The University of Pennsylvania is an elite private school, where the annual cost of attendance is $81,340 including room and board. This Ivy League institution paid Joe Biden nearly $1 million between the time he left office as vice president in 2017 and the time he announced his presidential campaign in 2019. So far as is known, Biden made a grand total of nine appearances on the Penn campus in exchange for this lucrative remuneration, and also got a free university-provided office in D.C. as part of the “Penn Biden Center” deal, which is now under scrutiny because classified documents were found at the D.C. office. But there’s more to the story, as Gabrielle Etzel reports at Campus Reform:
UPenn announced the creation of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in February 2017, and officially opened its Washington DC center in February 2018.
Biden was named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at UPenn in 2017. Prior to his bid for the Presidency, the DC think tank was designed with an office suite dedicated to Biden’s use while in the capital city.
UPenn paid Biden nearly $1 million for his contract between 2017 and 2019, according to the New York Post. Biden appeared on UPenn’s campus a total of nine times prior to suspending his professorship when he announced his presidential candidacy in April 2019.
At the inauguration of the Penn Biden Center, former president of UPenn Amy Gutmann stated, “The unmatched personal connections Joe Biden has with world leaders is equally important to our students, our faculty, policymakers, and the work of this new Center…in furthering [the] diplomacy and global engagement that is needed to advance the world order.”
Investigative reporting from The Washington Free Beacon reveals that, between 2017 and 2019, UPenn received $61 million in gifts and contracts from China. By comparison, UPenn received $19 million from Chinese investments between 2014 and 2017.
Following this report, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) filed an official complaint with the US Attorney’s Office alleging that UPenn and the Penn Biden Center may be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Can anyone explain the Chinese Communist government’s sudden increase in generosity toward Penn once the university made its deal with Biden? As Guttman said, the selling point for the deal was Biden’s “unmatched personal connections . . . with world leaders,” and maybe what she meant was, “We’re going to get lots of Chinese payola.”
We can perhaps only speculate about Beijing’s motives, but certainly there is more reason to suspect Biden was beholden to China than there ever was to suspect Trump of being beholden to Russia.
Georgia ain’t Oregon and Atlanta ain’t Portland, OK? So if the unbathed terrorist mobs of Antifa want heroic martyrdom, Atlanta’s the place to be, because cops down in Georgia shoot to kill:
Seven militants have been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism following a deadly shootout with law enforcement at their “autonomous zone” in a wooded area south of Atlanta. They are all from out of state.
(Because nobody from Georgia would try this bullshit.)
On Wednesday morning, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies conducted a raid on the so-called autonomous zone at the site of the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Since June 2021, Antifa and other far-left extremists from across the US have occupied the area to prevent the construction of what they call a “cop city.” The GBI says a Georgia State Patrol trooper was shot and severely injured during Wednesday’s raid by a man camped in the area. Officers returned fire and killed the gunman, who allegedly used a pistol.
(Folks down in Georgia call that “justice.”)
Georgia’s Department of Public Safety will not name the injured patrol trooper, saying it would “compromise security against criminal or terroristic acts due to retaliation,” but told local media he was in the ICU after having emergency surgery. The deceased gunman was named on Thursday by the GBI as 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Teran. He used the alias “Tort” and “Tortuguita.”
“Manuel used they/it pronouns…please make sure we are remembering them properly and respectfully,” wrote the Atlanta Community Press Collective in their statement revealing the shooter’s identity.
(“The only good Commie,” etc.)
Following the shooting, the GBI and its law enforcement partners continued to clear the autonomous zone and several arrests were made of suspects—all of whom are from out of state. The GBI say they confiscated a cache of weapons that include mortar-style fireworks and edged weapons. Matthew Ernest Macar, 30, Spencer Bernard Liberto, 29, and Sarah Wasilewski, 35, all from Pittsburgh, are each facing charges of domestic terrorism and aggravated assault upon a public safety officer.
A fourth suspect who would not identify himself in jail was later identified as 20-year-old Geoffrey D. Parson, of Baltimore.
Additionally, Timothy A. Murphy, 25, of Rockport, Maine, Christopher Reynolds, 31, of Dayton, Ohio, and Teresa Yue Shen, 31, of Brooklyn, New York, were charged with domestic terrorism.
TPM can report that several of the suspects come from well-to-do backgrounds. Shen is an alumna of the Manhattan liberal arts institution Barnard College. Macar graduated with a master’s degree in international affairs from Penn State University in 2016.
It’s unfortunate that not all of them died in Wednesday’s gun battle, but it seems like these terrorists are only getting started with the violence.
Police in Atlanta are on “high alert” following a call to murder cops put out by defenders of the “Atlanta Forest,” an autonomous zone occupation south of the city. They want revenge for their gunman comrade who died carrying out a shooting. #Antifahttps://t.co/PoXLJMtp3K
Let me tell you something: If these out-of-town hippies think they’re going to be safe on the streets of Atlanta on a Friday night . . .
Well, the cops will be the least of their problems. Crime in Atlanta has spun out of control the past couple of years. The local gang-bangers might not be too kind to these affluent “save the forest” kids.
By the way, don’t believe anything you read on the Internet about this situation. It seems that the Antifa lunatics and their “progressive” friends have orchestrated a propaganda campaign so that everything on Wikipedia about the site of this proposed police-training facility has been written in the past few months by supporters of the “autonomous zone.”
Beginning around 1920, the Atlanta Prison Farm used inmate labor to produce food for those incarcerated at the city’s federal penitentiary. At some point in the 1960s, the city of Atlanta acquired the property, and parts of it were used for a middle school campus. The remaining property is about 350 acres, including dilapidated buildings from the old prison farm, and the nonprofit the Atlanta Police Foundation reached an agreement with the city to develop about a quarter of the site — 85 acres — as a modern police training facility. But OMG! What insane propaganda has been produced to “Save the Atlanta Forest,” as if this were some pristine nature preserve, an untouched slice of wilderness!
You can read (at CNN, the pro-Antifa network) how the site is located “less than half a mile away from a tributary of the South River, which is one of America’s most endangered, according to nonprofit conservation group American Rivers. That’s a result of decades of neglect and pollution the area, which is overwhelmingly Black, has endured, local advocates say.” Anyone can look at a map and see that there are all kinds of development in the area — the nearby industrial park, a truck stop next to I-285, etc. — so the idea that the police training facility would do environmental damage to this allegedly vital “tributary” (Intrenchment Creek) is nonsense. And, as I say, only a quarter of the existing site will be used for the training facility, leaving more than 200 acres of parkland.
Being a native of Atlanta, let me tell you something about Georgia, in case you’re not familiar with the area. It’s hot and humid, which means that all manner of plant life grows with astonishing rapidity there. The house where I grew up in Douglas County had a chain-link fence around the backyard, and every summer one of my chores was to go out and cut the honeysuckle vines off that fence. If you didn’t cut those vines off — and it was tedious work, trust me — the whole fence would be covered in vines. The ditch down by the road? Oh, the hours spent with a slingblade cuttting back the brush and briars that sprang up relentlessly there! And the pine forest up the hill across the road? Oh, just 40 or 50 years earlier, that had all been farmland, until the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Stop farming your property for just a few years, and next thing you know, what used to be a pasture becomes a tangled forest — and that, my friends, is what happened to the old Atlanta Prison Farm.
The overgrown Atlanta Prison Farm
Reckon all those out-of-town hippies camping out in what they’ve dubbed “The Atlanta Forest” never handled a slingblade in their whole lives, and they sure as hell don’t realize that this “forest” only dates back to the 1960s or so, when the inmates stopped cultivating the property. Now it’s a tangled mess of briars and vines and oaks and pines and, if you’re a damned tree-hugging fool from Pittsburgh or someplace, maybe it seems like a South American rain forest or something, but it’s just what happens to any property in Georgia that’s gone untended for a while.
Converting this property into a police training facility seems like a worthwhile use of the otherwise neglected site, but what do a bunch of anarchist scum care about property and its worthwhile uses?
Breaking: Multiple violent suspects have been arrested & charged with domestic terrorism following the deadly shooting involving their comrade at the #Antifa-linked #Atlanta autonomous zone. They're all from out of state.
So, let us wish Antifa luck with their plans for a “Night of Rage” in Atlanta. Maybe the cops will kill a few more, then more out-of-town anarchists will show up to protest about that, and so on and so forth, until Georgia cops finally finish killing every last one of them.
Just hope the cops have plenty of ammunition . . .
As Dana Pico remarks, Lurch said the quiet part out loud — the idea that the billionaires, politicians, “experts” and corporate executive at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos are “a select group.” By whom were they “selected”? There is nothing remotely democratic about the world’s wealthiest people and their political henchmen forming a cabal to impose their plans for “saving the planet” on the rest of us:
Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry lauded fellow attendees at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, for trying to save the planet.
Kerry characterized efforts to combat climate change and save the planet as “almost extraterrestrial” given their scope in his remarks earlier Tuesday. He also downplayed criticism that has been levied against such climate activism, noting that “most people” believe he and the other WEF participants are just “crazy” tree huggers.
“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — a select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” Kerry remarked. “I mean, it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet.’”
“If you say that to most people, most people think you’re just a crazy tree-hugging, lefty, liberal, you know, do-gooder or whatever and there’s no relationship,” he added. “But really, that’s where we are.”
Kerry — who delivered the speech during a WEF session titled “Philanthropy: A Catalyst for Protecting Our Planet” — added that “allegedly wise adult human beings” still want to ignore the science, mathematics and physics of climate change. He also said half the species on Earth have already been killed, an apparent reference to a 2020 study predicting that global warming would eliminate half of the planet’s animal and plant species by 2070.
He also said the current growth trajectory of the world is unsustainable and implored world leaders to double down on climate commitments and policies, saying not nearly enough has been done to stave off the worst of climate change.
“If you look at the way we live, the incredible sort of destructive process of growth the way we interpret it — not as enlightened growth, but as a sort of robber baron growth — growth driven by a lot of different things,” he said. “We had 18 separate $1 billion events in the United States last year. And you look at Pakistan with 30 million people, in one single event, displaced and their lives were affected. An extraordinary upheaval.”
“We have to find a way to get really serious about bringing the corporate world on board around the world,” he continued.
What is this “extraordinary upheaval” in Pakistan? I had to look it up: “From 14 June to October 2022, floods in Pakistan killed 1,739 people.” So, out of a population of 231 million, about 0.0008% were killed. This is not to minimize the “upheaval,” but as a statistical expression of risk, it’s about as deadly as Memorial Day weekend in Chicago. More importantly, one bad monsoon season — which is what this “upheaval” really was — doesn’t actually prove anything about “climate change,” nor does it justify the billionaire power-grab that Kerry was advocating at Davos.
“Give us more money and power,” says the guy who flew to Switzerland at taxpayer expense to blab about his “extraterrestrial” plans for the benefit of similarly egomaniacal big shots. To which I reply:
THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GRAPH WAS A LIE!
First highlighted in a 2001 report, Michael Mann’s infamous graph suggested that we were on the verge of a sudden and drastic increase in global temperature — an emergency, a crisis, an apocalypse — that quite obviously has not happened in the past 20 years, and isn’t going to happen in the next 20 years, either, because the “science” behind Mann’s graph was simply wrong. Yet the “hockey stick” (and the predictions of impending catastrophe it inspired) became an article of faith among the True Believers of the Cult of Climate Change. The fact that every specific prediction based on this misguided “science” has proven false? Never mind that. The climate doomsayers have learned to cherry-pick isolated incidents of bad weather — a blizzard here, a flood there, a drought over yonder — and hype them up as “evidence,” even if these various events show no discernible pattern to the “change” they’re supposed to prove.
If you’re not convinced to join their cult, the doomsayers will dismiss you as “anti-science,” no matter how scientific your objections may be.
No matter how many actual scientists debunk Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, doomsayers like Kerry will insist that the impending catastrophe is still just around the corner — 20 or 30 years away — not because there is any truly scientific reason to believe this, but because impending catastrophe is essential to their hustle, the trick of their three-card Monte game. So Pakistan has a bad monsoon season and Kerry turns this into his great “A-ha!” If this year’s monsoon season isn’t as severe, Kerry and the other doomsayers will look elsewhere for their “proof,” and will certainly find it, because there’s always someplace in the world having bad weather. But whether this is actually proof of anything doesn’t matter, because climate change has become a religion to these people, which means that facts and logic make no difference to their belief.
Oh, they’re “a select group of people,” all right — and the folks who died at Jonestown were “a select group of people,” too.
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is more than 300 miles from Chicago, and it’s almost a five-hour drive — if you’re doing the speed limit, that is. On the other hand, if you’re doing 110 mph in a late-model Dodge Charger, the trip won’t take nearly as long. Except, of course, if you get pulled over by the cops, which is what happened last year to Keyonis Langston:
A state trooper saw a vehicle traveling east on I-94 July 10 at mile marker 58 in Eau Claire County hitting a speed of 104 mph.
The trooper activated his emergency lights but the vehicle failed to stop. The driver of the vehicle then turned off the headlights in an attempt to elude officers.
The vehicle then increased its speed to near 135 mph, passing vehicles and semi trucks on both the right and left shoulders. The vehicle swerved between both lanes of traffic, almost crashing with other vehicles on multiple occasions.
The pursuit was then terminated.
A pursuit with this same vehicle was again initiated in Monroe County, where it was involved in a crash.
The vehicle eventually left I-94, turned down a dead end road and the driver left the vehicle.
After a brief foot chase, officers took the driver into custody and identified him as Langston.
If convicted, Langston could be sentenced to up to 18 months in prison.
The pursuit and subsequent capture of Langston was recorded on police dashcam and bodycam video, which was recently released:
Langston had neither a valid driver’s license nor insurance, but these were trivial matters in comparison to fleeing/eluding an officer, which is a Class I felony in Wisconsin. After his arrest, Langston became hysterical, shouting, “I’m not a criminal,” babbling about a girlfriend in Minneapolis that just broke up with him, while asserting that he actually did have a license and insurance, but “when it pops up, it says invalid,” and could he please call his mom? After seeing this, I became curious, because I suspected that this wasn’t Langston’s first time at the rodeo, if you get my drift. Like, a previously law-abiding citizen doesn’t just suddenly decide to lead police on a 100-mph chase.
You see that mug shot? Not from his Wisconsin arrest. It’s from Chicago, where in February 2022 — just five months before his arrest in Wisconsin — Keyonis was busted after he ran a stop sign and, in addition to that infraction, was also charged with (a) driving on a suspended license, (b) driving an uninsured vehicle, and (c) multiple counts of resisting arrest/obstructing an officer. Nor was that his first encounter with law enforcement. In 2018, when he was 21, Keyonis Langston was arrested in Joliet for “speeding 26 to 34 mph above the speed limit.”
All of these arrests were mere traffic violations, you may say, and we have no reason to believe that Keyonis was really a criminal. Maybe he was just an urban version of the Dukes of Hazzard:
Just good old boys,
Never meanin’ no harm.
Beats all you never saw,
Been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.
If it hadn’t been for that high-speed pursuit through Wisconsin, and the video being posted to one of my favorite “real police action” YouTube channels, I never would have heard of Keyonis, who was facing up to 18 months in prison for fleeing and eluding. But there won’t be a trial and he’ll never go to prison, because Keyonis was from Chicago, where he became a statistic this past Thanksgiving weekend:
Eight people have been killed and 25 others wounded in shootings so far over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. . . .
Thursday night, two men were killed in separate shootings just over an hour apart and about five miles from each other on the South Side. Keyonis Langston, 25, was in the 8000 block of South Vernon Avenue when someone shot him in the head just before 8 p.m., authorities said. About 9:20 p.m., Randle Roby, 28, was found fatally shot on a sidewalk in the 100 block of West 112th Street. He suffered a gunshot wound to the face and abdomen and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Beats all you ever saw . . .
Y’all drive safely. It’s dangerous out there on the road.
