[The Z Man.com] Joe diGenova has been talking about the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election for at least a year, maybe longer. Unlike a lot of the people commenting on this in the mass media, he is not using it to sell books or boost his cable career. He also knows how the FBI and DOJ works from a practical matter. Being knowledgeable makes him a rare guy in the commentariat. Most of the people brought on as experts for the cable chat shows know very little about their alleged areas of expertise.
Regardless, he has been one of the most hawkish people on the Barr investigation, claiming that it is a real investigation with real criminal targets. In this recent radio interview he goes into the details of both the Barr investigation and the ongoing impeachment fiasco. He is a Trump partisan, so his opinions on impeachment are predictable, but his thoughts on the conspiracy are interesting. He probably has access to information from the Trump White House.
The interesting thing about all of this is just how widespread the conspiracy was during the 2015-2016 period. In that interview he talks about former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who is allegedly cooperating with Barr and Durham. What makes the Rogers issue interesting is that he was the original whistle-blower. He is not treated as such, because the media hates Trump and anyone associated with him, but Rogers was the guy who blew the whistle on the spying to the Trump people.
What’s also interesting about Rogers is he seems to have been a good guy, who decided to put an end to the shenanigans with regards to access to top-secret data by FBI contractors. He closed off their access at some point in 2016, which put him in bad odor with the Obama administration. He was eventually pushed out, which suggests the conspiracy has roots into the Obama inner-circle. That may explain why the easy cases to be made against the FBI conspirators are on hold.
That’s the other thing about the Rogers case. As CTH explains in that post, his addition to the story reveals that the use of the NSA database by political contractors working for the Democrats goes back to at least 2012. It is an axiom of white-collar crime that the practice always goes back much further than the evidence initially reveals. Anyone who has done forensic accounting knows this. You find the first evidence of a crime, but it turns out that the pattern goes back much further.
That may be what lies beneath all of this. The great puzzle thus far has been the lack of prosecutions, despite ample evidence. The FBI agents are all guilty of crimes that have been detailed in public documents and the IG reports. There is now proof that Comey perjured himself many times. Just from a public relations perspective alone, rounding up these guys and charging them with corruption seems like a no-brainer. Almost a year into his tenure and Barr has charged no one with a crime.
#1
Since the American people have been buggered for so long by the dishonest DC coup cabal, I for one would like to see real justice finally done. Besides wanting to see real justice done, the American people ought to be able to bring a class-action suit against these crooked bastids for fraud and for bilking us out hard-earned tax money.
#2
If the conspirators are not indicted, then our democracy is a sham.
By their own admission they sought to pull off a coup d'etat.
They enlisted foreign intelligence agents to spy on and entrap US persons. They lied shamelessly to the FISA Court and created a loop of self-referential BS reports shuffled through their accomplices in the media. Etc etc
[Forbes] In 2019, it didn’t matter if you were an actress or an athlete, an entrepreneur or an executive‐it was a tumultuous year for many, turbulent enough to render quite a few professional reputations ruined. Here, in our judgment, are the biggest career crashes of all, arranged in alphabetical order.
[CommDigiNews] As Americans get ready to leave 2019 permanently in the dust, one of life’s eternal truisms still remains. Namely, when a crisis is spiraling out of control, find a Powerful Bald White Guy (PBWG) to set things right. Powerful Bald White Guys run the world. Giving PBWGs their due means bringing them out of their hiding places once a year.
[Forbes] Gleaned from the pages of a book purchased by accident at the University of Nebraska, Warren Buffett's investment philosophy‐buy and hold stocks forever‐has proven to be one of the best-performing strategies of all time. It has also paid off particularly well this past decade.
Despite gifting large amounts of Berkshire Hathway stock to charity since 2006 (about $34 billion total), the Oracle of Omaha is ending 2019 with a net worth of roughly $89 billion, up approximately $42 billion since 2010 and making him the seventh-biggest billionaire gainer of the past 10 years. Buffett has never sold any Berkshire, and about 98% of his fortune is made up of the company’s shares.
The never-ever let go strategy has worked for most of the decade’s other biggest gainers as well, all of whom are at least $40 billion richer than in 2010. Altogether the ten added an astonishing $555 billion to their fortunes. A testament to the longest bull market on record, all are founders or long-term executives, past and present, of public companies that dominated the decade's headlines. Like Buffett, they have largely scored by holding onto massive positions in those firms.
#1
These people plugged directly into the human race's desire for "stuff." You can argue with details of their approaches, but they tapped the main vein.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/26/2019 9:51 Comments ||
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Excerpt:
[Gladstone Institute] Akkari writes that the Islamic cultural and religious elite in Denmark, "... Uses its influence over Muslims to negotiate with typically the left-wing... "
"They use the support of the left to strengthen the grip on Muslims' choices. They do so by standing as their representatives (often without having asked them for legitimacy of the representation)... The left supports the positions and representatives of the [Muslim, ed.] elite by helping them to stand for election or to have dialogue and cooperation with them during and after the elections. The left... shows good will for dialogue with the [Muslim, ed.] power elite. They increase their political votes with this relationship and use it actively..."
[Bloomberg Opinion] Democrats are facing a challenge they haven’t confronted since the 1988 presidential election. They are trying to persuade enough Americans to kick a Republican out of the White House even though the economy is doing well. They failed that year ‐ and as their latest presidential debate showed, so far they haven't figured out how to meet the challenge this time either.
Early in that debate, moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS noted that "the overall U.S. economy right now looks strong" and asked the candidates what they would say to voters "who may not like everything President Trump does but they really like this economy." Each of the candidates who responded denied her premise. They said it wasn’t really a strong economy after all.
One of their tacks was to bring up specific shortcomings of the economy. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said we have the highest child-poverty rate "of almost any major country on earth" and that wage growth over the past year, at 1.1% after inflation, has been "not great." Former Vice President Joe Biden said that "most Americans" would "have to sell something or borrow the money" to pay an unexpected $400 bill. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang said that depression, financial insecurity and student loan debt are at record highs.
Many of these specific complaints are false or overstated. America’s child poverty rate looks bad in international comparisons only if you are looking at relative poverty: the fraction of children in households making less than half the median income. That’s actually a measure of inequality. Look instead at levels of material deprivation among children, and the U.S. is in line with other countries. Child poverty rates have also been declining.
Wage growth during the past year was better than it has been for most of the past two decades; and it is as good a conjunction of wage growth and high employment levels as we have seen in this period.
Biden’s statistic about a surprise $400 bill is wrong. He almost certainly misunderstood a Federal Reserve finding that 61 percent of Americans would pay a $400 bill out of cash. The other 39 percent, it is true, would sell something or borrow the money, for example by running a credit-card balance. That doesn’t mean a majority of the population would "have to" resort to such measures.
[Gladstone] Under Laurence Tribe's scenario, the House Democrats get to "obstruct" the Senate and "abuse" their power (to borrow terms from the articles of impeachment).
I believe that the Senate need not wait for articles of impeachment to be transmitted. Senators are empowered by the constitution to begin a trial now ‐ with or without further action by the House. Just as the House has the "sole power of impeachment," so too the Senate has the "sole power to try all impeachments."
Tribe and the Democratic House majority, led by Speaker Pelosi, want to have their constitutional cake and eat it too: they want Trump impeached but not acquitted. Sorry, but the Constitution does not permit that partisan, result-oriented ploy. Either Trump has been impeached and is entitled to a Senate trial; or he has not been impeached and is entitled to a clean slate.
So there are only two constitutionally viable alternatives: either Pelosi must announce that Trump has not been impeached; or the Senate must initiate a trial. Preserving the status quo indefinitely ‐ Trump remaining impeached without having a trial ‐ is unconstitutional and should not be tolerated by the American people.
They pervert the process and try to ensure their desired result.
They wanted Kavanaugh accused of rape but not cleared-- forever smeared. They smeared the Gibson family in Oberlin OH as racists and will not relent -- even after a judgment and over $30 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
They wanted Nick Sandmann to be the face of the Class Enemy -- even after it became obvious he was the only adult on the steps that day.
#4
Can Pelosi veto a vote of the House on her personal say-so? The House voted to impeach (and I suppose the effort helped keep them out of mischief(*)); I'd have thought that adequate notice to the Senate.
(*) "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session."
Posted by: James ||
12/26/2019 23:09 Comments ||
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[NBC News] DAMASCUS, Syria ‐ A top adviser to Syria’s president says the United States has no right to Syria’s oil and has warned of "operations" against American troops guarding the oil fields.
Bouthaina Shaaban, who is a political and media adviser to Bashar al-Assad, recently told NBC News that the U.S. has "absolutely no right; it is our oil."
"He’s talking about stealing it," she added in her office at Syria's presidential palace in Damascus, referring to President Donald Trump’s declaration earlier this year that the U.S. would "keep" Syrian oil.
In October, the Trump administration announced plans to withdraw some 1,000 troops from Syria, amounting to most of the U.S. military presence in the country. But he later reversed course, approving an expanded military mission to secure an expanse of oil fields across eastern Syria.
Shaaban went on to warn of "popular opposition and operations against the American occupiers of our oil."
#2
Do let’s recall that President Trump promised that oil to the Kurds so they could support the effort hunting down the last of ISIS. We don’t want their piddly little oil aaaaalllll the way over there when we have more than enough of our own at home.
[American Thinker] - I was going to write a measured piece about how the failure of Nancy Pelosi to send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. But really, who cares about impeachment any more?
Then I accidentally found out that my AT piece of two weeks ago on "Women, the Public Square, and the Cancel Culture" made it on Right Wing Watch and Patheos, where I am described as a "far right misogynist." I can’t believe they said that!
More important is the flap over J.K. Rowling putting her head in the noose by tweeting on the notion that women are women whatever the transgender activists and the judges say. As a fashionable young yachtswoman said to the United Nations: "how dare you!"
I thought to myself: When the trans activists are canceling the feminist activists then the left has started eating its tail like the mythical Ouroboros. And whole thing about sex and gender and men calling themselves women and vice versa and everyone a victim is nothing but fake outrage, about fake victims.
And I thought. You know what? It’s not just the transgender activists; the whole LGBT thing is about "fake victims." And the feminists started it.
It makes sense, of course. After the left had had a grand old time advocating for the workers and then nobly decreeing an end to the Democrats’ Jim Crow laws, along came women, posing as victims.
I’ll grant that lower-class women have had a rough time since whenever, but feminism was and remains a movement of gentry women for gentry women and by gentry women.
The stunning achievement of gentry feminism was to transform the victim racket from a politics that at least pretended to care for the lower orders into a purely upper-class racket.
Gentry women are not helpless victims, never were. They are "fake victims."
If there are real women victims they would be the commoner and prole women condemned to life in the aftermath after the collapse of marriage in the lower orders.
And whose fault is that, gentry liberal feminist women? Far right misogynists?
You’d think there’d be hell to pay for the "unintended consequences" of feminism and the sexual revolution. But I predict that liberal gentry feminist women will get a pass. They always do. Because patriarchy.
Definition of "misogynist:" a critic of gentry women. Other women need not apply.
But back to our LGBT friends and the brilliant notion of "fake victims." After gentry feminist women invented the genre, why not extend the fake-victim concept to another group of gentry liberals? Why should gentry feminist women have all the fun? Gentry gays? No doubt about it, gays were being monstrously hunted down by bigoted fundamentalist Christian witch-hunting hate groups back in the day. And all gays wanted was a bit of respect and funding for AIDS.
Of course, in my young days, the gay-baiters were the lefties, because in England in the Sixties every lefty -- including the young Jeremy Corbyn, you think? -- knew that "poofters" were upper-class toffs like Lord Sebastian Flyte and his teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited. But now gays are helpless victims, and transgenders are supercalifragilistic helpless victims.
To understand the victim plague let’s reprise Curtis Yarvin’s Three Layers model in "The Clear Pill" that society is composed of gentry, commoners, and clients.
Okay, stop right there. Let’s call the "clients" by their real name: "victims," originally real-ish victims, now totally fake victims. So,
We may call [our layers] gentry, commoners, and [victims]. The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the [victims] are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.
And if there aren’t any real victims out there to provide a warrant for more government power for the gentry we will create "fake victims" out of prosperous woke gentry activistes and we will import battalions of "migrants and refugees" from beyond the seas to make up the numbers in the victim rank-and-file. You see if we don’t.
The logic of politics requires an "us" and "them." If there are victims, and we noble gentry are ethically mobilizing to defend them, there must be someone we are ethically mobilizing to fight against and cancel: employers, kulaks, running dogs, racists, sexists, homophobes, "far right misogynists," baskets of deplorables. In other words, commoners.
And this reality leads directly to President Trump’s spot-on meme:
"In reality they’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just in the way."
If the sacred quest of the liberal gentry class is to protect all the helpless victims, then it must be protecting the victims from something. And that something is You.
Nothing personal, you understand. But when the liberal gentry folk decide to make a nice omelette for the victims, real and fake, they always break a few commoner eggs.
Kurt for Christmas
[TownHall] - It’s glorious how the normal people of Virginia are rising up to reject Governor Blackface ... or is it Governor KKK-klothes? He can’t seem to remember which one he was in the photo, meaning he had probably donned both creepy get-ups at some point. Yay, our Democrat betters! In any case, the people are telling him, "No, we’re not letting you goose-stepping Bloomberg bots take our guns," and it is especially glorious that the means to make this righteous commitment is a new, and not garbage, sanctuary movement.
I’ve always been an advocate of playing by the left’s new rules, and this is a great opportunity to new rules the libs good and hard. We got your sanctuary right here, pinkos.
See, the left decided that Virginia, whose northern reaches are now full of government workers and other garbage people, needed to turn blue. With tons of lib donor money and the aid of a typically inept state GOP (I know those feel here in California), they managed to just barely grab control of both houses of the legislature. With Governor Byrd-Jolson in charge, they immediately promised to do away with the Second Amendment. They announced that they were going to confiscate the citizens’ scary guns and do all sorts of other things to show those disobedient, probably Jesus-loving rubes who was boss.
Except, as Chairman Mao ‐ who you think these dorks would appreciate more ‐ pointed out, power grows from the barrel of a gun, not out of a mean tweet.
...The Democrats freaked out, stunned that normal people responded to their diktats with middle fingers instead of abject submission. One lib threatened to turn the National Guard on the people of Virginia, which is a neat trick since the National Guard is made up of the people of Virginia.
...In fact, if Governor Duke Trudeau ever did consider the mass oppression of American citizens by military forces as his fellow Democrat threatened, the President should federalize the Virginia Guard and use it to restore a republican form of government in the state.
In any case, the Democrats have finally found a kind of sanctuary city they won’t goo goo over ‐ one that protects the constitutional rights of American citizens instead of one that undermines and breaks the duly-enacted laws passed by the American people’s representatives for the benefit of foreigners who shouldn’t be here in the first place.
...As much fun as it is to humiliate their garbage governor, the people of Virginia are doing something more important. They are getting woke. This urban lib attack on regular folks ‐ an attack totally unprovoked and being executed solely for the sheer lefty joy of making normal people bend to their will ‐ has roused a sleeping giant. Many of those uncool people, most of whom don’t eat kale or have unusual pronouns, did not bother to vote in recent elections. Then they found that the Democrats were planning to send people with weapons to their homes to steal the tools that keep them safe and free.
#4
I like the stuff about $250K to lock up gun owners. That'll buy 3 entry level screws at best, unless the corrections officer union gets there first and insists it get spent to shore up existing pension shortfalls.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/26/2019 13:34 Comments ||
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#5
He must sell himself real cheap if he thinks $250K is big money.
h/t Instapundit
[CJ] - The comedian Ricky Gervais has committed heresy by mocking a modern (and very recent) orthodoxy of the right-thinking intellectual: that a man who takes hormones, has surgery, and behaves like a woman actually is a woman in all respects, no different from women born female.
In support of a statement by J. K. Rowling, the famous children’s author (and by no means social conservative), that a transgender woman is not a woman‐she was expressing support for a woman dismissed by a think tank for holding such a view‐Gervais posted a witty tweet in which he mocked not only the opposing orthodoxy but, by implication, the underlying philosophy of so much current thought about social problems: that differences in outcomes between groups are explicable only and completely by such factors as prejudice and discrimination. He wrote:
These awful biological women can never understand what it must be like for you becoming a lovely lady so late in life. They take their girly privileges for granted. Winning at female sports and having their own toilets. Well, enough is enough.
...Here the question is not whether Rowling and Gervais are right, though most people would think that they are right, albeit that they would also increasingly fear to acknowledge it in public (a mark of creeping totalitarianism, incidentally). The question is, rather, whether they had the right to say what they did as part of the normal give and take of public debate. The reaction to what they said‐the veteran feminist, Germain Greer, was another object of such aggressive recrimination for having said something similar‐suggests that pressure groups’ attachment to freedom of speech is very weak. They prefer issuing fatwas.
A textbook of pharmacology that I used as a student suggested a natural history of a newly discovered drug. First it was hailed as a miracle-cure; then, as its side-effects were described, it was reprehended as deadly poison; finally, it was found to be useful in some cases.
Increasingly in our times, social ideas seem to go through analogous, but different, stages. First, they are too absurd to be entertained; then they are promoted and propagandized; finally, they are made obligatory articles of faith. The cycle seems to have a built-in accelerator. But it remains true, as Bishop Butler had it, that "everything is what it is and not another thing."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Z Man.com] Joe diGenova has been talking about the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election for at least a year, maybe longer. Unlike a lot of the people commenting on this in the mass media, he is not using it to sell books or boost his cable career. He also knows how the FBI and DOJ works from a practical matter. Being knowledgeable makes him a rare guy in the commentariat. Most of the people brought on as experts for the cable chat shows know very little about their alleged areas of expertise.
[Forbes] Gleaned from the pages of a book purchased by accident at the University of Nebraska, Warren Buffett's investment philosophy‐buy and hold stocks forever‐has proven to be one of the best-performing strategies of all time. It has also paid off particularly well this past decade. 
[Bloomberg Opinion] Democrats are facing a challenge they haven’t confronted since the 1988 presidential election. They are trying to persuade enough Americans to kick a Republican out of the White House even though the economy is doing well. They failed that year ‐ and as their latest presidential debate showed, so far they haven't figured out how to meet the challenge this time either.
