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Fani Willis, the DA who took the infamous mugshot of Trump, continues to prove herself to be one of the worst and most corrupt politicians, at least in the greater Atlanta area.

IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘Obviously Political’: WaPo Editorial Board Slams Biden’s Move To Halt Natural Gas Terminals.

AN ATLANTA LAWYER FRIEND SENDS THIS: Business Partners Of Fani Willis’ Alleged Lover Bankrolled Her Campaign. She Gave Them Lucrative Contracts.

My friend adds: “Oh, this is cascading. And I’m only sending you the stuff that’s already public. You’d be amazed what unsubstantiated rumors are flying around among the local bar.”

Well, let’s see how many of them turn out to be true.

From campus speakers to what professors can and cannot say, more speech is coming under question, according to a new survey.

In Jon Ronson’s book “Men Who Stare at Goats,” one member of a wacky new Age, unconventional warfare unit explains,  “we are trying to make the world a better place by having people jump around, screaming ‘Hoo-ah!'”

The book (and later hilarious movie) came to mind this week as various Biden Administration efforts to shape the market (and consumer choices) have collided with economic reality. President Biden looks more and more like the President who stares at goats trying to prove the power of mind over markets.

This month, the Administration has doubled down on grants for electric vehicles while pushing manufacturers to go electric. However, Ford is cutting production and laying off workers because of the lack of demand. Dealers are revolting as their lots are filling up with electric vehicles that no one wants.

This week, the Administration was embarrassed when energy developer Orsted withdrew from agreements with the State of Maryland to develop two offshore wind projects. The reason? The wind projects are simply not profitable despite the push for the Skipjack Wind 1 and Skipjack Wind 2 projects.

Federal and state pushes for all electric mass transportation fleets have also lead to problems. Cities like Asheville, North Carolina spent millions to buy more expensive electric buses only to find that they have to be recharged every 70 miles. Three out of five buses are now broken and cannot be repaired because the company that makes the buses has filed for bankruptcy.

Politicians have long sought to shape consumer demands or markets by sheer will . . . and billions of dollars. It has largely failed on a spectacular scale. However, they are rarely blamed when these bills come due years later without results. For example, the Obama Administration touted its investment in solar panels with a massive half billion dollar subsidy for Solyndra. After the photo ops with President Barack Obama, Solyndra would later collapse as did another government-subsidized company.

In his 1960 paper, Ronald Coase wrote his famous work “The Problem of Social Cost.” The work, associated with what became known as the Coase Theorem, argued, among other things, that, in a perfect market, it does not matter which party has an “entitlement” or legal advantage. The more valuable resource or product will prevail. For example, in his famous hypothetical involving a conflict between a rancher and a farmer, it did not matter (absent “transaction costs”) whether a state favored farmers or ranchers. The entitlement of the state only impacted the distribution of wealth, not the ultimate allocation of resources. The market would determine what is more valuable: cattle or crops.

There are many elements at work in these non-perfect markets. However, the general thrust of Coase is still relevant. Consumers drive market choices, not entitlements or subsidies. Federal subsidy programs are often as effective as yelling at a storm to stop it. President Biden is yelling at the market to go green, but the supply and demand elements are not yet present to make that a reality.

Nevertheless, the Biden Administration continues to try to manipulate the markets. Take the decision this week by Biden to halt natural gas export facilities on climate change grounds. Allies in Europe need increased natural gas exports to reduce their dependency on Russia. They are effectively funding the Ukrainian war on both sides by aiding Ukraine while buying Russian gas. The problem is that Europe, which has embraced green energy, has found that it cannot sustain their populations or industry. The question is whether reducing exports will change that equation. Europe wants to go green, but it is likely to simply turn to Russia for the cheaper energy source.

None of this computes with those gluing themselves to rare paintings. The fact is that most of us are concerned with climate change and support efforts to reduce carbon pollutants.  Moreover, consumers have no yen for fossil fuels. If the cost and convenience of electric cars improves, the market will likely shift. However, politicians trying to pick winners among technology rivals has rarely worked economically. Yet, it has worked politically. No one, including Obama, faced repercussions for disasters like Solyndra and other companies. Photo ops were held, billions spent, and virtues signaled . . .  and the public was left holding the bag

Despite the recent denial of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, President Biden once promised “I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.” It is just a matter of focus of mind over markets.

As you look into his eyes, just remember, as Ronson wrote, “we are not just soldiers, we are men who stare at goats.”

Academics in the Ivy League are falling like dominos since the plagiarism scandal helped take down Claudine Gay at Harvard. Now the Ivy League school has another high profile plagiarist allegedly in its midst.

WE CAN START WITH ABOLISHING THE CDC AND THE NIH: Systemic US reforms needed to prevent mass death in the next pandemic.

File this under "least surprising things to have happened this month, so far:"

YOU KNEW THEY WERE GOING TO END UP HERE EVENTUALLY: How much does human breathing contribute to climate change? All those billions of bodies exhaling carbon dioxide with every breath really starts to add up…

CENSORS, STALINISTS, PATERNALISTS, FAUX-LIBERALS, AND OTHERS WHO WOULD SUPRESS FREE SPEECH: YOU’RE ON NOTICE. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 18 in Missouri’s lawsuit alleging the federal government colluded with social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to suppress conservative and libertarians’ freedom of speech. And a lot of us are watching.

The Missouri Independent, explains the matter before the court, about which I and my fellow Insta-team members have written before:

“The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans prohibited the White House, the Surgeon General’s Office, the F.B.I., and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from having practically any contact with the social media companies. It found that the Biden administration most likely overstepped the First Amendment by urging the major social media platforms to remove misleading or false content […]

“A central dimension of presidential power,” the administration argues, “is the use of the office’s bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans — and American companies — to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest.”

But the bully pulpit, Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general wrote, “is not a pulpit to bully.”

Sadly, the outlet totally ignores the text of the 5th Circuit’s opinion, because, well, I think they’re kind of biased. Most reporters (and I have a lot of experience here) have been for too long living in a paternalist bubble. They know more than you do. They are inherently smarter than you. You work with your hands (Ugh). They know what’s better for you. “Shut up, serf!”

And to digress a bit, here’s where I find faux-liberal paternalism to be a form of fascism: To assert your view to the exclusion of others is a violation of others’ moral autonomy, in my mind, a core human right. In short, exactly what Stalin did.  But that’s for another time.

But here’s what we know for a fact: The Fifth Circuit said:

“We find that the White House, acting in concert with the Surgeon General’s office, likely (1) coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences, and (2) significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

In the oral arguments on that case, one judge asked the government lawyers whether the tone of the government was not like that of mob bosses in the movies: “Nice social media platform you have there. A shame if anything were to happen to it.”

Golly, where have we heard that before?

Spread the word to those faux-liberals who hide behind the chimera of “suppressing disinformation to save democracy” or other gibberish: we are watching. And fighting back.

 

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Colorado has fallen behind in economic growth.

Up until recently, Arizona and Colorado had remarkably similar economies, with Colorado having a slight edge — from state GDP and growth trajectories to population and jobs. But something happened in Colorado around five years ago that set us on a different course. For the first time since the Great Recession, Arizona’s economy now outpaces Colorado’s, even when factoring in the impacts of the pandemic.

According to the Arizona chamber’s report, the shift in tide came after Colorado’s 2019 state legislative session, which sparked the rapid onset of new mandates, costs and regulatory burdens on the business community. As the report’s joint authors at the Common Sense Institute said, “the lesson of Colorado’s anti-business policy transformation over the past half decade shows that climates can change quickly.”

Since 2019, Colorado’s annual job growth slowed by more than 60%. Sectors that are sensitive to governmental regulation, such as manufacturing and energy resources, have been declining.

Most of the job growth we have experienced has been found in professional business services — an area that (not coincidentally) assists with regulatory compliance through human resources, accounting, and legal support.

Political pull and “regulatory compliance” assistance are the big growth industries wherever big government dominates. All three are classes of parasites.

By Frank Bosse

During weather events, how often are we confronted with the simple claim: “More heat leads to more energy available, which leads to severe storms“?

This is so catchy that it can be understood with just a basic knowledge of physics.

So is the claim: “The warmer the tropical sea the more severe tropical storms, called hurricanes over the Atlantic or typhoons over the Pacific.” is often bandied about. The storms all occur over the ocean, and record surface temperatures were reported in 2023.

The temperatures (orange) already at the start of April 2023 were well above those of a year earlier . (Image: Climate Reanalyzer).  

Following this logic, the energy in storms in 2023 should also have been at a record level and there should have been more strong storms than ever before. And we did indeed see a record last year:

 Screenshot tweet by Ryan Maue (NOAA) at X.   

Since the beginning of systematic satellite-based observations in 1982, the number of severe tropical storms globally has never been as low as it was last year, in 2023. This contradiction between record-high ocean temperatures and record-low severe tropical storm numbers makes it clear that it is never as easy as often suggested. If you look at the relationship between the global ACE (for “accumulated cyclone energy” in storms) and the surface temperatures of the oceans, you will find the correlation is highly pronounced in the El Nino region, elsewhere there are only very unclear signatures.

This means: globally many storms with El Nino, few with La Nina. The image was generated with the KNMI Climate Explorer.

However, the oscillation there is natural and “modulates” the temperatures with a pattern in the Pacific tropics and subtropics with global effects. Note: In the real climate system, nothing is so simple that it can be explained with elementary school knowledge. Whoever tries to do this: you have to be particularly careful not to be manipulated.

The proposed ban on gas stoves followed a similar pattern in which research was produced by anti-fossil fuel activists and then repeated by other activists and the media, which then led to a policy -- later walked back by the White House after public outcry.

MYSTERY SOLVED: We Know Now Why Boeing’s Door Plug Bolts Didn’t Do Their Job. “The latest revelation is especially damning: the plane that sparked a new round of questions over Boeing’s ability to ensure its jets’ safety left the factory without the door plug bolts installed. They weren’t just loose — as door plug bolts on other aircraft were found to be upon mandatory post-incident inspections — they weren’t there. . . . If, as the evidence points, Boeing sent the 737 MAX 9 into service with Alaska entirely missing the bolts needed to keep the door plug in place, it seems there’s a lot more oversight necessary to ensure the bare minimum of quality control is achieved on the assembly line.”

I’LL BELIEVE DEMOCRATS ARE SERIOUS ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY WHEN THEY START ACTING SERIOUS ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY: Senate committee nukes bill to promote alternative energy source.

If Colorado is going to seek to promote nuclear-energy projects in the state, it won’t do so by declaring the fission process to be clean energy.

Democrats on a state Senate committee Wednesday killed a bill to promote nuclear energy by redefining it as clean, which would allow it to be used to meet statewide renewable-energy goals and qualify projects for clean-energy project financing. It was the second straight year such a bill died in the Senate Transportation & Energy Committee, signaling that the majority party, while backing reduction in fossil-fuel use, wants to concentrate on solar, wind and geothermal even in the face of a federal nuclear push.

Sen. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, and a group of nearly three-dozen supporters argued that the energy is more reliable than solar and wind in inclement weather and that it will be needed to meet the state’s goals for a zero-emissions power grid by 2040. The proposal, he argued, would have brought Colorado in line with federal Inflation Reduction Act standards at a time when the federal government is offering tax breaks for nuclear research and development and pushing it as a clean energy.

Democrats aren’t about producing clean energy. They’re about producing less energy.

A Berklee College student was convicted yesterday of stalking and threatening a fellow student who supported democracy and human rights in China. The Justice Department announced the verdict: Defendant, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, initiated stalking and threats campaign against individual who promoted freedom and democracy in China. A Berklee College of […]

The post Chinese communist student convicted in Boston of stalking and threatening pro-democracy student appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

Littlejohn, 38, will have 3 years of supervised release after serving his sentence.

JUSTIN “FIDELITO” TRUDEAU and the rise of the liberal dictator.

Remember the Freedom Convoy? This was the Canadian truckers’ revolt against Covid mandates which began two years ago this week. In January 2022, truckers blockaded major trade routes and rolled into Ottawa, beginning a month-long, often carnivalesque occupation of the Canadian capital. It was sparked by a change in vaccination rules that would have made life intolerable for unvaccinated truckers, even though most people were already jabbed and the threat from Covid was well on the wane. But it soon morphed into a much broader revolt against lockdown authoritarianism and the contempt it showed for blue-collar workers.

Trudeau’s response, you may recall, was enough to make Xi Jinping proud. . . .

Now, a top Canadian judge has decided that this outrageous clampdown was illegal to boot. Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act has been deemed an infringement on Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. It was ‘not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration’, the court ruled. All this gives the lie to the government’s absurd demonisation of the peaceful, multiracial truckers’ protests as a ‘dangerous’, ‘far right’ and even ‘insurrectionist’ movement. Indeed, so many of the claims made to justify the clampdown have turned out to be lies. At a separate inquiry in 2022, police had to admit that claims the truckers were ‘armed’ amounted to them having tools and tire irons. Not a single trucker was arrested in Ottawa for illegal possession or storage of a firearm, according to the Toronto Sun. While videos on social media showed a family friendly atmosphere, complete with bouncy castles, Trudeau talked darkly of kids being used as ‘human shields’. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister.

Imagine if Donald Trump had done this while he was still in power? There would have been a military coup. He’d probably be locked up right now, in some secretive facility buried miles beneath a mountain – the sort of place where they keep the Bond villains and the UFOs. And yet because the Western commentariat loves Trudeau and loathes the working classes his trucker crackdown was given a free pass. Even avowed left-wingers repeated the government’s absurd smears, dubbing the truckers ‘fascists’, ‘noxious reactionaries’ and ‘far-right populists’. I say ‘even’, but it wasn’t exactly surprising. After all, Western leftists have become so bourgeois, hysterical and historically illiterate that they now see any assertion of working-class power as fascist by definition.

They really are awful people.

FLASHBACK: Neurosis and the Curley Effect.

Reading all of these pieces I’m seeing a story that goes something like this: Depressed, neurotic people (especially single women) are more likely to support Democrats. Democrats support policies and messaging that produce more depressed, neurotic people, especially single women.

Now maybe this is an accident, but maybe it isn’t. Enter the “Curley Effect.” As this Harvard paper notes, “James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. . . . We call this strategy—increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies—the Curley effect. But it is hardly unique to Curley.”

Making the populace (especially women) more fearful, depressed, and neurotic is undoubtedly bad for societal wealth and happiness. But does it yield votes for Democrats? Clearly yes. Are they doing it on purpose?

Probably.

MAKE THEM PAY: Canada’s Laurentian Elite Cry Uncle.

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh, he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats. With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN. The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the police which proceeds to investigate.

The astroturfed outfit accused a podcaster of being a “white supremacist” and an “accelerationist.” The RCMP then provided CAHN’s “evidence” to legislators who then fed it to the subsidized media. Like a very, very good little girl, Canadian senator Paula Simons said he (the podcaster) wanted to “accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate,” during a debate in the house. None of this was found in any of the hundreds of hours of said podcast. Nevertheless, it was reported widely across the media as cold hard fact.

As in every single western democracy now staggering under unsustainable government-caused debt, the “natural ruling party” stood up for the thousands upon thousands of activist groups who besiege citizens with scare- and sob-stories meant only to increase the tax base for the Liberal elite. In recent years, to combat growing anti-government populism, elites in every western democracy have also supported political action groups meant to drive its enemies into the dirt. As reported by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, these are coordinated through the Five Eyes and gamed at the World Economic Forum, in a cross-cultural assault by the elites on the people.

In short, CAHN drove virtually 100 percent of the evidence used to invoke the Emergencies Act. All of its accusations were found to be fake, fictionalized or exaggerated, as the attached FOIA documentation demonstrated. The outfit is a typical attack dog, staffed by members of the hard left, like this character, its face: Sue Gardner. These people are sent around the Stations of the Activist Cross, acquiring credits, awards and citations, to give themselves credibility, without having creating anything of value in the real world. The marshalling of the greedy hard left by corporatists to force ideological purity upon the middle and working classes was a masterful strategy. It, and its international cadres, are entirely focused on destroying the political power of the middle and working classes by accusing them of “racism” and “hate.”

The most egregious finding of the court was that the RCMP faked intelligence that identified the protestors as being funded by MAGA in the U.S., because they wanted to “take over” Canada. Documents obtained under FOIA discovered the following, from Michael Schellenberger’s Public substack.

So the consequences for this misbehavior need to be biblical. If the ruling class faces no consequences, it will do it again. And no, losing an election isn’t enough. There need to be crushing personal consequences for the individuals involved in this.

It’s not as if their misrule hasn’t already imposed consequences on their citizenry: “Let’s put it this way, if Canada were a state, it would be poorer than West Virginia or Mississippi, despite being the second-largest country, with abundant natural resources, in the world, blessed with a highly educated populace. The courts decision may mean that Canada is emerging from its half- century stasis and its massive grifting class on its way to the abattoir.”

The US Department of Justice has charged over 1,200 people with federal crimes related to the January 6, 2021 riot. In order to convict those individuals, the DOJ has relied heavily on 14,000 hours of surveillance video as well as cell phone data, some of which somebody leaked to the New York Times.

“The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day,” wrote Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson in 2021 in the New York Times. “It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones…While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance.”

The New York Times authors had less cell phone data than what the FBI had available to it. And yet, amazingly, the cell phone and video surveillance data of the suspect who committed the worst crime on January 6 are, according to the FBI, corrupted and/or missing.

And what was the worst crime? The attempted assassination of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris while she was at the Democratic National Committee.

In other words, while FBI had cell phone data for the January 6 protesters, none of whom tried to kill anyone, it doesn’t have the cell phone data for the one person who did.

And while FBI had 14,000 hours of high-quality surveillance video for the January 6 protesters, it somehow does not have any video of the suspect actually leaving the bomb. Nor does it have high-quality video, including from the best angles, of the suspect.

That's an unbelievable coincidence.

And it gets worse.

Last year, the person who was in charge of the FBI investigation, the head of the Washington Field Office, admitted to Rep. Thomas Massie that the Vice President’s life was never at risk.

Read more

On Friday, hours after Biden's deadline for Texas to remove their National Guard troops from the border expired, the President decided to take action that would put a pause on liquid natural gas (LNG) exports.

EMAILS REVEAL WHY CDC ISSUED NO ALERT ON MYOCARDITIS: The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber obtained emails and other documents that show CDC leaders chose not to warn Americans about a frequently fatal side effect of the Coronavirus vaccines.

This is a HUGE story and one that reveals more about why the “Public Health” establishment has about as much credibility with Americans as used car salesmen and Bitcoin scam artists. That said, the story will be all but totally ignored by the Mainstream Media, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats (more than a few Republicans on the Hill as well).

The good news is there are still senators like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who told Stieber that the “CDC’s apparent decision to not immediately issue a formal alert to clinicians warning them about the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in vaccinated individuals is not only inexcusable, it’s malpractice,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

Johnson is currently the Ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. If the GOP regains the Senate majority in November, Johnson will be in a position to do something serious about CDC malpractice.

PARASITES TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE HOST: Government Workers Are Trying to Take Over Congress Now.

Serious and responsible people (in other words, not Trump or Biden) know that Social Security has a massive long-run problem.

A fast-growing number of seniors are expecting future benefits but only a slow-growing number of workers will be paying into the system.

But even if this demographic problem didn’t exist, there is the underlying flaw of a retirement system based on tax-and-spend (or debt-and-spend) rather than wealth accumulation.

The solution is obvious.

We need to shift to a system based on personal retirement accounts.

The transition to a modern system will be expensive, to be sure, but not nearly as costly as the $60 trillion-plus burden of propping up the current system.

But some people prefer the more-expensive option.

Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Alicia Munnell of Boston College want to divert a massive amount of money from the private sector to the government, and they want to do it by double-taxing the money Americans have in retirement accounts.

Here are excerpts from their new report.

The U.S. Treasury estimates that the tax preference for employer-sponsored retirement plans and IRAs reduced federal income taxes by about $185-$189 billion in 2020, equal to about 0.9 percent of gross domestic product. …it actually offers policymakers an opportunity to strengthen the nation’s retirement income system. Revenues saved from repealing the retirement saving tax preferences could be reallocated to address the majority of Social Security’s long-term funding gap. …an opportunity to use taxpayer resources more productively. …the case is strong for eliminating the current tax expenditures on retirement plans, and using the increase in tax revenues to address Social Security’s long-term financing shortfall. …Tax expenditures for employer-sponsored retirement plans are expensive – costing about $185 billion in 2020. … reducing tax expenditures for retirement plans could be an effective way to help address other pressing demands on the federal budget, such as Social Security’s financing shortfall.

By the way, it is no exaggeration to say the authors “want to divert a massive amount of money” to politicians over the next decade. Based on the Congressional Budget Office’s latest 10-year forecast, 0.9 percent of GDP is about $3 trillion.

It’s not just that the authors want to prop up a system that needs reform.

They also want to undo provisions in the tax code (IRAs and 401(k)s) that allow people to protect themselves against two layers of tax on income that is saved and invested.

It’s also laughable that the report states that a huge tax increase will “use taxpayer resources more productively.” If higher taxes to fund bigger government was a good idea, Europe’s welfare states would be richer than the United States rather than way behind.

Even the title of the Biggs-Munnell study is offensive. It implies that taxpayers are getting a handout or favor if politicians don’t impose double taxation. At the risk of understatement, being taxed one time rather than two times is not a subsidy.

P.S. The better option is a shift to retirement systems based on private savings, like the ones in Australia, Chile, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Netherlands, the Faroe Islands, Denmark, Israel, and Sweden.

P.P.S. Biggs and Munnell are misguided for wanting a big tax increase to prop up a bankrupt system. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that some people want to expand the bankrupt system. And they are proposing tax increases that arguably would cause even more economic damage.