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Chicago Alderman and her chief of staff indicted on bribery charges

Accused of accepting bribes in exchange for political favors, a Chicago Alderman and her chief of staff were indicted Thursday on federal bribery charges. The chief of staff was also charged in a separate scheme to purchase Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at a discount.

According to the indictment, Chicago Alderman Carrie Austin and her chief of staff, Chester Wilson Jr., conspired with construction contractors offering to provide free home improvements for assistance in acquiring city development projects between 2016 and 2019. Both Austin and Wilson allegedly abused their positions by accepting bribes, including free home improvement materials, home improvement services, furniture, and appliances.

Between December 2016 and February 2019, multiple text messages and emails recorded conversations between the public officials and the contractors with requests for kitchen cabinets, bathroom tiles, granite countertops, etc. in exchange for help obtaining city development projects. Both Austin and Wilson allegedly made illicit requests for home improvement materials and services at properties owned by each of them.

Questioned by FBI agents on June 19, 2019, Austin allegedly gave false statements when she denied receiving bribes from the contractors. Austin only admitted to receiving a cake from one of the contractors.

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Sociopaths at Time Magazine Want to Banish Air Conditioning

Far-left Time Magazine, one of the country’s chief conspiracy theorists pushing the Climate Change Hoax, openly advocates having air-conditioning banished.

In a lengthy piece of hysterical, anti-science scare-mongering that tries to turn the greatest life-saving, quality of life-improving invention since penicillin into a racist (that’s not a joke) villain, Time comes right out and says it — and naturally does so from its air-conditioned offices (I don’t link junk science):

The troubled history of air-conditioning suggests not that we chuck it entirely but that we focus on public cooling, on public comfort, rather than individual cooling, on individual comfort. Ensuring that the most vulnerable among the planet’s human inhabitants can keep cool through better access to public cooling centers, shade-giving trees, safe green spaces, water infrastructure to cool, and smart design will not only enrich our cities overall, it will lower the temperature for everyone. It’s far more efficient this way.

To do so, we’ll have to re-orient ourselves to the meaning of air-conditioning. And to comfort. Privatized air-conditioning survived the ozone crisis, but its power to separate—by class, by race, by nation, by ability—has survived, too. Comfort for some comes at the expense of the life on this planet.

It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it.

Okay, number one: fuck you. Number two: fuck you. Number three: Climate Change, Global Warming, or whatever they’re calling it today, is a hoax. Climatologists, scientists, and other so-called experts are 0-44 with their alarmist climate predictions, so let me assure you that if you try to take my air conditioning away based on fake prediction number 45, things are going to get ugly. Real ugly. Number four: Did I mention, fuck you?

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Biden’s pick for German ambassador is president of university that paid him nearly $1M

President Biden’s nominee to be the next ambassador to Germany is an Ivy League president whose university paid him nearly $1 million for an honorary professor gig where he was seldom seen, it was revealed Friday.

University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, who has headed the Philadelphia-based institution since 2004, is the first envoy to a G-7 nation to be nominated by Biden.

If confirmed by the Senate, the 71-year-old Gutmann would be the second woman to serve as America’s chief diplomat in Berlin. (Robin Quinville has served as acting US ambassador to Germany since June of last year.)

Biden accepted an honorary professorship at UPenn after he left office as vice president in 2017. He held the post until April 2019, when he launched his successful presidential campaign.

In July 2019, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Biden was paid $911,643 by Penn. The student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, counted just nine on-campus appearances by the then-former senator and vice president between February 2017 and February 2019. Five of those events featured cameos by Gutmann.

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The Descent Into (Utter) Madness

Little wonder that here and there sanity nostalgia is gripping the Western world, at least those isolated portions of it that are not internalising the sinister “new normal.” But it is seemingly to no avail. All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilisation into an asylum.

As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just broken one of the cardinal rules of his “Politics and the English Language,” but not his final injunction to “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”) of politicised mind-bending. The sort of language we are permitted to use circumscribes the thinking that we shall be allowed to engage in. The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat the mind and eventually to subjugate it.

A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious words and phrases as “picnic” and “you guys,” for being “oppressive”. “Picnic” is prohibited because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.

The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in bewilderment: “What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word ‘picnic’ at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed – S.K.] ‘trigger warning’? Loss of tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?”

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A Case of “Intellectual Capture?” On YouTube’s Demonetization Of Bret Weinstein

Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Donald Trump’s social media suspension, Apple and Amazon’s kneecapping of Parler, the removal of real raw footage from the January 6th riots, and others.

This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes.

Profiled in this space two weeks ago, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying — both biologists — host the podcast DarkHorse, which by any measure is among the more successful independent media operations in the country. They have two YouTube channels, a main channel featuring whole episodes and livestreams, and a “clips” channel featuring excerpts from those shows.

Between the two channels, they’ve been flagged 11 times in the last month or so. Specifically, YouTube has honed in on two areas of discussion it believes promote “medical misinformation.” The first is the potential efficacy of the repurposed drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. The second is the third rail of third rails, i.e. the possible shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.

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