Jts5665

THE FBI PERFORMS ITS ESSENTIAL FUNCTION AGAIN:

It’s amazing how this stuff magically happens. Reminds me of how they lost the 30 cell phones/passwords during The Russia Hoax. The losses always go one way. Does anyone believe this crap anymore? https://t.co/ROEmvjwd3f

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 20, 2021

DOES ANYONE THINK THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WILL SPEND THIS MONEY MORE WISELY THAN ELON MUSK WOULD HAVE?

Nbd here, just the world's largest online retailer bowing to Orwellian demands from a psychotic digital dictatorship:

ELITE STANDARDS: Harvard Fires ‘A Shot Across the Bow’ Of Higher Ed With Test-Optional Policy.

This basically just empowers administrators to admit people they like and discriminate against people they don’t with less of a paper trail. And — to be clear — that’s why they’re doing it.

Related: To reduce inequality, abolish the Ivy League.

Auto-driving has its critics but I'm guessing this baby won't grow up to be one of them:

Great Britain famously used Australia as a penal colony—a place to which they could send the worst of their worst criminals in order to get them as far away from civilized society as possible.

The post FBI Lawyer Convicted of Forging Trump-Russia Materials Already Restored to “Good” Standing with DC Bar appeared first on The Bongino Report.

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THIS IS A BIG DEAL: Researchers discover water in expansive canyon on Mars. “Alexey Malakhov, a researcher at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences who co-authored a study on the findings, said in a statement that the unexpected amount of water is ‘very much like Earth’s permafrost regions.’ Water in these regions is stored in ice that permanently persists under the dry soil because of cold temperatures, he said.”

D*MN IT, BEE!  KKK Disbands As Progressive Left Accomplishing All Their Goals.

America’s paper of record!

DON’T BE EVIL: New Google Drive policy could restrict access to your files.

Google’s about to make some changes to the way you share Google Drive files. The search giant has announced a new policy that will restrict access to files violating its policies, and prevent them from being shared in the process.

Google announced this change in a blog post, revealing that restrictions may be put in place on files that violate Google’s Terms of Service or abuse program policies. While the owner will still have full access, this move means sharing privileges will be revoked — even if someone already has a link.

According to Google file owners will receive an email when files are restricted. Not only does that alert them to the fact it’s happened, it will also give them the opportunity to appeal the decision and request a review.

“The cloud” is just a fancy way of saying “someone else’s hard drive.”

So if it’s something you don’t want someone else to take away, lose, or look at, then don’t store it on somebody else’s hard drive.

I realize Uber is a polarizing company with forceful opinions for and against. The following documentary seems siomething of a hatchet job.

But one story, starting at 24:56, had me laughing so hard I replayed the brief segment about it twice. Here was something that could compete with the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” in terms of brazen fraud.[*]

In a nutshell: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was desperate to break into the Chinese market, not just to wade into a pool of 1.4 billion customers, but also for the bragging rights of being the first Western tech company to “make it big in China”.

So not only did flood the zone with coupons for free rides, he offered new drivers $600 sign-up bonuses. And of course, the drivers would get paid per mile, on Uber’s dime, even if the rides were free trial rides.

Alas, he had not counted on the creativity of the local scammers. Local cybercriminals bought up whole “containerloads” (probably hyperbole) of cheap burner phones, half of which were used to sign up as drivers under false identities, the other half as customers.

So a signed-up “driver” would drive all over town with 40-50 “ride” cell phones spread all over the back seat, cash in the signup bonus and the mileage rewards for the “Potemkin passengers”, then the phones would be wiped, new throwaway phone numbers setup on all, bogus rider signups done with the new numbers, freebie codes applied, and then a fresh (in both senses) round of Uber-milking would start…

Eventually, Kalanick exited the Chinese market in return for an equity stake in the Chinese clone of Uber.

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[*] SPOILER ALERT: the fictional Broadway producer Max Bialystock [played by Zero Mostel] and his acoountant sidekick Leopold Bloom [played by Gene Wilder] sold shares in a production that added up to about 50,000% . If the play flopped, then no profits needed to be paid out — so the ploy depended on finding an utterly terrible play with no redeeming features, and staging it in the worst possible way with the worst actors and directors.

Alas, Bialystock & Bloom did such a marvelous job at creating the turkey of the ages that it became “so bad, it’s good” and an unintentional box-office hit as such — and now they were on the hook for 500 times the actual profits…

It is received wisdom among the (il)liberal left commentariat that Nazis were never socialist at all, to the extent that “fact-checker” derpseals fact-check you as “false” for attaching the label socialist to a movement explicitly calling itself the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). [It’s one reason I make a point of using the term National Socialist rather than the German nickname “Nazi” whenever possible.]

An interesting twist that not enough participants in this debate are aware of was the intra-NSDAP power struggle between two rival factions, which I will call the Hitlerites and the Strasserites.

Gregor Strasser and his brother Otto Strasser (five years his junior) were two of five siblings[*] born to a Bavarian jurist and civil servant. Both saw service in World War One and were discharged as Lieutenants, and both were awarded the Iron Cross First Class for bravery. Both had university degrees: Gregor in pharmacy, Otto in economics. Gregor took over a pharmacy in Landshut near Munich, Otto worked for a few years as a civil servant at the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture (Reichsernährungsministerium) in Berlin.

In fact, Otto’s first political engagement was in the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), which is still one of the two main political parties in Germany today and to which the new Chancellor Olaf Scholz belongs. Otto even fought in an SPD-affiliated paramilitary group, the “Rote Hundertschaft“ (Red Hundreds) against an attempted military coup (the so-called “Kapp Putsch“).

His brother Gregor apparently became a member of the NSDAP early on, and from December 1924 until March 1933 was a member of the Reichstag for it. Otto joined him in the party. Major intellectual influences on both men, especially on Otto, were two thinkers that combined hardcore Prussian nationalism with economic socialism: (1) the cultural historian and antiparliamentarian polemicist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925, whose magnum opus was called The Third Reich!); (2) the self-declared “National Bolshevik” Ernst Niekisch (1889-1967), who openly advocated a German-USSR alliance against “Africanized France”.

While Gregor Strasser lacked the [diabolical] demagogic talent of “Der Widerchrist” Hitler [y”sh], he made up for that in organizational talent and zeal, and built up an effective party apparatus of which he became “Reichsorganisationsleiter” [National Organization Leader, read: General Secretary] in 1928. The elder Strasser, possibly even more than Hitler himself, was materially responsible for transforming the NSDAP from a regional semi-fringe group into a national mass movement.

Moreover, both brothers were skilled polemical journalists and publishers. Soon Gregor head-hunted an editor with a doctorate for his new Berliner Arbeiterzeitung [Berlin Workers Paper], a failed playwright called [Paul] Josef Goebbels.

Their message, one that emphasized the socialist elements of the NSDAP program over the nationalist ones, resonated in the North of the country, especially among the working class in the country’s twin industrial heartlands of the Ruhr and greater Berlin. Strasser and Goebbels indeed drafted a revised party program that had Hitler accusing both of “Bolshevism”. The full text is available (in German) in R. Kühnl, “Zur Programmatik der Nationalsozialistischen Linken: das Strasser-Programm von 1925/26”, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte [=Contemporary History Quarterly] 1966, 14, 317. https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1966_3.pdf

As Otto Strasser put it after the war, the Strassers believed not just in common ownership of the means of production (“socialism” by any reasonable definition) but — while there were plenty of rhetorical tropes about Jewish usury etc. — they rejected what Otto Strasser called “zoological” [sic] antisemitism.

Hitler recognized Goebbels’s propaganda skills as well as his personal insecurity, and soon won him over to his camp. But Strasser was still a force to be reckoned with.

In 1930 the Berlin SA, in league with the Strasserites, rebelled against the national leadership. Hitler won the showdown, and Otto Strasser — who had quit the party and founded a dissident group that was popularly referred to as the “Black Front” — was forced to flee abroad. Hitler took personal command of the SA, then pled with Ernst Röhm — who was working as a military advisor to the Bolivian government — to return to Germany and become its chief of staff and de facto commander.

Back in 1919, then-Captain Ernst Röhm had been impressed by the rhetorical fury of one of his soldiers, Corporal Adolf Hitler, who had been sent by military intelligence to join a new small party called the DAP (German Workers Party) and had quickly become its chief orator. Röhm then in turn had joined the party himself [as member #623 — Hitler was #555; numbers started at 501 ;)], which soon changed its name to the familiar NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party). Röhm was one of the few people with whom Hitler was on a first-name basis, allowing Röhm to address him by the informal second person pronoun “Du”,[**] or as “Adolf” or “Adi” rather than “Mein Führer”. Remarkably, Röhm was openly homosexual (of a “butch” variety that defied the popular stereotype of the time) — which led to persistent rumors that Hitler himself was homosexual. (His own comments at the time: “we cannot be childish about people who put their lives on the line for the movement”. Later he would sing a very different tune about “violators of Paragraph 175”. [***], explicitly invoking it in a speech “justifying” the Night Of The Long Knives.)

Röhm accepted the position, and the ranks of the SA soon swelled mightily, from 77,000 when he took the position, to 430,000 in the spring of 1933. Especially in large cities, many a new Sturmbann (battalion) was said to be made up of “beefsteak Nazis”: brown[****] on the outside, red on the inside.

Coming back to Gregor Strasser: he continued to be the only serious rival for Hitler within the party. Indeed, in late 1932, the Reichswehr general and last Weimar Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher offered Strasser the position of Deputy Chancellor in an attempt to strengthen his minority government by including the Strasserite faction of the NSDAP. This led to a confrontation within the party leadership that ended with Strasser resigning from all leadership positions within the party.

After the NSDAP came to power first on January 30, 1933, then acquired dictatorial powers through the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) of March 24, 1933, the SA leadership became gradually disgruntled, and started talking of the need for a “second revolution”, while spouting quasi-Strasserite rhetoric.

Hitler’s real or feigned fear of being overthrown by an SA-putsch [with SS-leader Heinrich Himmler, y”sh, egging him on for Macchiavellian reasons] ultimately resulted in the purge codenamed “Unternehmen Kolibri” [Operation Hummingbird], better known as the Night of the Long Knives (June 30 and July 1, 1934). Among its 300-odd victims, the three most prominent ones were Röhm, Gregor Strasser, and Schleicher. The SA continued to exist but became a shadow of its former self; from then on, Himmler’s SS, which had “done the dirty work”, displaced the SA as a major power center and would ultimately become a state within the state.

Otto Strasser had fled first to Czechoslovakia, then via Switzerland, France, Portugal, and Bermuda would ultimately settle in Canada in 1941. His brand of “national socialism with a capital S” would ultimately become a major inspiration for what in far-right circles is known as the International Third Position (the two positions they reject being communism and capitalism). Bizarrely enough (?), in 1950, he was offered a position in the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, i.e., the East German Communist Party), but declined, as he ultimately wanted to return to his native Bavaria. He ultimately did return there, and after an unsuccessful attempt to launch a political party (the German Social Union), he lived out his remaining years at his sister’s house, writing his memoirs (which I read in French translation decades ago after stumbling onto them as “bookshelf filler” in a furniture store).

Paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane’s famous quip about the Universe: history is not only weirder than we suppose, it is weirder than we can suppose.

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[*] The three remaining siblings were their sister Olga (about whom little is known except that Otto lived at her house during his twilight years); the youngest son Anton, a civil law notary who later fell in battle on the Eastern Front; and Paul, later Father Bernhard, a Benedictine monk who spent the postwar years as a teacher and priest in the USA.

[**] Unlike English and Hebrew, but like many other Indo-European languages, German has a T-V distinction, between an informal second person (“Du”, cognate of English “thou”) and a formal/respectful one (“Sie”). Indeed, German has the reflexive verb “sich duzen” (calling each other “Du”) to describe people being close enough to adress each other so, like French “se tutoyer” [hence the Dutch loanword “tutoyeren”].

And yes, I am aware that German youngsters nowadays use “Du” indiscriminately — but that is a very recent development.

[***] Paragraph 175 of the Strafgesetzbuch/Penal Code originally went back to the days of Bismarck (May 15, 1871). Jurisprudence had limited its application very narrowly to one specific male-on-male act, in the presence of witnesses. The Third Reich broadened its scope to all forms of sexual activities between men, and reclassified it from a Vergehen (misdemeanor) to a Verbrechen (“crime”, idiomatically: felony).

[****] That brown became the uniform color of the SA/”brownshirts” is an accident of history: after the Versailles treaty forced Germany to give up its African colonies, tens of thousands of brown uniforms for the German colonial troops became useless, and the fledgling NSDAP bought them up at a fire sale price.

SOME SAY WE’RE RECAPPING THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD, AND YOU KNOW WHAT CAME NEXT: Scientists discover ‘surprising’ cause of Europe’s little ice age in late medieval era: Change in ocean currents – similar to phenomena seen today – likely cause behind substantial cooling, US scientists say.

Prediction: When we flip to global cooling the same remedies — increased taxes and regulation, worse lives for ordinary people — will be presented again as remedies for this new problem. Because the crises change regularly, but the responses never do.

Remember how Sen. Elizabeth Warren took a moment from powwowing across the plains to criticize Elon Musk, and how Elon ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED her on Twitter?

The post FDA Approves Booster for Minors Without Testing Booster on Minors appeared first on The Bongino Report.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Bay Area car break-ins are on the rise, prompting some auto owners to leave their trunks open.

Do 21st century San Franciscans watch Vertigo as an inadvertent documentary about Bay Area life in a gilded age?

Related: Crime and No Punishment.

QUESTIONS ASKED: How bad is the current inflation and when will it abate?

I hate inflation, but there’s something delicious about the fact that this problem, above all others, is responsible for the low esteem in which voters currently hold Joe Biden and his party. Inflation is reality’s “F-you” to a central element of liberal hubris — the view that the government can do whatever the hell it wants by way of spending, energy policy, etc. and suffer no bad economic consequences.

Lyndon Johnson found that out as well, as Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society:

But an alarm that had only recently begun to ring told [voters] something was wrong and getting wronger by the day. The Consumer Price Index was rising 3 percent annually, significantly when compared with the old rate, which had hung somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent. The recent economic boom, as Senator Russell Long of Louisiana pointed out, was not always a boom for the “little fellow.” Inflation offset the gains of growth. The purchasing power of weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers had actually gone down in 1966 and 1967.15 Perhaps the money trouble signified not a general shortage but simply that the government had grown too large for itself.

And by 1968, Johnson found, Congress was ready to challenge the Administration on money. There was, said Senator Alan Bible of one of the old gold states, Nevada, a “growing mistrust of currencies, and when such mistrust exists, people of the world will turn to minerals of value, namely gold and silver.” From France, Charles de Gaulle kept up the mockery. In the United States, those away from government work were also frank. One economist in the private sector, a Wall Street forecaster named Alan Greenspan, revived the old, pre-Roosevelt point: a true gold standard was the only thing that could keep a government fiscally honest. Greenspan was a fan and friend of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. In The Objectivist, Rand’s periodical, Greenspan wrote that American overspending wasn’t strength or a wartime phenomenon; it was predictable. A welfare state, which was what the United States had become, always overcommitted. “The welfare statists,” Greenspan said, were always “quick to recognize that if they wished to retain power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e. they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds. . . . Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” Another expert safely out of reach of Johnson, at the National Bureau of Economic Research, was Arthur Burns. Greenspan was just one economist; Burns, who headed the NBER, was the voice of the entire economics profession, independent and proud. Back in the 1950s, he had warned that “the problems of inflation will return to haunt us.” It had been Burns who back in 1960 had warned the presidential candidate Richard Nixon—correctly, as it turned out—that tight monetary policy at the Fed was slowing growth and could cost Nixon the election. Lately, Burns had been charging that Lyndon Johnson’s brand of prosperity featured serious “perils of inflation.” Burns, like Greenspan, pointed to the costs of the butter, not the guns. To attribute the recent large increases in the budget, and certainly future increases, to the costs of war, Burns said, frankly, was “a misconception.” The anti-poverty programs were the problem—a good share of them, as Burns told the New York Times, were “pure waste.” Precisely because they were outsiders, Greenspan and Burns could speak truth to power. Johnson was trading in the Great Dollar for the Great Society, and it was a lousy trade.

On the appropriate date of April 1^st, the New Yorker asked, “Is Biden Really the Second Coming of FDR and LBJ?”

Add the above passage from Shlaes to the 2015 headline, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate,” and Biden already seems a shoe-in to be the equal of both men!

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? NFL announces international market partnerships: Rams in China, Buccaneers in Germany, Dolphins in Spain.

To paraphrase Glenn from earlier this month, the WTA has more balls than the NFL — and the NBA: Peng Shuai: WTA suspends tournaments in China over concerns for tennis player.

UPDATE: NFL map endorses CCP’s claim that Taiwan is part of China.

(Updated and bumped.)

“SENATOR KAREN” HAS BEEN ON A TEAR:

UPDATE: From the comments: “Wow. I think it might be fair to say that Senator Karen……went off the reservation this week.”

THE ESTABLISHMENT PROTECTS ITS TOOLS: DC Bar Restores Convicted FBI Russiagate Forger to ‘Good Standing’ Amid Irregularities and Leniency.

A former senior FBI lawyer who falsified a surveillance document in the Trump-Russia investigation has been restored as a member in “good standing” by the District of Columbia Bar Association even though he has yet to finish serving out his probation as a convicted felon, according to disciplinary records obtained by RealClearInvestigations.

The move is the latest in a series of exceptions the bar has made for Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty in August 2020 to doctoring an email used to justify a surveillance warrant targeting former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months probation last January. But the D.C. Bar did not seek his disbarment, as is customary after lawyers are convicted of serious crimes involving the administration of justice. In this case, it did not even initiate disciplinary proceedings against him until February of this year — five months after he pleaded guilty and four days after RealClearInvestigations first reported he had not been disciplined. After the negative publicity, the bar temporarily suspended Clinesmith pending a review and hearing. Then in September, the court that oversees the bar and imposes sanctions agreed with its recommendation to let Clinesmith off suspension with time served; the bar, in turn, restored his status to “active member” in “good standing.”

Before quietly making that decision, however, records indicate the bar did not check with his probation officer to see if he had violated the terms of his sentence or if he had completed the community service requirement of volunteering 400 hours.

All our institutions have been corrupted.

For a few weeks, regime-friendly press outlets in Germany, like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, have been ringing the alarm about Telegram as a “lawless space” that poses a “danger to society.” Apparently it is a den of hate speech and incitement. This coordinated hyperventilation comes with demands that the new German government regulate Telegram as a social media application, which would require its administrators to report illegal content to authorities. Right now German law regards Telegram as a messenger app and thus exempts it from some of these rules.

In perfect tandem with this false press hysteria, police have raided the apartments of a Telegram chat group in Dresden. Allegedly, members of the chat, in the context of discussions about vaccine mandates, contemplated assassinating Michael Kretschmer, the CDU minister president of Saxony. Whenever police actions and press messaging campaigns align this perfectly, you should presume it is the work of agents provocateurs. In all likelihood, German security services are infiltrating Telegram chat groups, and putting about violent rhetoric in the interests of creating arrests and headlines to reinforce the press narrative.

I understand most of my readers aren’t in Germany, but as a back-up to Twitter I have my own Telegram channel, so I just want to advise everyone that caution is extremely important here. If you’re in a chat and anyone proposes violence, the chances that this is a bad actor are high, and you should distance yourself from these statements immediately. “I disavow all political violence and you should too” is the line I always use. Protect yourself.

Joe Biden hosted a Summit for Democracy a Taiwanese representative was speaking about the state of democracy and openness in Asia, showing a map that differentiated Taiwan from China.

ENABLING CHILD MOLESTATION AND STATUTORY RAPE: Biden’s Education Dept. to stop collecting data on sexual assault allegations by teachers.

In an apparent move to appease teachers’ unions, the Biden administration’s Department of Education intends to repeal a Trump-era effort to collect data on sex crimes committed by teachers against their students.

The Department of Education said on Thursday that the Office for Civil Rights will not ask school districts any questions about teacher-on-student sexual assault allegations as part of its 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection.

The change is supposedly designed to “reduce burden and duplication of data,” according to a department spokesman who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

They didn’t even bother coming up with a halfway decent excuse.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Biden Megadonor Scores $500 Million Federal Loan for Solar Company: Politically connected First Solar also secured $3 billion in loan guarantees from Obama administration.

POSTMODERN PRAETORIANS: Leftist ‘Journalists’ Float the Idea That Criticizing Joe Biden Is a Danger to Democracy.

  Stephen Lara did everything right. But even innocent people aren’t safe from civil forfeiture.   Stephen is a 39-year-old Marine from Lubbock, Texas. He is a devoted father of two teenage daughters and, once a month, he drives from Texas to see them in California, where they live with their mother. Eager to be […]