“Testifying in front of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary and Related Agencies last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked why the Bureau has failed to turn over a key document that allegedly shows President Joe Biden taking bribes from a foreign actor during his time as vice president.
“I can’t speak to the specific document. We are committed to working collaboratively with both committees but we also have to balance sources and methods and ongoing investigations,” Wray said under questioning from Republican Senator Bill Hagerty. “I really can’t get into the specifics here.”…”
What?!? Sorry, but as we understand things, certain members of the House and Senate can view any documents the President is privy to provided it’s done in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility).
Here’s the juice: This is deliberate dissimulation, patent prevarication and manifest mendacity. In other words, Wray is lying through his teeth.
Which brings us to this video:
NEW: FBI agents Ashley Roberts and Kathleen Brown showed up at the childhood home of pro-life activist Elise Ketch. The agents asked to speak with Ketch, who is a member of @PAAUNOW.
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 17, 2023
Our vision of the FBI growing up was the men and women portrayed on the television show starring Efram Zimbalist, Jr., Phillip Abbott and William Reynolds:
Honest, hard-working, scrupulously impartial. In reality, the FBI is a federal bureaucracy rotten to core, composed of completely corrupt apparatchiks we’d frankly be tempted to spit on should they come to our door.
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim report detailing how FBI employees who spoke out against the “politicized rot” within the bureau were suspended or had their security clearances revoked.
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The entire, rotten organization needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up under strict supervision and greatly diminished powers.
Chinese researchers say an artificial intelligence machine was given temporary full control of a satellite in near-Earth orbit, in a landmark experiment to test the technology’s behaviour in space. For 24 hours the Qimingxing 1, a small Earth observation satellite, was directed by a ground-based AI, without any human order, assignment or intervention, according to a paper published in the journal Geomatics and Information Science of Wuhan University.
The research team, led by Wang Mi from the university’s State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, said the aim of the experiment was to see what the AI would do of its own accord. The scientists said the AI picked a few places on Earth and ordered the Qimingxing 1 to take a closer look. No explanation was given for why the technology may have selected the locations.
One targeted area was Patna, an ancient city by the Ganges River in northeast India, which is also home to the Bihar Regiment – the Indian Army unit that met China’s military in a deadly encounter in the Galwan Valley in the disputed border region in 2020. Osaka, one of Japan’s busiest ports which occasionally hosts US Navy vessels operating in the Pacific, also ranked highly in the AI’s list of interests.
“This approach breaks the existing rules in mission planning,” said Wang and his colleagues in their paper published on April 3.
Oh, Wuhan, haven’t you already given the world enough through scientific experiments that “break the existing rules”? Accidentally spilling the Andromeda Strain wasn’t enough, so now you have to go and try to invent SkyNet?
(By the way, it says something about our modern world that a few months into the Covid pandemic, the nuclear powers of India and China could have their militaries get into a border skirmish that killed anywhere from 35 to 43 Chinese troops and 20 Indian troops, and it was barely noticed or discussed on this side of the world.)
For those wondering about the sourcing, the South China Morning Post is technically an independent newspaper in Hong Kong, but one with a well-established, non-antagonistic relationship with the Chinese government. The newspaper has been described as “on the leading edge of China’s efforts to project soft power abroad” by the New York Times, and The Atlantic reported that “concerns have been raised over the newspaper’s ethics, and its willingness to cooperate with Beijing.” Rose Lüqiu Luwei, a professor of journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University, told the publication Quartz that “the top management is already indirectly controlled” by the Chinese government. In other words, if you see news in the SCMP, it is very likely that the Chinese Communist Party wants you to see that news.
But satellite control isn’t the only area where Chinese-sponsored and -controlled institutions are racing ahead.
A recent Harvard University symposium concluded that China is setting itself up to be a kind of global arms dealer in the race to apply AI to government surveillance and control — the best friend of every autocratic regime on the planet…Basically, if an AI program has a potential military or national-security application, the Chinese government wants to use it.
…But hey, I’m sure the Chinese state-sponsored research and experiments in the military applications of artificial intelligence are a lot more careful.”
Nothing to worry about here, folks…
…other than the fact our Commander-in-Chief, the same clown who let a ChiCom spy balloon transit the country gathering intelligence on some of the nation’s most secretive sites, is emasculating our Military, crippling our economy and dividing our citizenry at the same time he’s undeniably on the payroll of our greatest foreign foe.
Speaking of 46*, the Editors at NRO accurately assess the true nature of…
“On May 21, 2014, then–Vice President Joe Biden, in his role as Obama administration point-man for American policy with respect to several countries, including Romania, delivered a speech in Bucharest, admonishing the prime minister and other Romanian officials that “corruption is a cancer.” He warned that allowing public corruption to fester “can represent a clear and present danger not only to a nation’s economy, but to its very national security.”
Investigations currently being pressed by House Republicans raise worrisome indications that Biden may have failed to heed his own advice.
That is the upshot of a 36-page interim report issued by the House Oversight Committee led by Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.). Thanks to Biden administration stonewalling, the committee’s probe is still at an early stage. In the president’s first two years, for example, Treasury Department practices were altered to deny the GOP minority access to over 150 Suspicious Activity Reports filed by banks in connection with Biden family transactions. Until Republicans took control of the House and its subpoena power in January, House GOP efforts stalled, with investigators left to rely on the yeoman’s work of Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), relying on information derived from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and whistleblowers.
Still, as the interim report details, after a perusal of just a fraction of the relevant data, his family members and their associates have hauled in over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies since Biden’s days as Obama administration vice president. These include Gabriel Popoviciu, a businessman convicted of bribery in Romania and relatedly investigated by British authorities. He poured over $1 million into Biden family accounts even as the then–vice president lectured Bucharest about corruption.
The Romanian payments to the Bidens fit a disturbing pattern replicated in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere. The source of the funds was a corrupt foreigner, in some cases likely a tool of a foreign state. Vast sums of money were first transferred from a company controlled by the source to a corporate shell controlled by a Biden crony, such as James Gilliar or, in the Romanian transactions, Robinson Walker. Over time, and after taking a cut, the crony would transfer funds to accounts controlled by Biden family members.
Often, those family members were the now-president’s famously erratic son Hunter and Joe’s brother, Jim, a consultant-of-all-trades. House investigators have identified as many as nine Bidens on the receiving end of money transfers, including minor children and such figures as Hallie Biden (a school counselor, who is the widow of the president’s late son Beau and was later the paramour of Hunter), who can have performed no conceivable services in exchange for these payments. Given the pattern of how public corruption works around the globe, the people making the payments must have expected that they were investing in official favor.
That is the most alarming fact in the pattern. It is easy to see large sums of foreign-source money coming the Bidens’ way. The bank records don’t lie. What’s not apparent is any legitimate value received in exchange. There are no obvious assets, commodities, or services as one would expect to find when legitimate transfers of exorbitant sums are exchanged in business transactions. The only apparent item of value is potential access to Joe Biden and his influence over American policy.
As a result, the payments resemble what investigators frequently find in examining criminal enterprises: conspirators forever grappling with the challenge of concealing where the money is coming from, how much of it there is, and who is getting it. By receiving big foreign payments — such as millions from Popoviciu and entities closely connected to the Xi regime and the Chinese Communist Party — the Biden cronies conceal the source from view. Meantime, the Biden family used at least 20 corporate shells — mainly limited liability companies (LLCs), 15 of which Hunter Biden set up while his father was vice president. These entities establish bank accounts. With the use of numerous accounts, the big payments are divided and staggered into smaller, less conspicuous transfers doled out over time. The labyrinthine structure and payout complexities — the kind you don’t tend to see in even big-dollar transactions that are on the up and up — raise colorable suspicion of money laundering.
Of course, whether criminal laws have been violated is a second-order issue. As then–Vice President Biden told the Romanians, public corruption can become a profound national-security problem. The question is what shady foreigners and corrupt regimes, some of them hostile to the United States, believe they were buying.
It has long been known that the Biden family did its most lucrative wheeler-dealing with China. In just the year between 2017 and 2018, the Bidens received $6 million from CEFC, a Chinese conglomerate — or, better, an agent of China dressed up as a conglomerate. Again, there was no apparent exchange of value other than potential access to Joe Biden — unless you count the $1 million paid to Hunter to serve as a defense lawyer (not his area of legal practice) to represent Patrick Ho, whom he famously referred to in a laptop recording as the “f***ing spy chief of China.” When the Justice Department prosecuted and convicted Ho for foreign corruption, it disclosed that there had been relevant national-security surveillance under FISA. Not long after that, China apprehended Hunter’s main CEFC partner, Ye Jianming, formerly a globally renowned tycoon and Xi protégé but one who has not been seen publicly since.
CEFC bore all the classic earmarks of a Chinese influence operation.
Predictably, the media–Democratic complex is doing its best to bury the House Republican findings. They deserve more attention and further investigation.”
You can say that again. Can you spell “treason”, boys and girls? We knew you could!
And in the EnvironMental Moment, energy correspondent Jeff Foutch forwarded an item from Bloomberg we initially took to be a parody:
“South Africa is ahead of its target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. Regular breakdowns of the coal-fired power plants that supply more than 80% of South Africa’s electricity mean that less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere and daily rotational cuts of more than 10 hours a day are further limiting emissions from factories.
“It’s unintentional,” Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Monday. “We reckon we are well within the range” of meeting the 2030 target, he said. “It’s very difficult to recommend the decommissioning of power stations in the middle of an energy crisis.”…”
Here’s a second shot of the juice: Only an utter idiot…or a Progressive Kool-Aid addict…could report such disastrous news as a positive development.
Moving on, here’s an octet of items certain to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
…who do these woke imbeciles think buys their trucks?!?
(3). In his call for Australian-style gun bans in the U.S., the Dear Misleader failed to mention the existence of the 2nd Amendment granting law-abiding Americans the constitutional right to possess firearms, instead deceptively suggesting gun rights have become an “ideological” and “partisan issue.” He also failed to mention Australians were unable to oppose the draconian measures their political class put in place during the pandemic, measures which would have been unconstitutional in the States, largely because only the government had guns.
This from a multi-millionaire community organizer whose family enjoys taxpayer-funded lifetime, heavily armed Secret Service protection.
(5). Meanwhile, six years after the fact and despite Durham’s inescapable conclusions, Adam Schiff is still doggedly reciting the same spurious claims:
Loathing the 🍊 man.
No democrat did more to sell SpyGate and collusion than Adam Schiff.
It’s a personal vendetta.
Hundreds of hours were devoted to peddling Russian collusion to the American people.
“…It was about a minute later that I encountered Feinstein coming off an elevator, sitting in a wheelchair and flanked by staff. It’s been hard to find the senator since her return; she’s kept her movements mostly to the least-populated passageways and skipped luncheons and non-urgent committee hearings.
I asked her how she was feeling. “Oh, I’m feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.” A fellow reporter staking out the elevator asked what was wrong with the leg. “Well, nothing that’s anyone concern but mine,” she said.
When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn. “No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.
OK.
“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty. “No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”
After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, who’ve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away…”
Feinstein desperately clinging to power reminds us of the story of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A to Tolkien’s classic The Return of the King, which offers additional details of their relationship after the book’s conclusion. Though he had a lifespan three times that of ordinary men, Aragorn felt his time drawing to a close, and as he had the ability to choose the moment of his passing, he had determined to do so while he was still in possession of all his faculties. Arwen, however, begged him to cling to life, to which his response was:
“Take counsel with yourself, beloved, and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless.”
Which is evidence Aragorn was either a Conservative…or J.R.R. just couldn’t imagine a politician becoming so addicted to power!
Since we’re on the subject of the clearly mentally-impaired…
John Fetterman participates in a Senate Banking Committee hearing with the former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank. pic.twitter.com/uKILMfuilN
Though we’re certainly no fan of this crook from Silicon Valley Bank, how’s he supposed to answer such a meandering, unintelligible question? Congratulations, Pennsylvanians: You elected the very antithesis of a statesman. Then again, if The Donald hadn’t endorsed Dr. Oz…?!?
(8). Speaking of laughs, Samuel Brinton, the former Biden administration energy official fired last year after attempting to steal luggage from an airport, was arrested this week as a “fugitive from justice”. Actually, he stole someone else’s luggage twice. The first time he protested his innocence, claiming he’d picked up the wrong bag by mistake…despite having not checked any luggage. Hey, a mistake anyone could make; After all, who wouldn’t want to stand and wait around at baggage claim despite not having checked any luggage?!?
Which brings us appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s this instant classic from Speed…
…along with these from the lovely Shannon…
…and Ed Hickey:
As for that last one, though there’s no proof of his guilt, by his own words The Donald is capable of having done it.
Finally, we apologize at the outset for darkening your day with a truly sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and the tale of an Arizona couple with special seats awaiting them in Hell:
“…When officers arrived, they found numerous bruises across the boy’s body, including swollen and bruised eyes, a bruised head and skull fractures. The boy also had no pulse.”These injuries were determined to be consistent with child abuse,” the Glendale Police Department said in a statement shared with Fox News Digital. According to police, Brazell and Lopez told inconsistent stories about the child being attacked by a dog before Brazell admitted to beating him.
“Upon further questioning and investigation, Brazell admitted to killing the child,” police said. “Brazell indicated he had hit the child multiple times with a leather belt while dangling him in the air by his leg.” “At one point, Brazell admitted to dropping him on his head onto a hardwood floor and swinging the child’s body into objects within the room, striking his head against some furniture,” the statement added.
The suspects were reportedly unconcerned about their crimes. The boy was breathing shallowly for a time, but the couple did not call 911 until he could no longer breathe. “Neither suspect showed any obvious remorse for their actions,” court documents obtained by FOX 10 Phoenix said. “They discussed leaving the state to California, and it is known that both have significant ties and family in California, as well as the means to travel there.” “Both Brazell and Lopez agreed to lie to police, paramedics and the hospital about what had occurred,” the police statement added.
The couple was booked into jail after their arrests. They are being held on $1 million cash-only bonds.”
“Allegedly” our a*s; They confessed! This is a case which calls not for the death penalty, but as slow and painful a demise as possible…along the lines of Pulp Fiction:
Magoo
Video of the Day
Fang Fang’s boy toy offers an obscure tweet into evidence, and is subsequently washed away by a flood of video testimony to the truth.
Tales of The Darkside
When you can’t define a term in your own resolution, you obfuscate fact with patent bullsh*t.
On the Lighter Side
In an encore performance, enjoy what is certainly one of the funniest SNL skits of the Bill Hader years, perhaps even of all time.
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.