January 29, 2024
DENVER: How About Free Money for Non-Gender-Conforming Illegal Aliens? “Denver launched a multimillion-dollar experimental universal basic income (UBI) program during the pandemic with the funds ‘earmarked for women, families, and transgender and gender non-conforming individuals,’ but now we learn they won’t be the only beneficiaries.”
PARTLY BECAUSE OFFLINE COLLEGE LOOKS SO AWFUL NOW: Public Perception of Online College Is Improving.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Truckers Are Delivering Anti-Leftist Freedom Messages All Over the World. “The world is now polluted with elitists and — worse yet — elitist wannabes, many of whom were empowered by the tyrannical madness of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, truckers remain salt of the earth people and, put mildly, have no use for the nonsense of rampaging leftism.”
MICHAEL WALSH: The Cold Civil War Gets Warmer. “For too long the Right, in high dudgeon, shouts ‘don’t they realize that…?’ regarding every new enormity. But actions speak louder than words, and what the Left has been trying to tell us for years is: ‘of course we do.'”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Houthi Hit on Russian Fuel Has Oil Traders Recalculating Risks.
Friday’s attack made one thing clear: whatever assurances Yemen’s Houthis offer, they don’t extend to a ship’s cargo if the vessel itself has even a tenuous link to the US, UK or Israel. The Houthis had said they were targeting Israeli assets because of the war in Gaza, and then extended their reach to US and UK vessels after those countries launched airstrikes in Yemen.
The attack means that a greater slice of the 3 million barrels a day of Russian crude oil and fuel that has been flowing through the Red Sea to reach customers in Asia could be at risk. And Russian volumes matter to the global market — despite sanctions imposed because of Moscow’s own war in Ukraine.
It’s true that insurance costs can be so prohibitive that some owners find it more attractive to go the long way around Africa — following container shippers that have already made that call. But, while Friday’s attack redefined the kinds of ships that might be viewed as targets, not all ships will fall into that category. The most likely outcome is that the numbers willing to risk it thins out, but the route doesn’t shut altogether.
The Houthis don’t need to shut down the Red Sea. They just need to keep the price of oil up for their sponsors in Tehran and their buddies in Moscow.
FLASHBACK: Neurosis and the Curley Effect.
Reading all of these pieces I’m seeing a story that goes something like this: Depressed, neurotic people (especially single women) are more likely to support Democrats. Democrats support policies and messaging that produce more depressed, neurotic people, especially single women.
Now maybe this is an accident, but maybe it isn’t. Enter the “Curley Effect.” As this Harvard paper notes, “James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. . . . We call this strategy—increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies—the Curley effect. But it is hardly unique to Curley.”
Making the populace (especially women) more fearful, depressed, and neurotic is undoubtedly bad for societal wealth and happiness. But does it yield votes for Democrats? Clearly yes. Are they doing it on purpose?
Probably.
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THE NEW SPACE RACE: Japan’s SLIM moon lander regains power, resumes operations. Excellent news.
JUSTIN “FIDELITO” TRUDEAU and the rise of the liberal dictator.
Remember the Freedom Convoy? This was the Canadian truckers’ revolt against Covid mandates which began two years ago this week. In January 2022, truckers blockaded major trade routes and rolled into Ottawa, beginning a month-long, often carnivalesque occupation of the Canadian capital. It was sparked by a change in vaccination rules that would have made life intolerable for unvaccinated truckers, even though most people were already jabbed and the threat from Covid was well on the wane. But it soon morphed into a much broader revolt against lockdown authoritarianism and the contempt it showed for blue-collar workers.
Trudeau’s response, you may recall, was enough to make Xi Jinping proud. . . .
Now, a top Canadian judge has decided that this outrageous clampdown was illegal to boot. Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act has been deemed an infringement on Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. It was ‘not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration’, the court ruled. All this gives the lie to the government’s absurd demonisation of the peaceful, multiracial truckers’ protests as a ‘dangerous’, ‘far right’ and even ‘insurrectionist’ movement. Indeed, so many of the claims made to justify the clampdown have turned out to be lies. At a separate inquiry in 2022, police had to admit that claims the truckers were ‘armed’ amounted to them having tools and tire irons. Not a single trucker was arrested in Ottawa for illegal possession or storage of a firearm, according to the Toronto Sun. While videos on social media showed a family friendly atmosphere, complete with bouncy castles, Trudeau talked darkly of kids being used as ‘human shields’. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister.
Imagine if Donald Trump had done this while he was still in power? There would have been a military coup. He’d probably be locked up right now, in some secretive facility buried miles beneath a mountain – the sort of place where they keep the Bond villains and the UFOs. And yet because the Western commentariat loves Trudeau and loathes the working classes his trucker crackdown was given a free pass. Even avowed left-wingers repeated the government’s absurd smears, dubbing the truckers ‘fascists’, ‘noxious reactionaries’ and ‘far-right populists’. I say ‘even’, but it wasn’t exactly surprising. After all, Western leftists have become so bourgeois, hysterical and historically illiterate that they now see any assertion of working-class power as fascist by definition.
They really are awful people.
THE MORE BONEHEADED AN IDEA IS THE CLOSER THE CHANCES REACH CERTAINTY THAT BIDEN WILL ACT ON IT: Will Biden Make the ‘Boneheaded’ Move of Nationalizing the Texas Guard?
HOWIE CARR: ‘This is Your FBI,’ thanks to DEI.
Here in Boston, we know just how corrupt the FBI can be.
For instance, framing innocent men for murders they did not commit, or providing explosives for gangsters to use to kill reporters.
Or taking payoffs to set up informants to be rubbed out by serial-killing cocaine dealers, and then after committing such crimes being promoted to director of the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia….
I could go on and on about the Boston FBI office. But you get the picture.
Still, as bad and as overrated as the G-men have always been, they’re worse now.
And the feds’ latest descent into abject incompetence and corruption can be summed up in three letters — DEI. . . .
“The FBI,” the Judiciary committee reports, “has lost its way in a toxic culture of dysfunction unable to find the courage to remedy recruitment and selection processes that have become self-destructive.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Claudine Gay could not be reached for comment.
“The FBI does not appear to be getting experienced, ‘mature’ candidates, such as the former cop, former military person, the professional career person, the lawyer, accountant or engineer.”
Sound familiar? The U.S. Army has the same problem. The brass can’t seem to recruit anybody who can do a push-up. Who in their right mind wants to risk their life by joining an organization run by entitled, shiftless incompetents who despise them?
“The FBI is now a joke among other law enforcement agencies because of its apparent investigative failures, political targeting of certain individuals/groups, and woke adoption… The FBI is considering hiring candidates not accepted by other law enforcement agencies.”
The G-men have Diversity Recruitment Events — “straight white males may not attend.”
In other words, there’s no room for a modern-day Inspector Lew Erskine. But Dylan Mulvaney or Jussie Smollett — come on down!
The FBI denies that they’re having problems recruiting qualified people. But then, the G-men lie about almost everything, as you may have noticed. It’s part of their “sources and methods.”
Here’s a story about the collapse of physical-fitness standards, from an FBI informant identified as SIERRA 72.
Read the whole thing.
Plus: “Failure to adhere to financial responsibilities is no longer a disqualifier. A candidate who was arrested and fought with police officers was not disqualified. People with a documented mental illness are not necessarily disqualified. Lack of candor is no longer a disqualifier.”
WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES: The Geopolitics of World War III.
On January 2, 2024, Foreign Minister Israel Katz proclaimed “We’re in the middle of World War III against Iran [led] radical Islam, whose tentacles are already in Europe.” He claimed that Israel, in engaging in a war against Hamas and other Iranian proxies, was defending “everyone.” Although his rhetoric may seem overblown to many in the United States and Europe, it should not be dismissed out of hand. Sometimes, regional conflicts, such as the Japanese conquest of Manchuria of 1931-32 or the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, foreshadow dangers that are more geographically extensive and militarily intense. Do the barbaric events of October 7, 2023, and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza prefigure a broader, global armed conflict? Or is this merely a local conflict, one that is likely unresolvable short of one side or the other engaging in genocide or ethnic cleansing?
We have written this paper in a specific context. Over thirty months ago we made a geopolitical prediction regarding the emergence of a global conflict with four fronts. However, social scientists rarely test their theories by predicting future political events. Who wants to be characterized as a Jonah or a Cassandra? As one eminent strategist argued, the future of war (in detail) is unknowable. And, with perhaps one notable exception, social scientists rarely engage, on a routine basis, in disprovable prediction. Without predictive tools, social scientists and strategists must rely on intuition, a knowledge of history, and good theories—all of which are often in short supply.
Read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, Biden can’t seem to decide which side he’s on — unless he already has: Biden is planning to throttle Israel’s arms supply as fury grows against Netanyahu’s bombing campaign in Gaza.
SAY ANYTHING: Nikki Haley Botches Response to $83.3 Million Jury Verdict Against Trump. “Rather than blasting the absurdity of the jury’s actions, Haley decided to use the situation to attack Trump.”