Category: Biden/Harris

Hunter Biden can be imprisoned for 25 years?

by philg

Bom dia from the mostly-gun-free capital of Portugal! Checking in on U.S. news, I noticed the following…

“Hunter Biden guilty of felony gun charges, faces 25 years in prison” (New York Post, so we know that it is true):

a federal jury found him guilty of three counts related to lying about his drug use in order to buy a gun … making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, making a false statement related to information required to be kept by a federally licensed firearms dealer, and possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of or addict to a controlled substance. … Hallie testified about finding the gun inside Hunter’s Ford Raptor pickup on Oct. 23, 2018 — 11 days after he bought it — and throwing the weapon away in a panic at a Wilmington grocery store.

So Hunter Biden had a gun for 11 days, but didn’t use it in any way as far as we know and now he can be put in the slammer for about 100 times as long as a typical San Francisco career criminal? (See below for what happens to a criminal in San Francisco who actually shoots and kills someone.) Were his statements knowingly false? If you ask a typical addict “are you addicted?” the person will respond “I can quit at any time.” That would be his/her/zir/their truth and not a lie.

I think the answer is “the judge won’t impose the maximum sentence”, but why should an individual human be given the discretion to imprison an important contemporary artist for what would essentially be the entire rest of his life?

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What are you doing to act in George Floyd’s memory?

by philg

From our President:

George Floyd changed the world and we should “act in his memory”.

Readers: what have you done today (or recently) to act in George Floyd’s memory? What did this American hero do that we should also do so that our children can see an ideal way for an adult to act?

Some other things that happened on May 25 that Joe Biden isn’t talking about (source):

  • 1241 1st attack on Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
  • 1784 Jews are expelled from Warsaw by Marshall Mniszek
  • 1787 Constitutional convention opens at Philadelphia, George Washington presiding
  • 1927 Henry Ford announces that he is ending production of the Model T Ford
  • 1942 First commercial fluid catalytic cracking facility begins production at Exxon – now produces half the world’s gasoline, developed by the “Four Horsemen” research team at Exxon
  • 1945 Arthur C. Clark proposes relay satellites in geosynchronous orbit (also on May 25, 1945: final U.S. fire bombing of civilians in Tokyo)
  • 1961 JFK announces US goal of putting a man on the Moon before the end of decade
  • 1961 NASA civilian pilot Joseph A. Walker takes X-15 to 32,770 m
  • 1968 Gateway Arch in St Louis dedicated
  • 1973 US launches 1st Skylab crew Kerwin, Conrad, Weitz
  • 1977 Original “Star Wars” movie (Episode IV – A New Hope), directed by George Lucas and starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, premieres
  • 1979 Israel begins to return Sinai to Egypt
  • 1986 Hands Across America – 6.5 million people hold hands from California to NY
    1991 Israel evacuates 14,000 Ethiopian Jews
  • 2017 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg receives an honorary degree from Harvard University, after dropping out in 2004 (a Harvard commencement without a pro-Hamas component!)
  • 2018 Harvey Weinstein turns himself in to New York police to face charges of rape, a criminal sex act, sex abuse and sexual misconduct (conviction overturned in 2024)
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Joe Biden’s complex mind (examples of cognitive dissonance)

by philg

Loyal readers know that I’m a huge fan of the human ability to hold beliefs that are apparent logical contradictions. Here’s an interesting collection from one Tweet exploring the interior of Joe Biden’s mind:

The basic mental disease present in all Biden foreign policy is the bizarre need to take both sides in every conflict. Condolences for the mass-murdering head of a terror regime. Humanitarian aid for Hamas, which Biden also says Israel should defeat. Weapons for Israel but also constant condemnation and criticism. Arms for Ukraine that they’re not allowed to use against targets in Russia. Taking the Houthis off the sanctions list but also bombing them.

Full tweet:

A reminder of my personal favorite collection of logical contradictions, from 2020:

And let’s not forget the mental gymnastics around immigration. The border is not “open”, but Joe Biden is considering “closing” it (and would “close” the non-open border if Republicans in Congress would cooperate). Native-born Black Americans are not being “replaced” by immigrants; it is just that their former houses and jobs are now occupied by the Latinx (Politico and NBER).

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Climate change is an existential threat, but China is a bigger threat

by philg

Joe Biden, 2023 (whitehouse.gov):

You know, I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us. And it is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change.

“Biden to Quadruple Tariffs on Chinese EVs” (Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2024):

The Biden administration is preparing to raise tariffs on clean-energy goods from China in the coming days, with the levy on Chinese electric vehicles set to roughly quadruple, according to people familiar with the matter. … signs that China was ramping up exports of clean-energy goods prompted concern in Washington, where officials are trying to protect a nascent American clean-energy industry from China.

Officials are particularly focused on electric vehicles, and they are expected to raise the tariff rate to roughly 100% from 25%, according to the people. An additional 2.5% duty applies to all automobiles imported into the U.S. The existing 25% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles has so far effectively barred those models, often cheaper than Western-made cars, from the U.S. market. Biden administration officials, automakers and some lawmakers worry that wouldn’t be enough given the scale of Chinese manufacturing.

In other words, it is better for all humans to be killed by climate change (the “existential threat” turning out to be real) than it is to drive a Chinese car or use any other “clean-energy good” from China.

One might think that the cognitive dissonance would start to become apparent even to climate change alarmists themselves. Greta Thunberg has switched to pro-Hamas activism (e.g., protesting against the 20-year-old Eden Golan singing in the Eurovision contest; this reminds me to wonder if there will be a sequel to the Will Ferrell movie). Even if we accept that Palestinians are the world’s most noble people, how is the status of their war against the Israelis more important than the impending death of all humans that she previously warned us about? Of course, there are the climate change alarmists who use private jets. And we have the Biden administration, which says that climate change is on track to kill all humans and also keeps the border open so that millions of migrants from low-carbon societies can become high-carbon-output residents of the U.S. (the quickest method of accelerating CO2 emissions imaginable). Finally, we now have these huge tariffs to discourage Americans from adopting what we’ve been informed are planet-saving/humanity-saving technologies.

Separately… the YANGWANG U9 from BYD, with the 1 horsepower that is required for moving at Miami Beach traffic speed and 1,299 hp in reserve.

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Formula Joe Biden race series?

by philg

As previously noted, the Miami F1 event featured a race in which drivers who weren’t as good as the F1 drivers were nonetheless featured due to a personal characteristic (gender ID). How about a series in which a different personal characteristic is used to restrict who may compete: age? For drivers who are at least 80 years old… Formula Joe Biden (FJB). Because Joe Biden loves the 1967 Chevrolet Corvette (photo below is from “Joe Biden and Colin Powell drag race their ’67 and 2015 Corvettes”), the FJB series would put every driver into a C8 Corvette. Some of the drivers might suffer from slow reflexes, so the Corvettes would be restricted to “teen driver mode”.

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God’s principal gifts to Americans: elderly Democrats

by philg

It’s Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week for observant Christians. In the old days, the majority of Americans believed that Jesus was God’s greatest gift to humanity. What or who has replaced Jesus? “Marilynne Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God” (New York Times, February 15, 2024):

I’m less than a year younger than Joe Biden, so I believe utterly in his competence, his brilliance, his worldview. I really do. You have to live to be 80 to find this out: Anybody under 50 feels they’re in a position to condescend to you. You get boxed into this position where people who deal with you are making assumptions about your intellect. It’s very disturbing. Most people my age are just fine. What can I say? It’s a kind of good fortune that America is categorically incapable of accepting: that someone with a strong institutional memory, who knows how things are supposed to work, who was habituated to their appropriate functioning is president. I consider him a gift of God. All 81 years of him.

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Bidenrithmetic Questions

by philg

How did Joe Biden sound today? I didn’t watch the State of the Union address, but I have skimmed the transcript. I think it is fair to say that Joe Biden is the most transformative president in U.S. history because a country is defined by its residents and Joe Biden has done more to change who lives in the U.S. than any other president (at least 7.2 million new neighbors via undocumented migrants plus perhaps 3 million additional immigrants arriving by what used to be called the “legal” process).

An arithmetic question… President Biden said that he wanted “100 more immigration judges to help tackle a backload of 2 million cases.” Isn’t that 20,000 cases per new judge? If each judge handled five cases per day and worked 220 days per year and migrants stopped walking across the southern border, the backlog would be cleared in 18 years?

An unfortunate turn of phrase?

Pass the Equality Act, and my message to transgender Americans: I have your back!

What do the doctors who perform gender affirming surgery say after a “top” or “bottom” surgery? “I have your ….”?

Delusions of grandiosity?

I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world.

If we believe Professor Dr. Greta Thunberg, Ph.D., wouldn’t the most significant actions on climate in world history have been taken by the fossil fuel pioneers? James Young, for example, who distilled paraffin from coal and oil shales. Edwin L. Drake, who pioneered drilling for oil. The scientists and engineers who built the first internal combustion engines and automobile industry. Or, if we want to look at the virtuous side of the equation, how about the engineers and scientists who made photovoltaic solar cells possible, starting with Edmond Becquerel? New York Times, April 26, 1954:

A federal appeals court in California found that it was illegal for Donald Trump to build a wall along our now-fully-open border with Mexico because Congress hadn’t appropriated the funds for this specific purpose (The Hill). The wall would have been within U.S. territory (stolen from Mexico, of course, but that’s another story). Biden seems to have vastly greater powers than Trump:

Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

Congress never appropriated money for this construction project. The construction will occur in waters and on land that aren’t part of the U.S. How is it possible for Trump’s border wall project to have been illegal while Biden’s “build stuff in Gaza” project is legal?

(Separately, Biden says that a river of free stuff from American taxpayers will “guarantee [that] Palestinians can live with peace and dignity”. But won’t the river of free stuff actually enable Palestinians to stay at war forever and pursue the military goals that the majority agree on? And won’t the U.S. delivery of essentials to Hamas-ruled Gaza help Hamas continue to hold Americans hostage? (Biden explicitly mentions the Americans held hostage by Gazans in the very same speech where he promises to give Gazans everything that they want or need.))

Official Hamas statistics are cited without skepticism by the U.S. president:

More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.

Here’s the stuff that Ron DeSantis should have learned to say…

Above all, I see a future for all Americans!

I see a country for all Americans!

And I will always be a president for all Americans!

Because I believe in America!

I believe in you the American people.

You’re the reason I’ve never been more optimistic about our future!

So let’s build that future together!

Let’s remember who we are!

We are the United States of America.

There is nothing beyond our capacity when we act together!

Note that the above message of solidarity and brotherhood/sisterhood/binary-resisterhood is contradicted just a few lines up:

I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot and the wealthy finally have to pay their fair share in taxes.

I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence.

The wealthy are scapegoated despite the fact that if they handed over 100 percent of their wealth it still wouldn’t satisfy Congress’s appetite for deficit spending (i.e., we’d still have a budget deficit and the accompanying inflation). Gun lovers are threatened. Those who work in the fossil fuel industry are targeted for unemployment. In other words, Biden points out that we’re not in this together right before saying that we should “act together”.

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How was the immigration of Jose Antonio Ibarra supposed to make Laken Riley better off?

by philg

“Migrant suspect in Laken Riley murder accused of ‘seriously disfiguring’ nursing student as affidavit reveals grim details in case” (New York Post):

The Venezuelan migrant charged with murdering Laken Riley allegedly beat her so brutally with an unidentified object that he disfigured her skull, according to new affidavits.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, who faces multiple murder and assault charges, is not thought to have known the 22-year-old nursing student when he allegedly kidnapped and killed her as she went for a run on the University of Georgia campus Thursday.

Ibarra entered the US illegally in El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 8, 2022, with his wife and her son seeking asylum, and was later released “for further processing,” ICE said.

Laken Riley will not be alive to see the full benefits of the Biden administration’s transformation of the United States via immigration, but for those of us who haven’t been killed by a migrant… what is the rationale for the current system? How was Jose Antonio Ibarra’s immigration supposed to improve the lives of Americans overall? In an ideal world where he didn’t kill anyone, what would he have done that would have made Laken Riley better off?

(If the answer is “his immigration wasn’t supposed to make Laken Riley better off” then in what sense is the U.S. government working on behalf of U.S. citizens?)

Separately, what’s happening with crime statistics in Venezuela? If their career criminals and gang members have all accepted Joe Biden’s invitation to move to the U.S., shouldn’t Venezuela soon be as safe as El Salvador? Or is Venezuela breeding new criminals even faster than it is exporting them?

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The Biden Administration cutoff of UNRWA, as reported by state-sponsored media

by philg

“Biden administration to restore $235m in US aid to Palestinians” (BBC, 2021):

US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to provide $235m (£171m) of aid to Palestinians, restoring part of the assistance cut by Donald Trump.

“UNRWA loses funding after charges that some employees took part in Hamas attack” (state-sponsored NPR, January 29, 2024):

The U.S. and more than a dozen other donors have now paused funding for the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, or UNRWA. The U.N. says the agency could run out of money within weeks. NPR’s Michele Kelemen reports that the U.N. has been facing allegations that some of its employees were involved in the October 7 attack on Israel.

Congressional Research Service, February 2, 2024:

The US fiscal year starts on October 1, almost the same date as the glorious October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation. So the U.S. has provided $121 million to UNRWA since the attack and withheld $300,000. This 0.25% reduction in funding (or failure to increase funding by 0.25%?) is what state-sponsored National Public Radio characterizes as a “funding pause”.

In other journalistic success stories, we can look at a New York Times headline, “Tesla Recalls About 2.2 Million Electric Vehicles Over Warning Light Font Size”:

Tesla is recalling about 2.2 million vehicles because the font on the warning lights panel was too small to comply with safety standards, U.S. regulators said on Friday.

“Warning lights with a smaller font size can make critical safety information on the instrument panel difficult to read, increasing the risk of a crash,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice.

The recall is one of several that Tesla has made in recent years, a setback for the company, the dominant maker of electric vehicles in the United States.

It’s “a setback for the company” to bring 2.2 million cars in for service? The font size tweak was done in one of the standard over-the-air software updates, a fact that is buried by the New York Times in a subhead and never explained in the article.

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Are American taxpayers the biggest funders of Hamas?

by philg

“Trump’s Claim that U.S. Taxpayer Money Funded Hamas Attacks Is False” (New York Times, October 8). If the NYT says that something is “false” and Trump is involved, perhaps it is worth investigating..

Although we say that we don’t like Hamas, they are the legitimate government of millions of Palestinians and have more popular support than Joe Biden does among Americans (AP: “The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is ‘most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,’ while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.”)

The most expensive services provided by the U.S. government to residents of the U.S. are, in Gaza, paid for by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), established in 1949. UNRWA pays for health care, schools, food, etc. for as many Palestinians as want them (fueled by these unlimited resources, Gaza has one of the world’s highest rates of population growth and, thus, there are more customers every day).

The U.S. is the largest donor to UNRWA (source):

Every American tax dollar that the U.S. sends to UNRWA to fund standard government services frees up a dollar for Hamas to spend on whatever it may choose.

From the NYT, a few months after Joe Biden took office, “Reversing Trump, Biden Restores Aid to Palestinians”:

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would restore hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid to Palestinians, its strongest move yet to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s policy on the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. … The move will once again make the United States a leading donor to the United Nations agency that assists about 5.7 million Palestinians in the Middle East.

It is true that we haven’t directly funded Hamas’s military operations, but by funding UNRWA to provision Palestinians with education, health care, food, etc. we are the primary enablers of Hamas’s military (much larger than the economic activity of Palestinians would otherwise be able to support).

My personal rating of Trump’s statement: Substantially True. The U.S. seems to be the biggest money source for Hamas, which “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” (charter, which also says, “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim”).

[Of course, schizophrenically the U.S. also funds Hamas’s enemies, sending $billions to Egypt, which keeps its border with Gaza closed and won’t allow Palestinians to emigrate to Egypt (they built a wall, bizarrely with help from the U.S., which says that walls don’t work), Jordan, which has opposed Palestinian military efforts, and Israel (“the Zionist entity”). So it would similarly be accurate to say that the U.S. enables larger militaries in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.]

Curiously, quite a few American Democrats who don’t identify as Muslim are now tweeting about “standing with Israel” (they’re also going to stand with Ukraine, with the 2SLGBTQQIA+, and in how many other places?). In other words, the very people who have been funding Hamas since the beginning of the Biden administration are now saying that they somehow support Hamas’s enemy.

Here’s the principal funder himself:

The top Democrat in Congress:

The top Democrat in Congress when the funding for Hamas was restored:

The #2 Democrat in Congress:

Governor French Laundry:

The Democrat who runs San Francisco:

The Democrat who runs Los Angeles:

New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker 2018 (source):

Senator Booker today:

How was Hamas going to achieve Booker’s 2018 objective of getting rid of walls in Palestine if not via military action against Israel?

The Black Lives Matter folks in Chicago (relevant to a comment, below):

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