Category Archives: Corruption

Let’s Suppress Fraudulent Votes

11 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by in Corruption, Election Fraud

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No matter how you feel about the 2020 presidential election, whether you think it was conducted fairly or that it was “stolen” from Donald Trump, you should at least come to grips with the reality that our electoral process is quite vulnerable to manipulation. Most voters agree that election fraud is a problem. A recent poll found that 56% of likely voters agree that “every state should require that ballots be available immediately after elections for bipartisan voter reviews to enhance election confidence and transparency. Only 23% are against ballot reviews…”. So these respondents also agree that compromises to the integrity of elections should be addressed.

Local Fraud, National Scope

There is plenty of evidence that the 2020 election was manipulated by agents both inside and outside the government, if only the mainstream press could be bothered to look at it. Nuts and bolts election fraud is largely a local phenomenon, though there is likely some coordination at higher levels. Robert Zimmerman provides this summary of the election fraud in the 2020 election in Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia:

Fulton County and its elections are controlled by democrats, much as in other large cities. Localized fraud in deep blue urban centers doesn’t have much if any effect on local races, but it throws statewide and national races into doubt. Of these deep blue enclaves, Zimmerman says:

“… the government is essentially a one-party Democrat operation. Many election districts in these cities have no Republican election judges at all. If the Democrats wish to commit election fraud, there is no one looking over their shoulder to question them, with some districts actually taking aggressive action in 2020 to illegally keep Republican poll watchers out. … Thus we saw strong evidence in all of these cities of pro-Democrat ballot-stuffing, of all types, from fake ballots to ballots counted multiple times to evidence the votes on the ballots themselves were changed by computer.”

In Wisconsin, the State Supreme Court finally ruled last month that the placement of hundreds of drop boxes in its largest cities was illegal. Those unsupervised drop boxes made it a simple matter for hundreds of “mules” to deposit stacks of fraudulent ballots, not to mention enabling other kinds of ballot harvesting on a massive scale. This was not limited to Wisconsin. Zimmerman also discusses Arizona’s Maricopa County (Phoenix), where there were a host of different issues casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election results. The race in Arizona was very close, and this kind of vote tampering likely threw the state into Biden’s column:

If you doubt the ease with which “mishaps” occur when ballots are counted, take a look at the following tweet from three weeks ago:

The point is that it’s amazingly easy for fraud to occur given the lax standards of accountability often seen in elections, particularly in one-party jurisdictions.

The New Front

Will the Left seize control of elections or leverage that control more aggressively, particularly in deep blue areas? With that control, they can reinforce their ability to swing elections for statewide offices and electoral votes, and they are certainly trying. The link just above describes some well-funded organizations channeling funds to support progressive candidates running for down-ballot positions with supervisory authority over local elections and their procedures. Charities founded by billionaire George Soros, Hilary Clinton, and Mark Zuckerberg are just some of the players involved. This activity has its parallel in Soros’ successful efforts to fund the campaigns of radical leftists for prosecutor jobs in many cities.

There is also the matter of private grants to local election offices, ostensibly to support the “health” of voters and election workers, but mostly used to “get out the vote”. This was the approach used by the activist group funded by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan:

“In 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a left-leaning group that distributed grants to mostly Democrat-dominated precincts, driving up the vote. The Zuckerbergs’ grants, dubbed Zuckerbucks, helped finance drop boxes and expanded mail-in balloting, among other activities.”

Pennsylvania recently prohibited private election grants in order to reduce outside influence on elections, a wise response to the violations of state law that occurred in the 2020 election. The ban covers nonprofits like the Center for Tech and Civic Life. Zuckerberg asserts that the organization distributed more grants to Republican jurisdictions (anywhere Trump won in 2020) than elsewhere, but that claim is dubious based on the amounts of those donations:

“… Republican jurisdictions were far more likely to receive grants of less than $50,000, which would likely not be enough to materially change election practices in the recipient jurisdiction.”

Pennsylvania is not alone in its bid to restore integrity by banning these grants. At least 20 states have passed similar laws since the 2020 election, with varying degrees of stringency. That’s good news, but it won’t stop tampering by officials elected with the aid of organizations intent on controlling election procedures.

Corrupting Federal Institutions

There have been, and still are, machinations at levels much higher than local election authorities. The FBI engaged in election sabotage in 2020 to destroy Donald Trump, a sitting U.S. President. This occurred on at least two fronts. There was the staged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Windmere in October 2020, with all hands attempting to implicate Trump and his supporters. Trump’s prospects fell in Michigan after the announcement of this foiled “kidnapping”, which was subsequently discovered to be a plot by the FBI to entrap a few rubes. Equally disturbing was the flagrant attempt by the Justice Department before the election to discount evidence that Hunter Biden had been engaged in influence peddling for years. That discounting continues to this day, of course.

These maneuvers followed the FBI’s complicity in the Russia Hoax, which was conceived in opposition research by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. The agency made use of a dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of a Clinton campaign contractor. Despite strong suspicions that the dossier was fabricated as well as politically motivated, it was used to obtain clearance from a FISA Court to surveil Trump’s presidential campaign. The FBI continued its misrepresentation of the Steele dossier throughout the Mueller investigation, which ultimately found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia

Today, we know the FBI and the Department of Justice are still at it. Their attempts to destroy Trump, just 80 days ahead of the 2022 midterms, are transparently motivated by politics, culminating in the raid on Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in search of “classified documents”. It is also likely a fishing expedition that they hope might turn up evidence of a “planned insurrection”. Note that neither Hillary Clinton nor Sandy Berger (President Clinton’s National Security Advisor) had their private residences raided despite personal and illegal possession of classified documents. The hypocrisy is jaw dropping, but it seems clear the Mar-a-Lago raid was another example of efforts within federal law enforcement to influence elections.

Another recent example of likely election influencing within a federal institution is how the Census Bureau managed to “significantly” miscount the populations of 14 states in the 2020 Census. Five of the six undercounted states were “red” states. Six of the eight over-counted states were “blue” states, including New York. The admission of the miscount by the Census Bureau occurred after redistricting took place, a process that surely would have been impacted by the count. So the Democrats picked up congressional seats by virtue of the miscounting. In addition, according to Matt Margolis, the miscounts will give the next democrat presidential candidate nine extra votes in the Electoral College.

Efforts to wholly eliminate the Electoral College are another example of the Left’s efforts to seize control of the Executive Branch, once and for all. The popular vote would be replaced and control ceded to a group of highly populated coastal states. As I’ve written before, the Electoral College was an arrangement necessary to obtain the agreement of all states to join the union. There is no doubt that many states would insist upon a similar arrangement today if we were to do it all over again.

Conclusion

There is very real potential for ongoing election tampering and vote fraud in elections, and the Left has demonstrated a wholehearted willingness to engage in this effort. Much of this activity takes place at the local level in jurisdictions in which election supervision is controlled by one party. The looser the rules, the greater potential there is for abuse. This also explains the motivation to pour resources into electing certain candidates to offices with supervisory power over elections. Also disturbing is the complicity of federal law enforcement in attempts to influence presidential elections. Our Republic cannot withstand the unbridled partisanship we’ve witnessed in the election process. Addressing these problems is likely to require a major clean-up and reorganization of the FBI and possibly the DOJ, but restoring the integrity of those institutions will probably require significant election successes for Republicans in 2022 and 2024. Yes, there really is a deep state!

Banished Illusions: They Screwed the People and the Country

22 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in Constitution, Corruption, Election Fraud

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There’s no shortage of nincompoops buying into the legitimacy of the Biden presidency and the bullshit narrative about “an insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th. I’m sure they’re quite content in their ignorance — they refuse to even consider the evidence available regarding the lack of ballot integrity in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and elsewhere, and they continue to pretend the January 6th debacle was a real threat to our democracy, rather than a largely peaceful group of wide-eyed goofballs who were mostly waved through the barricades by the Capitol Police.

One of the best summaries I’ve read about the attitudes of those who feel disenfranchised by the 2020 election is this series of tweets by the of the MartyrMade podcast, Darryl Cooper. His tweets are also discussed here by Tyler O’Neil. It is Cooper’s “general theory” on the perspective of “Boomer tier” Trump supporters, as he calls them. Last year’s fraudulent election was only the culmination of events going back to the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The whole thread is interesting, but you must get past a little “soft cover” at the start that might have been intended to distract the speech police at Twitter. I’ll try to summarize here:

  • The intelligence community spied on the Trump campaign in 2016, and that’s a major transgression! The DNC was involved too, actually paying for fabricated evidence. James Comey falsely denied any knowledge of that fact. John Brennan and Adam Schiff also lied shamelessly in this affair.
  • By the time Trump supporters realized all the noise was fake, they naively expected justice to be served. But no, and so their faith in certain institutions was shaken.
  • The gaslighting continued, and the whole thing consumed energy and had a chilling effect on participation in the Trump Administration. This was an active kind of subversion crossing “all institutional boundaries”.
  • The participation of the press was the poison icing on the cake. The press is now viewed by much of the country as a propaganda arm of “The Regime”.
  • Many aren’t sure whether the election was fixed, but if it was, they know they’d be lied to about it. 
  • Voting procedures in many jurisdictions were changed using COVID as a pretext. 
  • The press smoke-screened the Biden, Inc. scandals, including evidence of pay-for-play and incredibly lurid information on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Instead, the press played-up gossip about Trump. 
  • Trump people rightly felt betrayed by the very institutions they’ve always trusted, but they voted in record numbers, and we’re not convinced all were counted.
  • “But when the four critical swing states went dark at midnight, they knew.”
  • Conspiracy theories abounded, but media and tech shut down discussion of real anomalies. Had the election gone Trump’s way, they would have cried foul! 
  • The courts were handcuffed by fear of political violence and retribution.

I agree with substantially all of Cooper’s thread. Our experience since Donald Trump became an active politician has been disillusioning in several respects: it has shown how flimsy our constitutional rights and our republic are when the wrong actors come to dominate certain institutions. It also shows how malleable are the “facts” that we are asked to accept by these actors. We are seemingly helpless to defend the rule of law, the Constitution, and social norms when an intransigent minority decides it can simply ignore them. This is how tyranny is borne.

Election integrity is not an outlandish objective. Neither is demanding fair treatment of diverse viewpoints from social media, Big Tech, and educational institutions. And neither is it outlandish to demand safe communities and adequate police protection; that our borders be enforced; that our public health officials speak honestly about risks; and that we should never, under any circumstances, be judged, punished, or rewarded based on the color of our skin. These are just a few of the things we must demand, and never take “no” for an answer.

NFT Assets, Artists, and Con Games

08 Saturday May 2021

Posted by in Art, Corruption

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The art world is buzzing about “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs), or digital files in which ownership is secured by blockchain technology. As the name suggests, such a crypto-asset can exist only as a whole piece. That’s unlike crypto currency, which is infinitely divisible and, well, fungible. NFTs are diverse in their features and functions, and various kinds of art are now being traded as NFTs: digital images, GIFs, and audio clips, for example.

Beeple Crap

A digital artist named Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as Beeple, makes digital “Beeple-crap”, as he calls it, like the giant “Xi-bot” shown above. He has successfully monetized the digital images he’s posted on his web site over the last 13 years, and in a coup de grace, he recently aggregated all those images into a one-file mashup NFT for which a buyer paid $69.3 million in Ethereum (less a substantial fee to Christie’s auction house). And Beeple isn’t the only one making big bucks on NFTs!

Beeple’s “collage” is available for anyone to see or copy on the web. It’s called “Everdays: The First 5000 Days”. But precisely what are the rights now held by the buyer of “5000 Days”? Apparently, they are limited to the satisfaction of knowing digital proof of ownership is his, and whatever that smug feeling might be worth on potential resale! In fact, Beeple himself retains the copyright to 5000 Days, so it’s not as if the buyer is the only guy who can ever print a high-resolution copy. But here’s what Beeple says the buyer got:

“The biggest thing he actually bought is a relationship with me to promote his purchase. He and I are very aligned. I want to see this artwork go up in value. He wants to see the artwork go up in value, which benefits me. So the idea that he bought nothing is kind of misleading.”

The buyer, known as Metakovan, is the founder of Metapurse.fund, a highly influential player in crypto ventures and NFTs. But Metakovan’s purchase of 5000 Days is not his first collaboration with Beeple. They already had a significant “relationship”, and this transaction obviously won’t be their last.

If this smells a bit like a con game to you, you’re not alone. Don’t get me wrong: Beeple does produce art … very striking images, in fact. They might not be your cup of tea, and many are a bit cartoonish, but Beeple has computer skills and a real creative streak. He also has a knack for self-promotion unequalled, in relative terms, by perhaps any of the old masters or impressionists.

I’m perfectly happy to know there is a vibrant market in anything people call art. Whatever floats your boat, baby! However, I have trouble believing that long-term growth can occur on top of this kind of “valuation” without an escalating monetary inflation. Between the Federal Reserve’s open-spigot policy of near-zero interest rates and the advent of crypto-currencies with supply limits, dollars are getting cheap. Asset markets, still denominated in dollars, usually receive more than their fair share of bidding as excess dollars accumulate on balance sheets. So the outlook might be bright for NFTs as an asset class, such as it is.

Art In the Ersatz

The most regrettable thing about NFTs like 5000 Days might be what they reflect about the state of the art world itself. Richard Bledsoe of the Remodern Review has a lively take on 5000 Days and NFTs as a new stage in the long decline in the quality of what is called art. Bledsoe is no fan of contemporary art, which he argues has been enabled by elites who have successfully corrupted the art market.

I’m no expert, but I generally view contemporary art as less ambitious and requiring less skill than earlier forms. I think that’s easy to prove (see here and here), but it’s outside the scope of this post. I have wondered whether the emergence of contemporary art was impelled by the tremendous increase in prosperity during the late 19th and 20th centuries and the attendant expansion in the market for original art. Artists such as painters and sculptors, whose labor productivity did not greatly benefit from technology growth (we can argue about the last several decades), might have adjusted to this reality by focusing on simpler and more abstract forms. This is a digression, but it’s surely worthy of a much longer treatment. 

There’s no accounting for tastes, of course, and while I like some contemporary art, I’m definitely sympathetic to Bledsoe’s views. As for NFTs, he quotes from his book, “Remodern America: How the Renewal of Art Will Change the Course of Western Civilization”:

“Billions are being spent on unskilled and intangible contemporary art. Just like in the good old days, many of the suckers are the newly rich or globalists looking for social credibility and a fast buck. There’s a lot of money laundering and tax evasion in the equation as well.

How does the art world convince well-heeled fools to part with their money, when they are offering so little real value in return? Simple. The art market follows the tried and true methods honed by generations of confidence tricksters: the elaborate pantomime known as the long con…”

Don’t You Let That Deal Go Down

Bledsoe gives a brief sketch of the mechanics of the “long con” and how it’s practiced in the art market. He describes players such as the “Shill” (a promoter who avoids revealing a personal stake), the “Face” (a celebrity whose presence helps to “guarantee buzz will exceed rationality), and the lastly the “Roper”:

“… whose affluence leads to influence, a savvy and powerful individual whose participation gives credibility to the whole enterprise. What is ignored is how much moguls like this manipulate the market to serve personal interests, using insider trading, shady financing and backroom deals to inflate the value of their own collections.

In any other industry, common practices of the establishment art market could probably lead to criminal charges. But in the unregulated free-for-all of the art world, it’s very hard to bring these cases of potential white-collar crime to justice, and the victims here are less than sympathetic. After all, the buyers are people who have so much money it’s meaningless to them. Who cares if a bunch of billionaires are getting ripped off?”

All of these players seem well ensconced in the world of promoting NFT art: Beeple in particular, and the “art experts” at Christie’s, Beeple’s celebrity pals (OMG! Katy Perry!!), and finally Metakovan’s stature as an authority on NFTs and “tokenomics”. By the way, his considered opinion is that 5000 Days is “worth a billion dollars”. Well, okay then!

Carbon Indulgences

Another insane aspect of NFTs and the crypto-currencies used to buy them is the pushback over the carbon footprint of crypto-currency mining. This is discussed briefly by Bledsoe as well. While the electricity used in mining is significant, the amount attributable to any given transaction is minuscule. Yet now, sales of high-value NFTs are accompanied by the purchase of carbon credits. Read this description of an auction to be held for a piece of art created by Jerry Garcia on a Mac in 1990. It says “… carbon offsetting to be provided by a company called Aerial.” Now, Jerry Garcia was a talented visual artist on canvas and on his early Mac, not to mention his considerable magic as a guitarist and songwriter. God bless his family, and no offense to the Garcia Foundation, but they were perfect suckers for what has quickly become a standardized virtue signal or buy-off. The fact is that carbon offsets generally don’t have an impact for many years, and there are doubts as to their efficacy in permanently reducing carbon when the time comes.

Redeeming Potential

While the artistic value of NFTs like 5000 Days can be debated, my doubts about their value as assets center around the lack of real ownership rights conferred to buyers. Work is underway, however, on new NFT standards that would allow an NFT buyer to collect royalties, which would obviously carry real value. So, for example, a musician or band could immediately monetize a recording’s future royalties by selling it as an NFT. No one should have qualms about that, and good for the musicians.

I believe other kinds of NFTs have real value, in principle, such as the digital racehorses discussed in this article. Apparently, virtual horse races have already achieved a degree of popularity. These crypto-horses actually win prize money and collect stud fees, based on their digital bloodlines. Another example: NFTs can be concert tickets, electronic possession of which entitles the bearer to a particular seat at the venue; or, an NFT might remain in your “digital wallet” as a season ticket to sporting events. Among the claimed advantages over “normal” electronic ticketing is security, and NFT tickets live on as tradeable memorabilia as well.

Conclusion

It’s still early days for crypto-currencies and especially for NFTs. I can’t object to a free individual spending their hard-earned crypto-wealth on crypto-art like 5000 Days. Unfortunately, the market for NFT art does seem to embody aspects of a confidence game. And like Richard Bledsoe, I’m a skeptic when it comes to most contemporary art. However, there are circumstances under which the value of NFTs can be compelling, and the development of more “use-cases” will increase the value of digital currencies. New NFT standards and applications might well revolutionize certain industries. Continuing asset inflation instigated by central banks, and especially the Federal Reserve, will cause the dollar value of crypto-assets to rise. Big institutions like investment banks are starting to jump on the crypto bandwagon as well. So, while some NFTs might be short-term plays and might even be dangerous swindles, crypto and NFTs in general should not be dismissed as an asset class.

The Biden Family Influence Racket

31 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in Corruption, Politics

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If you’ve heard the Biden family’s long-time influence peddling racket is “fake news”, and you believe it, you’ve been manipulated. It’s certainly not a new story, in and of itself. There are certain mainstream media outlets that wouldn’t dream of reporting it now that not long ago were calling out the Bidens over this issue. It’s easy to be suspicious, given Hunter Biden’s lucrative association with the scandal-plagued Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. His contract with Burisma was executed around the time his dad Joe, the Vice President at the time, became heavily involved in President Obama’s diplomatic efforts in the Ukraine. Joe actually bragged publicly that he’d threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees unless a certain prosecutor was fired, a man who just happened to be investigating Burisma!

Then there were Hunter Biden’s manuevers in China, another country in which father Joe had been assigned as point man for the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts. The father and son travelled together, and it was well known that Hunter made a very profitable business deal with a billionaire owner of a Chinese energy firm, one with important connections to the Chinese Communist Part (CCP). Suspicious, to be sure.

But let’s review what’s happened more recently:

  • Earlier this month, the New York Post reported that the owner of a computer repair shop in Delaware came forward with a copy of a hard drive from a laptop. The owner claimed the laptop had been left with him by a besotted Hunter Biden in April 2019. Biden never picked it up, even after a reminder, so ownership of the laptop reverted to the shop. The owner said it contained compromising material on the Bidens.
  • The owner had turned over the laptop to the FBI almost a year ago because he feared that its possession might expose him to danger, given its contents. Apparently, the FBI did not follow up with him. This motivated the shop owner to go public with the help of Rudy Guiliani.
  • As disturbing as that may be, the larger story involves the trove of emails and texts on the laptop between Hunter Biden and his business associates. The messages indicate that Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, were involved in a heavy influence peddling operation.
  • The materials offer fairly strong evidence that Joe Biden was a financial beneficiary of the deals cut by Hunter and his team. These are deals that would have compromised Joe Biden in his dealings with foreign nations, and in particular the Ukraine and China.
  • Subsequently, two of Hunter Biden’s business associates confirmed the authenticity of the controversial communications made public. One of them, an investor and ex-naval officer named Tony Bobulinski, was brought in by the Bidens as CEO of their partnership with the Chinese. Bobulinski says he met with Joe Biden twice regarding the Chinese business deal for which Hunter solicited his support, and he calls Joe Biden a liar. Bubolinsky has been interviewed by the FBI and has provided documents to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.
  • Until a few days ago, no one in the Biden family, nor the Biden campaign, had denied that the laptop belonged to Hunter. But Joe Biden gave a blunt denial this week, saying of the whole story: “There is no controversy about my son. That’s a hell of a lie! That’s a flat lie because the president has nothing else to run on.” Alright Joe, so this whole thing is politically motivated. You might be right about the timing, but that certainly doesn’t vindicate your family of the corruption evident in these messages and the accounts offered by your son’s associates.
  • Now, there is documented proof of an earlier favor bestowed on the Chinese by Hunter Biden, his associates, and members of the Obama Administration, including Joe Biden. This was in 2011, when a group called the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) arranged through Hunter’s associates to tour the White House and meet with Joe Biden and other officials. The group included CCP and Chinese government officials as well as influential Chinese businessmen. It also resulted in some lucrative deals for Hunter Biden and his partners. The purpose of the meetings was put thusly by a Hunter Biden contact who helped arrange it, as quoted at the last link: “… CEC’s ‘mandate’ was ‘to let the U.S. know that the Chinese “private sector” [scare quotes in original] is ready and willing to invest in America.’ He thus observed the opportunity to leverage government policy and lucrative business: Cultivating the CEC would be ‘a soft diplomacy play that could be very effective.’” Specific deals for Hunter Biden’s team were also discussed by the partners in connection with the CEC visit.

It’s no surprise that Joe Biden is a liar: his history as a plagiarist is well known. He also falsely claimed the truck driver involved in the accident that killed his first wife was driving drunk. But these recent revelations are pretty damning. As president, any dealings Joe Biden might have with the Chinese would be severely compromised. He sold out his country to build his family’s wealth. It’s also been disturbing to witness the media’s effort to provide cover for the Bidens. This is not the work of journalists; it’s the work of propagandists in the tank for a candidate.

The World At Less War

05 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in Corruption, fascism, Terror, War

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War is hell, but the good news is we’ve seen a global trend toward less of it over the past 20 years, according to the just-released annual report from StrategyPage:

“Overall things are a lot more peaceful than the headlines or Internet chatter would have you believe. Like most major trends, world peace just kind of sneaked up on everyone and a lot of people have not noticed.”

These misperceptions can be attributed to the enhanced coverage of even incidents that are minor by historical standards, and the ready access to information in the internet age. Perceptions are heavily manipulated by the media, which often feeds on “scare stories”.

The StrategyPage report covers the recent evolution of conflicts in various parts of the globe. The warring that persists tends to be concentrated in certain kinds of societies:

“While there are still a few stone-age cultures left on the planet [with conflicts] there are also several more advanced ones that are cursed with a culture of medieval mayhem. These have come to be called failed states and the most active ones, Somalia and Afghanistan are often in the news. There are still a few imperial powers in the headlines. … The troublesome empires currently in the news include China, Russia, Iran, Turkey the Islamic Caliphate. Turkey, Russia and Iran are technically democracies but for the moment the imperial ways are ascendant and the main cause of problems with their neighbors.”

The report cites statistics on both “human development” and corruption, noting the association of war-making and terrorism with low levels of the former and high levels of the latter:

“Wars tend to be found in nations that are poorly (if at all) governed. This usually means corrupt rulers and a corrupt economy that is unable to provide for the welfare of the people. The nations mired in war and general mayhem tend to be those that score lowest on international surveys of well-being and lack of corruption. For example, the ten nations suffering the most terrorism deaths rank lowest in the Human Development Index the UN has compiled annually during the last 29 years…. The least corrupt nations have been most successful in leaving tribalism behind. The major reason tribalism survives is because, when lacking the presence of effective (high [corruption index]) nation-state a tribal government is usually the best alternative.”

There is an interesting discussion in the report about the similarities between modern-day fascist China and ascendant Naziism in Germany in the 1930s. Both can be described as market economies overseen by dictatorial, socialist regimes, together with strong militaries, territorial ambitions, and a large majority invested in feelings of racial superiority:

“China has similar goals to 1930s Germany. China has territorial claims on neighbors and wants more territory and resources for its huge population. The Chinese believe in the racial superiority of the Han ethnic group (which most Chinese belong to) and of historical destiny to rule the largest possible empire. Until the 18th century China was the largest nation-state on the planet but then went into decline for two centuries. Most Chinese agree that it is time for China to once again be the most powerful state in the world. This is causing problems.”

Here are a some of the other statistics quoted in the report:

“Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 deaths from wars and large scale civil disorder (which is often recorded as some kind of war) have led to a sharp (over 20 percent so far) drop in violence worldwide. This occurred despite increasingly active and lethal Islamic terror groups.

… most war deaths are not caused by terrorists and even in 2014 (a peak year for Islamic death cults seeking to revive the Caliphate), terrorism-related deaths (mostly Islamic terrorism) accounted for 20 percent of all war-related deaths. Islamic terrorism gets the most publicity but less glamorous disputes do most of the killing.

Global Islamic terrorism-related deaths have fallen by over 50 percent since 2014 when there were 35,000. Global deaths hit 19,000 in 2017 and under 16,000 for 2018. These deaths are still declining. This activity is most visible in the GTI (Global Terrorism Index), which counts all forms of terrorism.

In 2018 worldwide terrorism deaths declined 15 percent to 15,952. This decline is, so far, a four year trend …”

The StrategyPage report is encouraging in many ways. There is no question that international conflict could escalate quickly under certain circumstances. And there are heavy risks involved in the presence of nuclear weapons. An implication is the importance of preventing warring regimes, such as the religious dictatorship in Iran, from acquiring nuclear capabilities and threatening other nations with terror. The large players who possess nuclear weapons, for their part, are extremely cautious when it comes to the prospect of a “fighting war” with one another.

Ultimately, one hopes that economic advancement and the opportunities promised by modernity will dampen conflict within and between more backward societies. But as the report points out, there will always be adherents of failed, repressive dogmas, and these factions are often the agents of provocation and war-making. They cannot always be ignored. They should not be appeased.

The Bad News Industrial Complex

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Big Government, Corruption, Risk Management

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Matt Ridley had an interesting piece on his blog last month entitled “Bad News Is Sudden, Good News Is Gradual“. It’s about the timing of news, as stated, and it’s about our bias toward bad news more generally. There is no question that bad news tends to be more dramatic than good news. But with steadily increasingly lifespans, growing prosperity, and world poverty at an all-time low, surely good news must come as much or more frequently than bad. But good news can be inconvenient to certain narratives. It is therefore often ignored, and some other purported disaster is found as a substitute:

“Poverty and hunger are the business Oxfam is in, but has it shouted the global poverty statistics from the rooftops? Hardly. It has switched its focus to inequality. When The Lancet published a study in 2010 showing global maternal mortality falling, advocates for women’s health tried to pressure it into delaying publication ‘fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause’, The New York Times reported. The announcement by Nasa in 2016 that plant life is covering more and more of the planet as a result of carbon dioxide emissions was handled like radioactivity by most environmental reporters.“

Tales of bad outcomes can be alluring, especially if they haven’t happened yet. In fact, bad things might even happen gradually, but dark visions of a world beyond the horizon impart a spooky sense of immediacy, and indeed, urgency. Ridley notes the tendency of people to regard pessimists as “wise”, while optimists are viewed as Pollyannas. And he recognizes that risk aversion plays an important role in this psychology. That brings me to the point I found most interesting in Ridley’s piece: the many vested interests in disasters, and disasters foretold.

Risk management is big business in an affluent society. There is a lot to lose, and a squeamish populace is easily cowed by good scare stories. The risk management and disaster-prevention narrative can be wrapped around any number of unlikely or exaggerated threats, serving the interests of the administrative state and private rent-seekers. One particular tool that has been most useful to this alliance is the precautionary principle. It is invoked to discourage or regulate activities presumed to pose risks to the public or to the environment. But there are three dimensions to the application of the precautionary principle: it provides a rationale for public funding of research into the risk-du-jour, for funding projects designed to mitigate its consequences, and for subsidizing development of alternative technologies that might help avoid or reduce the severity of the risk, often at great expense. The exaggeration of risk serves to legitimize these high costs. Of course, the entire enterprise would be impossible without the machinery of the state, in all its venality. Where money flows, graft is sure to follow.

Well-publicized disaster scenarios are helpful to statists in other ways. Risk, its causes, and its consequences are not distributed evenly across regions and populations. A risk thought to be anthropomorphic in nature implies that wealthier and more productive communities and nations must shoulder the bulk of the global costs of mitigation. Thus, the risk-management ethic requires redistribution. Furthermore, wealthier regions are better situated to insulate themselves locally against many risks. Impoverished areas, on the other hand, must be assisted. Finally, an incredible irony of our preoccupation with disaster scenarios is the simultaneous effort to subsidize those deemed most vulnerable even while executing other policies that harm them.

Media organizations and their newspeople obviously benefit greatly from the subtle sensationalism of creeping disaster. As Ridley noted, the gradualism of progress is no match for a scare story on the nightly news. There is real money at stake here, but the media is driven not only by economic incentives. In fact, the dominant leftist ideology in media organizations means that they are more than happy to spread alarm as part of a crusade for state solutions to presumed risks. There are even well-meaning users of social media who jump at the chance to signal their virtue by reposting memes and reports that are couched not merely in terms of risks, but as dire future realities.

Mitigating social risks is a legitimate function of government. Unfortunately, identifying and exaggerating risks, and suppressing contradictory evidence, is in the personal interest of politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and many members of the media. Everything seems to demand government intervention. Carbon concentration, global warming and sea level changes are glaring examples of exaggerated risks. As Ridley says,

“The supreme case of unfalsifiable pessimism is climate change. It has the advantage of decades of doom until the jury returns. People who think the science suggests it will not be as bad as all that, or that humanity is likely to mitigate or adapt to it in time, get less airtime and a lot more criticism than people who go beyond the science to exaggerate the potential risks. That lukewarmers have been proved right so far cuts no ice.”

Other examples include the “beepocalypse“, genetic modification, drug use, school shootings, and certain risks to national security. Ridley offers the consequences of Brexit as well. There, I’ve listed enough sacred cows to irritate just about everyone.

In many cases, the real crises have more to do with government activism than the original issue with which they were meant to reckon. Which brings me to a discomfiting vision of my own: having allowed the administrative state to metastasize across almost every social organ and every aspect of our lives, a huge risk to our future well-being is continuing erosion of personal and economic liberties and our ability to prosper as a society. Here’s Ridley’s close:

“Activists sometimes justify the focus on the worst-case scenario as a means of raising consciousness. But while the public may be susceptible to bad news they are not stupid, and boys who cry ‘wolf!’ are eventually ignored. As the journalist John Horgan recently argued in Scientific American: ‘These days, despair is a bigger problem than optimism.'”

Clinton Corruption Remedy: Keep Her Out

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Corruption, statism

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Would I ever vote for Donald Trump? I’ve been critical of Trump’s positions on foreign trade, immigration policy and eminent domain. I think he’s an extremely risky candidate for any supporter of small government. But I’ve been much more critical of Hillary Clinton: she is a statist through and through, and she so often finds herself in close proximity to corruption and some other highly suspicious circumstances. I consider myself a libertarian, and I like Gary Johnson. Unfortunately, Johnson has disappointed me with his selection of Bill Weld as a running mate, his goofs on foreign policy and his often poor presentation of libertarian principles.

FBI Director James Comey has again concluded that there was no intent on Clinton’s part to violate national security with her private email server, but he also concluded that she was reckless in conducting sensitive government business, including the transmission of classified information, on that server. Unfortunately, Comey limited his investigation to the period during which she was Secretary of State. The server, however, was put in place before she was confirmed by Congress. The question of intent makes that time period relevant, but Comey ignored it. She broke the law concerning the handling of classified documents, there is no question about that. No less than five of Clinton’s aides took the Fifth Amendment to avoid prosecution. Evidently, Mr. Comey has been under pressure from a highly-politicized Justice Department. There are other investigations underway at the FBI and by Congress involving the Clintons, however.

The deluge of information via Wikileaks over the past month reflects horribly on the Clintons. I don’t care whether the leaks came from government sources, the Russians, or from other foreign actors. No one has challenged the authenticity of these leaks. Again, Hillary Clinton compromised national security by conducting her duties as Secretary of State on a private computer server. That’s what got her into the email mess. Now, we’ve learned that she gave her housekeeper access to her computer to print documents! At least five foreign intelligence services hacked into that server. Clinton also obstructed justice on the matter by destroying evidence and perjuring herself before Congress.

Wikileaks has shed additional light on the Clinton Foundation as well. The foundation functions as a money laundering scheme intended to disguise influence-buying as charitable giving, with the Clinton’s and their cronies as the real beneficiaries. Foreign governments, including several middle eastern powers, funneled money to the foundation while Hillary served as Secretary of State. Here’s Deroy Murdock on the Foundation:

“… its 2014 IRS filings show that it spent a whopping 5.76 percent of its funds on actual charitable activities — far below the 65 percent that the Better Business Bureau calls kosher. That paltry figure also mocks Hillary’s Las Vegas lie, uttered at the final presidential debate on October 19: ‘We at the Clinton Foundation spend 90 percent — 90 percent of all the money that is donated on behalf of programs of people around the world and in our own country.’ The Clinton Slush Fund . . . uh . . . Foundation seems to be mainly a travel and full-employment program for Hillary’s government in waiting. It’s also a bribe pump that sucks in money and spews out favors.“

The Clintons also have had strong ties to individuals with criminal histories, such as the notorious child predator Jeffrey Epstein. And Hillary Clinton’s reputation for contemptuous behavior toward others was so strong that State Department security personnel requested reassignment. It’s been reported that members of her Secret Service detail called her plane “Broomstick One“.

A Hillary Clinton victory in the president election will not end the investigations. Congressional leaders such as Jason Chaffetz and Trey Gowdy have vowed to press on aggressively, given that Clinton lied before their committees and to the American people about the existence of classified emails on her server. Impeachment by the House might occur, though Clinton’s offenses have occurred prior to her term in office, and the Senate would never attain the two-thirds majority necessary to convict.

It is possible that the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation will be damaging, but it is unlikely to bring an indictment. The DOJ under Clinton would be headed by Loretta Lynch or some other Hillary/Obama sycophant. There will be no DOJ indictment or special prosecutor as long as the Attorney General reports to the criminal herself. (The FBI cannot indict; it can only recommend indictment.) There would hardly be a real opportunity to render justice to Hillary at the federal level.

A local jurisdiction could bring an indictment for criminal activity. The Anthony Weiner laptop investigation by the NYPD could be troublesome for Clinton, depending on the extent to which any Clinton dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were recorded there.

There remains only one sure constitutional remedy for Hillary Clinton’s corruption: Tuesday’s election. Preventing her from taking office must be priority one. Hillary Clinton’s days of insider dealing would then be over, as would the politicized government created by Barack Obama, who was just recorded encouraging illegal aliens to vote! But Gary Johnson obviously won’t beat Clinton… the only real option is Donald Trump.

Yes, Trump is risky, and I’ll have plenty to criticize on my blog if he takes office. He is plainspoken but sometimes crude and offensive. Naturally, that “style” is especially offensive to the tender snowflakes who cling to identity politics, but I do not believe Trump is a racist. It’s true, I don’t know exactly what we’d get with Trump. I suspect he has some statist tendencies of his own, but I prefer that risk to the corruption and certain statism of Hillary Clinton.

So I must vote for Donald Trump. Putting Hillary Clinton in the White House would compromise our system of government. She is an accomplished grafter and cronyist, expert at leveraging her position of power for personal enrichment, and she is prone to taking retribution against enemies. The IRS, the DOJ and other agencies have already become partisan organizations under Obama. And as I mentioned earlier, Clinton is a statist who desires centralized power. That is always dangerous.

Read this excellent essay: “The Case Against Hillary Clinton“, by Lisa Schiffren of the Independent Women’s Forum.

Here is a page with a number of past posts about Hillary Clinton on Sacred Cow Chips.

A Land Under The Rule of Hillary

20 Thursday Oct 2016

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I just had to laugh when I saw a progressive cite “the rule of law” as a compelling reason to vote for Hillary Clinton. First, while she might not be a policy clone of Barack Obama, you can bet that she’ll take a similarly dismissive view of Constitutional principles, subjugating our governing framework to her own brand of executive authority whenever and wherever possible. The rule of law hasn’t stopped the Clintons from proving their cronyist bona fides, using positions of power to reward friends, foundation contributors, and to accumulate personal wealth. The Clinton’s are inveterate liars, having misled the American public on numerous occasions, as well as Congress. In 1996, New York Times writer William Safire called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar“. The Clinton’s are also vindictive: they have done their level best to destroy the reputations of various enemies over the years, and there is widespread suspicion that much dirtier deeds have been perpetrated in order to protect their interests.

Foundation of Graft

I quote here the opening paragraph of a July post on Sacred Cow Chips entitled “Clinton Foundation Domain of Darkness“:

“Hillary Clinton provides a fascinating case study in the art of graft, and the Clinton Foundation provides her with brilliant cover. The foundation masquerades as a legitimate charity, avoids taxes, and it provides a vehicle for what’s known as ‘pay-to-play’ influence-buying. It appears that Bill Clinton made a lucrative career of this while his wife was serving in public office. It was a sensitive issue when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, given the potential for compromising national objectives. It is still sensitive in view of the many gifts to the Clinton Foundation provided by foreign entities, not to mention the handsome speaking fees paid by foreign entities to the Clintons.“

Now we know, thanks to Wikileaks, that certain Clinton Foundation (CF) contributors and “Friends of Bill” (FOBs) were given priority access to Hillary Clinton and other senior State Department officials.

The next few paragraphs contain information described more fully at the first link above. The first point is the Clinton’s cozy relationship with Russian interests. CF accepted contributions from individuals hoping to arrange a large deal giving Uranium One, a Russian company, control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the U.S., a deal that Hillary Clinton’s State Department had to approve. Sounds like pay-for-play to me!

Also noteworthy is the relationship between CF and Laureate International Universities and Walden University Online, which have been accused of scamming earnest students. CF received substantial donations from Laureate‘s chairman, and Bill Clinton received millions as honorary chancellor of Laureate. In turn, Laureate received millions in State Department grants.

The devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 provided another avenue through which the Clinton’s were able to enrich their cronies. The complicated web of relationships included CF ties to organizations that received State Department funding. Here is Dinesh D’Souza:

“… a number of companies that received contracts in Haiti happened to be entities that made large donations to the Clinton Foundation. The Haitian contracts appeared less tailored to the needs of Haiti than to the needs of the companies that were performing the services. In sum, Haitian deals appeared to be a quid pro quo for filling the coffers of the Clintons.“

Gifts from foreign governments to CF are clearly red flags of potential influence buying. Many of the donors were Middle Eastern governments eager to acquire weapons from the U.S.  Hillary Clinton’s State Department, once again, was in a position to help them. Via Wikileaks, we know that Clinton’s campaign has been accepting contributions from lobbyists representing these governments. The Huffington Post‘s Senior Politics Editor, Sam Stein, says that Qatar’s $1 million birthday gift to Bill Clinton “confirms sort of the worst portraits of the Clintons and how they operated out of office.” What other favors could a Clinton presidency make possible?

As a charity, CF performs poorly, with less than 6% of its 2014 spending going to actual charitable causes, contrary to Hillary Clinton’s claims that 90% went to charity. The last link provides the following quote from The Federalist regarding historical totals from CF:

“The Clinton Foundation’s three largest charitable ‘program service accomplishments,’ according to its tax reports, are the Clinton Global Initiative ($23.2 million), the Clinton Presidential Library ($12.3 million), and the Clinton Climate Initiative ($8.3 million).”

The article also quotes Ira Magaziner, once among the top executives at CF:

“This is not charity. The whole thing is bankable. It’s a commercial proposition.”

The Vengeful Touch

The Clinton’s have a reputation for being vindictive and for being fairly ruthless in dealing with those who cross them. Here is a story on a Clinton request to discredit Congressman Trey Gowdy, who was looking into her deleted emails:

“Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, wrote an e-mail to staff where she says, ‘HRC asked me what offense we could do today to set up Gowdy for Face The Nation tomorrow.’“

This story about a detailed list of Hillary Clinton’s enemies is instructive. Apparently, Claire McCaskill and John Kerry were at the top of the list after the 2008 presidential campaign.

Hillary is also known to be extremely ill-tempered. Check out this account of Hillary Clinton’s post-townhall tirade against moderator Matt Lauer, according to a female NBC producer and a cameraman. Hillary was enraged because Lauer had asked a pointed question about her private email server and her handling of classified documents, a question that did not appear on the pre-approved list provided to her in advance of the townhall. She threw a profanity-laced tantrum upon leaving the stage, according to these accounts. She promised to have Lauer fired threw a glass of water into the face of an assistant, and finally delivered an arguably racist insult to DNC Chair Donna Brazile’s face.

There are many accounts of Hillary Clinton’s abusive behavior toward staff, both at the White House during her tenure as First Lady and later at the State Department. Here is the latest, from an FBI summary of an interview with one of its own security officials:

“CLINTON’s treatment of the DS [diplomatic security] agents assigned to protect her was so contemptuous that many of them sought reassignment or employment elsewhere. …by the end of CLINTON’s tenure, [her protective detail] was staffed largely with new agents because it was difficult to find senior agents willing to work for her.”

The FBI’s summary of the interview also describes Clinton’s routine violation of standard security protocols.

It’s long been rumored that the Clinton’s have dealt quite harshly with enemies who pose legal threats. The number of mysterious deaths of individuals who were apparently dangerous to the Clintons could be a series of strange coincidences. However, the laws of probability don’t provide strong support for that theory. Perhaps many of the deceased individuals were involved in other dangerous activities, but that would not reflect well on the Clintons, either. There are web sites that keep track of the Clinton “body count”. Left-leaning sites such as Snopes.com routinely label that scorekeeping as pure speculation and false, but often do so even before investigations are complete. Three recent deaths, discussed here, involved individuals believed to have information damaging to the DNC and/or the Clintons.

Security and the Email Imbroglio

Hillary Clinton’s careless and criminal email practices should convince any American that she is unfit for the job of President. Her efforts to obstruct the investigation into those practices are nothing short of spectacular, and are themselves worthy of prosecution. It’s even more appalling and corrupt that she has Obama’s Justice Department and FBI Director James Comey in the tank, so prosecution is unlikely to proceed without extraordinary developments. Fortunately, Wikileaks and FOIA requests have uncovered some of the deleted emails. It’s also clear that the FBI is in a state of internal revolt over the questionable handling of the email investigation and Comey’s ultimate refusal to recommend prosecution. The revolt could lead to additional revelations having major consequences for Clinton, Comey and others inside the government.

Austin Bay condenses Clinton’s email scandal into a “Three-Headed Crime” and highlights the bastardized way in which Comey managed to compromise his agency:

  • The Server Head: the “rogue email server … that she controlled. … designed to evade laws regulating the retention of government documents and thus evade scrutiny and accountability.“
  • The Loose Lips Head: “Hillary used her off-the-books and non-secure server system to transmit and analyze classified national security information ….“
  • The Nixon Head: “Hillary and her aides tried to hide evidence the rogue server existed and evidence they routinely mishandled of classified information.“

The email scandal came to light as a result of the Administration’s response to the terrorist attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Here is Bay:

“The House of Representatives began investigating the Benghazi attack and questioning the Obama Administration’s Great Benghazi Lie. Testimony wasn’t the only issue. The House had subpoena power. Providing inquisitive representatives and senators with Hillary’s Benghazi-related communications would expose the rogue email operation. Better start destroying evidence.“

Bay notes that even Jonathan Turley, who had originally defended Comey’s decision not to refer the email case for prosecution, changed his mind as more details came to light. Apparently, the revelation that the Justice Department gave “immunity to the parties on both ends of those communications” struck Turley as a tactic wholly unsuitable for a serious investigation. He doesn’t quite say that Comey or the DOJ were acting on Hillary’s behalf, but the case certainly gives that appearance.

The Press In Her Pocket

My attempt to get a fix on the suspicious history and current state of the Clinton’s and their gang of operatives relies, to some extent, on nontraditional news sources. The mainstream media is willing to ignore Hillary Clinton’s many transgressions, with almost no mention of the latest Wikileaks dumps, FBI document releases, and other documented Clinton indiscretions. Kimberley Strassel is correct in saying that this is in no small part Donald Trump’s fault, as he manages to create a circus of distractions on an almost daily basis. Here is her conclusion:

“Mrs. Clinton has been exposed to have no core, to be someone who constantly changes her position to maximize political gain. Leaked speeches prove that she has two positions (public and private) on banks; two positions on the wealthy; two positions on borders; two positions on energy. Her team had endless discussions about what positions she should adopt to appease ‘the Red Army’—i.e. ‘the base of the Democratic Party.’

Voters might not know any of this, because while both presidential candidates have plenty to answer for, the press has focused solely on taking out Mr. Trump. And the press is doing a diligent job of it.“

It’s ironic that the press takes so little interest in the Clinton misadventures. Or rather, the truth is that many in the press intentionally omit reporting of these issues. That helps to maintain a solid base of low-information voters in Hillary’s thrall, under the misapprehension that she has any respect for the rule of law.