Tuesday, January 30, 2024

News of the World

    The publication asserts that the African corps will bolster Russia's military presence through a network of bases under the control of the Russian Ministry of Defence, as part of Moscow's efforts to revive its influence amid a rapid decline in Western influence.

    "It would also allow the Kremlin to consolidate control of Wagner’s business network in Africa, including potentially lucrative mining interests, following the death last year of the group’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin," the publication writes.

    Here in Boston, we know just how corrupt the FBI can be.

    For instance, framing innocent men for murders they did not commit, or providing explosives for gangsters to use to kill reporters.

    Or taking payoffs to set up informants to be rubbed out by serial-killing cocaine dealers, and then after committing such crimes being promoted to director of the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia….

    I could go on and on about the Boston FBI office. But you get the picture.

    Still, as bad and as overrated as the G-men have always been, they’re worse now.

And how are they worse? 

    “The FBI,” the Judiciary committee reports, “has lost its way in a toxic culture of dysfunction unable to find the courage to remedy recruitment and selection processes that have become self-destructive.”

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Claudine Gay could not be reached for comment.

    “The FBI does not appear to be getting experienced, ‘mature’ candidates, such as the former cop, former military person, the professional career person, the lawyer, accountant or engineer.”

    Sound familiar? The U.S. Army has the same problem. The brass can’t seem to recruit anybody who can do a push-up. Who in their right mind wants to risk their life by joining an organization run by entitled, shiftless incompetents who despise them?

    “The FBI is now a joke among other law enforcement agencies because of its apparent investigative failures, political targeting of certain individuals/groups, and woke adoption… The FBI is considering hiring candidates not accepted by other law enforcement agencies.”

    The G-men have Diversity Recruitment Events — “straight white males may not attend.”

    In other words, there’s no room for a modern-day Inspector Lew Erskine. But Dylan Mulvaney or Jussie Smollett — come on down!

    The FBI denies that they’re having problems recruiting qualified people. But then, the G-men lie about almost everything, as you may have noticed. It’s part of their “sources and methods.”

The article goes on to relate information revealed by an anonymous FBI informant about how they are being forced--not by market forces but by directions from above--to recruit and keep diversity hires that are, variously, obese, mentally unstable, illiterate, lacking work ethics, and more. Read the whole thing.
  • Speaking of corruption in the FBI: "FBI Tied January 6 Pipe Bomber To Metro Card Of Ex-Gov Official, But Blocked Interview Of Him, Former Agent Says"--The Daily Wire. Using security footage of the man planting the pipe bombs, they were able to track the man to the DC metro and link him to a metro card. The card allowed them to identify where the man got off the train, where they again used surveillance footage to track the man to where he got into a car. "Both the car and the fare card were in the name of the same person — a retired Air Force chief master sergeant who was now working as a contractor with a security clearance, they said." But the team was not permitted to question the former chief master sergeant and, later, were reassigned to track down protestors that had attended the J6 rally. Reading between the lines, the pipe bomber must have been yet another government agent provocateur
  • And more FBI news: "Charles McGonigal sends top FBI bosses into a frenzy as they're now trawling through 22 years of high-level investigations for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spy"--Daily Mail. McGonigal become the supervisory special agent in the counter-espionage section at FBI headquarters in Washington in 2002, was promoted to field supervisor of a counter-espionage squad at the Washington field office four years later, then moved to running the bureau's cyber counter-intelligence coordination section before finishing his career as chief of the New York office's counter-intelligence division, before retiring in September 2018. But unsatisfied with the $200,000 per year salary he was earning at retirement and the $850,000 he was earning after retirement, he turned to more lucrative, but illegal work, including "concealing a $225,000 bribe from an unnamed former Albanian spy while he was working for the FBI" to arrange a meeting with Nikki Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and later "digging dirt for notorious [Russian] oligarch Oleg Deripaska, sanctioned over his country's occupation of Crimea."
    His downfall may have been an affair, however. The article relates:

    However the other woman once in his life, ex-mistress Allison Guerriero, wants him to receive another five years on top, telling DailyMail.com exclusively: 'What the government is asking for is not nearly sufficient for the American people to receive justice.'

    Guerriero, a former vice president of US operations for Israeli security firm Mifram, previously told DailyMail.com after the New York sentencing: 'I cannot wipe the smile off my face knowing that he is going to be incarcerated.'

    The 50-year-old former mistress, who was with McGonigal for 18 months before ending their relationship in December 2018, may have sparked the investigation into the former FBI chief.

    She discovered a bag containing $80,000 in rolled up bills at the apartment they were sharing in Brooklyn – and alerted authorities some months after the split.

    At the time they were together, McGonigal's wife Pamela was living with their children at the family home in exclusive Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington DC. The spook went back to his wife after his affair ended.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

    The IDF has hunted down and killed its own with the same zeal it has reserved for letting the blood of Gaza’s civilians. A preliminary IDF Report about those Israeli “hostages killed by soldiers, as they waved a white flag, and yelled for help in Hebrew,” revealed the following: “IDF soldiers had spotted a building two days prior with the inscription ‘SOS’ and ‘Help! Three hostages,’ inscribed on a wall.” (Ha’aretz, Sat., 16.12.023) On encounter, the three had indeed waved a white flag, and had stripped down to their skinny torsos. Still, the IDF opened-fire on them. The hostages were hunted down. They died running from the Jewish State’s soldiers.

    The IDF’s appetite for destruction is worse than unwholesome. The near-gleeful chase and murder of hostages by IDF soldiers exists on a continuum of depravity. Extrapolate one can from this—the IDF’s killing of surrendered, manifestly unarmed men—to the IDF’s Rules of Engagement with Gaza’s civilians, evident in the orgiastic bloodletting and heartless ethnic cleansing winding to a close (as there are no more ethnic Gazans to uproot). Killing their own with such unexamined ease says something about this army’s Rules of Engagement with its prey, Gaza’s civilians.

And:

Americans are hardly deficient in their solidarity for the Jewish State and for Jews, in general. American society is philosemitic, even Zionist. If anything, it is not antisemitism that plagues American institutions, but systemic anti-whiteness. Jews, generally, offer daggers if one dares to suggest that gifted Caucasian American men are being ejected from all echelons of society.

    China’s population fell by two million in 2023, marking the second straight year of decline. Statistics suggest that China’s total fertility rate, which has steadily declined from 1.5 births per woman in the late 1990s to 1.15 in 2021, is now approaching 1.0—far below the replacement level of 2.1 that would maintain current population levels.  Naturally, China’s trajectory is far from unique. It is following the broad pattern seen throughout East Asia, with birth rates declining to the lowest in the world, and national populations poised to age rapidly in the coming decades. Such trends point to major economic, social, and political challenges ahead for both China and the region—including increasingly unsustainable pension systems, surging eldercare needs, and rapidly aging workforces.

    Perhaps unappreciated is the extent to which current official population projections actually underestimate the extent of these challenges, precisely because they bake in shaky statistical assumptions that fertility rates will “rebound” in coming decades. China’s own long-term plans include similar assumptions. The 2016-2030 population development plan issued by the State Council assumes that China’s fertility rates will rise from 1.5-1.6 (in 2015) to around 1.8 by 2020 and 2030. Wenzhou’s corresponding municipal plan issued in 2022 assume that the total fertility rate will rise back to around 1.35 by 2035.

    Absolutely nothing like these trends have been observed anywhere in East Asia over the past decades. Indeed, fertility rates are going in exactly the opposite direction. Fertility rates in Taiwan and South Korea, which hovered in the 1.1-2 zone in the early years of the 21st century, have steadily declined over the past two decades—reaching 0.87 in Taiwan (for 2022) and 0.72 for South Korea (in 2023). Even Japan, which had registered total fertility rates between 1.3 and 1.4 since the late 1990s, is now in the seventh year of a steady decline, reaching 1.26 in 2022.
    JAXA [Japan's space agency] successfully established communication with the probe on Sunday night, and the craft has resumed its mission.

    After a last-minute engine failure caused the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, to make a rougher-than-planned landing, JAXA used battery power to gather as much data as possible about the touchdown and the probe's surroundings. 

    The craft was then turned off to wait the sun to rise higher in the lunar sky in late January.

    With power, SLIM has continued work to analyze the composition of olivine rocks on the lunar surface with its multi-band spectral camera, seeking clues about the Moon's origin and evolution, the agency said.

    Earlier observations suggest that the moon may have formed when the Earth hit another planet.

    A black-and-white photo posted by JAXA on social media showed the rocky lunar surface, including a rock the agency said it had named 'Toy Poodle' after seeing it in initial images. The probe is analyzing six rocks, all of which have been given the names of dog breeds.

The article also notes that "SLIM carried two autonomous probes, which were released just before touchdown, recording the landing, surroundings and other lunar data."

Warming of the global climate system over the past half-century has averaged 43 percent less than that produced by computerized climate models used to promote changes in energy policy. In the United States during summer, the observed warming is much weaker than that produced by all 36 climate models surveyed here. While the cause of this relatively benign warming could theoretically be entirely due to humanity’s production of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, this claim cannot be demonstrated through science. At least some of the measured warming could be natural. Contrary to media reports and environmental organizations’ press releases, global warming offers no justification for carbon-based regulation.

1 comment:

Weekend Reading

 First up, although I'm several days late on this, Jon Low posted a new Defensive Pistolcraft newsletter on 12/15/2024 . He includes thi...