Chew on this

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dOES THE POOFTER ON THE LEFT REALIZE THAT HIS MAKEUP AND EARRINGS WOULDN’T BE WELCOMED IN GAZA? JUUST ASKIN’.

WATCH: After Demanding Meat Tax, Activists at UN COP29 Climate Conference Won't Go Near Vegan Buffet

Climate nerds at the 2024 United Nations Climate Change (COP29) Conference being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, spent the early part of their panel discussions talking about how they could tax meat in an effort to force people away from the apparently ozone-depleting food group.

Willem Branten, public affairs and policy officer at the True Animal Protein Price (TAPP) Coalition (yes, that is a thing), demanded the EU Commission, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and China lead the way in implementing what amounts to a "sin tax" on meat.

Branten, who looks exactly as you might imagine, called on "the use of at least 20 percent of their revenues for ... pricing mechanisms to finance the loss and damage fund so that we can pay for the damages done by our past consumption of meat and animal proteins."

Branten added, "This is why we want to make the polluter pay."

And then it was time for lunch.

One sale, and one new listing

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Sold:

8 Park Avenue (Greenwich Park Ave, not Old Greenwich) has sold for $2.985 million, on an April ask of $3.875. Aging — built in 1930) – but a nice location.

New:

242 Taconic Road, $1.395 million.

1930 home, on just a half-acre in the 4-acre zone, and sold “as is”, but so what? I’d happily take it, and admire the view over my neighbors’ meadows from the comfort of my own deck chair. How much land do I need to maintain, really, if I’m not raising cattle?

Maybe the tide is cresting?

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That’s what it was all about, Alfie, and you lost

University of Michigan Student Government Impeaches Woke President

The University of Michigan's experiment in woke governance has come to an end. Today a majority of the student government voted to impeach the body's current president and vice president, both of whom were elected earlier this year as part of a slate of pro-Palestinian candidates.

The Ann Arbor-based school’s Central Student Government voted 30 to 7 in favor of ousting President Alifa Chowdhury and Vice President Elias Atkinson — who are part of a pro-Palestine activist group called “Shut It Down” —  for neglecting their responsibilities and actively trying to block funding for student groups on campus, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The pair had reportedly refused to resign after calls from the rest of the CSG, which alleged that they both had also threatened physical harm against its members.

“Since their time in office began, they have refused to do the duties constitutionally required of them, have incited violence against members of this body, and have openly degraded representatives for disagreeing with the mechanisms by which they govern,” said sophomore CSG member Margaret Peterman during a public meeting on Tuesday. “After repeated calls for their resignation from over 40 current and former members of CSG and repeated refusals to do so, this assembly is left with no choice but to impeach.”

To really appreciate this we have to go back to the beginning. Earlier this year when pro-Palestinian campus protests were all the rage, a group of activists at UM came up with a unique plan. They would run for student government on an explicit platform of shutting down the student government until the school agreed to divest from Israel. 

The first part of the plan worked. The activists were elected and Alifa Chodhury became student president. She promptly vetoed the distribution of any funding to campus groups over the summer break. And when student returned in the fall, she did it again.

At this point, students who hadn't voted for this plan were getting irritated. The money in question wasn't coming from the school, it was a fee which all students had to pay to fund these groups. They still had to pay but now none of their activities had any money. 

As opposition built, the university put forward an alternative plan. They agreed to essentially loan student groups the money to continue operating with the promise that, at some point in the future, those groups would pay the university back once student fees were released. As you can imagine, the activists running student government were angry because this ended their leverage. In one last desperate act, they tried to pass a plan to redirect all of the money to rebuild a university in Gaza. That plan failed to pass and that's when things got ugly.

Political posturing is lots of fun and a sure way to fit in with your fiends, but it loses its appeal when yu get what you’ve asked for, and it pinches.

To be fair, all her decisions were horrible.

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Left-Wing Staffers Bullied Kamala Into Making One Of Her Worst Campaign Decisions

John Loftus:

Young left-wing staffers in Kamala Harris’s campaign kicked up a backlash over a plan for the vice president to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, according to a report Wednesday.

…. On Wednesday, the Financial Times shed some new light on the campaign’s decision to nix the Rogan appearance. According to a campaign adviser, woke staffers were upset about the optics of Harris appearing on a show like Rogan’s, which caters to a predominantly non-woke, male audience.

“There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, told the Financial Times.

Color me shocked: young, idealistic, left-wing staffers disconnected from reality bullying the supposed adults in the room into making a stupid decision. How many times have we seen that before?

It’s likely Kamala’s appearance on Rogan’s show would not have made a difference. She probably would’ve bombed. But, for a campaign performing so poorly among young men, it’s also possible an interview with the mega-famous podcaster could’ve helped her make inroads with that demographic. It would’ve been worth a shot, at least. And it was a terrible look for her to back down from an appearance after Trump chopped it up with Rogan for hours.

Harsh, but fair:

The saga seems emblematic of so many liberal institutions, which increasingly cow-tow to a small minority of whiny activists. Whether it’s in legacy media companies like The Washington Post or The New York Times or prestigious universities like Harvard or Yale, young left-wingers are taking the older crowds out to lunch. The adults in the room are not adults at all: they’re cowards running little daycare centers for the spoiled and stupid.

Brookridge Drive sale

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62 Brookridge Drive, listed at $6.495 million, has sold for $6.550. The sellers paid $5.650 million in October 2023 and didn’t even have time t take new pictures of the place.

Speaking of pictures, Zillow and its ilk are now yanking them off the intenet as soon as a property is sold. This is no bout at the instance of the Greenwich MLS, which is doing ots best to remove as much information on its listings as it can get away with. The tax card, for instance, showing mortgages, pending foreclosures, and previous sales, is gone from the MLS website. Soon, we’ll be back to the pre-internet days of notebooks , jealously guarded by individual agents, and why not? Buyer-representatives are gone, so if a buyer ants information on a particular property he’ll just have to go directly to the listing agent, ask nicely, and hope he isn’t lied to. That’ll work.

Here, by the way, is the brokers “exclusive” listing site showing, as of this writing, pictures of the place. I’m sure it will be brought down soon.

I don't like this one (UPDATED)

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Trump nominates Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general in surprise pick

He’s been fiercely loyal to Trump these past years, and Trump is understandably concerned with loyalty as much as competence, but in this case, he seems to have gone strictly with loyalty, and chosen a lightweight.

UPDATE: Professor Reynolds shares my skepticism, but points out, Hey, it’s an improvement on what we had:

(Another) Update: Just saw this on X this morning.

Pentagon reform now

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Balloon Payment Comes Due

Last year, China sent a surveillance balloon over most of the continental United States, including Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, where nuclear weapons are stored. China’s craft surveilled Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, home of U.S. Strategic Command, in charge of the nation’s nuclear forces. China’s balloon also got a close look at Whiteman Air Force Base, home to the B-2 stealth bomber, capable of delivering nuclear and conventional payloads.

China’s craft was first sighted by a private photographer, picked up by national media, and only then acknowledged by the Biden-Harris administration. The Communist regime claimed the balloon was for “mainly meteorological purposes,” that the craft had “limited self-steering capability,” and that “westerlies” blew it off course. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed China’s claims.

“Those winds are very high,” Milley told CBS News, “the particular motor on that aircraft can’t go against those winds at that altitude.” Pressed as to whether the aircraft was on a Chinese intelligence mission, Milley said, “I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn’t transmit any intelligence back to China.” For a different perspective consider Dr. Marina Miron, a researcher in the War Studies Department at Kings College London.

Dr. Miron earned her PhD at the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy. She has advised NATO on counterinsurgency and serves at the Kings College Centre for Military Ethics. As Dr. Miron told the BBC:

The balloon could be controlled by operators on the ground, who could raise or lower the craft to pick up different wind currents. You would want to be able to make it linger over a spot to collect data. This is something you can do with a balloon which you cannot do with a satellite.

The ground operators could be any of the nearly 300,000 Chinese students now in the USA.*

Nobody leaves China without approval of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which sends “students” on a mission. For example, Juan Tang, supposedly a cancer researcher at UC Davis, was a member of the CCP and the Liberation Army (PLA) the force that slaughtered peaceful demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Gen. Milley doubtless knew that stateside ground operators could easily download the intel. So in the style of Maj. Kong (Slim Pickens) in Dr. Strangelove, Milley was taking evasive action. That might be expected from the man who compared President Donald Trump to Hitler and Trump’s supporters to brownshirts.

Milley also hinted that he would tip off China in the event of an American attack he thought Trump might be planning. The general actually called Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng and defended the call as conducting the duties of his office. In effect, Milley appointed himself commander-in-chief, a move not exactly authorized by the Uniform Code of Military Justice or consistent with common sense and basic morality.  As Sir Bedevire (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of history and warfare?

Mark Milley received his commission from the Army ROTC at Princeton, where he majored in political science, and his master’s from Columbia was in international relations. Milley never attended West Point, unlike Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe played a major role in taking down Hitler’s National Socialist regime. In 2021, Gen. Milley presided over a humiliating surrender in Afghanistan that made the Taliban the best-armed terrorist force in the world. Yet Gen. Milley boasts more U.S. military medals than Gen. Eisenhower. See here and here, and another comparison comes to mind.

* According to the Department of Homeland Security, as of April, 24,376 Chinese nationals were apprehended at the border and March saw a 50 percent increase from 2023 and a 2,000 percent increase from 2021. In addition, “more than 1,000 Chinese nationals have crossed the northern border every month for the past five months.”

Yesterday, word came out that Trump is considering a drastic cleansing of the stables:

Trump Preparing Executive Order to Cull the Military of Woke Generals and Admirals

The Trump transition team is considering an executive order that would send into retirement any three- or four-star general deemed "lacking in requisite leadership qualities." If fairly applied, that standard would force a super-majority of the 44 four-star and 162 three-star officers off active duty. 

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.

The draft order says it aims to establish a review that focuses “on leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence.” The draft doesn’t specify what officers need to do or present to show if they meet those standards. The draft order originated with one of several outside policy groups collaborating with the transition team, and is one of numerous executive orders under review by Trump’s team, a transition official said.

The warrior board would be made up of retired generals and noncommissioned officers, who would send their recommendations to the president. Those identified for removal would be retired at their current rank within 30 days.

BACKGROUND:

Donald Trump's Pledge to Rid Our Military of the 'Woke' Virus Causes Consternation in the Right Places – RedState

Rum, Buggery, and the Lash Makes a Comeback as the US Navy Fights Recruiting Woes; Well, Better Hold the Rum – RedState

The upper echelons of the US military are broken. There is no visible interest in readiness or warfighting. The focus is on whatever social justice idea that is coming down the pike. This rot has spread deep into the rank and file where sexual proclivities and other non-essential traits determine if a successful career is possible (see Unexpectedly, the USAF Finds Itself With a Critical Shortage of Pilots While It Says It Has Too Many White Officers). Stories abound of officers and noncommissioned officers being afraid to discipline women or sexual minorities for fear of being reported to the Star Chamber for some career-ending offense. In the aftermath of the USS Bonhomme Richard burning down, there were tales of US Navy petty officers buffing floors while sailors lounged about because they feared being accused of harassment. And who can forget the active network of "pup" fetishists operating rather openly in the Army? See Army Starts Sham Investigation Into Bondage Fetish Colonel and His Friends Because They Think You're Stupid for details.

But some former officials believe the potential Trump administration is looking to politicize the military.

“Do they start wearing MAGA hats in formation to signal who’s where?” asked one former senior Pentagon official. “The potential for this to go wrong is infinite.”

...

This seems like a reasonable objection, however:

U.S. troops take an oath of office to the constitution and vow to not follow any illegal order, and Congress must approve the promotion of general officers.

But establishing a board separate from the current process, which uses serving officers, could undermine the idea that generals refrain from sharing their political views within the Pentagon. It could also potentially prompt officers not to speak out against orders they believe are illegal, says Eric Carpenter, professor of military law at FIU College of Law.

“This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” said Carpenter, a former Army lawyer. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”

A reasonable objection, but not necessarily one that should kill the idea, at least according to the author of the article I’m quoting from:

Like any other great idea, it isn't without high risk. The justness of this retention board's actions will rest on the credibility of its members. It will be difficult to get retired four-star officers to sit on a panel that orders the involuntary retirement of former colleagues. Even if it is not perceived as fair, we're no worse off than today, and a strong message has been sent about the purpose of the Armed Forces.

My opinion is that, if it rid the Army of other General MIleys lurking in the shrubbery at the Pentagon, it’s probably worth trying.