Hiding In Plain Sight: Jeanette Jennings and Transgender Munchausen by Proxy

Posted on | March 21, 2023 | 3 Comments

Jeanette Jennings and her failed experiment, ‘Jazz’

Megan Fox of PJM has a rather too-detailed-for-comfort story about the tragic reality TV star “Jazz” (née Jared) Jennings. Let’s just say that the poster girl for transgenderism, who first appeared on the cable show I Am Jazz at age 14, is not happy with the results of his/“her” transition.

Really, there was no precedent for what was done to this child, except perhaps the experiments of Doctor Mengele. The use of so-called “puberty blockers” (synthetic hormones) at an early age to prevent the normal process of maturation — well, who had ever heard of such thing? Undergoing “gender reassignment” surgery at age 17 — gosh, what could possibly go wrong? Trust me, you don’t want to know the answer.

Jazz Jennings has had numerous “sex change” surgeries and has been on countless hormones. She reveals: “I just want to feel like myself. All I want is to be happy and feel like me, and I don’t feel like me, ever.”

This is the sad reality of transitioning. pic.twitter.com/K9JBhGAoNL

— Isabella Maria DeLuca (@IsabellaMDeLuca) March 16, 2023

“Jazz Jennings” is the victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and the perpetrator of this atrocity is his/“her” mother, Jeanette. (By the way, the surname “Jennings” is a pseudonym.) Some day, maybe, if the world regains its sanity, psychologists will study this case as a textbook example of how manipulative neurotic mothers ruin their children’s lives. That this was done publicly — as an entertainment spectacle to enrich TV executives — makes it even worse. Megan Fox summarizes the saga:

Jazz didn’t make any of these decisions. Nothing that was done to him — from living his entire life on a reality show for the entertainment of the mob to being rushed into irreversible surgery — was done in private. Every fight with siblings, every argument with parents, and every embarrassing moment have been broadcast for the world to gape at. He can’t even go out with friends at age 21 without his mother tracking him down to check on him. Jazz missed his first semester at college because he was so mentally unwell.
If I could talk to Jazz, I would first hug him and tell him how sorry I am that the adults in his family, his medical team, and this country didn’t stand up for the child we all watched go through this heinous reality. What kind of monsters are we? Were the executives at TLC so blinded by money that none of them asked themselves, “what happens if this backfires and we destroy this kid?”
Jazz has been used in an unforgivable way as the face of a movement that he didn’t even understand and still might not fully grasp. He’s a show pony, a cause, a public experiment done for the entertainment of some and the political goals of others.

There must be a shortage of millstones in Broward County.

Category: The Transgender Cult

In The Mailbox: 03.21.23 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | March 21, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.21.23 (Morning Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It was just one of those days yesterday – sleep schedule was AFU and I just didn’t feel well all day. Today’s a little better.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Heavy Metal Makes You A Happier Person
EBL: Barbie, Ode to KFC: Axis of Awesome, and Fatbody Alexander Vindman – Ukraine War Profiteer?
Twitchy: So Many Journalists Hoping To Cover Pro-Trump Riot In NYC, It Turned Into The Spiderman Meme, also, Governor Hairgel Wants Diesel Trucks Phased Out To Save The Glaciers
Louder With Crowder: TikToker’s cat slaps the virtue signaling out of her mouth when she declares her pronouns, also, Steven Crowder Leads With More Than 58,000 Presale Paying Subscribers
Vox Popoli: Bank Contagion, Boomer Shock, Vaccine Denial, and That Will Not Shock the World
Stoic Observations: Lovecraftian Tonic
Gab News: The Regime’s War To Make Memes Illegal

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Chosen – Updated
American Conservative: And the Winner Is, also, The War by Women
American Greatness: What Happened to Stanford?, also, Media Outlets, Tech Companies, and Democratic Politicians Benefited from SVB Bailout
American Thinker: A Gigantic Egg All Over Brad Raffensperger’s Face, Government Tyrants Play with Fire, and 3 years ago American Thinker was the first to call out the fraud of Dr. Anthony Fauci and was viciously attacked by the WaPo, NYT other MSM outlets
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Santiago de Cuba officials say they have no resources to combat bedbug epidemic, France donates 98 tons of powdered milk for thousands of severely anemic Cuban children, and Team USA destroys Team Castro 14-2 at the World Baseball Classic
BattleSwarm: 1911 vs. 2011, also, Something About Credit Suisse
Behind The Black: Blobs and jellyfish in space
Cafe Hayek: Getting Comparative Advantage Straight, also, Reality Isn’t Optional, Exhibit #79,201,096e28
CDR Salamander: Preliminary Notice to CDR Salamander OG Blog Readers, also, Episode 650: Keeping America’s Dominance at Sea with Jerry Hendrix
Chicago Boyz: Worthwhile Reading and Viewing
Da Tech Guy: Navy’s abortion policy is a hot mess, Draft for my 1996 League (With a Thumbs Up from Curt Schilling), and Two Predictions one Nastier than the other
Dana Loesch: On The Leaked Trump Indictment & Rumored Arrest,
Don Surber: Highlights Of [Last] Week, Winning The Woke War, and Avenatti Says There’s No Case Against Trump
First Street Journal: The Feds admit it: they are trying to force guilty pleas by the Capitol kerfufflers through intimidation
Gates Of Vienna: The Vax Damage Lottery, The Lebanon of Central Europe, and Archbishop Viganò: “What We Need is an Anti-Globalist Alliance”
The Geller Report: Biden Treasury Secretary’s Policy Destroys Small US Banks While Bailing Out Chinese Depositors, Experts Say, also, Soros DA Alvin Bragg Wants President Trump Handcuffed and Perp Walked
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Messier 55, You Can’t See This From Here, and I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Hollywood In Toto: The Cure Bosses Springsteen Around with Ticketmaster Victory, also, What Is Woke? One Sound Bite Can’t Capture It All
The Lid: Fact-Checker Finds Biden’s Economic Lie
Legal Insurrection: Iowa Board of Regents Suspends DEI Policies in Higher Education, LA Times’ Hot Take on Banking Crisis: It’s a ‘Blessing in Disguise’, Latest Twitter Files Shows Stanford’s “Virality Project” Flagged Real Covid Science as ‘Disinformation’, U.S. Navy’s Priority in 2023? Climate Change, and DeSantis Forms Alliance Of 19 Governors To Combat Biden’s Economy-Crushing ESG Obsession
Nebraska Energy Observer: Laetare Sunday, also, Saturday … just for you
Outkick: Deion Sanders Forces Colorado Players To Wear Blank Jerseys – ‘We Ain’t Giving You Nothing’, Virginia Slugger Completely Disrespects N.C. State With Violent Bat Spike After Moonshot, Gets Walked Off 30 Minutes Later, Trish Stratus Returning To WWE, WrestleMania, UFC Octagon Girls Arianny Celeste And Brittney Palmer Hit The Beach, and MSNBC Columnist Says Mets Fans Are Upset Edwin Díaz Is Lost For The Season Due To Colonialism
Power Line: The Conservative Case for San Francisco’s Reparations Plan, Inside Stanford’s disgrace: Judge Duncan speaks, Young Woman Messes with a Police Officer; Karma Comes Quickly, and The three percent fabrication
Shark Tank: Rubio Slams Cuban Baseball Team Controversy
Shot In The Dark: Dog Whistle, also, Who’s The Boss
This Ain’t Hell: Thousands of dollars of kickbacks results in prison time for VA medical center manager, Veterans in the News, AL Post Commander Accused, Verlon James – Fake Navy SEAL, and Body fat assessment exempted for Soldiers who score at least 540 points on Army Combat Fitness Test
Transterrestrial Musings: WW II And The Red Army, Russia’s Space Program, and Fauci
Victory Girls: Democrats Want Protests If Trump Is Arrested – Don’t Fall For It, also, Robin DiAngelo Says Exactly What Scott Adams Said, But Isn’t Racist?
Volokh Conspiracy: Do the 5th and 14th Amendments Impose Equivalent Due Process Limits on Court Jurisdiction?
Watts Up With That: The Humanitarian Horror That ‘Electrify Everything’ Would Unleash, also, A Simple Reason Why Net Zero Is Impossible
Weasel Zippers: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Attempts To Claim Dems Were “Bipartisan” When They Were In Charge, 16 People On FBI’s Terror Watch-List Arrested At U.S. Border, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) Outraged That Conservatives “Hate” Progressive Government, Politics
The Federalist: How Ditching Social Norms Guarantees Failure, Not Freedom, How Biden’s Social Security Demagoguery Is Stoking Inflation, From 2008 To The SVB Bailout, New Documentary Traces The Fed’s Same Old Recklessness, and Why Is The New York Times Urging America To Buddy Up With Communist China?
Mark Steyn: Tal Bachman: God Writes Back, also, There Be Monsters: The Bug-Out Fantasy of Tremors

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Category: Linkagery

The Answer Is ‘Yes’

Posted on | March 21, 2023 | 2 Comments

Chris Rock’s question was rhetorical:

In light of the recent news that Donald Trump might face indictment for an alleged campaign finance violation, several experts have come forward to criticize the case against him. Some have argued that the charges are weak, while others have pointed out the hypocrisy of Trump’s potential arrest, given that Hillary Clinton faced a similar accusation but only paid a fine. . . .
Chris Rock made his statement at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony at the Kennedy Center, which was honoring Adam Sandler. In an apparent dig at the politicians in attendance at the ceremony, he asked the crowd if they were “stupid” for contemplating such a move.
He exclaimed, “Are you guys really going to arrest Trump? Do you know this is only going to make him more popular? It’s like arresting Tupac. He’s just gonna sell more records. Are you stupid?” The comedian’s remarks were met with roaring laughter from the crowd that included the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Biden administration officials.

Here’s the thing: If Democrats could “elect” Joe Biden as president — because 81 million votes, am I right? — and install the brain-damaged John Fetterman in the Senate, they don’t fear any political consequences, no matter how extreme their behavior. Success in rigging elections, combined with the news media’s willingness to act as Democratic operatives as bylines, means that Democrats never expect to face consequences, for anything, ever. We shall see if trying to prosecute Trump on the basis of a case that helped send Michael Avenatti to prison will prove to be an exception to this rule. Stay tuned . . .

Category: Corruption, Democrats, Donald Trump

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Olga Kurylenko

Posted on | March 20, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Born in 1979 in Berdyansk, in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine, Olga moved to Paris at the age of 16 to start her modeling career and ten years later began acting, finding success two years later in the video game movie Hitman and later as Bond Girl Camille Montes in Quantum of Solace. More recently, she’s been in Black Widow and The Death of Stalin as Maria Yudina.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Evening wear…very nice!

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #2022, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Mexican Drug Cartels Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: MAGA Indictment, St. Patrick’s Day Rule 5, Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris, The Murder of Julius Caesar, The Trad Wife Whisperer, Piggy|Cerdita, Next Exit, When Movies Were Good – The Magnificent Seven, and Siberia.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Portia Doubleday, Happy St. Paddy’s Day, Fish Pic Friday – Summer Rials, Giant Orange Blob Threatens Florida, Gov. Moore Goes Fishing for Catfish Money, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Moore Dictates Maryland Adopt Electric Motoring, Happy Pi Day, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Gone Fishin’, Palm Sunday and Maryland, My Maryland

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: Rule 5

What Happened to Charlie Sykes?

Posted on | March 19, 2023 | 2 Comments

Charlie Sykes in his talk-radio heyday at WTMJ

Jeff Goldstein has a long essay slamming #NeverTrump pundit Charlie Sykes, a well-deserved slam, in reaction to a very bad Bulwark column Sykes wrote about Republican critics of Biden’s Ukraine policy.

Although it’s not my main point, let me briefly address that subject: One of the basic principles of success in politics was distilled to its essence in the title of Phyllis Schlafly’s famous 1964 book, A Choice Not an Echo. That book was written in support of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy, at a time when liberalism was near it apogee of prestige, and the GOP Establishment was trying to foist moderate Nelson Rockefeller on the party as their presidential nominee. Although Goldwater lost in a landslide to LBJ, the choice of Goldwater proved decisive for the Republican Party’s future. There never would have been a Reagan presidency had it not been for “AuH2O” in 1964.

What does “conservative” mean, if it does not mean opposition to liberalism? Or to put it another way: Why should anyone vote Republican, if the GOP is going to support the same policies advocated by Democrats? Schlafly’s book clarified this point at a time when many Republican politicians (notably including Mitt Romney’s father) were responding to the liberal agenda by enthusiastically shouting, “Me, too!”

As it was in the Age of LBJ, so it is in the Age of Biden. Most conservatives, I believe, are in favor of Ukraine’s independence, and hope to see Putin’s invasion fail, but this does not mean — and should not mean — that the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy is off-limits to criticism. As a matter of fact, I have offended some of my friends (including colleagues at The American Spectator) by acknowledging the basic validity of John Mearsheimer’s critique of long-term U.S. policy toward Russia. Our Russia policy has been a mess for decades, going back at least as far as Clinton’s ill-advised intervention against Serbia in 1999 (the Serbs historically being a Russian ally) and Donald Trump at least ought to get credit for having tried to pause this bipartisan bungling.

Much of the problem has to do with the military weakness of our so-called “allies” in NATO. What good is an ally, if they can’t put a combat-effective armored brigade into the field? And the abysmal state of military readiness of our European allies has been notorious for many years because, as Trump repeatedly pointed out, most of them were not living up to their NATO agreement to devote 2% of their GDP to defense spending. (The U.S. spends more than 3.5% of GDP on its military.)

The weakness of our European allies makes a bellicose posture toward Russia problematic. If the Germans, French, Dutch, et al., wanted to confront Putin, why weren’t they doing what was necessary, in terms of defense spending, to create a credible deterrent to Russian aggression? The Europeans seem to have a rather one-sided view of the NATO alliance, with Uncle Sam playing the role of military Sugar Daddy. And when Putin made his lunge into Crimea in 2014, what was the response? Nothing but a lot of talk, talk, talk and economic sanctions, which Putin shrugged off. If the West was not willing to fight for Crimea, why should Putin expect them to fight for the Donbas? And so, by a combination of military weakness and diplomatic provocation, the West more or less invited the 2022 Ukraine invasion. Certainly, Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan was interpreted as a green-light signal by Putin.

Where is Charlie Sykes’ in-depth analysis of U.S. foreign policy? If he’s written one, I missed it, but what we get from him instead is a parroting of MSNBC talking points about Trump “channeling Kremlin propaganda,” as if it were impossible to criticize U.S. policy without being a pro-Putin stooge. But the real bottom line is this: Sykes voted for Biden, and is defending Biden’s policy in toto — to criticize Biden is tantamount to treason, according to Sykes’ brand of True Conservative™ principles.

Beyond the matter of Ukraine and Russia, aside from any consideration of policy, foreign or domestic, there remains the disturbing question: What the hell happened to Charlie Sykes?

Because of my long-term interest in education (being a Christian conservative homeschooling dad back in the 1990s), I was mainly familiar with Sykes because of his excellent 1995 book, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add, which was largely an attack on the then-trendy “outcomes based education” (OBE) agenda. At that time, there was no difference between Sykes and, say, Michelle Malkin in terms of the basic issues facing America. He was a staunch conservative and, most importantly, was the No. 1 local talk-radio host in Wisconsin.

How much do you know about the business of talk radio? Well, during the 30-year reign of Rush Limbaugh as the king of the genre, there were a comparative handful of hosts — among them Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Michael Savage — who were successful in national syndication. But most conservative talk-radio hosts were strictly local phenomena, and Charlie Sykes was one of these. Based at Milwaukee’s WTMJ, he was the morning host beloved by Wisconsin conservatives. He had begun his career as a print journalist, working his way up to editor of Milwaukee Magazine by the mid-1980s before subsequently getting into talk radio. His two-decade tenure as one of the most influential figures in Wisconsin conservative politics arguably reached its pinnacle in 2011, during the showdown over the state budget between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s powerful public-employee unions. Charlie Sykes was the loudest voice on the right during that protest carnival that attracted nationwide attention, but then things started going downhill. Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, carrying Wisconsin by a seven-point margin, 53%-46%, despite the fact that GOP candidate Mitt Romney had picked Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate.

Meanwhile, the commercial viability of local talk radio was beginning a slow but inexorable decline, as online streaming services became more popular. Listening to local radio during the daily commute was a habit for many people, but younger audiences were downloading playlists to Spotify, and never got the car-radio habit. Of course, being a local conservative talk-radio host was always a less lucrative career than many listeners may have imagines. You heard your local host in the morning, then Rush Limbaugh came on at noon — both of them on the same station — and you might have imagined that your local host was making the same kind of money as Rush, but au contraire! One year at CPAC, I found myself sitting outside a pub with a crowd that included a talk radio host who had gotten some nationwide attention, but was then working at a local station in the South and, wow, how bitter he was! Limbaugh had signed a $50,000-million-a-year contract and was carrying on as usual, meanwhile this local talk-radio guy was scrapping for every dollar, fighting against advertiser boycotts, etc. He felt like he was getting screwed over, trying to make a living in a dying business.

We can imagine that things weren’t much better for Charlie Sykes at WTMJ during that era, circa 2013-2015, as conservative talk radio was beginning its slow, steady descent into oblivion. Politically, however, there was reason for conservatives in Wisconsin to be optimistic. Walker defeated a recall effort in 2012 and, in 2014, was reelected to a second term by a comfortable 52%-47% margin. Walker was highly touted as a 2016 presidential candidate. Meanwhile, Republicans expanded their majority in the Wisconsin legislature and, in Washington, Paul Ryan was emerging as a congressional leader, his national profile boosted by his campaign as Romney’s running mate. In fall 2015, when House Speaker John Boehner stepped aside, Ryan became the Speaker, and it looked like a great time to be a conservative from Wisconsin. But in June 2015, Trump had taken that ride down the escalator, and one of the first casualties of Trump’s rise was the presidential candidacy of Scott Walker. After two lackluster debate performances, Walker dropped out of the primary campaign, and called on other GOP candidates to follow his lead, to unite behind a single alternative to Trump. This effort failed.

And it was just around that time, in the fall of 2015, that Charlie Sykes shoved all-in on #NeverTrump. Like most of his comrades in that project, Sykes has ended up a de facto liberal Democrat. Trump Derangement Syndrome is incurable like that: Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

Ace of Spades long ago took to mocking Sykes as “Charlie Three Wives,” and when you become an object of Ace’s ridicule, your credibility as a conservative is pretty much over. Like most of the #NeverTrump crowd, Sykes cannot accept responsibility for his own choices — it’s Trump’s fault he committed career suicide, you see. Now 68, Sykes is apparently determined to spend his dotage in the role of Grandpa Simpson.

It didn’t have to be this way. All of these people who let themselves be sucked into the vortex of Trump Derangement Syndrome could have resisted that temptation. There is plenty of viable political terrain between being a True Believer in the Cult of Personality, on the one hand, and being Charlie Sykes, on the other. Byron York, for example, has maintained both his sanity and his integrity during the past several years when many of his former colleagues went over the deep end with the #NeverTrump crowd. But if you listen to Charlie Sykes (or David French, or Bill Kristol, or Rick Wilson) they never stop insisting that their core principles as True Conservatives™ required them to die on that particular hill, and they are such absolute fanatics as to make the Khmer Rouge seem moderate by comparison. Is there a lesson here, a “moral to the story,” so to speak? I dunno. Politics is a team sport, and some of these guys seem to be like superstar NFL players who sign a big contract and then start acting like divas (e.g., Antonio Brown). They think they can throw a tantrum and walk off the field in the middle of a game, without damaging their own prospects. I’m reminded of an old Persian proverb, “The dogs may bark, but the caravan keeps rolling.”

It’s a shame what happened to Charlie. But it’s his own fault.

Category: Donald Trump, Republicans, Russia, Ukraine

‘Stockholm Syndrome’? SVB, BLM and the Toxic Plague of Liberal White Guilt

Posted on | March 18, 2023 | 2 Comments

Bert the Samoan Lawyer sent this story to me with the dry remark, “Basically, this means the taxpayers are picking up the tab for BLM”:

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank New York (SBNY) donated a combined sum of $71.5 million to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, according to a new database released by the Claremont Institute.
SVB forked over a whopping $70,650,000 to BLM while, while SBNY gave $850,000 according to the records gathered by the conservative think tank.
Claremont’s database cited several “social impact reports” that recorded the transactions and highlighted SVB’s pledge from early last year, to give $5 billion to companies aiming to assist with “the transition to a sustainable, low carbon, net zero emissions economy.”
They were criticized following their collapse, for taking their eye off the ball by prioritizing eco-conscious environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing over sound investment principles, while also focusing on diversity and social justice in hiring over strict merit.
One of SVB’s LinkedIn posts in 2022 celebrated the “diversity” hire of Jay Ersapah as the head of Financial Risk and Model Risk Management, highlighting how she helped “establish and is the lead for the LGBTQ+ network at Silicon Valley Bank; where she works closely with Stonewall to create and promote a culture where all can bring their authentic selves to work.”
That same year, Ersapah hosted an “exclusive fireside chat with Suki Sandhu, the author of “How To Get Your Act Together: A Judgement-Free Guide to Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men.” The topics discussed included “How to get started with LGBTQ+ inclusion” and “Global best practice in LGBTQ+ inclusion — what great looks like.”
Other big-name corporations listed in the BLM donor database included: CitiGroup and Facebook, which each gave over $1 billion, Amazon (almost $170 million), Apple ($100 million), and American Express ($50 million), among dozens of others.

Let us pause briefly to scrutinize the “intersectional” logic behind SVB’s hiring of a risk management executive who hit all the “diversity” quota marks — brown, female, and gay. A three-fer!

While her resume shows extensive financial-sector experience, that wasn’t why Jay Ersapah got hired at SVB, as their publicity surrounding her hiring focused almost entirely on her identity-politics qualifications “to create and promote a culture” for “LGBTQ+ inclusion” — as if this is why banks exist? When did the banking industry become obsessed with “inclusion” and why? The simple answer is, White Guilt, which happens to the be the title of an excellent book by Shelby Steele.

“Inclusion” is about cashing in on White Guilt. Jay Ersapah cashed in, and then brought in Suki Sandhu, a brown gay man from England, to have a “fireside chat” to preach the Gospel of Inclusion to the (presumed-to-be-defective) “Straight White Men” working at SVB. The bank probably paid Sandhu a lucrative fee, and there’s an international syndicate of these “diversity” specialists who get paid to promote this nonsense. They have no other skills, no other service to vend, beyond their status as experts in diversity and inclusion, and Corporate America pays out untold millions in consulting fees and salaries for such people.

Why is this happening? On the one hand, I’m prone to suspect that this is a completely cynical gesture on the part of bigtime financiers, who understand perfectly well the shakedown aspect of “diversity” — you don’t want to get sued for discrimination, and the price you pay for protection against such claims is to engage in a lot of virtue-signalling, which takes the form of quota hiring, publicity campaigns with lots of rainbow-flag themes, and of course, giving money to support whatever trendy “social justice” cause is The Current Thing.

From such a cynical perspective, it doesn’t even matter whether an outfit like Black Lives Matter is legitimate. BLM turned out to be a fraudulent racket, but so what? From the perspective of a banking executive trying to purchase protection against claims of racial discrimination, it’s the symbolic value of the contribution that really matters.

Explaining the “inclusion” craze in Corporate America as a function of cynicism is, to me, much preferable to considering the alternative, i.e., that CEOs actually believe all this crap. How could it be that an executive makes it through a top university MBA program, claws his way up the company ladder, lands himself a seven-figure gig as the Big Cheese and then, having reached the summit of success, surrenders to a psychopathology of self-hatred? Because let’s be honest about what White Guilt really is — an irrational impulse, symptomatic of mental illness.

Debutante-turned-terrorist Patty Hearst

“Stockholm Syndrome” was the popular diagnosis in the case of the young heiress Patty Hearst who, after being kidnapped and held for ransom by a radical ultra-Maoist cult calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, began to identify with her captors and joined their campaign of “revolutionary” violence. That could be understood as a metaphor for what has happened to “woke” corporations.

For the past 10 or 15 years, companies have been more or less compelled to signify their allegiance to various “progressive” causes for fear of being bombarded with online harassment campaigns. Some have traced this back to the campaign of terroristic intimidation against contributors to the Prop 8 campaign in California in 2008. Perhaps as a result of such intimidation, which threatens the targets with destruction of their careers and livelihoods, business leaders became so accustomed to repeating the mantras of “social justice” that they actually internalized this preposterous radical belief system, in much the same way Patty Heart eventually internalized the SLA’s absurd slogan: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”

In this interpretation of why companies “get woke and go broke,” they are helpless victims of a psyops campaign, coercively brainwashed to adopt the worldview of their enemies until they actually believe the rainbow-flag nonsense they promote in their publicity. As I say, I’d prefer to think otherwise; it makes me uncomfortable to think anyone could really believe that bullshit. Much better to suppose that corporate executives are just cynically repeating these slogans for the sake of making a buck.

Either way, however, there’s no danger that I could be deceived by their sloganeering. My survival depends upon keeping a firm grip on my own sanity amid this swirling carnival of 21st-century madness.

Bert the Samoan Lawyer knows this as well as anybody. He first met me in the aftermath of my disastrous 1979 experiment with psilocybin mushroom tea and Bolivian flake cocaine. Having descended into the psychotic vortex of drug-induced lunacy and managed somehow to escape, I’ve since dedicated myself to a life of respectable bourgeois stability. Given my early experience of pure Gonzo insanity, I consider that being normal is my greatest achievement. So there is no danger of my succumbing to the masochistic neurosis of White Guilt, or the clearly abnormal behavior of corporate executives promoting bizarre causes like Drag Queen Story Hour. Not enough psilocybin on the planet to make me fall for delusions like that. Just going to sit here sanely drinking my coffee and reminding you: Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Category: Gays, Progressivism

What Did China Get for Its Money?

Posted on | March 18, 2023 | 1 Comment

The family of “the big guy” collected over a million dollars:

President Biden’s daughter-in-law Hallie is the mysterious “new” Biden family member who got paid Chinese cash in 2017, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer revealed exclusively to The Post Thursday.
Comer said the payments to first son Hunter Biden’s sister-in-law-turned-former lover were revealed in subpoenaed bank records.
The records show Hallie Biden received $35,000 over two transfers in 2017 from Biden family associate Rob Walker, who got $3 million on March 1, 2017, from State Energy HK Limited, a firm affiliated with CEFC China Energy.
President Biden, who allegedly was the “big guy” mentioned in communications about the same Chinese venture, dined at Hallie Biden’s residence last Friday during his regular weekend trip home to Delaware. It’s unclear if they discussed the looming bombshell, which Comer (R-Ky.) publicly teased Monday night on Fox News’ “Hannity.”
One transfer to Hallie from Robinson Walker LLC was for $25,000 on March 20, 2017, Comer’s staff wrote in a Thursday morning memo to committee members. Another $10,000 was transferred on Feb. 13 — raising “many questions” according to a committee aide because it came shortly before, rather than after, the $3 million haul.
The information creates an unexpected new avenue for investigation — and the memo notes the bank records don’t include the first names of all Biden family recipients, meaning there may be others involved, in addition to Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden.
Hallie Biden is the widow of Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, and the mother of two of the president’s grandchildren, Natalie and Robert Hunter. She dated the president’s other son, Hunter, from around 2016 to 2019, a timeframe that included the Chinese dealings.
“Democrats described our subpoena as providing nothing more than records for Papa John’s and Starbucks, but they failed to mention the records we’ve received documenting the Biden family’s business schemes,” Comer told The Post, referring to committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin’s disclosure of the subpoenas this week.

What did the Chinese expect in return for this money? That’s the big puzzle. The payment to the Biden family came at a time when Democrats had lost the White House, and one wonders how the Chinese clients expected the family of the former vice president to exercise influence in their favor. Certainly the only “business” involved was influence peddling — what relevant expertise did Hunter Biden offer, other than being Joe Biden’s son? Democrats (and their media allies) seem to believe that the use of cutouts and middlemen to launder these payments from the Chinese is sufficient defense against accusations that Joe Biden himself is guilty of corruption. No sensible person buys this excuse, but still what intrigues me is the question of how the Chinese purchasers of Biden’s influence expected to be repaid for their “investment.”

If we are free to engage in speculation, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Joe getting his family members paid by the Chinese after he left the vice-presidency was in fact the fulfillment of some secret agreement made while he was still vice president. That is to say, Biden did the Chinese favors during the Obama administration, with the agreement that he’d get paid after he left office. This is just wild speculation, of course, but there must be some explanation for this deal, which on the surface doesn’t make much sense from an influence-buying point of view. Maybe the explanation is simply that the Chinese clients didn’t understand U.S. politics well enough to realize that “former vice president” isn’t a very influential position in America.