Not in the news…..

Harvard’s Legacies Are Nothing to Be Proud Of Ironically, the main reason for Harvard’s success is due to the very practices that are attacked in this article. You don’t want to go to Harvard for a better education. You want to go to Harvard to network with rich people. If you did not give rich kids an easy pass into the university, how would that work? But to admit this is to admit how little real education takes place in universities around the country.

Controversial stuff from Pakistan. I don’t vouch for it, but it is interesting because it does not come from a US observer. “If ever there was a thought within Pakistan’s leadership — political, military, and business — that Beijing could replace Washington as the foreign capital with the most influence in Islamabad, that idea is now firmly dead. We just have not gotten around to telling China yet.”

Fake Hate: Virginia Girl Admits She Made Up ‘Hair Cut’ Assault at School Where Karen Pence Teaches Just a reminder. You always see the stories. You rarely see the retractions.

The long knives come out for The Hill’s John Solomon Just a reminder, the consensus is enforced.

Things you may have missed……

In 2014 California passed Proposition 47, which made theft of property valued at less than $950 a misdemeanor offense. This is how it is working out……

You’ve likely seen the videos on social media or the local news: groups of people rushing into a store, grabbing armfuls of merchandise. The brazen crimes are on the rise and CBS13 has learned, in most cases, the crooks get away from authorities.

After searching police reports and arrest records, CBS13 found that while the rate of these grab and dash crimes is on the rise, the rate of arrest is down. We turned to law enforcement and the retail industry for answers. Both blame a California law intended to make “neighborhoods safe.”

In a New Study on Bird Loss, Some Scientists Say Subtlety Is Lost, Too That is code for “they totally misrepresented things to get more publicity.”

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity

Not In the News….

Who wants to leave California? Young voters can’t afford housing, and conservatives feel alienated. Okay, so this is a standard news source. But California’s troubles with housing and massive outflows don’t always get that much attention.

The Military Officials Who Knew Saudi Arabia Would Fail

That weird whistleblower’s complaint. “Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.” And there is more here.

Even if the rules were not changed just to allow this complaint to go forward, the complaint itself is not standard.

Talking About Biden

On purely technical grounds, I am cool with the fact that the House of Representatives wants to work on impeaching the President of the United States. The founders of this nation made it so that it only took a bare majority of the House to impeach but also made it so that it took to two thirds of the Senate to convict. Obviously they wanted to make it easy to bring charges but hard to make them stick. The Constitution also made it so that the House is the sole legal entity who has the power to impeach. Courts have suggested (correctly in my opinion) that this means that the house is the sole arbitrator of what is or is not an impeachable offense. On the whole, I think the House will cause less harm trying to impeach the President then other things they are likely to be doing if they don’t occupy themselves chasing after the bad orange man. And regardless of whether it is a good idea or not, it is inarguably constitutional which is more then you can say for a lot of their other activities.

What does get my blood up is being told over and over again by the mainstream media that we should not talk about Biden and that it is the actions of Trump that are the only legitimate subjects of conversation. As a form of therapy, I am going to talk about Biden……

Biden has boasted in the past that he got the Ukraine Prosecutor looking into his son’s company fired. From the Article….

It’s definitely horrible for Biden. The former vice president brought this issue on himself, recounting in 2018 how he told Poroshenko years earlier to fire Shokin or forfeit a promised $1 billion U.S. loan.

“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours,’ ” Biden said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. ” ‘If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ ”

Biden’s son followed his Father to Ukraine to make money off his father’s name. From the article……

Granted, Shokin was a shady character. Yet at some point he had been investigating Burisma, the largest gas company in Ukraine, which also happened to be paying Hunter Biden a $50,000 monthly salary as a board member.

By coincidence, Hunter had landed this cushy gig in a foreign country only a few months after the Obama ­administration began dispatching his father, Joe, to the very same foreign country on a regular basis.

There was, of course, absolutely nothing in Hunter’s résumé to indicate that he would be a valuable addition to foreign energy interest. He didn’t speak the language, and he had no particular expertise in the energy industry.

There are a lot of lies going around about this entire situation. Most of them revolve around the idea that the prosecutor that Biden got fired had no interest in his son so the two things could not possibly be related. This is not true. From the article…..

At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma. Shokin told me he was making plans to question Hunter Biden about $3 million in fees that Biden and his partner, Archer, collected from Burisma through their American firm. Documents seized by the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the payments, which in many months totaled more than $166,000.

Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma’s owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.

After I first reported it in a column, the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting.