefcase.
As I said, there are no Wilford Brimleys in Washington.
But the American public is there and most people know the difference between shit and Shinola.
Last summer, the Bezos Post reported, “Nearly 6 in 10 Americans think that the investigations into Trump are an effort to keep him from winning the White House next year. Trump argues that he’s being indicted because his opponents want to punish his supporters; half of Republicans think that the probes are ‘an attack on people like me.’”
That poll was taken weeks before the Mugshot Seen ’Round The World.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/trump-triumphing-over-evil?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
A significant point this blogger makes involves the FBI under Hoover being set up for political control and grandstanding, rather than investigating crime, an antecendant coming into its own these days:
Trump Triumphing Over Evil
The Raid on Mar-A-Lago likely gets him re-elected. (By the way, today's poll is terrific.)
MAY 08, 2024
“Come sundown, there’s gonna be two things true that ain’t true now. One is the United States Department of Justice is goin’ to know what in the good Christ is goin’ on around here. And the other is I’m gonna have someone’s ass in my briefcase.” Wilford Brimley as Wells in Absence of Malice.
In the movie, DOJ lawyers tried to pressure Paul Newman’s character into testifying by leaking lies about him to the press. Newman uses his wit to get the investigators investigated as Washington sends in a grown-up, played by Wilford Brimley, to clean up the mess.
America needs you, Wilford Brimley. Wilford, won’t you please come home.
But there are no grown-ups left in Washington. The FBI and the rest of the government feed a steady stream of lies to a Washington press corps that believes it is doing the work of Edward R. Murrow when it is really Ralph Wiggums saying, “I’m helping.”
For four years, the press flogged the dead piñata of the Russian hoax. The press promoted the Mueller investigation as if the former FBI director were Eliot Ness going after Al Capone. The Jeff Bezos Washington Post, NYT, AP, the networks and the cable news stations all praised Bobby Sox Mueller.
Carl Cannon, executive editor of RealClearPolitics, stood almost alone in reminding the public how Mueller and his successor at the FBI, Jimmy the Weasel Comey, botched their first big case after 9/11.
Cannon wrote, “They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure.”
It was an inside job. A government researcher sent the anthrax letters. Clouseau and Clueless nabbed the wrong researcher.
Cannon wrote, “Despite the jihadist slogans accompanying the mailed anthrax, it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or any foreign element; the FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins; the reason is that they had quickly obsessed on an innocent man named Steven Hatfill; the bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was targeted by an anthrax-laced letter) and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources — a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put her conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill.
“In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters — including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI).”
Eventually, evidence cleared Hatfill and Ivins killed himself. Taxpayers paid Hatfill $5.82 million — hush money — to cover the asses of Mueller and Comey.
Everyone in DC knew this when the Russian hoax investigation began but ignored it to praise Mueller and promote him as the savior of the republic who would get Donald Trump for a crime that not only did he not commit but it didn’t exist!
For months on end, the press passed along lie after lie as Mueller fed their fantasies of the 2016 election being all a fantasy. The press rewarded Mueller with reports about the walls closing in and a dam about to break. Two years and $24 million later, Mueller found nothing because there was nothing to find.
No one in the press apologized. The media went on to the next nonsense — the impeachment of a president because he asked Zelensky to see about investigating corruption by Hunter Biden. Investigating a political opponent is something only done in a banana republic.
We know now, buddy. Boy, do we know.
The press thought it hit the jackpot with the January 6 actually peaceful protest inside the Capitol. Thousands of innocents face bogus charges approved by the kangaroo courts of DC but this horseshit opera isn’t over until the fat ladies and gentlemen of the Supreme Court sing their song.
Which brings me to Mar-A-Lago.
In the summer of 2022, an FBI SWAT team raided Donald Trump’s home.
30 agents spent 9 hours rifling through his stuff. They confiscated 100,000 items and claimed 100 of them were classified material that Trump should not have.
That means 99.9% of the stuff the FBI took the agents had no business taking. They stole it. The full list of items taken is here. The items seized included 1,693 newspapers and news clippings. Having a clipping of a recipe from a newspaper can land you in jail as a national security law violator but being secretary of state and sending 33,000 emails full of State secrets to foreign donors to your fake charity does not.
I was blogging at the time. I wrote on September 5, 2022:
J. Edgar Hoover set the FBI up not to necessarily solve crimes but to garner publicity and get the goods on the politicians in Washington.
The tradition continues today. The FBI used facial recognition technology to hunt down and harass Trump supporters who dared protest at the Capitol.
This raid is all too typical. They did the same thing to Richard Jewell 26 years ago when they tried to frame him for the Atlanta Olympics bombing. He was a hero who saved hundreds of lives and the FBI treated him like shit.
The president is only the latest to suffer from the bureau bullies. The list of items confiscated shows the biggest threat to domestic tranquility is spelled F-B-I.
By the way, taxpayers had to pay hush money to Jewell to cover up the FBI’s persecution of the man. I can list many more examples including Ruby Ridge. I won’t because I need the space to look at the Raid at Mar-A-Lago, which is about to get its Happily Ever After.
Fox reported the judge on Tuesday postponed the trial indefinitely. This came after chief witch hunter Jack R. Smith admitted on Friday that he tampered with evidence.
The Fox story said, “Smith and federal prosecutors admitted in a court filing that documents seized during the raid on Mar-a-Lago are no longer in their original order and sequence.
“‘There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,’ Smith’s filing states.
“The prosecutors had previously told the court that the documents were ‘in their original, intact form as seized.’”
I am not a lawyer but it looks like the judge must dismiss the case with prejudice because of this tampering. How can anyone trust the FBI when it claims this paper or that document was at Mar-A-Lago when they raided the place? Jack S lying to the court should result in an investigation. Perhaps the various Bars that the Jack S is a member of should issue sanctions against him.
The contamination of the evidence also should moot the indictments in DC but again, I am no lawyer.
After the judge postponed this trainwreck indefinitely, Julie Kelly of Real Clear Investigations tweeted:
You will see tonight outrage by legal “experts” about Judge Cannon vacating trial date and refusing to set a new one. They will again accuse her of being in the tank for Trump and demand Jack Smith seek her recusal.
At the same time, these frauds will refuse to cover all of the new developments related to DOJ tampering with evidence, misrepresenting the condition of the evidence to the court, doctored evidence, and perhaps even missing/misplaced documents.
Keep in mind — Jack Smith is the one who decided to bring this unprecedented indictment in June 2023 then add a superseding indictment on the case a month later. He then handed down the DC indictment in August 2023--Judge Chutkan leapfrogged over Cannon's initial date and set a March 4 trial date, further delaying proceedings in Florida.
Smith forced the defendants to comply with CIPA, which are stringent rules related to handling/sharing of classified materials in such cases.
His team foot-dragged discovery and failed to set up a secure location for months where defense could view classified discovery evidence.
Cannon has held numerous sealed and public hearings over the past several months as well as addressed multiple competing motions for dismissal of the case.
We know why Jack S wants a delay because he knew all along he has no case and this is all for show like the Mueller investigation was. Jack S should have his ass in a briefcase.
As I said, there are no Wilford Brimleys in Washington.
But the American public is there and most people know the difference between shit and Shinola.
Last summer, the Bezos Post reported, “Nearly 6 in 10 Americans think that the investigations into Trump are an effort to keep him from winning the White House next year. Trump argues that he’s being indicted because his opponents want to punish his supporters; half of Republicans think that the probes are ‘an attack on people like me.’”
That poll was taken weeks before the Mugshot Seen ’Round The World.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/trump-triumphing-over-evil?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
39
Politics & Religion / The Sheer Weight of Slime
« on: May 08, 2024, 08:59:00 AM »
A fine survery of the sundry lawfare tendrils Trump is enduring:
America is On Trial, and Amerika is Too
A guilty verdict for one, is a guilt verdict for the other
JUPPLANDIA
MAY 08, 2024
It’s easy to get bored of talking (or even reading) about the Trump trials.
And it’s easy to get lost in how much there is to say. The sheer weight of the thing. The size of it. The number of charges. The number of crimes (by which I mean both the number of ‘crimes’ which don’t apply but which Trump is charged with, and the number of actual crimes committed by those bringing these cases against him).
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But I think its important to still give a summary of what those cases are. I’ll explain why after the summary.
First there were the E. Jean Carroll civil cases, in which an eccentric Democrat columnist fantasized about an imaginary sexual assault for which she could provide no evidence and which was supposed to have occurred decades earlier, and was then funded by a major Democrat donor to bring cases in a Democrat city before Democrat judges and juries to decide whether a Republican was guilty of this crime for which no evidence existed. This was the one that decided that the statute of limitations no longer applies when Democrats decide it doesn’t apply, and that crimes can be proven without the existence of any proof.
Both of these were important principles to establish for the other cases to be able to proceed.
In a surprising twist, Democrat Judge Kaplan allowed a Manhattan Democrat jury to find Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation. In a following ruling he decided that Trump had defamed E. Jean Carroll by pointing out that she is a liar, and in a further surprise a Democrat jury then decided that Trump should pay a total of 83.3 million dollars to the woman who lied about him for the crime of calling her a liar.
Now apparently settled with another enormous fine (Trump has agreed to pay 175 million dollars, reduced from the original theft of 350 million) was the New York civil case (the Real Estate Fraud Case) prosecuted by Letitia James and presided over by Judge Engoron. This was the one that saw a Judge with an established hatred of Trump rule that expert testimony regarding real estate valuation could be dismissed with a judicial slander of the witness, that normal business practice in real estate is fraud when conducted by Donald Trump, and that fraud can still be present when the supposedly defrauded ‘victims’ all state that no fraud occurred.
Following that there’s the Documents Case, that Jack Smith is prosecuting and that Judge Cannon is presiding over. (“On June 8, 2023, former President Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta were indicted by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida on charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. A superseding indictment was unsealed on July 27, 2023, which charged an additional defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, and included three additional charges against Trump of evidence tampering, willfully retaining national defense information, and lying to investigators”).
Judge Cannon stands out as pretty much the only judge overseeing these cases who wasn’t a Democrat pick (McAfee was appointed by Kemp, but doesn’t seem to be a declared Republican. If he is, its from the same RINO wing that went along with Trump’s impeachments), and entirely coincidentally of course this is the case where it has already been established in court that the FBI investigators tampered with the key evidence and that the Democrat prosecutors lied to the judge. During the unprecedented FBI raid that acquired the ‘evidence’ for this case, the FBI took it upon themselves to spread documents around on the floor before taking ‘incriminating’ pictures of them (On June 9th, 2023 Trump posted on Truth Social that the scattered files had been “staged” by the FBI. As usual, he was right). Those pictures were publicly released (who does that with real evidence in a real case?) to justify the raid.
To make those pictures just how they wanted them, they attached confidential, top secret sheets to the documents, which they had created. They have now had to admit that they did this, and that when the prosecution told Judge Cannon that the documents being used as evidence were in the condition they were found in, this was a lie. Scans of the contents and the current contents do not match. There is in fact therefore no way to prove that the documents haven’t been more thoroughly tampered with, just as if seized drugs used as evidence had been handled and moved around by unrecorded agents instead of stored, unchanged, in an evidence locker where every interaction with them is recorded. On top of that, the documents may come from a batch of documents (SIX pallet loads) that Trump and his assistants were forced to take by repeated demands to do so (from General Services Administration).
There’s also the Hush Money Case relating to Stormy Daniels, prosecuted by Alvin Bragg which Judge Merchan is presiding over. (“The indictment includes 34 counts of felony falsification of business records primarily related to the alleged hush money payments”). Judge Merchan is, and hold your surprise on this one, a Democrat judge with an established hatred of Trump.
Next there’s the Jan 6th Conspiracy Case, which includes 2 counts of obstruction and 2 of criminal conspiracy based on the idea that Trump encouraged Jan 6th and plotted to overturn a legitimate result. That one is the one where the Supreme Court is now pondering the issue of Presidential immunity, but the original case was again prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith and is presided over by Judge Chutkan.
Finally, of the major cases still active there is the Fulton County, Georgia case (the RICO Conspiracy Case) which is prosecuted by Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis and presided over by Judge McAfee. This is the one that casts all of the efforts to acknowledge massive electoral fraud as a series of criminal racketeering acts under legislation designed for the prosecution of organised crime syndicates. The counts include things like deciding that a President or members of his administration questioning fraud is guilty of the crime of impersonating a public official. This was also the case in which we found out that the prosecutor hired her boyfriend on a very generous publicly funded salary to work on the case and also enjoyed romantic trips with him before lying about the nature of their relationship.
If you want excellent commentary on these cases individually or collectively, Julie Kelly has been providing this, in detail, on her Substack. If you want a summary of them all with links to mainstream media articles (for what that is worth, if anything…it at least shows us what insane justifications they are constructing) then the Lawfare website (at lawfaremedia.org>current-projects>the-trump-trials) provides an incredibly helpful listing of all of them.
So why should we still be talking about these cases, why should we still be interested? Half of them are mired in legal back and forth and are subject to long delays. One is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity.
One of the things I’ve noticed when discussing any of the real crimes occurring at present is how the sheer magnitude of what is being done sometimes makes addressing it difficult. Let’s say our subject is the dishonesty of the mainsteam media in relation to Trump. Where do we start? Do we talk about the way they pressed Russian collusion for years? Do we talk about that? But then that leads us into related facts, like John Brennan presenting Obama in a meeting with the knowledge that this collusion narrative was a fiction invented by a probable Russian agent working for Hilary Clinton. That then evokes the memory of over 50 intelligence agents lying about Russian collusion as well in a public statement.
Or do we talk about how ‘drink bleach’ and ‘there are good Nazis’ were both lies presented as confirmed truths by the mainstream media?
Or are we then led into a wider discussion of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ and how none of the people deploying these terms are themselves truthful? Do we mention the suppression of Lab Leak during Covid, or science advisors distorting the evidence being presented to Trump and then boasting about it in their books?
With the ‘lawfare’ being conducted at present, which one of the 91 charges do we talk about first? If we want to show prosecutorial and judicial malpractice, we are overly spoilt for choice. No one article is going to be able to cover how much of a crook Jack Smith is, let alone Smith, Willis and Bragg together with Engoron, Chutkan and Merchan as a group. Every one of these people are people who should be recused from involvement in cases regarding a political opponent they personally detest. In each and every case there is boundless evidence of conflicts of interest from those bringing and hearing the cases, ones which make the very idea that the process we are witnessing is ‘justice’ obscenely laughable.
How can a judge fairly preside over the case of a person they hate with every fiber of their being, a person they hate more personally and deeply than they ever hate drug dealers, rapists or child abusers appearing in court before them?
How can a prosecutor be allowed to bring cases against political opponents when they have campaigned on the basis of getting that person, by ANY means, when they have publicly made that declaration as part of their own political promise?
How on Earth is anyone supposed to pretend that such a political promise, when it manifests as a legal reality, is a legitimate response to a real crime,rather than a purely political witch hunt? Of course it is a purely political witch hunt….it was a campaign pledge!
How is any of this allowed to go this far, when at every stage the basic legal requirements of any approach towards actual justice are being deliberately and continuously set aside?
Freedom from unjust, politically motivated fines and punishments, and from cruel and unusual treatment? Set aside.
The requirement that there be some actual, untampered with, legitimate evidence on which a case comes to trial? Set aside.
The statute of limitations and its role protecting people from baseless accusations brought forward years after all evidence has vanished? Set aside.
The right to an unbiased jury, selected without political intent, in a place where justice is at least a possibility? Set aside.
Client attorney privilege? Set aside.
Freedom of speech and the right to defend oneself against accusers, including the right to point out their connections and conflicts of interest? Set aside by gagging orders.
The Presidential Records Act and all prior precedent on the treatment of former Presidents relating to documents? Set aside.
The actual purpose of the legislation you are using, like the RICO Act? Set aside.
The right to expect that the statutes used against you are being used as they have always been used, rather than that they are twisted into entirely novel interpretations with no basis in law? Set aside.
The expectation of equality before the law, and that the same actions require the same responses and the same justice? Set aside.
The difference between a misdemeanor and a felony? Set aside.
The need to prove an underlying crime and announce what crime is actually being responded to in order to change an accounting error into a felony ? Set aside.
How do you take the documents case seriously, for example, when Joe Biden can take documents as Vice President he had no right to take, leave them in his car or scattered around multiple locations,unprotected and unsecured, for years, and at the same time that Jack Smith is prosecuting Trump, Joe Biden gets a free pass on that? And Mike Pence does too? And Bill Clinton did? No amount of mainstream media MSNBC articles beginning ‘No, These Cases Aren’t the Same’ excuses that double standard away.
How do you take fraud cases based on two words in a private ledger seriously, when the prosecution won’t tell you or the judge what the actual crime is?
So where do you start with all this, where do you end?
Well, in a way, it is better to talk about the generality than the specifics, not because the details favor the other side, but because there are a million details that do not. There is too much criminality, selectivity, hypocrisy and outright tyranny in the process to ever be able to mention it all.
And the generality is that all of this only occurs in a system that is already utterly corrupt. It’s tempting to say broken, but that’s not accurate. It’s doing what it now exists to do, which is enforce a regime and crush all opposition to the regime. Those holding the levers of power are directing it this way, on this path. This is where they want to go.
The form of a US justice system still exists. It’s simply that all the justice has been removed from it.
Yes, Donald Trump is on trial. But that’s not really the big picture, as unjust and as disgusting as this treatment of Trump undoubtedly is.
America itself is on trial. The old America is on trial. The America of equal justice, and the America of decent values, and the America of any hope at all that any part of this nation remains a shining dream instead of a soiled nightmare.
And Amerika is on trial too. The Amerika of the regime, the Amerika of the nightmare. The Amerika that acts like a banana republic, the Amerika of One Party Rule, the Amerika where one side of politics and its supporters stole an election, imprisoned protesters and dissidents without trial and finally made questioning electoral theft a new crime with which to imprison the old President it removed.
There are two nations on the same soil, and neither can abide the other.
The verdict against Trump will be the verdict on both of them. Is it a place of equal justice where people have the right to vote for the candidate and policies they want? Or is it going to be, for a long time to come, a tyranny where all the Third World rules apply? That’s already not being decided by an election, even a rigged one. It’s being decided in court.
If Trump wins, America wins. If Amerika wins, Trump has lost.
But so has America. At that point, it will have lost just about everything that made it America in the first place.
https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/america-is-on-trial-and-amerika-is?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
America is On Trial, and Amerika is Too
A guilty verdict for one, is a guilt verdict for the other
JUPPLANDIA
MAY 08, 2024
It’s easy to get bored of talking (or even reading) about the Trump trials.
And it’s easy to get lost in how much there is to say. The sheer weight of the thing. The size of it. The number of charges. The number of crimes (by which I mean both the number of ‘crimes’ which don’t apply but which Trump is charged with, and the number of actual crimes committed by those bringing these cases against him).
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But I think its important to still give a summary of what those cases are. I’ll explain why after the summary.
First there were the E. Jean Carroll civil cases, in which an eccentric Democrat columnist fantasized about an imaginary sexual assault for which she could provide no evidence and which was supposed to have occurred decades earlier, and was then funded by a major Democrat donor to bring cases in a Democrat city before Democrat judges and juries to decide whether a Republican was guilty of this crime for which no evidence existed. This was the one that decided that the statute of limitations no longer applies when Democrats decide it doesn’t apply, and that crimes can be proven without the existence of any proof.
Both of these were important principles to establish for the other cases to be able to proceed.
In a surprising twist, Democrat Judge Kaplan allowed a Manhattan Democrat jury to find Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation. In a following ruling he decided that Trump had defamed E. Jean Carroll by pointing out that she is a liar, and in a further surprise a Democrat jury then decided that Trump should pay a total of 83.3 million dollars to the woman who lied about him for the crime of calling her a liar.
Now apparently settled with another enormous fine (Trump has agreed to pay 175 million dollars, reduced from the original theft of 350 million) was the New York civil case (the Real Estate Fraud Case) prosecuted by Letitia James and presided over by Judge Engoron. This was the one that saw a Judge with an established hatred of Trump rule that expert testimony regarding real estate valuation could be dismissed with a judicial slander of the witness, that normal business practice in real estate is fraud when conducted by Donald Trump, and that fraud can still be present when the supposedly defrauded ‘victims’ all state that no fraud occurred.
Following that there’s the Documents Case, that Jack Smith is prosecuting and that Judge Cannon is presiding over. (“On June 8, 2023, former President Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta were indicted by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida on charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. A superseding indictment was unsealed on July 27, 2023, which charged an additional defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, and included three additional charges against Trump of evidence tampering, willfully retaining national defense information, and lying to investigators”).
Judge Cannon stands out as pretty much the only judge overseeing these cases who wasn’t a Democrat pick (McAfee was appointed by Kemp, but doesn’t seem to be a declared Republican. If he is, its from the same RINO wing that went along with Trump’s impeachments), and entirely coincidentally of course this is the case where it has already been established in court that the FBI investigators tampered with the key evidence and that the Democrat prosecutors lied to the judge. During the unprecedented FBI raid that acquired the ‘evidence’ for this case, the FBI took it upon themselves to spread documents around on the floor before taking ‘incriminating’ pictures of them (On June 9th, 2023 Trump posted on Truth Social that the scattered files had been “staged” by the FBI. As usual, he was right). Those pictures were publicly released (who does that with real evidence in a real case?) to justify the raid.
To make those pictures just how they wanted them, they attached confidential, top secret sheets to the documents, which they had created. They have now had to admit that they did this, and that when the prosecution told Judge Cannon that the documents being used as evidence were in the condition they were found in, this was a lie. Scans of the contents and the current contents do not match. There is in fact therefore no way to prove that the documents haven’t been more thoroughly tampered with, just as if seized drugs used as evidence had been handled and moved around by unrecorded agents instead of stored, unchanged, in an evidence locker where every interaction with them is recorded. On top of that, the documents may come from a batch of documents (SIX pallet loads) that Trump and his assistants were forced to take by repeated demands to do so (from General Services Administration).
There’s also the Hush Money Case relating to Stormy Daniels, prosecuted by Alvin Bragg which Judge Merchan is presiding over. (“The indictment includes 34 counts of felony falsification of business records primarily related to the alleged hush money payments”). Judge Merchan is, and hold your surprise on this one, a Democrat judge with an established hatred of Trump.
Next there’s the Jan 6th Conspiracy Case, which includes 2 counts of obstruction and 2 of criminal conspiracy based on the idea that Trump encouraged Jan 6th and plotted to overturn a legitimate result. That one is the one where the Supreme Court is now pondering the issue of Presidential immunity, but the original case was again prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith and is presided over by Judge Chutkan.
Finally, of the major cases still active there is the Fulton County, Georgia case (the RICO Conspiracy Case) which is prosecuted by Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis and presided over by Judge McAfee. This is the one that casts all of the efforts to acknowledge massive electoral fraud as a series of criminal racketeering acts under legislation designed for the prosecution of organised crime syndicates. The counts include things like deciding that a President or members of his administration questioning fraud is guilty of the crime of impersonating a public official. This was also the case in which we found out that the prosecutor hired her boyfriend on a very generous publicly funded salary to work on the case and also enjoyed romantic trips with him before lying about the nature of their relationship.
If you want excellent commentary on these cases individually or collectively, Julie Kelly has been providing this, in detail, on her Substack. If you want a summary of them all with links to mainstream media articles (for what that is worth, if anything…it at least shows us what insane justifications they are constructing) then the Lawfare website (at lawfaremedia.org>current-projects>the-trump-trials) provides an incredibly helpful listing of all of them.
So why should we still be talking about these cases, why should we still be interested? Half of them are mired in legal back and forth and are subject to long delays. One is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity.
One of the things I’ve noticed when discussing any of the real crimes occurring at present is how the sheer magnitude of what is being done sometimes makes addressing it difficult. Let’s say our subject is the dishonesty of the mainsteam media in relation to Trump. Where do we start? Do we talk about the way they pressed Russian collusion for years? Do we talk about that? But then that leads us into related facts, like John Brennan presenting Obama in a meeting with the knowledge that this collusion narrative was a fiction invented by a probable Russian agent working for Hilary Clinton. That then evokes the memory of over 50 intelligence agents lying about Russian collusion as well in a public statement.
Or do we talk about how ‘drink bleach’ and ‘there are good Nazis’ were both lies presented as confirmed truths by the mainstream media?
Or are we then led into a wider discussion of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ and how none of the people deploying these terms are themselves truthful? Do we mention the suppression of Lab Leak during Covid, or science advisors distorting the evidence being presented to Trump and then boasting about it in their books?
With the ‘lawfare’ being conducted at present, which one of the 91 charges do we talk about first? If we want to show prosecutorial and judicial malpractice, we are overly spoilt for choice. No one article is going to be able to cover how much of a crook Jack Smith is, let alone Smith, Willis and Bragg together with Engoron, Chutkan and Merchan as a group. Every one of these people are people who should be recused from involvement in cases regarding a political opponent they personally detest. In each and every case there is boundless evidence of conflicts of interest from those bringing and hearing the cases, ones which make the very idea that the process we are witnessing is ‘justice’ obscenely laughable.
How can a judge fairly preside over the case of a person they hate with every fiber of their being, a person they hate more personally and deeply than they ever hate drug dealers, rapists or child abusers appearing in court before them?
How can a prosecutor be allowed to bring cases against political opponents when they have campaigned on the basis of getting that person, by ANY means, when they have publicly made that declaration as part of their own political promise?
How on Earth is anyone supposed to pretend that such a political promise, when it manifests as a legal reality, is a legitimate response to a real crime,rather than a purely political witch hunt? Of course it is a purely political witch hunt….it was a campaign pledge!
How is any of this allowed to go this far, when at every stage the basic legal requirements of any approach towards actual justice are being deliberately and continuously set aside?
Freedom from unjust, politically motivated fines and punishments, and from cruel and unusual treatment? Set aside.
The requirement that there be some actual, untampered with, legitimate evidence on which a case comes to trial? Set aside.
The statute of limitations and its role protecting people from baseless accusations brought forward years after all evidence has vanished? Set aside.
The right to an unbiased jury, selected without political intent, in a place where justice is at least a possibility? Set aside.
Client attorney privilege? Set aside.
Freedom of speech and the right to defend oneself against accusers, including the right to point out their connections and conflicts of interest? Set aside by gagging orders.
The Presidential Records Act and all prior precedent on the treatment of former Presidents relating to documents? Set aside.
The actual purpose of the legislation you are using, like the RICO Act? Set aside.
The right to expect that the statutes used against you are being used as they have always been used, rather than that they are twisted into entirely novel interpretations with no basis in law? Set aside.
The expectation of equality before the law, and that the same actions require the same responses and the same justice? Set aside.
The difference between a misdemeanor and a felony? Set aside.
The need to prove an underlying crime and announce what crime is actually being responded to in order to change an accounting error into a felony ? Set aside.
How do you take the documents case seriously, for example, when Joe Biden can take documents as Vice President he had no right to take, leave them in his car or scattered around multiple locations,unprotected and unsecured, for years, and at the same time that Jack Smith is prosecuting Trump, Joe Biden gets a free pass on that? And Mike Pence does too? And Bill Clinton did? No amount of mainstream media MSNBC articles beginning ‘No, These Cases Aren’t the Same’ excuses that double standard away.
How do you take fraud cases based on two words in a private ledger seriously, when the prosecution won’t tell you or the judge what the actual crime is?
So where do you start with all this, where do you end?
Well, in a way, it is better to talk about the generality than the specifics, not because the details favor the other side, but because there are a million details that do not. There is too much criminality, selectivity, hypocrisy and outright tyranny in the process to ever be able to mention it all.
And the generality is that all of this only occurs in a system that is already utterly corrupt. It’s tempting to say broken, but that’s not accurate. It’s doing what it now exists to do, which is enforce a regime and crush all opposition to the regime. Those holding the levers of power are directing it this way, on this path. This is where they want to go.
The form of a US justice system still exists. It’s simply that all the justice has been removed from it.
Yes, Donald Trump is on trial. But that’s not really the big picture, as unjust and as disgusting as this treatment of Trump undoubtedly is.
America itself is on trial. The old America is on trial. The America of equal justice, and the America of decent values, and the America of any hope at all that any part of this nation remains a shining dream instead of a soiled nightmare.
And Amerika is on trial too. The Amerika of the regime, the Amerika of the nightmare. The Amerika that acts like a banana republic, the Amerika of One Party Rule, the Amerika where one side of politics and its supporters stole an election, imprisoned protesters and dissidents without trial and finally made questioning electoral theft a new crime with which to imprison the old President it removed.
There are two nations on the same soil, and neither can abide the other.
The verdict against Trump will be the verdict on both of them. Is it a place of equal justice where people have the right to vote for the candidate and policies they want? Or is it going to be, for a long time to come, a tyranny where all the Third World rules apply? That’s already not being decided by an election, even a rigged one. It’s being decided in court.
If Trump wins, America wins. If Amerika wins, Trump has lost.
But so has America. At that point, it will have lost just about everything that made it America in the first place.
https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/america-is-on-trial-and-amerika-is?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
40
Politics & Religion / FBI Provides Props for Trump Raid
« on: May 08, 2024, 06:37:04 AM »
Second post.
So it turns out the "Top Secret" coversheets shown if a lot of the Mar El Lago raid pics shared with the press--and which "Progressives" extrapolated by suggesting nuclear codes and similar were found on site--were brought to the scene by the FBI. But hey, what's a little stage management between what clearly has morphed into a political foe?
https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/08/fbi-admits-to-bringing-props-to-stage-crime-scene-photos-at-mar-a-lago/
So it turns out the "Top Secret" coversheets shown if a lot of the Mar El Lago raid pics shared with the press--and which "Progressives" extrapolated by suggesting nuclear codes and similar were found on site--were brought to the scene by the FBI. But hey, what's a little stage management between what clearly has morphed into a political foe?
https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/08/fbi-admits-to-bringing-props-to-stage-crime-scene-photos-at-mar-a-lago/
41
Politics & Religion / FBI: Purveying Falsehoods, Concealing Truths?
« on: May 08, 2024, 06:29:34 AM »42
Politics & Religion / A Delicious Melange:
« on: May 07, 2024, 11:47:27 AM »
This could be unpacked and posted under several different topics, but as I’m dashing around at semester’s end I’m too lazy to do so. Hence it all gets dropped here:
Politics Post Dobbs; ESG Beats Up Boeing; & EVs in a Death Spiral.
THE PIPELINE
MAY 07, 2024
Enemies of the People: Minouche Shafik
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh tackles the present state of abortion politics.
On Abortion, Take the Win and Move On
In Hollywood, there's an unwritten writers' rule that when you've sold the project "in the room," get up and leave before the execs change their minds. Similarly, a good field commander knows that when you've won the local engagement, stop fighting and transfer your energies and forces to another spot on the battlefield where the conflict is still raging. In other words, once the immediate battle has been won, move on to a different front.
With its Dobbs V. Jackson decision in June 2022, the Supreme Court did two things that ought to have appeased the Right: in the matter of abortion, it overturned its Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 and it upheld the constitutional structure of federalism. And yet for some in the Stupid Party, that's not good enough. Which delights the Democrats who, saddled with Joe Biden, are desperately seeking an issue around which to rally their troops this fall.
That Roe was wrongly decided had long been a cardinal belief on the Right, both as a matter of law and of principle; Roe was promulgated during the Warren Burger court, and the gaseous, soft-headed opinion (which built on the "emanations" and "penumbras" cited in Earl Warren court's 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which had to do with contraception) was written by the other member of the "Minnesota twins," Harry Blackmun. It was absurd on its face, and it handed a destructive social-policy win to the Left, whose totalitarian impulse is always to nationalize every issue and, literally, make everything a federal case. Having made "states' rights" into a phrase of obloquy by attaching it to even the principled opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they proceeded to do the same with abortion, pivoting from "abortion advocacy" to "a woman's right to choose" and thus laying the onus on those who opposed baby murder.
Still, there was the matter of the pesky Tenth Amendment, the last of the Bill of Rights, which reads in plain English: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” And nowhere in the constitution was to be found the word "abortion." Accordingly, the practice had been left up to the several states, which could either outlaw it completely or extend it to the moment of birth, as they chose. The Left, however, is never content to live and let die when it can force its desires on the entire body politic, and so the battle was fought for nearly half a century. And then, suddenly, it was won.
A smart political party would celebrate its win and move on. But no: malcontents on the Right… immediately began pushing to severely restrict the practice nationally.
Joan Sammon wrote about one company which has been ravaged by ESG.
Boeing: From Aviation Excellence to ESG Disaster
Since late January much has been discovered about Boeing Corporation in the wake of a near mid-air catastrophe at 16,000 feet when a panel, known as, the left, mid-exit door plug, blew off an Alaska Airlines 737-Max 9 aircraft. The dramatic event has been punctuated by revelations by multiple whistleblowers describing failed quality-control processes, documentation inconsistencies, petty bosses, and an adherence to prescriptive management tactics that flowed from the corporate board and C-suite.
The disastrous list of failures offers a prescient example of how influences from outside a company and even from outside an industry can distract a board and C-suite from its core business and cause irreparable damage. The accounts reveal how the decisions of three decades ago have intersected with the decisions of three years ago, leaving in their wake the death of innocent people, the stench of mediocrity, and a litany of leadership lessons from which other corporate leaders can learn.
In the days following the January door plug blow out, a post appeared on an aviation blog written by an anonymous, purported current employee. The author flatly asserted that four bolts that were supposed to hold the door plug in place were "…not installed when Boeing delivered the plane [to Alaska Airlines], our own records reflect this." The whistleblower further described the Renton, Washington-based 737 production system as a “…rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen” -- even asserting specific details about the exact plane that lost the door plug mid-air.
This check job [of the door plug] was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH [right hand] side door, not the LH [left hand] that actually failed. …it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did.
While the account is stunning on its face, it aligns with similar details revealed in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by former Boeing employee John Barnett about the 787 program in South Carolina. Details of that complaint describe a similar fundamental shift away from the two factors that had made the Boeing brand an industry leader -- precision engineering and quality manufacturing. The suit describes a contentious work environment that fostered speed over quality. It describes how managers worked to force out senior employees who remembered the higher standards and Boeing’s brand promise of decades ago.
Barnett ended up dying from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, after day two of what was supposed to be three days of testimony about what he allegedly knew about the Boeing failures, and what he had done to try to correct or effect the defective manufacturing processes. Barnett's curiously timed death is considered by family, friends and his attorneys to be suspicious.
But for many, the issues revealed by whistleblowers and Boeing clients and their passengers earlier this year are not new. The C-Suite and board’s emphasis on cost-cutting, its inappropriate regulatory relationships, influences by activist organizations regarding ideological themes, and a disregard for safety were revealed during the lead up and in the aftermath of tragedy that in late 2018 and 2019 led to two fatal crashes-- killing a combined 346 people. In those cases, it was the decision by Boeing to use Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS without communicating its existence to airline customers and their pilots, that led to those crashes.
Buck Throckmorton wrote about EV companies entering the death spiral.
EVs Enter the Doom Loop
The irrational exuberance of the electric vehicle bubble is reaching its denouement, as legacy automakers are backing off of their previously ambitious EV sales and production goals, proposed new EV manufacturing plants are being suspended, and lithium battery manufacturing operations are laying off workers.
There is an almost predictable storyline in how these ventures have played out, which is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of a quarter-century ago, except that the dot-com bubble wasn’t suffused in eco-virtuousness nor did the companies of its era receive such heavy public subsidization before going bust.
The typical boom-to-bust storyline of companies in the EV-era starts with the much-hyped announcement of a “transformational” new manufacturing operation that will be built, bringing hundreds (or thousands) of environmentally responsible jobs, generously funded with federal and state incentive dollars, to produce something that will satisfy the imminent demand for a product (EVs) that actually has no history of consumer demand.
Politicians then proudly pose for photo ops with the enviro-hustlers to whom they are handing out tax dollars. The company also goes public, and despite a lack of profit or meaningful revenue, its stock price soars. As product demand fails to develop, the company continues to produce press releases promising fabulous things to come, which credulous media sources breathlessly republish as news. But the lack of revenue and cash flow ultimately catch up with the company; promised expansions are canceled; the stock price collapses; and the story ends with the promised plant either closing or never getting built in the first place.
Jack Dunphy evaluated the mismanaged response to the protests at UCLA.
On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence
Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.
But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.
A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?
Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.
In the small hours of yesterday morning, police officers at last routed the motley rabble of such people who had been occupying the main quad on the campus at UCLA, arresting more than 200 of them and scattering the rest. Left behind were tons of assorted garbage and graffiti covering some of the school’s most iconic buildings.
UCLA administrators had taken a hands-off approach to the encampment for days, this despite the fact that some of the occupiers had taken it upon themselves to limit access to one of the school’s main libraries as final exams were drawing near. A request sent out days earlier to other University of California campuses for additional police officers was withdrawn, leaving the 65-man UCLA P.D. to cope with what was clearly an escalating problem.
Late on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, counter-protesters arrived on campus, apparently compelled to action in the absence of legitimate authority. They brawled with the occupiers for hours until a sufficient number of officers from the LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and the California Highway Patrol could be assembled and restore order.
It need not have come to this.
And Tom Finnerty blogged about a Climate Discussion Nexus video examining the environmentalist claims about rising sea levels around the globe.
Are Sea Levels Rising, or Are Cities Sinking?
https://thisweekatthepipeline.substack.com/p/politics-post-dobbs-esg-beats-up?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=19pel1&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Politics Post Dobbs; ESG Beats Up Boeing; & EVs in a Death Spiral.
THE PIPELINE
MAY 07, 2024
Enemies of the People: Minouche Shafik
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh tackles the present state of abortion politics.
On Abortion, Take the Win and Move On
In Hollywood, there's an unwritten writers' rule that when you've sold the project "in the room," get up and leave before the execs change their minds. Similarly, a good field commander knows that when you've won the local engagement, stop fighting and transfer your energies and forces to another spot on the battlefield where the conflict is still raging. In other words, once the immediate battle has been won, move on to a different front.
With its Dobbs V. Jackson decision in June 2022, the Supreme Court did two things that ought to have appeased the Right: in the matter of abortion, it overturned its Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 and it upheld the constitutional structure of federalism. And yet for some in the Stupid Party, that's not good enough. Which delights the Democrats who, saddled with Joe Biden, are desperately seeking an issue around which to rally their troops this fall.
That Roe was wrongly decided had long been a cardinal belief on the Right, both as a matter of law and of principle; Roe was promulgated during the Warren Burger court, and the gaseous, soft-headed opinion (which built on the "emanations" and "penumbras" cited in Earl Warren court's 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which had to do with contraception) was written by the other member of the "Minnesota twins," Harry Blackmun. It was absurd on its face, and it handed a destructive social-policy win to the Left, whose totalitarian impulse is always to nationalize every issue and, literally, make everything a federal case. Having made "states' rights" into a phrase of obloquy by attaching it to even the principled opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they proceeded to do the same with abortion, pivoting from "abortion advocacy" to "a woman's right to choose" and thus laying the onus on those who opposed baby murder.
Still, there was the matter of the pesky Tenth Amendment, the last of the Bill of Rights, which reads in plain English: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” And nowhere in the constitution was to be found the word "abortion." Accordingly, the practice had been left up to the several states, which could either outlaw it completely or extend it to the moment of birth, as they chose. The Left, however, is never content to live and let die when it can force its desires on the entire body politic, and so the battle was fought for nearly half a century. And then, suddenly, it was won.
A smart political party would celebrate its win and move on. But no: malcontents on the Right… immediately began pushing to severely restrict the practice nationally.
Joan Sammon wrote about one company which has been ravaged by ESG.
Boeing: From Aviation Excellence to ESG Disaster
Since late January much has been discovered about Boeing Corporation in the wake of a near mid-air catastrophe at 16,000 feet when a panel, known as, the left, mid-exit door plug, blew off an Alaska Airlines 737-Max 9 aircraft. The dramatic event has been punctuated by revelations by multiple whistleblowers describing failed quality-control processes, documentation inconsistencies, petty bosses, and an adherence to prescriptive management tactics that flowed from the corporate board and C-suite.
The disastrous list of failures offers a prescient example of how influences from outside a company and even from outside an industry can distract a board and C-suite from its core business and cause irreparable damage. The accounts reveal how the decisions of three decades ago have intersected with the decisions of three years ago, leaving in their wake the death of innocent people, the stench of mediocrity, and a litany of leadership lessons from which other corporate leaders can learn.
In the days following the January door plug blow out, a post appeared on an aviation blog written by an anonymous, purported current employee. The author flatly asserted that four bolts that were supposed to hold the door plug in place were "…not installed when Boeing delivered the plane [to Alaska Airlines], our own records reflect this." The whistleblower further described the Renton, Washington-based 737 production system as a “…rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen” -- even asserting specific details about the exact plane that lost the door plug mid-air.
This check job [of the door plug] was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH [right hand] side door, not the LH [left hand] that actually failed. …it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did.
While the account is stunning on its face, it aligns with similar details revealed in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by former Boeing employee John Barnett about the 787 program in South Carolina. Details of that complaint describe a similar fundamental shift away from the two factors that had made the Boeing brand an industry leader -- precision engineering and quality manufacturing. The suit describes a contentious work environment that fostered speed over quality. It describes how managers worked to force out senior employees who remembered the higher standards and Boeing’s brand promise of decades ago.
Barnett ended up dying from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, after day two of what was supposed to be three days of testimony about what he allegedly knew about the Boeing failures, and what he had done to try to correct or effect the defective manufacturing processes. Barnett's curiously timed death is considered by family, friends and his attorneys to be suspicious.
But for many, the issues revealed by whistleblowers and Boeing clients and their passengers earlier this year are not new. The C-Suite and board’s emphasis on cost-cutting, its inappropriate regulatory relationships, influences by activist organizations regarding ideological themes, and a disregard for safety were revealed during the lead up and in the aftermath of tragedy that in late 2018 and 2019 led to two fatal crashes-- killing a combined 346 people. In those cases, it was the decision by Boeing to use Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS without communicating its existence to airline customers and their pilots, that led to those crashes.
Buck Throckmorton wrote about EV companies entering the death spiral.
EVs Enter the Doom Loop
The irrational exuberance of the electric vehicle bubble is reaching its denouement, as legacy automakers are backing off of their previously ambitious EV sales and production goals, proposed new EV manufacturing plants are being suspended, and lithium battery manufacturing operations are laying off workers.
There is an almost predictable storyline in how these ventures have played out, which is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of a quarter-century ago, except that the dot-com bubble wasn’t suffused in eco-virtuousness nor did the companies of its era receive such heavy public subsidization before going bust.
The typical boom-to-bust storyline of companies in the EV-era starts with the much-hyped announcement of a “transformational” new manufacturing operation that will be built, bringing hundreds (or thousands) of environmentally responsible jobs, generously funded with federal and state incentive dollars, to produce something that will satisfy the imminent demand for a product (EVs) that actually has no history of consumer demand.
Politicians then proudly pose for photo ops with the enviro-hustlers to whom they are handing out tax dollars. The company also goes public, and despite a lack of profit or meaningful revenue, its stock price soars. As product demand fails to develop, the company continues to produce press releases promising fabulous things to come, which credulous media sources breathlessly republish as news. But the lack of revenue and cash flow ultimately catch up with the company; promised expansions are canceled; the stock price collapses; and the story ends with the promised plant either closing or never getting built in the first place.
Jack Dunphy evaluated the mismanaged response to the protests at UCLA.
On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence
Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.
But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.
A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?
Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.
In the small hours of yesterday morning, police officers at last routed the motley rabble of such people who had been occupying the main quad on the campus at UCLA, arresting more than 200 of them and scattering the rest. Left behind were tons of assorted garbage and graffiti covering some of the school’s most iconic buildings.
UCLA administrators had taken a hands-off approach to the encampment for days, this despite the fact that some of the occupiers had taken it upon themselves to limit access to one of the school’s main libraries as final exams were drawing near. A request sent out days earlier to other University of California campuses for additional police officers was withdrawn, leaving the 65-man UCLA P.D. to cope with what was clearly an escalating problem.
Late on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, counter-protesters arrived on campus, apparently compelled to action in the absence of legitimate authority. They brawled with the occupiers for hours until a sufficient number of officers from the LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and the California Highway Patrol could be assembled and restore order.
It need not have come to this.
And Tom Finnerty blogged about a Climate Discussion Nexus video examining the environmentalist claims about rising sea levels around the globe.
Are Sea Levels Rising, or Are Cities Sinking?
https://thisweekatthepipeline.substack.com/p/politics-post-dobbs-esg-beats-up?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=19pel1&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
43
Politics & Religion / Selective Law Enforcement & Campus Protests
« on: May 06, 2024, 10:13:31 PM »
Piece exploring selective enforcement of trespass and other statutes occurring on campuses currently. To my mind the most significant paragraph in the article is this final one:
From what I can gather, the problem in cities is usually not that the police department itself is unwilling to assist, but that they are under orders from the mayor, afraid of upsetting far left constituents, to stand down. This is going a bit beyond my expertise, but from what I understand the Justice Department could and should, but won't under the Biden administratio :-Dn, investigate whether these police departments are violating the terms of their federal funding, and also denying equal protection of the law, by refusing to enforce the law for ideological and political reasons. An added factor is that this lack of enforcement is to the specific detriment of Jewish students who have disproportionately faced threats, intimidation, and violence from people at the encampments.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/04/hans-bader-on-selective-law-enforcement/
From what I can gather, the problem in cities is usually not that the police department itself is unwilling to assist, but that they are under orders from the mayor, afraid of upsetting far left constituents, to stand down. This is going a bit beyond my expertise, but from what I understand the Justice Department could and should, but won't under the Biden administratio :-Dn, investigate whether these police departments are violating the terms of their federal funding, and also denying equal protection of the law, by refusing to enforce the law for ideological and political reasons. An added factor is that this lack of enforcement is to the specific detriment of Jewish students who have disproportionately faced threats, intimidation, and violence from people at the encampments.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/04/hans-bader-on-selective-law-enforcement/
44
Politics & Religion / The Falling Crime is Rising
« on: May 06, 2024, 08:29:52 PM »
Biden’s crime rate flimflam:
The State of Crime: A Steep Decline, or Another Bidenesque Wild Story?
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024
In his State of the Union address this year, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “Americans deserve the freedom to be safe, and America is safer today than when I took office,” boasting that “[l]ast year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.”
What are voters to make of this? Is it another wild story from Biden, who not too long ago implied that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea in World War II?
Crime/public safety was a top issue in the 2022 midterm elections, and it remains a key issue in the approach to this November’s elections. A Pew Research Center survey reports that six in ten U.S. adults feel reducing crime should be a political priority, and that “[c]oncerns about crime have risen somewhat in both parties since the start of Biden’s presidency. About seven-in-ten Republicans (68%) say reducing crime should be a top priority this year, up 13 points since 2021. And 47% of Democrats say the same, up 8 points since 2021.”
Several recent articles from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), an organization “dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety,” examine the state of crime and crime reporting and conclude, overall, that factors other than actual crime are giving rise to the illusion of safer streets.
Two of the articles (The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime and The Media Say Crime Is Going Down. Don’t Believe It: The decline in reported crimes is a function of less reporting, not less crime) evaluate the statistics and the efforts to reinforce Biden’s claim that violent crime is falling dramatically. A third article examines reliability and other problems with the FBI’s reporting of violent crime.
According to the CPRC, one factor contributing to the ostensible dip in violent crime is that almost 40% of local law enforcement agencies are no longer transmitting their information to the national Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database. In “2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI (including large departments for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York),” and for other jurisdictions, like Baltimore and Nashville, crimes are being underreported or undercounted. This leaves a large gap; by 2021, the real crime data collected by the FBI represented only 63% of police departments overseeing just 65% of the population. When compared to pre-2021 data, the result is a questionable “decline” in crime.
Another factor that undermines the official narrative of less crime is the degree of non-reporting or underreporting of crime by victims. Since 1973, the federal National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has bypassed police statistics and relied, instead, on interviews with a nationally representative sample of some 240,000 individuals. The information collected includes the frequency and type of crime experienced, including crimes that have not been reported to police.
The CPRC summary of NCVS data states that in 2022 (the most recent survey available), only “42% of violent crimes, such as robberies or aggravated assaults, and 32% of property crimes, such as burglary or arson, were reported [to police]… the [NCVS] shows that total violent crime—reported and nonreported—rose from 16.5 incidents to 23.5 per 1,000 people. Nonreported violent crime in 2022 exceeded the five-year average between 2015 to 2019 by more than 17%.”
To provide a somewhat broader context regarding these trends, the NCVS survey for 2015 stated that “[f]rom 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” and that in 2015, “0.98% of all persons age 12 or older (2.7 million persons) experienced at least one violent victimization.” By 2022, according to the NCVS, the violent crime rate had increased to 23.5 per 1,000, and “about 1.24% (3.5 million) of persons age 12 or older nationwide experienced at least one violent crime.”
Another indicator of crime that the CPRC examined was changes in arrest rates. As arrest rates decline, the number of crimes reported to police falls, because if “people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police.” The CPRC compared violent crime arrest rates in 2022 with arrests for such offenses over the five years before COVID-19, and found that in 2022, the arrest rate across all cities fell by 20%. Looking at major cities only (those with a population of over one million), the drop in 2022 was an even more precipitous 54%, with only 20.3% of violent crimes in such cities being cleared by arrest.
For murder and non-negligent manslaughter exclusively, arrest rates in major cities decreased from rates that had been consistently over 60% during 2015 to 2019, to 40.6% in 2022. Major cities saw similar reductions in arrests between those time periods for robberies, aggravated assaults, and rape. Robbery arrest rates dropped by over half (from over 30% in 2015-2019 to 13.1% in 2022) and aggravated assault arrests declined from a high of 54.6% in 2015 to just 23.4% in 2022. Property crime arrests mirrored the trend. “Comparing the five years from 2015-2019 to the arrest rate in 2022 shows a drop of 33% for all cities and a 63% decline for [major] cities.”
Using these arrest rates and the NCVS figure that only 42% of violent crimes were actually reported to police in 2022, the CPRC conclusions regarding crime become much more dismal. Of the 42% of actually reported crimes in 2022, only 35.2% likely resulted in an arrest, meaning that overall, only 14.6% of violent crimes result in an arrest. Applying the analysis to major cities only (using the 2022 figure of 20.3% reported violent crimes resulting in arrest), the implication is that only 8.4% of all violent crimes culminated in an arrest. “For property crimes, the numbers are even worse. With 31.8% of property crimes reported to police and only 11.9% of those reported crimes resulting in an arrest, that means that only 3.8% of all property crimes result in an arrest. For large cities with over a million people, only 1.4% of all property crimes result in an arrest.”
The last paper by the CPRC reviewed the FBI’s violent crime statistics by comparing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program (official police statistics of crimes reported to law enforcement) with the NCVS data collected by another federal agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (The agencies’ measurements overlap somewhat but are not the same; the NCVS includes, for instance, unreported crimes.)
According to the CPRC, from 2008 through 2019, the two measurements were “unrelated” (a correlation coefficient of 0.0473) but have since shifted to an almost perfectly negative (or inverse) correlation of -0.9597. While the FBI figures indicates a national drop in violent crime, the NCVS reports the opposite: “between 2021 and 2022, the FBI UCR showed reported violent crime fell by 2.1%, but the NCVS showed reported violent crime increased by 29.3%.” The evidence “indicates real problems with the FBI-reported violent crime measure and that the FBI data are extremely misleading after 2020,” and unfortunately, the mainstream media tend to rely “exclusively on FBI-reported violent crime data.”
Last week, another article, this one written by a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice, took exception to President Biden’s claims that last year, “the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.” The most recent, finalized FBI crime statistics (2022) fail to support any “record-setting decline in murder rates.” Using alternatively-available data for the half-dozen largest local law enforcement agencies for 2023, the author concludes that, while these agencies did report declines in homicides from 2022 to 2023, the declines “are nowhere near enough to compensate for the huge murder spike from 2019 to 2022. Indeed, homicides across all six agencies rose from 2019 to 2022 by a combined 46 percent.”
The outcome for overall violent crime is expected to be the same. When the “BJS publishes the 2023 NCVS early this fall, it won’t be surprising if it shows a similar trend—a reduction in urban violent crime from 2022 to 2023 that doesn’t come close to negating the 58 percent increase from 2019 to 2022. But for now, the only truly reliable national statistics [the NCVS] for making cross-year comparisons only cover through 2022. According to those numbers, America’s urban areas have collectively seen nothing but increases in violent crime since our most recent experiment in lenient law enforcement began.”
President Biden is anxious to enhance his appeal to voters by unrealistic assertions that his policies have made the country “safer today,” with the added benefit that a “safer” America justifies his delusional gun control measures. If the CPRC and others are correct, there has been no astonishing decline in homicides, or even violent crimes generally. The real declines are the worrying drop in reporting of crimes to police and the much-reduced arrest rates, without Americans actually experiencing a greater “freedom to be safe.”\
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20240506/the-state-of-crime-a-steep-decline-or-another-bidenesque-wild-story
The State of Crime: A Steep Decline, or Another Bidenesque Wild Story?
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024
In his State of the Union address this year, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “Americans deserve the freedom to be safe, and America is safer today than when I took office,” boasting that “[l]ast year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.”
What are voters to make of this? Is it another wild story from Biden, who not too long ago implied that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea in World War II?
Crime/public safety was a top issue in the 2022 midterm elections, and it remains a key issue in the approach to this November’s elections. A Pew Research Center survey reports that six in ten U.S. adults feel reducing crime should be a political priority, and that “[c]oncerns about crime have risen somewhat in both parties since the start of Biden’s presidency. About seven-in-ten Republicans (68%) say reducing crime should be a top priority this year, up 13 points since 2021. And 47% of Democrats say the same, up 8 points since 2021.”
Several recent articles from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), an organization “dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety,” examine the state of crime and crime reporting and conclude, overall, that factors other than actual crime are giving rise to the illusion of safer streets.
Two of the articles (The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime and The Media Say Crime Is Going Down. Don’t Believe It: The decline in reported crimes is a function of less reporting, not less crime) evaluate the statistics and the efforts to reinforce Biden’s claim that violent crime is falling dramatically. A third article examines reliability and other problems with the FBI’s reporting of violent crime.
According to the CPRC, one factor contributing to the ostensible dip in violent crime is that almost 40% of local law enforcement agencies are no longer transmitting their information to the national Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database. In “2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI (including large departments for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York),” and for other jurisdictions, like Baltimore and Nashville, crimes are being underreported or undercounted. This leaves a large gap; by 2021, the real crime data collected by the FBI represented only 63% of police departments overseeing just 65% of the population. When compared to pre-2021 data, the result is a questionable “decline” in crime.
Another factor that undermines the official narrative of less crime is the degree of non-reporting or underreporting of crime by victims. Since 1973, the federal National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has bypassed police statistics and relied, instead, on interviews with a nationally representative sample of some 240,000 individuals. The information collected includes the frequency and type of crime experienced, including crimes that have not been reported to police.
The CPRC summary of NCVS data states that in 2022 (the most recent survey available), only “42% of violent crimes, such as robberies or aggravated assaults, and 32% of property crimes, such as burglary or arson, were reported [to police]… the [NCVS] shows that total violent crime—reported and nonreported—rose from 16.5 incidents to 23.5 per 1,000 people. Nonreported violent crime in 2022 exceeded the five-year average between 2015 to 2019 by more than 17%.”
To provide a somewhat broader context regarding these trends, the NCVS survey for 2015 stated that “[f]rom 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” and that in 2015, “0.98% of all persons age 12 or older (2.7 million persons) experienced at least one violent victimization.” By 2022, according to the NCVS, the violent crime rate had increased to 23.5 per 1,000, and “about 1.24% (3.5 million) of persons age 12 or older nationwide experienced at least one violent crime.”
Another indicator of crime that the CPRC examined was changes in arrest rates. As arrest rates decline, the number of crimes reported to police falls, because if “people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police.” The CPRC compared violent crime arrest rates in 2022 with arrests for such offenses over the five years before COVID-19, and found that in 2022, the arrest rate across all cities fell by 20%. Looking at major cities only (those with a population of over one million), the drop in 2022 was an even more precipitous 54%, with only 20.3% of violent crimes in such cities being cleared by arrest.
For murder and non-negligent manslaughter exclusively, arrest rates in major cities decreased from rates that had been consistently over 60% during 2015 to 2019, to 40.6% in 2022. Major cities saw similar reductions in arrests between those time periods for robberies, aggravated assaults, and rape. Robbery arrest rates dropped by over half (from over 30% in 2015-2019 to 13.1% in 2022) and aggravated assault arrests declined from a high of 54.6% in 2015 to just 23.4% in 2022. Property crime arrests mirrored the trend. “Comparing the five years from 2015-2019 to the arrest rate in 2022 shows a drop of 33% for all cities and a 63% decline for [major] cities.”
Using these arrest rates and the NCVS figure that only 42% of violent crimes were actually reported to police in 2022, the CPRC conclusions regarding crime become much more dismal. Of the 42% of actually reported crimes in 2022, only 35.2% likely resulted in an arrest, meaning that overall, only 14.6% of violent crimes result in an arrest. Applying the analysis to major cities only (using the 2022 figure of 20.3% reported violent crimes resulting in arrest), the implication is that only 8.4% of all violent crimes culminated in an arrest. “For property crimes, the numbers are even worse. With 31.8% of property crimes reported to police and only 11.9% of those reported crimes resulting in an arrest, that means that only 3.8% of all property crimes result in an arrest. For large cities with over a million people, only 1.4% of all property crimes result in an arrest.”
The last paper by the CPRC reviewed the FBI’s violent crime statistics by comparing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program (official police statistics of crimes reported to law enforcement) with the NCVS data collected by another federal agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (The agencies’ measurements overlap somewhat but are not the same; the NCVS includes, for instance, unreported crimes.)
According to the CPRC, from 2008 through 2019, the two measurements were “unrelated” (a correlation coefficient of 0.0473) but have since shifted to an almost perfectly negative (or inverse) correlation of -0.9597. While the FBI figures indicates a national drop in violent crime, the NCVS reports the opposite: “between 2021 and 2022, the FBI UCR showed reported violent crime fell by 2.1%, but the NCVS showed reported violent crime increased by 29.3%.” The evidence “indicates real problems with the FBI-reported violent crime measure and that the FBI data are extremely misleading after 2020,” and unfortunately, the mainstream media tend to rely “exclusively on FBI-reported violent crime data.”
Last week, another article, this one written by a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice, took exception to President Biden’s claims that last year, “the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.” The most recent, finalized FBI crime statistics (2022) fail to support any “record-setting decline in murder rates.” Using alternatively-available data for the half-dozen largest local law enforcement agencies for 2023, the author concludes that, while these agencies did report declines in homicides from 2022 to 2023, the declines “are nowhere near enough to compensate for the huge murder spike from 2019 to 2022. Indeed, homicides across all six agencies rose from 2019 to 2022 by a combined 46 percent.”
The outcome for overall violent crime is expected to be the same. When the “BJS publishes the 2023 NCVS early this fall, it won’t be surprising if it shows a similar trend—a reduction in urban violent crime from 2022 to 2023 that doesn’t come close to negating the 58 percent increase from 2019 to 2022. But for now, the only truly reliable national statistics [the NCVS] for making cross-year comparisons only cover through 2022. According to those numbers, America’s urban areas have collectively seen nothing but increases in violent crime since our most recent experiment in lenient law enforcement began.”
President Biden is anxious to enhance his appeal to voters by unrealistic assertions that his policies have made the country “safer today,” with the added benefit that a “safer” America justifies his delusional gun control measures. If the CPRC and others are correct, there has been no astonishing decline in homicides, or even violent crimes generally. The real declines are the worrying drop in reporting of crimes to police and the much-reduced arrest rates, without Americans actually experiencing a greater “freedom to be safe.”\
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20240506/the-state-of-crime-a-steep-decline-or-another-bidenesque-wild-story
45
Politics & Religion / The Two State Solution: Minnesota & Michigan?
« on: May 06, 2024, 08:17:56 PM »
Some biting ironies herein:
President Biden just made a strong move against Israel, ordering the US government to stop shipping weapons supplies to the Israeli Defense Forces. It was his fine strategic mind at work, once again.
Usually the public defers to the president and his advisors on foreign policy, unless the issues become very prominent or the president forfeits their trust. Those are the two problems now facing the Biden administration. The war in Gaza is a major issue — and the public has zero confidence in Joe’s strategic wisdom. He lost the public’s confidence on that score after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failed attempts to appease Iran. Now, they are unlikely to defer to his judgment in distancing himself from Israel, America’s greatest ally in the region.
It’s an exaggeration to say the Biden administration is abandoning Israel outright. It isn’t. Rather, it is Joe’s latest, “on the one hand, on the other hand” policy move, and it is entangled with the riots and encampments on college campuses. A couple of weeks ago, Biden issued a brief condemnation of campus antisemitism, then remained silent as campus after campus erupted — and finally read a brief speech condemning the hatred. It was the least he could do.
Biden’s immediate goal is to put visible American pressure on Israel to stop an invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah and to squelch the prospect of resuming major military operations. Biden would like to stop them at least until the November election is over. After that, who cares?
The administration’s moves are dictated less by international strategy than by US politics. Biden fears he cannot win reelection if he loses Michigan and Minnesota, where Arab-American votes are crucial. He is also anxious about disaffected younger votes costing him other battleground states, either by voting for another candidate or not voting at all. For Biden, the “two-state solution” is less about Israel and Palestine and more about Michigan and Minnesota.
The dilemma for Biden and his party is that, when you look beyond voters under thirty and Arab Americans, the rest of the national electorate supports the Jewish state. Overwhelmingly. None of them teach anthropology at Columbia — and they are appalled by students’ open support for terrorism and the spread of vitriolic antisemitism. They are angered by administration efforts to appease students (and professional agitators) who hate Israel, openly support Hamas terrorists and have revived the old cry of defunding the police. (It’s a routine part of student demands.)
Biden already faced serious headwinds with centrist voters because of inflation, an open southern border and weak economic growth. The troubles in the Middle East and on college campuses add to those headwinds.
The dilemma for Biden is winning back those disaffected independent voters without losing those on the left. To solve it, the president has positioned himself squarely in the middle of the road, with cars and trucks whizzing past him in both directions. He ignored Margaret Thatcher’s admonition that standing in the middle of the road is where “you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” But that is exactly where Biden now stands.
It is not a happy position to be in, and neither side likes it. That opposition was clearest this weekend on the campus of the University of Alabama, where a pro-Israel, pro-America group faced off against an anti-Israel, anti-American group. In unison, both groups shouted “Fuck Joe Biden.”
He promised to bring the country together — and he has.
By
Charles Lipson
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.
https://thespectator.com/politics/joe-biden-pause-weapons-shipments-israel-misstep/
President Biden just made a strong move against Israel, ordering the US government to stop shipping weapons supplies to the Israeli Defense Forces. It was his fine strategic mind at work, once again.
Usually the public defers to the president and his advisors on foreign policy, unless the issues become very prominent or the president forfeits their trust. Those are the two problems now facing the Biden administration. The war in Gaza is a major issue — and the public has zero confidence in Joe’s strategic wisdom. He lost the public’s confidence on that score after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failed attempts to appease Iran. Now, they are unlikely to defer to his judgment in distancing himself from Israel, America’s greatest ally in the region.
It’s an exaggeration to say the Biden administration is abandoning Israel outright. It isn’t. Rather, it is Joe’s latest, “on the one hand, on the other hand” policy move, and it is entangled with the riots and encampments on college campuses. A couple of weeks ago, Biden issued a brief condemnation of campus antisemitism, then remained silent as campus after campus erupted — and finally read a brief speech condemning the hatred. It was the least he could do.
Biden’s immediate goal is to put visible American pressure on Israel to stop an invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah and to squelch the prospect of resuming major military operations. Biden would like to stop them at least until the November election is over. After that, who cares?
The administration’s moves are dictated less by international strategy than by US politics. Biden fears he cannot win reelection if he loses Michigan and Minnesota, where Arab-American votes are crucial. He is also anxious about disaffected younger votes costing him other battleground states, either by voting for another candidate or not voting at all. For Biden, the “two-state solution” is less about Israel and Palestine and more about Michigan and Minnesota.
The dilemma for Biden and his party is that, when you look beyond voters under thirty and Arab Americans, the rest of the national electorate supports the Jewish state. Overwhelmingly. None of them teach anthropology at Columbia — and they are appalled by students’ open support for terrorism and the spread of vitriolic antisemitism. They are angered by administration efforts to appease students (and professional agitators) who hate Israel, openly support Hamas terrorists and have revived the old cry of defunding the police. (It’s a routine part of student demands.)
Biden already faced serious headwinds with centrist voters because of inflation, an open southern border and weak economic growth. The troubles in the Middle East and on college campuses add to those headwinds.
The dilemma for Biden is winning back those disaffected independent voters without losing those on the left. To solve it, the president has positioned himself squarely in the middle of the road, with cars and trucks whizzing past him in both directions. He ignored Margaret Thatcher’s admonition that standing in the middle of the road is where “you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” But that is exactly where Biden now stands.
It is not a happy position to be in, and neither side likes it. That opposition was clearest this weekend on the campus of the University of Alabama, where a pro-Israel, pro-America group faced off against an anti-Israel, anti-American group. In unison, both groups shouted “Fuck Joe Biden.”
He promised to bring the country together — and he has.
By
Charles Lipson
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.
https://thespectator.com/politics/joe-biden-pause-weapons-shipments-israel-misstep/
46
Politics & Religion / Biden v. Trump on Antisemitism
« on: May 06, 2024, 08:08:13 PM »
Not sure how Jews can vote for the Big Guy in view of contrasts such as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCfLuWMpDU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCfLuWMpDU
47
Politics & Religion / Wisco County Clerk Fired for 2020 Fraud?
« on: May 06, 2024, 08:02:56 PM »
An interesting tweet re Wisco 2020 electoral skullduggery:
https://x.com/behizytweets/status/1787530897031315682?s=61
https://x.com/behizytweets/status/1787530897031315682?s=61
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Politics & Religion / President of Hamas
« on: May 06, 2024, 07:52:00 PM »
Imagine the din if Trump’s family members were so directly connected to a terrorist regime. Actually we don’t have to imagine, having endured years of “Trump is a Russian stooge” fables:
How Hamas Bought Joe Biden
Bloodstained currency, smuggled gold bars and a $200,000 check.
On March 1, 2018, Joe Biden got a $200,000 check. The story of where that check came from involves everything from “bloodstained currency” to smuggled gold bars to ‘The Exorcist’.
But above all else it involves an enemy Muslim tyranny with ties to 9/11 and Hamas.
When I first broke the story a week before Election Day, it was about how hospital patients in smaller poorer hospitals, including one that had inspired ‘The Exorcist’, had suffered because of the corrupt greed of the Biden family. But even then there was a strange element which led to one of the key figures in the case receiving “blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden: Joe’s brother.
Four years later, in the midst of the Hamas war, the identity of the “Middle Eastern country” behind the Biden business takes on new importance because it is a state sponsor of Hamas.
And congressional investigators and investigative journalists have also traced a trail from Qatar, through James’ health care business to that $200,000 check he sent to Joe Biden.
The health care business that brought together the Biden family and an Islamic terror state had targeted stricken rural hospitals in Kentucky, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Americore’s CEO was introduced by James Biden to Joe at a fundraiser for the Beau Biden Foundation: co-chaired by Hunter Biden whose infamous laptop bore the foundation’s sticker.
James Biden allegedly promised that Joe would get behind the company, join its board and that the company’s work would even “help his brother get elected.”
“There’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open,” James promised the company.
But the money wasn’t coming in and James Biden was taking out major personal loans from the company that was supposed to be managing struggling hospitals. And with Joe out of the White House, there wasn’t going to be any government bailout of Americore any time soon.
James Biden didn’t set out to open doors in this country, but in an enemy of the United States.
The Americore pitch sought $30 million to buy up hospitals and named Jim as the “Brother and Campaign Finance Chair of former Vice President Joe Biden.” Internal documents showed that this resulted in a meeting with a Qatari “minister”. While the Qataris had plenty of money to burn, getting it to America involved conspiracies more often associated with drug dealers.
A “former executive recalled discussion at one point of trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars”.
Qatar’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of Hamas) and Iran had led to an embargo by its neighbors. And Qatar’s ties to terrorists, including to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who hid out there until he was allegedly tipped off by a member of the Islamic tyranny’s royal family that America was coming to get him, may have complicated the proposed investment funding mechanisms.
The next stage of the plan involved James Biden becoming the “chief global banking emissary” for Billerfy which processed payments for a cryptocurrency exchange known as Quadriga that traded money for crypto. Later that year, Billerfy’s accounts were frozen and millions were found in a personal account. Six days later, Quadriga’s 30-year-old CEO suddenly died in India, locking up $70 million in cash and $191 million in crypto. Another co-founder, Michael Patry, whose real name turned out to be Omar was raided and authorities discovered gold bars in a vault. The whole operation was then exposed as a massive ponzi scheme.
But by then James Biden had already benefited from $600,000 in “personal loans” from the health care company. On March 1, 2018, Americore wired $200,000 to James and he wrote a $200,000 check to Joe. But the loans, according to bankruptcy court documents were conditioned based on “representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could “obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.”
Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.
As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.
Qatar is one of the few countries with that degree of political influence in Washington D.C.
But the single most shocking document from James Biden’s relationship with Qatar may be a letter that he allegedly wrote to the Qatari leadership on “behalf of the Biden family.”
“We are not particularly close to this administration and have a different vision,” Biden’s brother wrote, accusing the Trump administration of being “fractured” and “beleaguered by major issues that are not soon to be resolved.” However he promised that the Biden “family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency.”
“If this is in keeping with the vision of His Excellency, on behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” he concluded.
Even while undermining the sitting administration, Biden’s brother was offering the services of his family to an enemy nation. This has wider implications beyond Qatar’s role backing Hamas.
Qatar was also the central intermediary in the Taliban “deal” and had formed an alliance with Iran. It is difficult to know whether the “Biden family” relationship with Qatar played any role in the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and in the sanctions relief offered to Iran.
We do know there was a relationship between the Biden family and a state sponsor of Hamas, which Joe Biden profited from, and that has disturbing implications for our national security.
“We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden,” James Biden once bragged. One of those investors had ties to Iran, Al Qaeda, Iran and Hama.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-hamas-bought-joe-biden/
How Hamas Bought Joe Biden
Bloodstained currency, smuggled gold bars and a $200,000 check.
On March 1, 2018, Joe Biden got a $200,000 check. The story of where that check came from involves everything from “bloodstained currency” to smuggled gold bars to ‘The Exorcist’.
But above all else it involves an enemy Muslim tyranny with ties to 9/11 and Hamas.
When I first broke the story a week before Election Day, it was about how hospital patients in smaller poorer hospitals, including one that had inspired ‘The Exorcist’, had suffered because of the corrupt greed of the Biden family. But even then there was a strange element which led to one of the key figures in the case receiving “blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden: Joe’s brother.
Four years later, in the midst of the Hamas war, the identity of the “Middle Eastern country” behind the Biden business takes on new importance because it is a state sponsor of Hamas.
And congressional investigators and investigative journalists have also traced a trail from Qatar, through James’ health care business to that $200,000 check he sent to Joe Biden.
The health care business that brought together the Biden family and an Islamic terror state had targeted stricken rural hospitals in Kentucky, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Americore’s CEO was introduced by James Biden to Joe at a fundraiser for the Beau Biden Foundation: co-chaired by Hunter Biden whose infamous laptop bore the foundation’s sticker.
James Biden allegedly promised that Joe would get behind the company, join its board and that the company’s work would even “help his brother get elected.”
“There’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open,” James promised the company.
But the money wasn’t coming in and James Biden was taking out major personal loans from the company that was supposed to be managing struggling hospitals. And with Joe out of the White House, there wasn’t going to be any government bailout of Americore any time soon.
James Biden didn’t set out to open doors in this country, but in an enemy of the United States.
The Americore pitch sought $30 million to buy up hospitals and named Jim as the “Brother and Campaign Finance Chair of former Vice President Joe Biden.” Internal documents showed that this resulted in a meeting with a Qatari “minister”. While the Qataris had plenty of money to burn, getting it to America involved conspiracies more often associated with drug dealers.
A “former executive recalled discussion at one point of trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars”.
Qatar’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of Hamas) and Iran had led to an embargo by its neighbors. And Qatar’s ties to terrorists, including to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who hid out there until he was allegedly tipped off by a member of the Islamic tyranny’s royal family that America was coming to get him, may have complicated the proposed investment funding mechanisms.
The next stage of the plan involved James Biden becoming the “chief global banking emissary” for Billerfy which processed payments for a cryptocurrency exchange known as Quadriga that traded money for crypto. Later that year, Billerfy’s accounts were frozen and millions were found in a personal account. Six days later, Quadriga’s 30-year-old CEO suddenly died in India, locking up $70 million in cash and $191 million in crypto. Another co-founder, Michael Patry, whose real name turned out to be Omar was raided and authorities discovered gold bars in a vault. The whole operation was then exposed as a massive ponzi scheme.
But by then James Biden had already benefited from $600,000 in “personal loans” from the health care company. On March 1, 2018, Americore wired $200,000 to James and he wrote a $200,000 check to Joe. But the loans, according to bankruptcy court documents were conditioned based on “representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could “obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.”
Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.
As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.
Qatar is one of the few countries with that degree of political influence in Washington D.C.
But the single most shocking document from James Biden’s relationship with Qatar may be a letter that he allegedly wrote to the Qatari leadership on “behalf of the Biden family.”
“We are not particularly close to this administration and have a different vision,” Biden’s brother wrote, accusing the Trump administration of being “fractured” and “beleaguered by major issues that are not soon to be resolved.” However he promised that the Biden “family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency.”
“If this is in keeping with the vision of His Excellency, on behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” he concluded.
Even while undermining the sitting administration, Biden’s brother was offering the services of his family to an enemy nation. This has wider implications beyond Qatar’s role backing Hamas.
Qatar was also the central intermediary in the Taliban “deal” and had formed an alliance with Iran. It is difficult to know whether the “Biden family” relationship with Qatar played any role in the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and in the sanctions relief offered to Iran.
We do know there was a relationship between the Biden family and a state sponsor of Hamas, which Joe Biden profited from, and that has disturbing implications for our national security.
“We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden,” James Biden once bragged. One of those investors had ties to Iran, Al Qaeda, Iran and Hama.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-hamas-bought-joe-biden/
49
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Re: Pathological Science, Unscientific American
« on: May 06, 2024, 06:59:25 PM »https://www.city-journal.org/article/unscientific-american
A great, shameful piece, Doug. Thanks for posting!
50
Politics & Religion / Those Who Calls the Tune “Progressives” Dance To
« on: May 06, 2024, 06:29:42 PM »
A fine dissection of what people and which orgs are pulling the strings in the current pro-Hamas bout of protest and associate asshattery, with that rouge’s gallery of course involved in previous BLM, defund the popo, Trump is a big meany, and similar well choreographed “Progressive” efforts:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/people-setting-america-on-fire-soros-tides-wespac
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/people-setting-america-on-fire-soros-tides-wespac