If you're looking to make a cool $2,000,000 real easy, you could do worse than drop everything you're doing, learn how to become a hacker, and figure out how to hack one of the most famously airtight operating systems in human history:
VOLOKH CONSPIRACY: “China Kinda Sus.” Five individuals have been indicted by a federal grand jury for attempting to silence critics of China in the U.S.
GREEN IS THE COLOR OF DECLINE: Electric Vehicles (EVs) are dirtier than gas-powered cars and they are racists, too. If you doubt it, check this out from Issues & Insights.
It would take no more than a few minutes of a White House adviser’s time to learn that the “companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump” in most cases aren’t companies at all. More than half the gas stations in the country are single-store operations run by an individual or a family, according to the Association for Convenience and Fuel Retailing (NACS), a trade association representing the stores that sell more than 80 percent of the gasoline American consumers use.
A “Shell” or “Exxon” logo on the canopy above a filling station doesn’t mean those oil companies own the gas station. All it means is that the station’s owners have contracted with that company for the right to advertise the well-known brand. It’s the same as having a neon “Coors Light” sign hanging in a bar—which doesn’t mean MillerCoors owns the establishment.
And those gas station owners aren’t raking in massive profits, either. Over the past five years, retailer gross margins have averaged 10.7 percent of the overall price of gas, according to NACS data. But most of those profits come from selling food, drinks, cigarettes, and the like.
The Hustle, a business and tech newsletter, put together a useful breakdown of the economics of gas stations last year. “Selling gas generally isn’t very profitable” due largely to intense price competition among retailers and the ease with which consumers can shop around (because they are literally in their cars). On fuel alone, gas stations have an average margin of 1.4 percent.
If gas stations sold fuel at cost, consumers might hardly notice the difference—but the small-time entrepreneurs running those stations would have a harder time making ends meet.
Biden’s ignorance about gas stations sounds like a replay of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D–Mass.) attempt at blaming higher food prices on greedy grocery store owners—despite the fact that they often operate on similarly tiny margins. It’s also a worrying sign when coupled with the fact that the White House has ordered the Department of Justice and FBI to investigate companies for earning “illicit profits” due to inflation.
Exit questions: “How can the Biden administration be trusted to police companies’ profits when it is demonstrating such economic illiteracy?”
And, why can’t the administration coordinate their messaging on one of the most important issues to voters going into the midterms?
LONGEVITY: Drug that increases human lifespan to 200 years is in the works. “Taken in pill form, the drug would eliminate cells in the human body that are responsible for advancing the ageing process – potentially doubling our lifespan. But is this desirable?”
The new owners asked that the newspaper staff refrain from commenting on the pending litigation while settlement talks were ongoing. That’s standard and prudent in legal proceedings. You don’t want employees saying things that might become evidence at trial or disrupt the settlement negotiations.
The staff refused to follow instructions. For that, one was fired. Another quit, saying he had literally cried about being denied the “right” to say whatever he wanted to say in the newspaper, whenever he wanted to say it, regardless of the impact on the newspaper’s pending lawsuit and settlement negotiations.
OK, that’s how these things sort out. Bosses boss, children are childish, and crybabies cry. Life goes on.
But now it’s getting serious. A group of the Aspen progressive establishment – the leftist elite who control the town – recently sent a letter to the new owners demanding they reinstate the fired staff, publish the content (of dubious veracity) that was withheld while the litigation was pending, and promise that in the future they will follow the publishing diktats of the letter-signers. The letter to the newspaper and the newspaper’s reply are HERE.
The letter-signers include all five county commissioners, the mayor and a former mayor, numerous city councilmen from Aspen, Snowmass and nearby Basalt, and the challenger to the Republican representative for the Congressional District that includes Aspen. Every single one is a Democrat, as are over 70% of Aspen residents.
The letter-signers gave the newspaper owners two weeks to comply with their demands. If they don’t, then the letter-signers threaten “reactions.”
To make sure the newspaper owners get the message, the letter details the threatened “reactions.” They include:
“Directing our individual organizations to pull advertisements and notices from the paper; encouraging local businesses to do the same; refusing interviews with reporters at the Aspen Times; or calling for a boycott of the paper.”
This is astounding. Government officials explicitly referencing their government organizations are threatening to put a newspaper out of business as punishment for its editorial decisions about what to publish and when.
If these letter-signers as private citizens simply wanted to express their objections to the newspaper’s editorial decisions, fine. That’s what letters to the editor are for – to persuade or sometimes just to rant.
But they chose coordinated actions in their capacity as government officials to overtly threaten the existence of the newspaper.
John Kerry, America’s first “special envoy for climate,” who seems to spend more time in those private planes than most of us do in bed, has a personal carbon footprint the size of Brooklyn and is well known for docking his $7 million yacht in neighboring Rhode Island to avoid a half million in taxes from his home state of Massachusetts.
I have a personal note of my own to add, having attended, for PJ Media, the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in the midst of the biggest blizzard I had ever encountered—and I went to college in New Hampshire.
I was sitting waiting for one of the panel discussions to begin when, to kill time, I casually addressed the man next to me, asking him where he was from.
“The Maldives,” he said. Amazing, I thought, because I had just read the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean were in danger of extinction, actually going completely under water, because of global warming.
So, trying to be polite, I commiserated with him about the peril to his homeland, but he just shrugged. “Is nothing,” he explained. “We put up sandbags against tide. We do every year. No problem.”
I looked at him non-plussed. “You came a long way. Why’re you here?”
He squinted at me, as if he thought I was either an idiot or I was kidding. “For the money,” he said flatly.
Thousands of farmers were gathering in a village near the centre of the Netherlands on Wednesday to protest a government plan to curb nitrogen pollution, many travelling by tractor from all corners of the country and snarling traffic.
The protest in Stroe, 70 kilometres east of Amsterdam, follows the introduction last week of targets for reducing pollution by harmful nitrogen compounds in some areas by up to 70% by 2030 – the latest attempt to solve a problem that has plagued the country for years.
Reductions are necessary in emissions of nitrogen oxides from farm animal manure and use of ammonia for fertilisation, the government says. Nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere help form acid rain, while fertiliser washed into lakes can cause algal blooms that kill marine life.
Farmers argue the targets are poorly conceived and unfair. They are expected to lead to a 30% reduction in the number of Dutch livestock, with effects more concentrated in agricultural areas bordering nature preserves.
“These reductions are so severe that those rural communities will be totally devastated economically, and that’s the reason our farmers are going to Stroe today” said Sander van Diepen, a spokesperson for agricultural organization LTO.
As John O’Sullivan tweets, “This is a warning. People have no idea of the sacrifices that will be required of them in lifestyle changes as well as in higher taxes and higher energy prices to meet Net Zero targets. And they won’t like them.“
TAX DOLLARS TO PROMOTE ATHEISM OVERSEAS: Hard to believe, but the U.S. State Department is handing out grants of as much as $500,000 to organizations promoting atheism overseas. Can you imagine if these grants were instead to promote Christianity?
As Egon Alter (@AlterEgon75) put it in their reply,
This is a gross mischaracterization of Thomas’ words.
HE is not making the claim, the plaintiffs in the case are.
And he said they object because aborted fetus cells were used in the development of the vaccine, which your reporting verifies, not that the vaccine contains them.
UPDATE:
You can see a screenshot of Justice Thomas’s exact words in this tweet from AGHamilton29. Thomas said,
They object on religious grounds to all available COVID-19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.
Firstly, note that he is paraphrasing the opinion of the petitioners, not giving his own opinion. Secondly, note that the petitioners themselves did not claim that the vaccines were made from aborted foetuses, they claim that foetal cells were used in the development process, which they were. As one would expect from a judge, Thomas has noted this crucial distinction.
Again via the estimable AGHamilton29, I see that it was not just Politico spreading this false story.
They sit on a throne of lies, because the truth is fatal to them.
Instilling fear of jail time and financial ruin in the hearts of doctors for good faith prescription of pain medication is not the way to go. As recognized by all 9 SCOTUS justices.
Our beloved brothers over at The Babylon Bee just touched a nerve with Facebook by getting a little too close to reality and making a video about a pregnant Ken doll.
SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN EPA CLEAN AIR RULES, holds that agency rules that address “major questions” must have clear authorization from Congress. The decision, sadly, is less sweeping than it might have been, but still moderately good news for restraining administrative agencies. Here’s the link.
Gorsuch has a nice concurrence spelling out the democracy-threatening aspects of administrative law, which includes this footnote throwing shade at the father of Administrative Law, Woodrow Wilson:
For example, Woodrow Wilson famously argued that “popular sovereignty” “embarrasse[d]” the Nation because it made it harder to achieve “executive expertness.” The Study of Administration, 2 Pol. Sci. Q. 197, 207 (1887) (Administration). In Wilson’s eyes, the mass of the people were “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” Id., at 208. He expressed even greater disdain for particular groups, defending “[t]he white men of the South” for “rid[ding] themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant [African-Americans].” 9 W. Wilson, History of the American People 58 (1918). He likewise denounced immigrants “from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland,” who possessed “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” 5 id., at 212. To Wilson, our Republic “tr[ied] to do too much by vote.” Administration 214.
All true. Wilson was a racist, an elitist, and an entitled twit with a wildly exaggerated opinion of his own intellect and competence.. In short, the perfect progenitor for modern progressivism.
In a historically embarrassing decision, the FDA recently became the only international regulatory body to authorize the use of mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer for children aged six months to five years.
For the overwhelming majority of young children and toddlers, there is likely no justification or need for this concerning authorization.
They are at vanishingly small risk of serious complications from COVID, meaning that the risk-benefit calculation is precarious at best, and potentially negative at worst.
It’s also a testament to the disturbingly successful politicization of the US regulatory agencies that essentially no other internationally respected country anywhere on earth has made this bewildering decision.
Sweden, for example, has stopped the rollout of the Moderna vaccine for anyone under 30.
Not 18. Not 12. Not 5. 30.
The United States is now going to be vaccinating children as young as six months old with the same product that Sweden has banned for use in anyone under 30, citing side effects that tilt the risk-benefit numbers.
Despite this concerning difference of opinion, the White House Chief of Staff/Acting President Ronald Klain confusingly celebrated the announcement:
Interestingly, The New York Times link Klain tweeted brought up yet another concerning aspect of the authorization process, requiring an examination of the FDA’s documents and past statements.
The first interesting bit of information from the lengthy FDA release is their estimate of vaccine efficacy for older age groups.
The numbers are…bleak:
Observed estimates of vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease due to the Omicron variant include the following: 8.8% (95% CI, 7.0 to 10.5) at 25 or more weeks since primary vaccination in adults; 59.5% among adolescents 12 to 15 years of age 2 to 4 weeks after dose 2, 16.6% during month 2 after the second dose, and 9.6% during month 3 after the second dose
8.8% effectiveness against symptomatic illness after ~6 months amongst adults.
Within just two months of vaccination, effectiveness against symptomatic illness amongst 12 to 15 year olds drops to 16.6%, and 9.6% by the third month. They don’t specify effectiveness afterwards, presumably because it drops to zero percent or even turns negative.
Furthermore, their estimates of vaccine effectiveness against hospitalizations and emergency department visits are dramatically lower than the 95-100% rates claimed by “experts” that were used to justify discrimination and horrifying calls to exclude the “unvaccinated” from medical care:
Observed estimates of primary series mRNA vaccine effectiveness against hospitalizations due to the Omicron variant in adults have been reported at 41%-57% at 6-9 months or longer after the second dose.
In one observational study among adolescents 12 to 18 years of age (median interval since vaccination, 162 days) during the Omicron-predominant period, primary series vaccine effectiveness was 40% (95% CI, 9 to 60) against hospitalization for COVID-19
Observed estimates of primary series mRNA vaccine effectiveness against emergency department/urgent care visits due to the Omicron variant in adults have been reported between 31%-38% at 6-9 months or longer after the second dose.
Whatever the claimed efficacy percentage was pre-Omicron, these percentages are greatly diminished compared to expectations.
As low as 41% for vaccine efficacy against hospitalization for adults 6-9 months or longer after the second dose.
Emergency department or urgent care as low as 31%. 40% with a confidence interval of 9-60% for adolescents 12-18 years of age.
This is yet another reason why mandates based on vaccination are completely indefensible:
These numbers are remarkably low and would fail the original 50% target that the FDA set for emergency authorization of COVID vaccines.
Remember the concerning part I mentioned earlier about the process for young kids?
Not only are the effectiveness percentages not reaching their 50% threshold in adults, for kids, they simply threw out that standard.
In order to authorize the vaccine for younger age groups, the FDA imputed vaccine efficacy by “immunobridging” and comparing antibody generation from older age groups:
Vaccine effectiveness was inferred by immunobridging based on a comparison of immunogenicity endpoints (SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody geometric mean concentrations (GMTs) and seroresponse rates 1 month after Dose 3) between participants 6-23 months of age from study C4591007 (n=146) and participants 16 through 25 years of age from study C4591001
Essentially, even though antibody creation is clearly not enough to prevent symptomatic infection, or achieve the original 95% estimates, the FDA inferred effectiveness of vaccination amongst babies and toddlers based on comparisons of antibody generation.
At this point, it’s already obvious why the U.S. is going to be the only Western country to start mRNA vaccinations for children this young.
Political pressure from Acting President Klain, activists like Ashish Jha, Jeremy Faust, Jerome Adams and others is undeniably dangerous.
This might potentially explain why the FDA changed the goal from 50% efficacy to antibody generation — to submit to political pressure from the White House and their allies in the media and “expert” community.
Last month, Vinay Prasad detailed the absurdity of this decision:
https://youtu.be/2ywnTg4rPWY
He also mentions that the 50% target initially determined was “arbitrary” and quite low.
The effectiveness of the vaccinations against hospitalization during the Omicron era for those who are “fully vaccinated” is lower than that, and they inferred efficacy amongst young kids based on antibody generation in those same age groups.
In short, they threw out their arbitrarily determined target, which was already low, and then imputed efficacy based on an end point (antibody generation) that we’ve already seen does not work particularly well against the current dominant variant.
So sure, this is extremely disconcerting and frustrating, but hey, at least Ron Klain is happy.
Natural Immunity
The FDA in their infinite wisdom also ignored that the CDC’s own estimates, which state that 75% of kids have already had COVID:
Of course, no one involved in this decision making process is willing to acknowledge that 75% of kids were infected with COVID despite masking, school closures and other “interventions” designed to prevent or “slow” the spread of the virus. But I digress.
Natural immunity is likely more protective against future infection than vaccination, as this Tracy Høeg tweet explains based on data from a New England Journal of Medicine study:
The FDA raced to authorize the vaccines for extremely young children based on antibody response instead of efficacy estimates while ignoring that 75% of young kids already had better protection.
It’s a clinic in what not to do.
Actual Efficacy Estimates
The FDA did generate some vaccine efficacy estimates for both ages 6-23 months and 2-4 years and the figures they arrived at show why they had to resort to antibody response instead of actual proven reduction.
Participants 6-23 months of age
A preliminary descriptive efficacy analysis of COVID-19 cases occurring at least 7 days post- Dose 3 among participants 6-23 months of age in the Dose 3 evaluable efficacy population included a total of 3 confirmed cases accrued in participants with and without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection up to the data cutoff of April 29, 2022. The Dose 3 evaluable efficacy population included 376 participants randomized to BNT162b2 and 179 participants randomized to placebo. The VE estimate in this preliminary analysis was 75.6% (95% CI: -369.1%, 99.6%), with 1 COVID-19 case in the BNT162b2 group compared to 2 in the placebo group (2:1 randomization BNT162b2 to placebo).
Emphasis Added
There was 1 case in the vaccination group and 2 in the placebo group. That’s it.
That’s how you get to confidence intervals of -369.1% to 99.6%. The vaccine could have nearly 400% negative efficacy for babies, or it could be one of the greatest vaccines ever created with near perfect effectiveness. Who knows! Certainly not the FDA based on 3 total cases of COVID in this age group.
But don’t worry, they collected a lot more data for the 2-4 year age group.
That data set had 7 total cases:
Participants 2-4 years of age
A preliminary descriptive efficacy analysis of COVID-19 cases occurring at least 7 days post- Dose 3 among participants 2-4 years of age in the Dose 3 evaluable efficacy population included a total of 7 confirmed cases accrued in participants with or without evidence of prior
SARS-CoV-2 infection up to the data cutoff of April 29, 2022. The Dose 3 evaluable efficacy population with and without evidence of prior SARS CoV-2 infection included 589 participants randomized to BNT162b2 and 271 participants randomized to placebo. The VE estimate in this preliminary analysis was 82.4% (95% CI: -7.6%, 98.3%), with 2 COVID-19 cases in the BNT162b2 group compared to 5 in the placebo group (2:1 randomization BNT162b2 to placebo). One confirmed case in the placebo group occurred in a participant with evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to 7 days post-Dose 3.
Well at least we’re down to a possible 8% negative efficacy in the confidence intervals!
But again, don’t worry, the FDA is aware of this limitation, and many more besides:
In a combined analysis of both age groups, VE was 80.4% (95% CI: 14.1%, 96.7%) with 3 cases in the BNT162b2 group and 7 cases in the placebo group. Interpretation of post-Dose 3 efficacy data for both age groups, and for the age group of 6 months through 4 years overall, is limited for the following reasons:
Vaccine efficacy post Dose 3 cannot be precisely estimated due to the limited number of cases accrued during blinded follow-up, as reflected in the wide confidence intervals associated with the estimates.
These descriptive efficacy data are preliminary, as the protocol specified 21 cases have not yet been achieved.
There were highly variable dosing intervals between doses 2 and 3, with median intervals of 112 (range 56 to 245) days among participants 6-23 months of age and 77 (range 42 to 239) days among participants 2-4 years of age in the Dose 3 evaluable efficacy population.
The median blinded follow-up time post Dose 3 in the analyses was only 35 days for participants 6-23 months of age and 40 days for participants 2-4 years of age.
The protocol specified 21 cases were not achieved. But they authorized the vaccines anyway!
Amongst the 2-4 year age group, there was a significantly higher rate of cases that “met the criteria for severe COVID-19” in the group that received the vaccine:
Seven cases in participants 2-4 years of age met the criteria for severe COVID-19: 6 in the BNT162b2 group, of which 2 cases occurred post unblinding, and 1 in the placebo group.
This does not imply that those who get vaccinated are more likely to have a severe case of COVID, but it once again underscores the problem of such small sample sizes and abandoning the original targets.
And it should be noted that the severe cases were determined to not be “clinically significant:”
All of which were considered by the investigator as not clinically significant based on examination at the illness visit and contributing circumstances such as the participant crying during examination
The Data Tables
The FDA knows that most Americans will never look at the data tables, especially those in the media and activist Twitter “expert” class.
But anyone who does examine them can immediately understand the absurdity of the FDA’s decision making process:
The confidence intervals for every single efficacy calculation for participants 6-23 months drop below zero. Every single one.
The overall estimate is 14% and even that could be as low as -21.2%.
It’s just laughable. Well, it would be laughable if it weren’t such an important decision.
If you want to be charitable, at least the overall efficacy percentage for those aged 2 to <5 didn’t have negative confidence intervals:
Although three of the four main endpoints did have negative confidence intervals, so it does still require a significant amount of charity.
It’s also worth noting that the time period between the administration of Dose 1 and Dose 2 was associated with negative efficacy in both age groups.
This has likely contributed to data reporting issues when calculating vaccine effectiveness in the real world. Any case occurring during this time period is considered “unvaccinated,” except in these age groups, which is when efficacy is at its lowest point.
The fact that the FDA authorized these vaccines for kids based on this data is quite simply inexcusable.
The sample sizes didn’t meet their protocol specified 21 cases.
Vaccine efficacy calculations, even excluding the gigantic confidence intervals, were far below the arbitrary 50% target they created for emergency use authorization among adults.
Including the confidence intervals shows the possibility of negative efficacy, which while unlikely, is still possible given the extraordinarily small amount of cases in both the vaccine and placebo groups.
They simply used “immunobridging” to infer protection based on antibody generation, instead of predetermined efficacy rates.
It’s yet another terrifying indicator of just how politically motivated the FDA has become, and how activism has distorted intellectual honesty.
“Experts” are so desperate to maintain their reputations and avoid being labeled an “anti-vaxxer” by influencers like Eric Feigl-Ding, Angela Rasmussen and others that they appear to be unwilling to call out flaws in the decision making process.
It’s simultaneously hard and easy to believe that this was all it took to justify an “emergency” use vaccination for age groups at extremely low risk of severe illness.
This decision deservedly will be yet another reason for the ever-increasing erosion of trust in public health’s supposed “experts,” an embarrassment for U.S. regulators captured by politics.
Below is a slightly augmented version of my Hill column on the report that the Biden Administration will go forward with administrative punishment for border agents who were falsely accused of “whipping” Haitian migrants in Texas.
Here is the column:
At the height of the Stalinist purges, Soviet internal affairs minister Lavrentiy Beria famously boasted: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”
The agents likely felt their fates were sealed the minute that President Biden promised to punish them, before an official investigation had even started. Either the president was wrong, or the agents must be guilty … of something.
The controversy began when the Border Patrol responded to a large influx of undocumented migrants in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19. Officials ordered a mounted unit to an under-defended part of the border. Mounted units are commonly used by federal, state and local police agencies for crowd control. The agents found themselves facing a large group of Haitian migrants crossing the border, and they positioned themselves on the river’s edge to block entry.
A photographer captured the scene, which included agents using bridle reins to guide their skittish horses. While the entire videotape clearly shows the agents using the reins on their mounts, not on the migrants, some clearly misleading still shots appeared to make it look like the opposite was happening. Condemnations immediately erupted from politicians and pundits; some media reports presented the abuse allegations as fact — as the “whipping (of) Haitian asylum seekers.”
For his part, President Biden rode the wave of media outrage, declaring: “It was horrible what — to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”
Of course, the Soviet Union’s Beria was a model of efficiency compared to Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who promised last September that the investigation would be “completed in a matter of days, not weeks.” Then months dragged on, and Mayorkas and his department went into virtual radio-silence.
The problem for Mayorkas was that the whipping story was not just false but was clearly false from the outset. The photographer who captured the images of the incident, Paul Ratje, stated within the first 24 hours that it was false and “nobody saw a Border Patrol agent whipping” migrants. That was obvious from the videotape, too.
However, the president, some congressional Democrats and many in the media had already adjudicated the case. The agents had to be guilty of something.
So, the agents wallowed in suspension for months. On the six-month anniversary of the incident, I wrote a column on President Biden’s “Red Queen Justice,” noting that the case followed a “classic response to such scandals [which] is to bury them in investigation to wait for public attention to wane.” I noted that officials also could avoid responsibility “by changing the question. For example, what began as an investigation into whether agents used reins to whip migrants might be converted into a long investigation into the use of horses in crowd control operations. That will take a lot of time and, when the report is issued, the actual whipping allegation can be buried in a broader policy debate. That will allow the media, as well as the administration, to focus on the policy as opposed to the personnel involved.”
It is not clear if the administration will clear the agents of whipping migrants, though such a charge would presumably have been treated as a criminal matter. Moreover, it is not clear why, if such an assault did occur, it would take nearly ten months to find a violation. Whipping migrants is not commonly treated as an administrative matter.
If the Fox News report is true, however, the border agents may be found guilty of still unknown administrative offenses.
For many in Washington, the important thing would be that the agents are found guilty of something — anything.
It is all reminiscent of how President Biden rushed to public judgment about the fatal shooting of two men and the wounding of a third during riots in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020. At the time, Biden strongly implied that accused shooter Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” despite no evidence supporting that claim. Even after many accusations about Rittenhouse were debunked and a jury acquitted him of all criminal charges, Biden said publicly that the verdict left “many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included.”
Similarly, after protests in Washington’s Lafayette Park in June 2020, Biden repeated a now-debunked claim that the park was cleared with teargas to enable a photo op for then-President Trump, an allegation that falsely impugned the integrity of then-Attorney General Bill Barr. From the outset, there was ample evidence undermining that claim, but neither Biden nor many in the media waited for an investigation to establish the facts. Later, the Justice Department’s inspector general disproved the claim.
Now, as with those previous debunked claims, Biden knows he will have a cooperative media that is unlikely to challenge his version of what the Border Patrol agents did — because they are equally invested in the earlier, inaccurate condemnation of the border agents’ actions.
In announcing the agents would be punished before an investigation had even begun, Biden — like Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen — insisted on “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.” The agents likely do not hold out much hope, given how there has been little acknowledgment, let alone an apology, from the president, who remained silent for months after his original claim was debunked. They will finally have the verdict to go with the sentence . . . the offense, of course, to be named.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
A research paper found that people who did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine had a lower rate of suffering a severe case of the virus amidst the pandemic. The article, which has been uploaded to the preprint server ResearchGate, relied on data from over 18,500 respondents across 175 countries. Analysis revealed that individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 reported fewer instances of hospitalization in comparison to their vaccinated counterparts. MSN – a news website launched by vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates’s Microsoft in 1995 – covered the study, titling its article “Severe COVID-19 ‘Rare’ In Unvaccinated People,” but appears to have taken down
Back in 1983, Ronald Reagan colorfully described the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Today, it seems we have a new candidate for the headquarters of all evil: the World Economic Forum headed by Klaus Schwab.
The WEF has no borders, includes all nationalities, embraces governments, NGOs and big business, has no military, nuclear arsenal, flag or anthem, and purports to solve all the world’s problems at its annual conference each year while delegates down champagne and caviar. It sponsors a leadership training program that boasts such covid cultists as Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau. Is Klaus Schwab the first honest-to-goodness Bond villain, bent on taking over (or depopulating) the world?
Professor Schwab certainly looks the part with his German accent and his prize place on top of the Swiss mountains. He also certainly pretends to run the world. In fact, he has been pretending to run the world since the 1970s, when he started his yearly conferences, hoping to get noticed. Getting noticed took decades. Many of the WEF Young Leaders program graduates presently in power around the world only entered his ‘classes’ 30 years after the WEF started. For decades Klaus has lived the ‘fake it till you make it' adage. Has he finally made it?
The title of Klaus’ 2020 book “The Great Reset”, coauthored with Thierry Malleret, was catchy enough to be taken on as a slogan during 2020-21 by a slew of political leaders wanting to communicate for myriad local political reasons that the pandemic has opened up some kind of grand reinitialization opportunity in global politics.
Few of these leaders will have read the book though, because if they had, they would have been taken aback by some of its contents. For example: “First and foremost, the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour.”
Such a view is not commonly spouted by the über-rich barons running global corporations or the governments they influence, for the obvious reason that it constitutes a direct attack on their stash. Certainly they might publicly express the wish for less inequality – who wouldn’t? – but many would baulk at a “massive wealth redistribution,” Robin-Hood style, to labourers and away from capitalists like themselves.
In fact, over the last two years the exact opposite has happened: the world now contains more billionaires and more poor people. “You will own nothing and be happy,” another oft-quoted and much-maligned Schwabism, also describes the opposite of what has actually happened, which can be summarized instead as “the rich own lots more while the poor own nothing and are miserable.”
This year, the WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland held from May 22-26 triggered the usual outpouring of hatred on Twitter and other platforms. The gossip implies that the WEF is secretly plotting to take over the world by means of a secret collaboration between government and big business, as if rich and powerful people needed a vehicle like the WEF for that. It feels satisfying to those wronged by covid policy to think they have identified the head of the snake responsible for the mess.
The WEF, they claim, is the coordinating platform for all the secret deals that make the rich richer and the entrenched heads of government more powerful, while national and local sovereignty is being clandestinely forfeited, leaving the ordinary person to rot away slowly with neither resources nor rights.
These accusations against the WEF are accompanied by misrepresentation and outright fakery. Photos were recently circulated on social media of hundreds of private planes lined up on an airfield, claimed to be those of attendees at Davos 2022 who were (for shame!) flouting their own pretensions to reduce carbon emissions. According to Reuters, one of the two widely circulated photos was in fact taken years ago at Las Vegas Airport around the time of a boxing title fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, while another was taken in January 2016 at a Swiss air force base that is often used by Davos attendees and was probably associated with the event that year.
None of us was able personally to fly to Davos this year (though some of us have attended such events in the past), but no matter: every session of the 2022 meeting from May 22-26 was posted online. This included the opening address, via video link, by none other than Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, resplendent in his trademark brown tee and staring down the camera with unblinking intensity. Invigorated by the President’s defiant address, attendees turned their attention to the remaining 220 or so sessions that covered every weighty and worldly topic under the sun.
We took the time to watch a few, and found them to share a few characteristics. First, those involved expressed overblown expectations of what would be achieved during the discussions. Second, the discussions themselves were intelligent and informative. Third, the discussions all led to no particular kind of action.
The basic model of a WEF conference session is to subsidize smart people (the presenters) to say smart things to rich people (the audience), who themselves pay the exorbitant conference registration fees in order to network with each other and have smart people pretend to take them seriously for a few days.
In a word, Klaus Schwab is a glorified and very talented conference planner selling flattery. He pretends that $60,000 provides the attending customer with access to crucial world decisions, all made in 4 days. The hordes paying the entry fee schmooze together, down vast quantities of wine and canapes, and participate in panel discussions that purport to solve problems associated with the world’s economy, environment, and society in end-on-end blocks of 45 minutes each. (Actually, it is closer to 35 minutes, because of 10 minutes of Q&A from the audience squeezed in at the end of each session. Given the price tag of attendance, the organizers rightly expect some delegates to feel justified in having their moment on the mic.)
Typical of the level of ambition evident in WEF conference sessions, in his introduction to this year’s session on global taxation, host Geoff Cutmore announced that the incipient panel discussion was about getting to a point where “we all feel comfortable about what we’re paying, and we feel comfortable about what other people are paying and we feel comfortable about what corporations are paying and we all feel comfortable about where that tax revenue is ultimately going.”
Whoa. He might have added, “And if we have a few minutes left over at the end, we’ll work out how to restore the Amazonian rain forest.” The panel consisted of the heads of both Oxfam and the OECD, plus a heavily masked economics professor from Harvard. Imagine what the head of Oxfam would have thought about Cutmore’s pronouncements, given how critical Oxfam has been of the tax evasion and self-enrichment of elites, particularly in the last 2 years. If only he could get the conference delegates to pay their taxes and stop robbing poor people, he could axe Oxfam altogether!
Some sessions do make the stomach turn. For example, in one, Pfizer announced an “Accord for a Healthier World,” with its CEO sitting alongside Bill Gates and two African potentates. Announcements like this are made at the WEF, but would they really not exist if not for the WEF? Unlikely. By providing a platform for such announcements, however, it becomes a lightning rod for suspicion. The WEF styles itself an “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation,” and like any large entity of its kind, it wants to get even bigger and more influential. But at heart, this is business. Klaus Schwab’s business.
The WEF claims serious positive impacts. For example, its ‘First Movers Coalition’ consists of 50 companies that have committed to investing in green technologies and removing carbon. Sounds great, right? The snag, of course, is that they have set up the measurement in such a way that they are able to decide themselves what is meant by ‘green’ or by ‘removing’ carbon. You can count caretaking a forest today as ‘removing’ carbon, and as long as the audience doesn’t know that you cut down and burned a mature forest in the same place last year, they will applaud!
Similarly, the WEF champions a system of reporting called ‘Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics’ (containing environmental, social, and governance, or “ESG,” measures), developed in a cooperative effort with major accounting firms and adopted by 70 companies. Paying a reasonable amount of taxes is not in those KPIs. Nor is free speech. Metrics, but not as you know them.
But what about the smoking gun represented in the many top politicians of today’s world who graduated from the WEF’s Young Leaders program? What about the creepy 2019 WEF conference about what to do in a pandemic?
On the Young Leaders program, it is undoubtedly true that the WEF has become a very successful job networking organization. But it did not invent networking. Networking societies for the rich and powerful have existed for centuries. Think of the Freemasons, the Rotary society, Chatham House, private high schools, Oxbridge, or the Ivy League. The rich and powerful will network with each other, come hell or high water, WEF or no WEF.
Perhaps those who met at the WEF have gelled together on an evil ideology that is bad for the world, but that ideology is clearly not the “Great Reset” ideology articulated by Schwab, since they are not following it in the slightest. Why then does Schwab not protest at how politicians are pretending to enact a Great Reset that is the very opposite of what he advocated in his book? Because he does not really care about his own ideas. A puffed-up conference organizer, Schwab follows his flock of customers rather than leading them. He is being used as a stooge.
OK, but what about that 2019 pandemic simulation conference? Again, you can read all about it online, a level of publicity for their plans that is surely not what you would expect of Bond villains. In these simulations, the WEF folks came to the conclusion that during a pandemic, movement and trade should not be disrupted because of the high costs to society. Yes, you read that right. Once again, this is the very opposite of what was actually done.
The WEF pandemic conference was just one of the many ‘war games’ simulations that entertain people continuously all around the world. Pandemic simulations this week, asteroid simulations next week, killer bee simulations after that. Rather a lot of problems can be covered off in 220 sessions, and one of them is bound to be tomorrow’s news.
The total disconnect between what his pandemic conference said should be done and what actually happened during covid times is once again proof that Klaus is not led by his principles. If he were, he would have been loudly protesting what has gone on over the past two years. Instead, he is merely riding his “good luck” that the leaders who came to drink champagne at his events have now embraced him as their supposed figurehead.
Since he is well into his 80s, Klaus probably figures that if an angry world population came to believe that he was responsible for the disaster that has befallen them, he’d be dead long before they came for justice. Thierry Malleret, his younger co-author on “The Great Reset,” has more to worry about in that regard!
The WEF, in sum, is hot air all the way. It is led by a man who epitomizes pomp, which is nothing new in the circles of the rich and powerful. WEF-approved hot air is no different to the regular variety.
Sure, it’s a place where schmoozing and coordination happen, but the WEF invented neither schmoozing nor the idea of an old-boys club. It is simply the current clubhouse. The real culprits will find another venue the day after the WEF’s shingle is taken down.
COLORADO: Demand grew for educator firearms classes after Texas school shooting. “Demand to enroll in the program typically jumps in the days and weeks after a mass shooting. However, Carno said the demand since the mass school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas is 10 times greater than anything she’s experienced before.”
Uvalde police sent quite the warning — to teachers.
Below is a slightly augmented version of my Hill column on the report that the Biden Administration will go forward with administrative punishment for border agents who were falsely accused of “whipping” Haitian migrants in Texas.