RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/if-you-are-a-vaccine-company-executive

Remember NINJA loans?

NINJA stood for “No income, no job/assets.” Back in the mid-aughts, when the banks and not the regulators were the ones going crazy and setting the financial system on fire with free money, they were all the rage.

I remember hearing ads for them in 2006 and 2007 and thinking, this has to be a bait and switch. You cannot walk into Your Friendly MegaBank and walk out with a few hundred grand for a house with no proof you even have a job! A job seems pretty basic.

But you could. And people did. Lots of people.

Underlying this madness was a model, naturally. American housing prices had never collapsed nationally and simultaneously since at least the Depression. Therefore the models that the banks and mortgage originators used said they never would.

Therefore on a national basis the collateral – the houses – underlying the mortgages would always be fine, even if the borrowers couldn’t repay them. The lenders just needed to be in different markets to be geographically protected. Besides, the bankers were all reselling the loans and offloading the risk. They got paid up front, whether the loans were paid back or not.

It was a very good business.

Until it went bad.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/10/durhams-investigation-incriminating-inference-in-the-fbis-empty-russiagate-predication/

James Comey’s cohorts were not memory-challenged Clouseaus but were more like diabolical Lex Luthors, ruthlessly plotting to take down a despised newcomer politician for partisan ends.

The vaporous predication for the FBI’s opening of its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of “Russian collusion” is often attributed solely to anti-Trump bias, with no more to learn from its study. But sustained examination shows it to be not only pretextual but also designed to conceal American history’s most insidious governmental treachery since Benedict Arnold.

According to the FBI, the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was opened on July 31, 2016, because lowly Trump aide George Papadopoulos had been told by one Professor Joseph Mifsud that Russia had emails harmful to Hillary Clinton. Two weeks later, Australian (FFG) diplomat, British-connected Alexander Downer, pried from Papadopoulos that Russia had dirt on Hillary, which he repeated in July to an American embassy in London. 

Because both Mifsud and Downer were Western intelligence plants, without any knowledge of Russian designs, this was clearly a bootstrapped, circular predication. That millions of common citizens also suspected Russia had email dirt on Hillary did not seem to dampen FBI ardor.

Quickly thereafter, the FBI opened highly secretive “SIM” (Sensitive Investigation Matter) investigations on Trump advisors Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos without any actual evidence, on the speculation that they were the most likely conspirators. 

Later, the FBI was adamant to Inspector General Michael Horowitz that the CIA’s “Brennan did not provide the FBI any intelligence that predicated the opening,” nor did Comey’s team “become aware of Steele reporting until September 19, 2016.” Rather, “predication . . . was based solely on the FFG (Downer) information.” 

All of these denials, as shown below, are arrant nonsense, but why is the FBI staying so far away from these two sources? Wouldn’t both Steele’s and Brennan’s investigations strengthen the nonexistent basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane? 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/10/the-likely-cause-of-the-media-blackout-on-imploding-whitmer-kidnapping-plot/

Once upon a time in America, a high-profile federal prosecution imploding amid credible accusations of FBI entrapment would earn wall-to-wall headlines in the national news media. A wife-beating FBI agent who used at least one criminal informant and a dozen more government assets to concoct a plot to abduct a sitting governor—intended to create damaging headlines for an incumbent president right before Election Day—would receive nonstop coverage on cable and broadcast news outlets.

Social media would be flooded with all the juicy details. Names like “Richard Trask” and “Stephen Robeson” would be household names.

But none of that is happening with the Justice Department’s rapidly crumbling case against several men arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation cottage in the fall of 2020. Defense attorneys have made a strong case that without the FBI’s guiding hand—and deep pockets courtesy of American taxpayers—the scheme never would have materialized past random social media chatter.

“[The] undisputed evidence . . . establishes that government agents and informants concocted, hatched, and pushed this ‘kidnapping plan’ from the beginning, doing so against defendants who explicitly repudiated the plan,” five defense attorneys wrote in a December 25 motion, one of several defense filings that details proof of an elaborate FBI operation to lure their clients into the abduction caper.

And the bad actors in the government’s script keep finding themselves in more trouble. 

Richard Trask, the lead FBI agent on the case, was fired for physically assaulting his wife in a drunken rage following a swinger party last summer. Body-camera footage made public last month shows a shirtless and clearly inebriated Trask being arrested by local police. (He was not charged with driving under the influence.)

A Michigan news station recently unearthed Trask’s Trump-hating rants posted on social media in 2020. “If you still support our piece of shit president you can fuck off,” Trask wrote on Facebook at the same time he was “investigating” threats against Whitmer. Trask said he hoped people who support Trump “burn in hell.”

Two other FBI agents working with Trask at the Detroit FBI field office who handled multiple informants also have been dismissed from the case; FBI agent Jayson Chambers is accused of running a security business on the side and FBI agent Henrik Impola is accused of committing perjury in another case. The Justice Department just notified the court that Trask, Chambers, and Impola are no longer on the government’s witness list.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/the-graveyard-of-false-covid-claims/

O n the Fourth of July, President Biden said, “Two hundred and forty-five years ago, we declared our independence from a distant king. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”

How’d that turn out?

Bad predictions, bad information, and a habit of stomping all over the truth are a big part of the reason why so many Americans are feeling not just depressed but actually angry about what’s going on with the virus.

Six months after Biden’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, caseloads are at record levels, an average of 1,500 people a day are dying from Covid, and, far from being independent from the virus, we seem to be its seething subjects. Teachers are refusing to go back to school in Chicago and elsewhere, while strict mandates remain in effect in many locales such as New York and Los Angeles County, where two-year-olds are required to wear masks indoors, and masks are even required outdoors at large gatherings, such as the Super Bowl slated to be held in L.A. on February 13.

All this after we were told we were in the mopping-up phase. Studying the virus seems to work a lot like Hollywood, where, as William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything.

Consider that a Supreme Court justice said something utterly asinine the other day: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators,” claimed Sonia Sotomayor. Only about 5,000 children are hospitalized with, or because of, Covid. Suddenly the Supreme Court is a fount of misinformation.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/11/americas-u-haul-revolution/

“It’s not a civil war. Call it the U-Haul Revolution. No shots fired. Just people moving for personal freedom and growth.”

Not everyone in Blue State America is moving to a far healthier Red State. It only seems that way. But enough are doing so to say, without a doubt, it is one of the most significant trends in America today. A revolution of sorts.

It’s long been known in demography and population economics that people leave areas known for authoritarian tyranny, stagnation, stultification, crime and excessive regulation in order to find the opposite somewhere else: economic freedom, dynamism, social diversity and good government.

It’s a big reason why literally hundreds of millions of people around the world have expressed their desire to emigrate to the U.S.

But it’s also true within countries, too.

Amid a backdrop of slow overall population growth, a problem in itself, comes the mass exodus of more than a million Americans moving largely from Blue States to Red States, expressing dissatisfaction with high taxes, rampant crime, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, excessive state government regulations, a politically stifling “woke” culture, and lack of economic opportunity and freedom.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/import-americans/

A skills-based immigration system is a possible answer to American demographic decline.

Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to just 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1. Ten years ago, when I published How Civilizations Die), the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics.

Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery. The only medium-term solution lies in immigration of skilled adults, and the only two prospective sources of large-scale immigration of skilled adults are China and India.

Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later.

In the modern era, religious commitment has been the strongest predictor of the desire to bring future generations into the world; other writers, notably the British demographer Eric Kaufmann, have made parallel arguments. What demographers call the great fertility transition occurred with urbanization and the end of child labor. In agricultural societies and early modern industry children were cheap labor and considered (as in wrongful death lawsuits) a resource with a definable monetary value. Once national pension systems replaced family care for the aged, and children no longer were expected to work until early adulthood, children offered spiritual rather than monetary value.

https://www.city-journal.org/smash-and-grab-retail

When police busted a shoplifting ring operating out of a liquor store last spring, they calculated that the dozen or so people involved had swiped at least $375,000 worth of goods from retailers such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Walgreens. The pair heading the ring relied on small-time thieves, including several with drug arrest records, to launch brazen “grab-and-go” operations in which they snatched expensive goods and then raced out of stores and fled in cars with phony license plates. Though police and prosecutors often categorize shoplifting as a nonviolent crime, the gang’s sprees resulted in several physical confrontations, including one in which a gang member assaulted a store employee with a stun gun. This may sound similar to the organized smash-and-grab lootings that have plagued high-end retailers in San Francisco and other Northern California communities recently, but this gang was operating out of Daytona Beach, Florida—and had done so for nearly two years.

In fact, retail crime has been rising throughout the U.S. for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020. The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.

Even more troubling, shoplifting no longer fits its traditional mold as a nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults. Nearly two-thirds of the retailers surveyed by the National Retail Federation said that violence associated with store thefts has risen, led by organized gangs that resell the goods they steal. Corie Berry, CEO of Best Buy, recently said that store crime had become so pervasive that it was depressing profits and traumatizing staff. Like retailers, top law-enforcement officials place some of the blame for the crime surge on a widespread lessening of penalties for shoplifting. “As we’ve witnessed brazen smash and grabs, consequences are key,” Laura Cooper, head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said before Thanksgiving. “Without deterrents and accountability, communities will be victimized, and businesses terrorized.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/is_the_tide_finally_turning.html

Yours truly has been pretty down in the mouth for quite a while, for good reasons.  I mean, look around.  Mask mandates.  Experimental drug mandates.  De facto quarantines.  Literal quarantines.  Destroyed small businesses.  Large businesses unable to fill their shelves.  Men pretending to be women.  Joe Biden in the White House.  Not a lot of happy-face material there. 

I’m getting a sense the tide may be turning.  It sure seems that the super-insulated bureaucratic Deep State is beginning to understand that it is not invincible.  Ironically, there may also be new hope politically if Democrats don’t correct course and remain blind to how self-destructive their Trump obsession will be.

On the COVID front, suddenly we see a rash of what we used to call in the news business “skin-backs.”  In plain English, that would be corrections.  In journalism and politics, that’s particularly painful, so skin-back captures it pretty well.

I think the Covidians have already begun The Big Skin-Back.

So many lies for so long are becoming so obviously lies that they need to get ahead of the story.  Otherwise, their only option is to continue to defend the lies in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of their duplicity and, after losing battle after battle, completely destroy their credibility, even with mainstream media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brad-raffensperger-vs-noncitizen-voting-democrats-new-york-eric-adams-republicans-11641848856?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Eric Adams has made his first mistake as New York City’s new mayor, endorsing a City Council bill to let roughly 800,000 noncitizens vote in local elections. Mr. Adams said Saturday he looks forward to “bringing millions more into the democratic process”—assuming a court doesn’t block the plan, which is possible.

In either case, New York’s Democrats are handing Republicans a political issue. Note what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on TV over the weekend: “I think that we should have a constitutional amendment, a U.S. constitutional amendment, that only American citizens vote in our elections.”

The host, CBS’s Margaret Brennan, tried to do an instant fact check. “Only U.S. citizens do currently vote in elections, but go on,” she said. This ill-informed response from somebody in the news business suggests average Americans will be blindsided when they hear what New York is doing. It goes way past the experiments with noncitizen voting that a handful of other cities have tried.

San Francisco, notably, opened up elections only for school board, and turnout has been low. In 2020, a city official says, 36 noncitizens registered and 31 voted. In 2018 there were 59 ballots. For context, the current registration form warns that data provided by prospective voters, including name and address, “may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”