Richard Fernandez on China

The New Neo Posted on by

Richard Fernandez has been writing a great many posts about China lately. In fact, his last five were on the subject: here, here, here, here (that one’s indirectly about China, anyway), and here.

One of the essays highlights a quote from John Kerry in the NY Times which goes like this:

“My response to [the Chinese on the subject of energy and climate change] was, ‘Hey look, climate is not ideological. It’s not partisan, it’s not a geostrategic weapon or tool, and it’s certainly not day-to-day politics. It’s a global, not bilateral, challenge,’” he said on a call with reporters. …

“Needless to say, adding some 200-plus gigawatts of coal over the last five years, and now another 200 or so coming online in the planning stage, if it went to fruition would actually undo the ability of the rest of the world to achieve a limit of 1.5 degrees,” he said, adding, “The stakes are very high.”

Not only do the Chinese respond by essentially saying, “Hey, little guy, what are you going to do about it?”, but Kerry’s assertion is absurd on its face. I suppose you could change it to read, “The issue of climate change should not be ideological. Neither should it be partisan, nor a geostrategic weapon or tool, nor day-to-day politics. It’s a global, not bilateral, issue and a possible global, not bilateral, challenge.”

Not that China cares one hoot. And Kerry is also lying through his teeth because climate change long ago became exactly what he says it is not.

Fernandez’s most recent post on China is the one in the group that is of the greatest interest to me. In it he writes:

But the ultimate blow to Biden’s Global World has been to its economic underpinnings. China had been going broke gradually, then all of a sudden. “The roots of the crisis date to [Chinese] tax reforms in 1994 which bolstered central government coffers but left local governments reliant on land financing for revenue.” By China’s own reckoning, the country’s vaunted economic growth rested on three huge bubbles that, once exploded, could threaten the Party’s own legitimacy. “This year, Xi has set out to reform the ‘three huge mountains’ of housing, education and healthcare to rein in soaring costs for city dwellers as a way to shore up legitimacy as the ‘people’s leader’, analysts said.”

The Communist Party encouraged the bubbles in order to tax them. But now, with the stream of new business finally exhausted and the entire edifice threatening to collapse like a house of cards, Chairman Xi has suddenly rediscovered Maoism…

Like Indiana Jones, Xi is pursued by three giant rocks and hopes to reach the socialist bunker leaving Western markets to take the brunt of the impact…

The dissolution of the landscape means the Biden administration isn’t plagued by any one malady anymore but by multiple organ failure. The Guardian writes, “Is Joe Biden failing? Less than nine months into his presidency, rising numbers of Americans and not a few foreign allies appear to think so…

At the heart of the Biden collapse is one major factor: Joe had counted on presiding over a world that no longer exists. He is king, but the king of vanishing empire. The situation can no longer be salvaged by tinkering, but only through a radical paradigm shift that the aged occupant of the White House is neither prepared nor able to undertake.

Fernandez is a very smart guy, and I would always pay attention to what he’s saying. I’m no China expert, but what he writes about that country makes sense to me.

However, I’m puzzled by some things Fernandez seems to be saying about Biden in that essay. One is that he doesn’t emphasize what I think are the two most important elements in Biden’s decline in popularity: the growing perception among US voters that Biden’s mental deficits are huge, and their judgment that Biden (or Biden’s administration) has been responsible for the debacle that was the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Another thing that puzzles me is that Fernandez seems to think – or at least he writes as though he thinks – that Biden is the one who is mainly in charge here and pulling his own strings. I’ve stated several times that I don’t think Biden is as far gone as a lot of people believe, but I do see him as very cognitively challenged and I see his policies as a combination of fairly vague ideas of Biden’s plus a lot of input from “advisors” who are mainly holdovers from the Obama administration (plus some unknown others).

I’m not sure how much credit Fernandez is giving Biden when he writes that Biden “had counted on presiding over a world that no longer exists.” My sense of Biden is that his evaluation of China was as an entity that could be played for money and favors, if not for himself then certainly for his family members such as Hunter. I think that really was as far as it ever went for Biden, who never struck me as especially involved with geopolitical strategies of any sophistication or depth.

And now I think Biden is running on habit as far as his own input into things goes, and although I think he has some input I don’t think it’s very great.

As Fernandez makes clear, these are extremely challenging times, and Biden is not up to handling them. But neither would any Democrat be, in my opinion – and precious few Republicans, as well.

It is said that Otto Von Bismarck stated, “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” Let’s hope so.

Two versions of Robin Gibb’s “I Am the World” separated by over 40 years – plus Glenn Gould

The New Neo Posted on by

The Bee Gees began singing and writing songs when they were little children, and they turned pro before they were even teenagers, supporting their entire family of seven. They became sensations while still in their late teens, but they had to move back to England from their adopted Australia to do that.

Right around the time they left Australia for England they had their first huge hit in Australia and New Zealand, “Spicks and Specks,” released in 1966. Follow the link for a humorous video they made at the time, around ages 16 for the twins and 19 for Barry.

The B side of the single was the song “I Am the World.” It’s not one of my absolute favorites of the Bee Gees, but I do like it considerably.

“I Am the World” was recorded when Robin Gibb was 16. He wrote it himself, around then or some time before that. Although most Bee Gees songs were written by all three together, there were quite a few written by each of them alone, and this is one of the first songs Robin ever wrote solo. Perhaps it’s even the very first, which could account for its holding a special enough place in his heart for him to rerecord it much later.

Here’s his version at 16:

And here is Robin’s rerecording in 2008 at the age of fifty-eight, just four years before he died (the album on which it appears was released posthumously). I don’t know whether he was already ill when he made this recording, but I think he may have been, because photos from the time show him to be extremely thin. At any rate, he was certainly never the same after his twin Maurice died suddenly of a heart attack in 2003, and that is also when the Bee Gees ended as a group because of the death and the importance of Maurice (Mo) to their unique sound.

This second arrangement is somewhat different from the first one, and he seems to have taken the key down a notch. In Robin’s voice the ensuing years of experience, love, and loss can be heard; this is no longer an exuberant 16-year-old singing.

I am quite fascinated with the changes in people’s singing as they age. The voices themselves sometimes degenerate at least somewhat in quality (although I don’t hear much of that decline here with Robin, except for his taking it down to a slightly lower register). But they often gain so much in depth that the later versions bring tears to the eyes when the first versions don’t.

Each has its pluses and I’m not sure which one I prefer in this case. I like the soaring high notes of the younger version, but the rich complexity of the bittersweet feeling in his voice in the second is more touching.

The contrast is more touching still.

It reminds me somewhat of the two versions Glenn Gould made of “The Goldberg Variations” by Bach. That may seem an odd comparison to you, but not to me. The “voice” of his piano was quite different when Gould was an energetic and eager wunderkind at the start of his career, compared to when he reflected back at fifty, bringing to his later rendition a wealth of experience not long before he died. I prefer Gould’s later version, although in a few sections I think it verges on being too slow.

Here they are:

Notice that you can sometimes hear Gould singing along very softly. He didn’t want to do it, but he said it just happened. I once read that Gould’s mother, who was his earliest piano teacher, was also a singer, although I can’t find anything on that at the moment. I did find this:

[Gould] often hummed or sang while he played, and his audio engineers were not always successful in excluding his voice from recordings. Gould claimed that his singing was unconscious and increased in proportion to his inability to produce his intended interpretation from a given piano. It is likely that this habit originated in his having been taught by his mother to “sing everything that he played”, as his biographer Kevin Bazzana puts it. This became “an unbreakable (and notorious) habit”. Some of Gould’s recordings were severely criticised because of this background “vocalising”. For example, a reviewer of his 1981 re-recording of the Goldberg Variations opined that many listeners would “find the groans and croons intolerable”.

I find them fascinating, an attempt by Gould to get even closer to the music and to somehow become it. Isn’t that what singing is?

Report on Maricopa County 2020 election audit

The New Neo Posted on by

Once an election occurs, if mail-in voting fraud occurs it is extremely difficult to catch it and there is virtually no way to prove that it materially affected the outcome. That’s why fraud must be prevented, because it cannot be corrected or even definitely discovered after the fact except in very limited ways in very limited cases (mostly incorrect tallying of regular votes, or smoking gun discoveries in which someone is caught in the act in a way that cannot be disputed).

Those who would perpetrate voting fraud know this. And vote-by-mail – which is severely limited in most sane countries – is one of the very best ways to perpetrate fraud unless very stringent safeguards are in place. Which fraudsters also know.

Which brings us to reports on the results of the forensic audit of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, Arizona (not the official reports, but rather a leaked copy):

The media is already spinning the findings of the audit.

“The partisan review of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election found a vote count nearly identical to what the county had previously reported,” CNN reported. Like other liberal outlets, CNN focused on the results of the hand-recount part of the audit. As we know, hand recounts may account for slight discrepancies in counting but do not address irregularities or potentially illegally cast ballots.

Yes, we know that, and what’s more, CNN knows it. This audit was not primarily about a recount, which is a great deal easier to do and would never uncover the type of fraud alleged in 2020.

More:

So, let’s look into what the audit actually says…

“On the positive side there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the County….

“However, while it is encouraging for voters, it does not allay all of the concerns:

None of the various systems related to elections had numbers that would balance and agree with each other. In some cases, these differences were significant.
There appears to be many ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election.
Files were missing from the Election Management System (EMS) Server.
Ballot images on the EMS were corrupt or missing.
Logs appeared to be intentionally rolled over, and all the data in the database related to the 2020 General Election had been fully cleared.
On the ballot side, batches were not always clearly delineated, duplicated ballots were missing the required serial numbers, originals were duplicated more than once, and the Auditors were never provided Chain?of?Custody documentation for the ballots for the time?period prior to the ballot’s movement into the Auditors’ care. This all increased the complexity and difficulty in properly auditing the results; and added ambiguity into the final conclusions.”

In other words, a lot of “garbage in, garbage out.” And there’s not a thing we can do about it, short of attempting to prevent a recurrence – attempts which the Democrats will aim to block at every turn.

More:

“By the County withholding subpoena items, their unwillingness to answer questions as is normal between auditor and auditee, and in some cases actively interfering with audit research, the County prevented a complete audit,” the summary explains. “This did not stop the primary goal of offering recommendations for legislative reform to the Arizona Senate, but it did leave many questions open as to the way and manner that the 2020 General Election was conducted. As a result, while many areas of concern were specifically identified, our full audit results validating the 2020 General Election are necessarily inconclusive.”

And that was the goal of the County’s withholding. But even if the County had been fully cooperative, I don’t think the question of whether Biden really won could ever have been answered, because we have no way of knowing who the fraudulent, extra, or missing votes were for. The system blocks that ability, due to the secret ballot.

I have described in earlier posts how other countries deal with the issue. Most simply block absentee or mail-in ballots unless there is a very well-documented reason, and therefore the number of them is much much smaller. Certain countries who do have significant mail-in ballots save all the paperwork in safes or other protective ways, and have the ability after the election, if there is a big dispute and the court orders it, to unlock and match the actual ballots to the envelopes in which they came and the documentation of who sent in that particular ballot. Therefore the country retains the ability to do an actual audit that would discover whether fraud existed and also whether it materially affected the results.

Biden’s margin of victory in Arizona was 10,457. Here is a chart of the numbers in the audit:

The auditors have made recommendations to prevent such discrepancies in the future. Whether they will be adopted or not is anyone’s guess.

Sharia law returns to Afghanistan

The New Neo Posted on by

Entirely predictable, including the new secrecy part:

As for their laws and punishments which Turabi insists are not to be criticized, he said that “cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” but that the new Taliban government hadn’t yet decided whether to carry out the punishments in public as they have in the past but pledged they will “develop a policy” to handle brutal punishments for actions they deem to be crimes. If that’s what the Taliban is admitting publicly, there’s surely worse happening that’s so far gone unpublicized.

The Taliban have learned a bit about PR from their last stint in power and then their years in exile. They will keep their brutality more secret this time, but they will continue to be brutal. They have learned how to keep the West at bay – and indeed, it’s easier to do so than before, because the West is far more tired and feeble and has lost the courage of its own former convictions.

The Biden administration has insisted that it’s up to the Taliban to choose how they want to lead and have called on their new government to [be] inclusive and tolerant…

Laughable and delusional on the part of the Biden administration – although I don’t really think they believe for a moment that it would be possible.

They shoot horses, don’t they?

The New Neo Posted on by

With a camera, taking photos at the border.

And those photos got the horses fired because, as Jim Treacher writes, “The Biden administration cares more about how things look than how things are.”

Actually, they don’t care about either, but since things actually are getting pretty wretched under their administration, they don’t want to talk about or confront that but rather to ignore, dodge, or lie about it. They also know that they sometimes find images, incidents, or false reports that they can exploit for propaganda purposes, and that their supporters love and value that sort of thing. So that’s why they do it.

At this point, Whipgate has apparently morphed into Horsegate, because it has been definitively proven that there were no whips being wielded by men on horseback on Haitians at the border. But there were men on horseback and there were others on foot, and something about the horses seems to have got people’s goat and has been used to conjure up images of slavery. I’m not sure why – my picture of Southern slavery in the US conjures up many images, but horses don’t figure prominently in them at all, except perhaps in front of a plow. I’m also not sure how many people, even on the left, actually are buying this particular hype, but my guess is quite a few.

Treacher continues:

It’s about time the Biden administration did something about the biggest threat in America today: horses. First our hospitals filled up with people OD’ing on horse paste, and now those damn horses are killing black people at the border or whatever. Just say neigh! #BanHorses #JustSayNeigh

Biden murdered seven children in Afghanistan with a drone strike, and nobody was fired. Some cowboys enforced the border on horseback, as they’ve been doing for 100 years, and Biden fired the horses.

Here’s a quote from Psaki [emphasis mine]:

“So what he has asked all of us to convey clearly, to people who are understandably have questions, are passionate, are concerned, as we are about the images that we have seen, is 1, we feel those images are horrible and horrific, there is an investigation the president certainly supports, overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, which he has conveyed will happen quickly. I can also convey to you that the secretary also conveyed to civil rights leaders earlier this morning that we would no longer be using horses in Del Rio. So that is something, a policy change that has been made in response.

There are many things I could say about that quote – including the fact that we never get to a number 2, and that Psaki’s use of the word “conveyed” (over and over) is a somewhat odd construction. But the important part is what I have highlighted, which is the admission that it’s the images that have so offended, and caused the horses to be put out to pasture, and that this administration apparently considers these images horrible and horrific.

That is profoundly unserious and strangely hysterical. Just what is horrible or horrific about these images? Is it the horses themselves, which are doing nothing bad to anyone except perhaps acting as a kind of intimidation? Is it the fact that some men are riding them while others are on foot, setting up a sort of hierarchy? But after all, these are border police, and they are trying to police the border. Is it the fact that the men on foot happen to be Haitians and the ones on horseback (whom I can’t see all that well in terms of race or ethnicity) are assumed to be white (many border officers are Hispanic, but we’ll leave that issue aside for now)?

Or is it the fact that we have a border at all and are trying to enforce it against people who are trying to get into this country illegally? Is that just too awful for words? Not to me. There are some sad human stories there, no doubt, but we have a legal immigration policy and people should abide by it. If American voters wish to change it and allow more legal immigrants in, then by all means vote for representatives who pledge to do that. Until then, the border needs enforcement, and in certain types of terrain horses have long been used as an aid to doing this.

As Treacher also points out, there are far more horrible and horrific things this administration has done, but Psaki et al would prefer not to mention them at all and want us to forget them.

The real “Pygmalion”? – Jane Burden Morris

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I noticed that last night commenter “Zaphod” brought up Jane Morris towards the end of the open thread (see this as well as this). I thought I’d respond by putting up a link to an ealier post of mine on Jane Morris, but when I looked for it I was surprised to find no such post existed. It was actually in draft form, along with about a thousand other unpublished posts of mine.

Yes, you read that right – about a thousand. It amounts to a severe case of post-hoarding – as I wrote over three years ago, when the number of hoarded posts was about half what it is today. In that piece on post-hoarding, I described three categories of hoarded posts, but I now realize I should add a fourth: posts that started out sounding interesting but didn’t quite pass muster once I’d fleshed them out.

My post about Jane Morris is one of that latter group. And yet, after reading Zaphod’s comment, I’ve decided to liberate it from bondage and put it out here despite that. Why not? At least, it’s a break from politics. So here it is.]

You know how it goes. You’re researching something, way leads on to way, and suddenly you’ve stumbled on an altogether different but fascinating story. This happened to me recently when I was researching some artwork for a post, and I came across the story of Jane Morris, who turns out to have been not only an artist’s model and the wife of William Morris, but was probably the model for Eliza Doolittle in “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady”:

Burden was born in Oxford, the daughter of a stableman, Robert Burden, and his wife Ann Maizey, who was a laundress…Her mother Ann was illiterate and probably came to Oxford as a domestic servant. Little is known of Jane Burden’s childhood, but it was poor and deprived.

In October 1857, Burden and her sister Elizabeth, known as “Bessie”, attended a performance of the Drury Lane Theatre Company in Oxford. Jane Burden was noticed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones who were members of a group of artists painting the Oxford Union murals, based on Arthurian tales. Struck by her beauty, they asked her to model for them. Burden sat mostly for Rossetti as a model for Queen Guinevere and afterwards for William Morris, who was working on an easel painting, La Belle Iseult, now in the Tate Gallery. Like Rossetti, Morris used Burden as the model for his painting of Queen Guinevere. During this period, Morris fell in love with Burden and they became engaged, though by her own admission she was not in love with Morris.

Burden’s education was limited and she was probably destined to go into domestic service like her mother. After her engagement, she was privately educated to become a rich gentleman’s wife. Her keen intelligence allowed her to recreate herself. She was a voracious reader who became proficient in French and Italian and became an accomplished pianist with a strong background in classical music. Her manners and speech became refined to an extent that contemporaries referred to her as “Queenly”. Later in life, she had no trouble moving in upper class circles. She was possibly the model for the heroine in the 1884 novel Miss Brown by Vernon Lee upon which was based the character of Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1914) and the later film My Fair Lady. She also became a skilled needlewoman who would be later renowned for her embroideries.

Here’s a painting by Rossetti for which Jane modeled:

She has the “look” beloved by the pre-Raphaelite group of painters. The features and hair seem exaggerated, don’t they, to create a certain dramatic impression? But actually, Burden really did look like that. Here’s a photograph of Burden taken in 1865:

An even more dramatic description of her reversal of fortune, and her looks, can be found in Paris Review:

…Janey’s habitual unsmiling expression, seen in paintings and photographs alike, conveys neither regret nor contrition. Instead, Rossetti captures the very quality that made this reserved and intelligent woman so captivating as a model: the suggestion of a complicated, closely guarded inner life behind the saturnine composition of her features…

[After her discovery by the pre-Raphaelites] a career as a domestic servant, the likeliest future for a stable hand’s daughter, had been averted. For Janey, the fact that her appearance proved the catalyst may have been the most surprising part. “It is likely,” observes her biographer, Jan Marsh, “that no one had ever said she was beautiful ” and may indeed have described her as plain or even ugly.”…But Rossetti and his circle put forth an ideal of female beauty entirely at odds with prevailing tastes, which, in the early Victorian era, favored petite blondes with childlike features and hourglass figures. Pale, lanky, and black-browed Janey, once immortalized by the Brotherhood, launched a revolution: by the 1870s, the writer Mary Eliza Haweis was marveling that, on account of the Pre-Raphaelites, “certain types of face and figure once literally hated [are] actually the fashion”…In fact the pink cheeked dolls are nowhere; they are said to have ”˜no character.’ ”

…“I was a holy thing to them,” she reminisced of her early days with the Pre-Raphaelites.

Some of her embroidery can be found here.

[NOTE: When I clicked on that last link today, I found a pop up that had “The Starry Night” on it – the subject of my open thread for the day – and an ad lower down with the Magritte apple painting on it. Odd coincidences – unless those things were based on my browsing history and specially tailored to me.]

More lies from Biden, and no one should ever be surprised

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden repeats the Whipgate lie, and follows it up with his trademark macho bluster:

See also this.

I wrote a post recently about the absurdity of the lies of the left, the reasons that the left feels immune from criticism about those lies, and the function of the lies. But this lie about the border isn’t in the category of “absurd,” it’s a more traditional type of leftist lie aided and abetted by the press. It rests on a kernel of truth: a photo of the border authorities on horseback, trying to deal with some illegal immigrants (Haitians, I’m pretty sure). The photo was misinterpreted right off the bat, and given a much more pernicious spin (whipping) than was the case (reining the horses).

But the lie (it may have started as a mistake, perhaps, but once a correction was issued it became a lie) is a very useful one, so it is repeated and repeated. Biden and company know that the MSM is unlikely to expose this – lies such as “border police whipping poor black Haitians” play really really well with the public. And we have the photos, right? – so it must be true.

Biden has always been one of the most flagrant of political liars, and that’s saying something. So why would he stop now, in his dotage? And make no mistake about it – although his aides feed him many of his lines, and he is very cognitively challenged, he’s not so far gone that he doesn’t know what he’s doing quite a bit of the time, at least in some basic way. He simply doesn’t care about the truth and never did. He cares about what’s expedient for Joe and for the Democrats, that’s all.

Remember, this is the guy who launched his campaign with the Charlottesville lie, the gift to the Democrats that keeps on giving, and he doubled down on it again and again:

The first words Joe Biden spoke as he announced his presidential campaign on Thursday were “Charlottesville, Virginia.”

The former vice president entered the race with a video that framed the 2020 campaign as a battle to redeem the soul of the nation from a Donald Trump presidency he cast as “an aberrant moment in time.” And he chose to highlight the President’s reaction to white supremacists’ August 2017 march in Charlottesville and the killing of a counter-protester…

In the aftermath of the violence in Charlotesville, Biden wrote in The Atlantic that Trump’s willingness to divide the United States “knows no bounds,” and that Trump had “emboldened white supremacists with messages of comfort and support.”

“If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden wrote then. “The giant forward steps we have taken in recent years on civil liberties and civil rights and human rights are being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America.”

I very much doubt Biden actually wrote those words, but that’s more or less irrelevant. Biden lies repeatedly, whether the lies are generated by him or whether they are given to him by others. And these are not just tangential lies of the type that’s typical for politicians – bragging or exaggeration, for example – although they certainly include that sort of lie. They also feature huge material lies, and obvious lies such as his repeated lying about Afghanistan.

Lies have been the centerpiece of Biden’s political career, his 2020 campaign, and his presidency.

[NOTE: So far the “fact-checkers” of the MSM have avoided fact-checking this particular lie.]

More questions about the January 6th surveillance videos

The New Neo Posted on by

This RedState post, including the comments, raises further questions about January 6th and what the surveillance videos released so far show – and what they don’t show. Here’s a point I really didn’t discuss in yesterday’s post about the videos:

We know from court filings that there were federal agents there on January 6th. We still don’t know their roles or how many, or who in the videos were agents and who were not. There has been no attempt to tell us, either, and yet it’s very important information.

At RedState author Bonchie also points out:

And while the narrative for a long time on the right was that these were Antifa operatives, that was always the wrong assumption, in my opinion. It always made much more sense that the men in black were federal agents, FBI or otherwise. Remember, this is the same FBI that essentially orchestrated the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping attempt. It’s the same FBI that had more agents at last week’s “Justice for January 6th” rally than there were actually protesters…

The government could clear this up in an instant. After all, they can track down random people across the country who stole a beer from Pelosi’s office, but we are to believe they just don’t know who those men are? Give me a break.

And what of the men who scaled the side of the Capitol – apparently at the same time it was easy to just walk right in? A commenter at RedState asks more questions:

Who were the six (6) young men who grappled their way up the front of the Capitol Building for the staged photo op?

Stairways to the building were clear at the same time. They did this for pre-planned effect, with cameras ready.

Why did they suddenly become drama queens – in coordination with the Capitol police firing flash bangs at the milling and peaceful crowd?

I’d like a statement on who those men were, too. Surely there are witnesses, even if the video doesn’t show their identities?

And I’d like a timeline of how the violence began, based on a comprehensive look at the videos (probably impossible at this point, since the feds have stonewalled their release so far and even now only a small portion have been released). Were the feds reacting to something the crowd did in terms of violence, or did the crowd react to something the feds did in terms of violence? This would seem to be important information, as well. I’ve yet to see an attempt to analyze this, although it’s certainly possible I’ve missed something.

If anyone knows where any of this is discussed in depth, please give a link.

The Biden administration wants Big Brother IRS to get even bigger

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that the Biden administration’s proposal to expand the spy powers of the feds and the IRS wouldn’t be popular even with most Democrats, if they knew about it:

The Biden proposal would drop the dollar threshold for transactions at which federal tax agents would be allowed to examine an individual’s private bank account from the present $10,000 to only $600.

Biden also wants to double the IRS workforce by adding 87,000 new government agents under the President’s “The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda.”

Biden and Democratic allies in Congress claim the actions are needed to close the “tax gap,” the difference between what current federal law requires to be collected by the government and how much actually goes into the Treasury.

Boozman [R-Ark] said Biden’s unprecedented explosion of new federal spending is the major reason behind Biden’s push to double the size of the IRS and give it virtually unlimited power to monitor how much income Americans earn and where they spend it, said Boozman…

Boozman said the $10,000 threshold was approved decades ago to enable the IRS to assist federal law enforcement efforts against drug cartels, terrorist groups, and organized crime rings.

Boozman and some other Republican senators have introduced a bill to stop it, but I can’t imagine that the bill can pass the Senate these days. I assume it would require 60 votes, because the filibuster is still in place, so even if Manchin and Sinema wanted to join the Republicans, I don’t think that would be enough. And all the other Democrat senators – whether they bill themselves as leftists or not – seem to march in lockstep with the left on virtually every bill.

You can cynically say that you don’t think the Republicans really care, either, and that it’s all theater, yada yada yada. But I disagree. I think the Republicans realize exactly how this will be used: to go after the Democrats’ enemies (the right), plus the middle class kulaks.

At Instapundit it’s been pointed out that the WaPo and the NY Times, those stalwart newspapers of record, have been somewhat silent on the matter. No surprise there, because I think they know this would be unpopular with some Democrats, as well, who don’t mind screaming “tax the rich” but who themselves are not all that keen on being monitored and on the idea of so many more IRS agents.

If you have any reasonably moderate Democrat friends and family, you might run this one by them and ask if they’re in favor of the administration’s plans. I’d be curious to hear their responses.