“The owner of Insider and Politico tells journalists: AI is coming for your jobs,” CNN Business reported Wednesday. Mathias Döpfner, CEO of publisher Axel Springer, “predicts that AI will soon be able to aggregate information much better than humans.”
“Döpfner’s warnings come three months after Open AI opened up access to ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot,” the report notes. “The bot is capable of providing lengthy, thoughtful responses to questions, and can write full essays, responses in job applications and journalistic articles.”
“Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes ChatGPT, a chatbot that gives strikingly human-like responses to user queries, is as significant as the invention of the internet,” Reuters reported in February. “Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content,” Gates told Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper. “This will change our world.”
That seems to be a thing with him. With the environment, with Covid, with guns…
It may change the elites’ world in terms of employment costs. But doing that may also increase pressure for another hot topic among billionaires wishing to avoid a reserved spot in a new Reign of Terror by offering up sops like the unsustainable “guaranteed universal income” pipedream. As for changing the world in terms of journalistic content, ChatGPT is only as objective as the content it accesses, and a “test drive” of the bot shows all the old biases and assumptions made by legacy media “real reporters” drive the machine’s “understanding” of politically weighted issues.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres seems not to know that the Academy Awards already happened. He delivered a highly melodramatic and unrealistic speech Wednesday claiming that global warming will cause glaciers to melt, sea levels to rise, and disaster to strike both humanity and the climate. Sure, similar predictions that the Arctic ice would disappear and global warming was in imminent danger of triggering a worldwide apocalypse have been wrong for at least forty years, but why learn from the past?
Glaciers are also the world’s water towers. They represent the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet — supporting our nutrition, health, economies and energy production. And nearly 2 billion people — one out of every four people on earth — live in areas where glaciers and seasonal snowmelt supply their water.
But, these silent giants are facing a rude awakening. Human activity is driving our planet’s temperature to dangerous new heights. Global warming is a global warning that we are on the wrong track. And melting glaciers are the canary in the coalmine.
Very poetic, no doubt. Reminds me of how the Arctic was going to be ice-free by 2018. Oh, wait. That didn’t happen. And data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), reportedly confirmed by NASA satellite data, recently showed that the world has not experienced global warming for eight years—the globe is cooling, in fact.
Antarctica is losing an average of 150 billion tons of ice mass every year. The Greenland ice cap is melting even faster — losing 270 billion tons per year. To put that in perspective, that combined total ice melt in just one year is the equivalent of a wall of ice fully five metres high, covering my entire home country of Portugal.
Climate Depot and Climate Change Dispatch reported in September 2021, “Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced Wednesday that the Arctic ice sheet extends 25 percent further than it did [the] summer [before].” As of Jan. 2022, Arctic ice was still stable. Has a huge crisis suddenly started since then? I’m going to go out on a limb—or an ice cap—and say probably not.
Unless we reverse this trend, the consequences will be catastrophic. Low-lying communities and entire countries could be erased forever. We would witness mass movements of entire populations — and fierce competition for water and land. And disasters would accelerate worldwide — including floods, droughts and landslides. Losing these giants would be a giant problem for our world.
Guterres had plenty of government projects to suggest as solutions to achieve “climate justice” (whatever that means) and to “adapt and build resilience against climate disaster.” Amazing how these globalists always suggest governments and international entities as the solution, with new power given them to “rescue” us. Call me crazy, but Guterres just seems to be using climate alarmism to push for more top-down, authoritarian control of our lives.
It is a fitting coincidence that the announcement of Greta Thunberg’s honorary doctorate in theology came the same week as a new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world has less than a decade to stop “catastrophic climate change” by halting the use of fossil fuels.
You can be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu all over again, since we have been getting “less than a decade to stop climate change” warnings for more than 30 years. Only someone who has assimilated climate catastrophism as a fanatical religion could fail to be embarrassed by this record of hysteria and goal-post shifting, which makes St. Greta of Thunberg’s theology degree ironically fitting.
Yet the new IPCC report is not a report at all. It is merely a 36-page “Summary for Policy Makers” (SPM in the climate trade) ahead of a new “synthesis report” that will merely repackage the last complete three-volume IPCC climate change assessment from 2021. The new synthesis report, which will likely run a thousand pages or more, is “coming soon,” according to the IPCC’s website.
In other words, the new “synthesis report” is not new at all, but is produced to keep climate agitation at a full boil. The SPM is released ahead of main report to generate headlines, which will then be repeated, Groundhog Day-style, when the full report is released later. The new SPM did the trick: the New York Times‘s chief stenographer for the climate cult, Brad Plumer, produced a breathless story that can be written now by ChatGPT, declaring that “Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade.” This whole well-worn exercise is the climate cult equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
The firearm community consists of two primary groups: The gun owners and the gun manufacturers and sellers. The firearm industry provides the goods and services we all need in order to enjoy our Second Amendment rights.
Going after gun owners is, typically, a losing strategy for anti-gunners. It doesn’t take much to show that gun owners are law-abiding folks and that if we were all dangerous, with over 400 million guns in private hands, violent crime would be much worse.
So, they’ve long gone after gun stores, but they haven’t exactly left gun manufacturers alone.
We often talk about where and how weapons are purchased — but rarely where and how they are manufactured. These realities challenge the conventional way we talk about guns in terms of a “culture war” between red and blue states.
For example, the blue states of Massachusetts and Connecticut have some of the strictest regulations on firearms carrying and possession. But they are also major sites of gun manufacturing in this country. The weapons used in the 2018 Parkland shooting, for example, were manufactured by Smith and Wesson, a gun manufacturer based in Massachusetts.
The deeper and bigger point is that the U.S. is the world’s principal supplier of weapons.
Blue states with strict gun laws often suffer gun violence when weapons are trafficked in from red states with looser gun laws. Similarly, many countries surrounding the U.S. with high rates of gun violence, like Mexico, obtain guns both legally and illegally from this country.
With no system to effectively control and track who ends up with those guns, these weapons are often obtained by military units or police that have committed human rights abuses or who work with criminal groups.
In other words, literally every sin ever committed with a gun rests on the gun manufacturers’ heads.
However, I’m going to clue the writers–there are two of them, so they’re clearly twice as ignorant–on a few facts about how gun distribution works in this country.
First, let’s talk about domestic gun sales.
The gun manufacturer builds a given firearm and then sells it. It’s true that, in theory, anyone can buy that gun and have it shipped to pretty much any city in the nation…to a point.
The weapon needs to first be legal in that state, for one thing. An AR-15 that’s legal in Georgia isn’t legal in Massachusetts, so local laws need to be obeyed.
Second, that gun must go to someone with the proper licensing. Since most people don’t have an FFL, they are generally shipped to a gun store, which then conducts all the required background checks and whatnot. As such, the gun manufacturer can ship it out trusting that everything required will be done.
Yet after it leaves the store, they have absolutely no control over what happens. That customer could have the gun stolen or he could just hand it off to someone else. They have no say.
Then the writers talk about atrocities abroad as if companies like Colt are to blame.
Except, those companies can’t just export guns because someone cut them a check. Due to federal law, weapons exports must be approved by the State Department. Again, Colt can’t ship a bunch of M-4s somewhere just because they want to. They need government approval to do so lawfully.
Once they’re sent, the gun manufacturers are, once again, powerless to do anything about what happens with those weapons.
See, our intrepid authors are convinced that these gun makers are the scum of the Earth, but they can’t seem to grok that they’re ruled by numerous regulations other industries simply don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t be the merchants of death they’re painted as even if they wanted.
Frankly, these two should be embarrassed by what they wrote and the publication that printed it should be embarrassed as well. What we have here is a screed dictated by ignorance with a few links thrown it to make it look like they did their research.
A Chicago carjacker got busted when he tried to steal a car that he didn’t know how to drive. The crook, 25-year-old Andrew Moran, can’t drive a stick shift but the car he jacked had a manual transmission.
The thug tried to drive away but couldn’t get the car to work so he bailed and fled on foot. But Moran’s low IQ hadn’t finished failing him yet.
When he fled the scene, he kept the keys to the car he left behind. The keys had an Apple AirTag attached making it easy for the police to track him down.
SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Even on a good day, Linda Garinger of Ramona, California, thinks about dying.
Since she went on kidney dialysis two years ago, she’s had a heart attack and a cardiac episode associated with her thrice-weekly treatments.
Her energy is low as her other vital organs slowly fail. Her blood pressure is out of control—hovering at around 200 systolic over “100-something”diastolic whenever she undergoes dialysis.
Garinger feels it’s only a matter of time before her next heart attack, which could prove fatal unless she gets a new kidney.
“The dialysis is very stressful on me. My vision is going. My hair is falling out. I’ve got skin cancer,” said Garinger, 68. “They said it’s from the dialysis not filtering out all the bad stuff.
“My biggest fear is I’ll have a heart attack during dialysis. I’m just going downhill right now.”
Mr President You're MISLEADING us 😆😆 ✔Your veto is forcing investment decisions to be BASED ON POLITICS, Not financial criteria ✔You're killing competition by FORCING YOUR (ESG Factors) funds are notorious underperformers & high-risk leaving future of RETIREES LESS SECURE
San Francisco District Supervisor Hillary Ronen is “begging” for more police officers in the Mission District. Crime is out of control, and the city absolutely has to do something about it.
You have to sympathize with her and her constituents. Sure sounds like things are really bad out there. I wonder how any city could allow such a degradation in its policing capability?
Hillary Ronen is the one to ask. She led the fight to defund the police, after all.
President Joe Biden appeared to criticize Ron DeSantis on his handling of transgender youth and floated the possibility of a nation-wide transgender law in an interview clip released Monday.
“What’s going on in Florida, is as my mother would say, ‘close to sinful.’ I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden said while speaking with actor Kal Penn.
“It’s not like … a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘you know, I decided that I want to become a man or I want to become a woman … I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings, they love, they have feelings, they have inclinations,” Biden continued. “It’s cruel.”
“And the way we do it is we make sure we pass legislation like we passed on same-sex marriage. You mess with that, you’re breaking the law and you’re going to be held accountable,” Biden added.
DeSantis has led an administration-wide effort to ban sex change treatments for minors. He has said doctors should be sued for performing sex changes on children and suspended a state attorney refusing to adhere to the child sex change ban.
DeSantis also requested public universities report how many students they treated for “gender dysphoria,” and in October, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormone therapy for children under 18.
Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman and has garnered attention on social media for using hyper-feminine stereotypes, asked Biden in October if he thinks states should “have the right” to ban “gender-affirming health care.”
“I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that, as a moral question and a legal question,” Biden responded.
“I just think it’s wrong,” Biden added. “I feel very, very strongly that you should have every single solitary right, including, including use of your gender identity bathroom in public.”
Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Jason Weida told the Caller that “the ‘gender-affirming’ model pushed by the Biden Administration is decades behind other developed countries, including Sweden and most recently Norway.”
“What is ‘sinful’ is the establishment pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency,” Weida said.
“Last year, the Agency conducted a thorough review of several services promoted by the Federal Government to treat gender dysphoria and found that these services – sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers – are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long term affects,” he added.
As Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham started her post-session news conference Saturday, she already knew the score.
Of the roughly 40 public safety bills introduced this year, the governor said she championed 10.
“We have about a handful up, and out of 40, it’s 10 [that passed], and not all of those would really constitute what I think are strong public safety measures,” she said.
“I know that is an area that you want me to say I’m disappointed,” Lujan Grisham added. “I’m motivated. I am very motivated to find additional ways to make sure that we really do everything in our power that makes our communities and cities in our state safe.”
The Legislature passed a gun storage law named after a 13-year-old Albuquerque boy authorities say was shot and killed by a fellow student who took his father’s gun to an Albuquerque middle school. Lawmakers also passed a bill that cracks down on organized retail crime and made it a fourth-degree felony to buy a gun for another person who is prohibited from owning a firearm.
But some of the governor’s biggest priorities went nowhere, including a ban on assault weapons; a bill to raise the age to 21 to buy or possess semi-automatic firearms, including assault weapons; and a 14-day waiting period to buy guns.
Other gun-related legislation — prohibiting firearms within 100 feet of polling places and updating the Unfair Trade Practices Act to lift restrictions on the filing of lawsuits against manufacturers or distributors — passed the Senate but didn’t get a hearing in the House, where they were likely to meet stiff opposition.
The governor also pushed for establishing a “rebuttable presumption” to keep repeat violent offenders awaiting trial off the streets instead of letting them be released pretrial. The bill was tabled in committee amid concerns it was unconstitutional.
Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, said she was “extremely disappointed” the bill to impose a 14-day waiting period on gun sales didn’t get a hearing in either chamber. Of all the violence prevention bills proposed this year, that was the bill that would’ve made the biggest difference, she added.
“The studies we looked at say it’s a game-changer in terms of suicide and crimes of passion,” she said.
But Viscoli said she was grateful the Legislature passed House Bill 9, intended to keep guns out of the hands of children and teens. The governor signed it into law Tuesday.
“We’ve been working on getting that passed since 2017,” she said.
Rep. Pamelya Herndon, D-Albuquerque, who sponsored the legislation known as the Bennie Hargrove Act, called some of the other gun bills considered by the Legislature controversial, noting some are “going to take some time.”
Lujan Grisham, who was hammered over a crime wave plaguing New Mexico as she campaigned for a second term last year, vowed to keep “pushing the Legislature” to enact more measures, including funding to put an additional 1,000 police officers on the ground.
“The Legislature should expect me to look at that again because I know we need 1,000 officers,” she said.
Asked about her strategy to get her public safety priorities across the finish line, Lujan Grisham said she has to think about “creative solutions.”
“I’m going to keep trying,” she said.
“Just look at the stats. We’ve released some folks that should never have been released and have already reoffended in Albuquerque while we’ve all been in the legislative session,” she said, referring to efforts to pass a pretrial detention bill. “I find that to be intolerable. There are states who do it better, and I don’t know why we don’t just do exactly what those states are doing. I don’t need to recreate the wheel.”
The governor said she would continue to battle for modified pretrial detention, noting “everyone here knows I’m introducing that again. And again and again, and I might just try to change the Constitution so I can run again.”
Lujan Grisham said she was kidding but added she would continue to battle on crime legislation. And she made no apologies for her battle against guns, brushing off criticism she’s infringing on law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights.
“I have not talked to a single policymaker, not one legislator, who’s interested in preventing responsible gun owners from accessing firearms,” she said.
“What we’re trying to address is that we have a gun violence issue and that guns … get into the hands of people who should not have them,” she said. “That … takes a scalpel, like figuring out where we got a problem and taking care of that particular problem.”
Observation O’ The Day
Kostas Moros
@MorosKostas
I don’t understand what the point is supposed to be here. Yes, bullets are very lethal, and will cause serious injury even when not fatal. Nobody disputes that. That is the point of firearms, we didn’t think we were buying paintball guns or something.
Also, this is another post by Giffords that shows they ultimately want to ban all guns even though they won’t admit it. Because these same horrific wounds would result from non-“assault weapons”, guns limited to ten rounds, etc.
With standard human corruption, these elitists delude themselves by believing that since they were just enough smarter than the average bear in one subject to wind up suuuuper rich, they must be as smart in everything else. Thus they walk themselves right into stupidity.
Beware of plutocrats bearing gifts. The annual clown show at Davos epitomizes how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.
The recent ‘Great Awokening’ of our elites reflects a long-standing shift among executives in terms of priorities and perspective. The capitalist class first arose out of the middle orders, and even from within the peasantry, as the industrial revolution, particularly in the Netherlands and Britain, challenged the autocracy of both the church and the monarchical state. These were often tough, ruthless entrepreneurs embodying values of hard work, thrift, family and faith.
But with the managerial revolution of the 1950s, the nature of executive elites changed. As sociologist Daniel Bell first identified half a century ago, business leaders were no longer upstarts and thus the natural opponents of state power. Instead, they reflected a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, a worldview which transformed the foundations of middle-class culture. The goal of this new executive class, as Bell saw it, was not so much building great companies, but gaining accolades from their peers, the press and the public – a trend also set out in Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book, The Third Wave.
The rise of the socially conformist business executive was briefly obscured during the entrepreneurial boom of the 1980s, when Wall Street and tech leaders embraced Reaganite deregulation. The era of financier Mike Milken, Apple founder Steve Jobs, AMD founder Jerry Sanders and FedEx founder Frederick Smith seemed to reflect a resurgent ‘cowboy capitalism’. These entrepreneurs were too busy making money to care about controlling the lives of the common folk. So much so that in 2006, economist Carl Schramm argued that Joseph Schumpeter’s prediction of bureaucratic capitalist decline would be overcome by an ‘entrepreneurial America reborn’.
This era came crashing to an end with the 2008 financial crisis and the massive state bailouts of large banks. The banking sector became more concentrated, with the number of American banking institutions falling by a third between 2000 and 2020. By 2020, the five largest banks controlled over 45 per cent of all assets in the US, up from under 30 per cent 20 years earlier. Worldwide, the five largest investment banks now control roughly one-third of investment funds; the top 10 control an absolute majority. In Europe, such oligopolies are even more powerful, with the top three banks accounting for a majority of assets in most European countries.
It is the same story with the technology sector. Once the vaunted centre of grassroots entrepreneurialism, a lack of antitrust measures from both Republicans and Democrats has allowed technology companies to morph into quasi-monopolies. Google controls over 90 per cent of the search-engine market; Microsoft owns over 74 per cent of computer-operating-system software; Amazon has nearly half of the US online retail market share and a significant proportion of cloud computing; Google and Apple together account for 90 per cent of smartphone operating systems.
Such immense market power encourages executives not to take risks and innovate, but rather to consolidate their dominance by acquiring smaller competitors. Amazon, Meta and Google now account for two-thirds of all online-advertising revenues, which now represent the majority of all ad sales. These oligopolies also seem poised to dominate emerging technologies, from cloud services and underwater fibre-optic cables to AI.
Alongside this economic concentration, we see as well uniformity of viewpoints and growing control over the means of communication. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple largely not only control the biggest platforms, but have also taken direct ownership of movie studios, newspapers and magazines. All these outlets, along with the AI models these firms produce, tend to reflect the worldview of the tech oligopoly.
There was a time when cleanliness was viewed as “next to godliness.” That clearly has changed. It is now apparently next to white supremacy. While it would be impossible to discuss all of the wacky scholarship being published today, Loyola (Chicago) Professor Jenna Drenten is a standout with a new theory that “cleanliness” is a “cultural gatekeeping mechanism” with “racist,” “sexist” and “classist” roots. It turns out that the sweet spice rack that your kid brought back from shop is actually a stratified, structural vehicle for white supremacy and male dominance . . . unless you keep it messy. Otherwise, you are pushing racist, sexist “pantry porn.”
Professor Drenten has struck out at a social media trend of posting videos showing off different ways to organize pantries. Where many see neatness, Drenten sees racism and sexism. She notes that these video creators, “predominantly white women,” have created “a new status symbol” to replace the old one of “nice houses,” “nice yards” and “nice neighborhoods.” She wrote:
Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.
What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.
She warns others not to fall for “pantry porn”:
Magazines like Good Housekeeping were once the brokers of idealized domestic work. Now online pantry porn sets the aspirational standard for becoming an ideal mom, ideal wife and ideal woman. This grew out of a shift toward an intensive mothering ideology that equates being a good mom with time-intensive, labor-intensive, financially expensive care work.
Pantry maintenance is a new area of racism and sexism for Professor Drenten. Before she went after domestic Bull Connors, she blew the whistle on video gaming with papers on “Video Gaming as a Gendered Pursuit” and “More Gamer, Less Girl: Gendered Boundaries, Tokenism, and the Cultural Persistence of Masculine Dominance.”
So the Federal gov has to pay billions of dollars when this should have been handled by private companies? https://t.co/3j9wb58cKf
‘On DOD property’ purchases? That means the PX, and just to make a point, PX prices aren’t all that much, if any, lower than what’s outside the front gate, where there also will be no waiting periods either, unless there’s a state law. This is Kabuki Theater.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is calling on the Pentagon to hire more mental health workers and directing military-run health care clinics to screen for alcohol abuse in order to reduce veteran suicides, but he’s holding off on implementing several anti-gun proposals recommended by the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, at least for a few more months.
That committee is recommending the Defense Department institute a seven-day waiting period for all gun sales on DoD property, along with a four-day waiting period for ammunition purchases. In addition, the committee says the Pentagon should raise the age to purchase a firearm on base to 25-years-old. On Thursday Austin called for the creation of a suicide prevention working group that will look at how feasible it would be to implement the committee’s recommendations, with a deadline of June 2nd for the working group to submit its findings.
His orders reflect increasing concerns about suicides in the military, despite more than a decade of programs and other efforts to prevent them and spur greater intervention by commanders, friends and family members. But his omission of any gun safety and control measures underscores the likelihood that they would face staunch resistance, particularly in Congress, where such legislation has struggled in recent years.
Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters in a briefing Thursday that Austin’s orders involved areas where the department already has the authority to take immediate steps.
“While we recognize that suicide has no single cause, and that no single preventative action, treatment or cure will eliminate suicide altogether, we will exhaust every effort to promote the wellness, health and morale of our total force,” Ryder said.
The initial study committee recommended that the department require anyone living in military housing to register all privately owned firearms. In addition, the panel said the department should restrict the possession and storage of privately owned firearms in military barracks and dorms.
Reducing veteran and active duty suicides is an incredibly important goal, but the draconian gun control policies recommended by the committee are liable to create a backlash; not only on Capitol Hill but among many military members and potential recruits, at least if Austin moves forward with implementing them. The military is already struggling to meet its recruiting goals, and imposing a host of anti-gun restrictions on active-duty and reserve members would likely make those problems a lot worse.
That helps to explain why Austin didn’t immediately move to implement those proposals, but choosing to kick this can down the road for a couple of months rather than reject the gun control components of the suicide prevention recommendations means that these bad ideas could still become a nightmare for members of the military before long. Instead of trying to restrict the Second Amendment rights of our men and women in uniform, I hope that Austin’s working group takes a look at some of the efforts to prevent veteran suicide taking place within the 2A community, starting with the Sentinel app that was recently awarded a $1-million dollar grant from the VA. The app was developed by D.C. Project member Kathleen Gilligan, who lost her own son to suicide a decade ago, and aims to help veterans look out for each other.
When things are going poorly, Joe Biden usually heads out for another gun-control push, issuing executive orders, demanding more legislation, and repeating many of his most preposterous anecdotes and claims. Because Biden’s gun rhetoric offers little more than emotionalism, it doesn’t have to make much sense — which, of course, plays to his greatest strength.
During the spring and summer of 2022, when inflation kept hitting new 40-year highs, Biden gave one cynical speech on gun violence after the next. This week, as the banking system yawned under the weight of his reckless policies, Biden was in Monterey Park, where 11 people were murdered by a 72-year-old lunatic during last year’s Lunar New Year celebration, to demand Congress pass more laws.
Obviously, it’s all meant to be a distraction. But it also needs to be debunked.
Here is CBS News giving the White House the lead it was looking for:
President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that aims to increase the number of background checks to buy guns, promote better and more secure firearms storage and ensure U.S. law enforcement agencies are getting the most out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer.
Biden’s executive order will direct U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to increase background checks by “cracking down on gun sellers who don’t perform them when required.” This is already the law, and there’s no evidence of any widespread problem with licensed gun sellers circumventing checks to illegally sell firearms to criminals.
Even if gun dealers were a bunch of disreputable characters, it makes little sense for them to risk their businesses when a healthy market for legal guns exists. But it is true that occasionally, as happened with the Charleston Church shooter, law enforcement doesn’t do its job. So maybe Biden should sign an executive order demanding the FBI try harder.
The attorney general is free to crack down on criminals whenever he pleases. Biden’s executive orders feed the false perception that more background checks would lead to less violence. Biden admits in his speech that goal of his new EO is “moving us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.”
Biden’s refusal to work with lawmakers was brought up again by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) on the issue of protecting the solvency of Social Security. Yellen tried to insist that Biden “cares very deeply” about the program, but couldn’t explain any of his actions to back up that claim. Instead, Yellen insisted Biden “stands ready to work with Congress.”
“That’s a lie,” Cassidy pointed out, as lawmakers have tried to meet with Biden on the subject to no avail.
It’s unsurprising that Biden doesn’t have a plan to address Social Security or negotiate a debt ceiling increase, considering his previous failures. From the Afghanistan withdrawal to declaring “independence” from COVID in 2021, Biden’s plans, when he does have them, don’t end any better.
SENATOR CASSIDY: "Why doesn't the president care?"
YELLEN: "He cares very deeply."
CASSIDY: "Then where is his plan?"
YELLEN: "He stands ready to work with Congress."
CASSIDY: "That's a lie! A bipartisan group of senators have repeatedly requested to meet with him!" pic.twitter.com/jpud6ai0MO
“They have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system,” Roger Altman, who served as deputy treasury secretary in the Carter and Clinton administrations, told CNN on Tuesday morning.
“I didn’t say it has been nationalized. I said they are verging on that because they have guaranteed the entire deposit base,” he clarified.
ROGER ALTMAN: Well, the term “bailout” is, obviously, a loaded one. And it’s in the eye of the beholder. It’s like one person sees something and thinks it is a catastrophe, and another person sees the same thing and thinks it’s a small accident.
But the main point here is that the rescues of 2008 and 2009 which we all remember so vividly became ferociously unpopular, one of the most unpopular things that the federal government has done in 50 or 100 years. Many people think they led to the growth of the Tea Party and the growth of the MAGA movement, and so forth. And therefore, the administration today doesn’t want to get within 100 miles of that term “bailout.”
Now, what the authorities did over the weekend was absolutely profound. They guaranteed the deposits, all of them, at Silicon Valley Bank. And what that really means, and they won’t say it, and I’ll come back to that, what that really means is that they have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system, the entire deposit base. Why? Because you can’t guarantee all the deposits in Silicon Valley Bank and then the next day say to the depositors, say at First Republic, sorry, yours aren’t guaranteed. Of course, they are.
And so this is a breathtaking step, which effectively nationalizes or federalizes the deposit base of the U.S. financial system. You can call it a bailout, you can call it something else, but it’s really absolutely profound.
Now, the authorities, including the White House, are not going to say that, because what I just said of course implies that they have just nationalized the banking system. And technically speaking, they haven’t. But in a broad sense, they are verging on that.
By the way, the shareholders in Silicon Valley Bank, obviously, lost all their money. And therefore, if you are a shareholder at First Republic or some of the other banks that you showed on your screen a few minutes ago, you are concerned because you saw that at Silicon Valley Bank the shareholders were wiped out. But the depositors at those institutions have nothing to worry about because they have just been guaranteed.
COLLINS: It is a remarkable statement to hear you say that you believe the U.S. banking system has been nationalized because of this.
ALTMAN: Well, no. I didn’t say it has been nationalized. I said they are verging on that because they have guaranteed the entire deposit base. Usually, the term “nationalization” means that the government takes over the institution and runs it and the government owns it. That would be the type of nationalization we have seen in many other countries around the world. Obviously, that did not happen here. When you guarantee the entire deposit base, you have put the federal government and the taxpayer in a much different place in terms of protection than we were in a week ago.
The Vice President's husband, Doug Emhoff, compares conservative school board parents to the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust. "This hate is interconnected."pic.twitter.com/e5tpBsswOK
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 15, 2023
They are just following the formula created in the 1940’s by the Soviet Union pic.twitter.com/HO4CwL0oP4
