Gov Corruption
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RELATED: Speaking of Disney, we face a big problem with ‘think tanks.’ For a deeper dive into the outsized role of big corporations like Disney in the lawmaking process, you might be interested in Brian Berletic’s recent video (or article. I’ll link both).
YouTube: Brian Berletic explains how think tanks draft nearly all federal laws (34:13).
Brian Berletic, who lives in Thailand, is a heterodox geopolitical commenter whose thoughts frequently challenge conventional narratives. He provides alternative perspectives on global events, especially related to U.S. foreign policy, international conflicts, and the roles of various countries in global affairs. He has been a Proxy War critic from the jump.
Berletic’s article (linked below) and his companion YouTube video (linked above) are both titled, “Who Really Controls US Foreign Policy? While he focused on foreign policy, it is all true for U.S. domestic policy as well. The gist is that over 1,000 NGO ‘think tanks,’ like the RAND Corporation and a dizzying array of Soros-funded groups with banal, helpful-sounding names, constantly lobby Congress, which winds up rubber stamping spoon-fed legislation, often without Congressmen even reading the bills they happily sponsor.
It’s not clear at this point whether any meaningful legislation was actually drafted by Congress, as opposed to non-transparent, unelected, billionaire-financed elites infesting DC think-tank groups.
To be clear, I do not agree with all Berletic’s opinions. But this article is a great start in understanding the precise mechanism of how leftwing oligarchs and captured corporations (Disney) pull the levers of power in Washington. Helpfully, Berletic also offered some suggestions for what to do about it.
☕️ EXPENSIVE THINGS ☙ Friday, August 9, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Stock market recovers as Middle East tensions recede; Vice President impersonates groundhog; Butler PD's eye-opening bodycam videos; Disney losing again as park suffers; great legal news; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
U.S. Secret Service Breaks into Massachusetts Hair Salon and Tapes Over Security Camera, Allegedly to Let People Use the Bathroom During Kamala Harris Fundraiser
The salon’s owner, Alicia Powers, had already complied with the Secret Service’s requests by closing her business for the day to accommodate the security needs of the event, which was being held at the nearby Colonial Theatre.
“They had a bunch of people in and out of here doing a couple of bomb sweeps again — totally understand what they have to do, due to the nature of the situation,” Powers told Business Insider. “And at that point, my team felt like it was a little bit chaotic, and we just made the decision to close for Saturday.”
However, what transpired next left Powers feeling violated and betrayed. According to Powers, Secret Service agents took it upon themselves to enter her locked salon, use her bathroom, and tamper with her security cameras—all without her consent.
Security footage obtained by Business Insider showed a female Secret Service agent taping over the lens of a Ring security camera located at the salon’s entrance.
The agents then proceeded to break into the salon, triggering the security alarm and using the facilities for nearly two hours before leaving the building completely unsecured.
“When I got back to my phone, it was actually closer to 2:30 before I caught that. When I saw that people were in here I literally got in my car I raced here they had already essentially cleaned up and left,” Powers told iBerkshire.
“When I got back here, my front door was left unlocked. I don’t know how long it was unlocked for and that’s essentially the the gist of what happened. They were walking around in here for a good hour and a half, my alarm was going off the entire time, that should have alarmed somebody that maybe you shouldn’t be in the building.”
The Housing Theory of Childless Cat Ladies
Would a YIMBY building boom rejuvenate urban family life or produce sterile, megacity hellscapes?"Housing costs are one of the biggest line items in raising a child because kids tend to take space and we know when there are plausibly exogenous shocks to housing costs, that fertility responds," Stone tells Reason.
As evidence, he cites a study of changes in fertility rates in the United Kingdom during the Great Recession, where government policy interventions dramatically lowered the costs of mortgages for some, but not all, homeowners.
Households that were eligible for lower mortgage rates saw increased birth rates. The literature shows a similar dynamic for renters too, says Stone. When rents drop, births go up.
In his Atlantic article, Thompson cites a recent research brief from the Economic Innovation Group showing that while high-cost, high-regulation urban areas have seen a huge drop in their young child population, quickly growing exurban counties in the Sun Belt (where housing supply is more elastic) are adding lots of toddlers.
The relationship between housing regulation and housing supply is also pretty robust and straightforward: more regulation leads to less supply, which in turn drives up home prices and rents.
Reducing regulation would increase supply and lower home prices and rents. The most straightforward assumption would be that this would lead to an increase in the number of children people have.
So case closed?
Housing Density
Not necessarily.In a recent post, the popular pro-natalist X account More Births pulls together a lot of international data on density and fertility to argue that "apartments in high-rises are inherently anti-family. The more of them you build, the lower fertility will be."
In an article for the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), Stone conducts a more thorough parsing of the data and comes to a similar conclusion.
File this story under more great news for freedom; we are enjoying the first fruits of the post-Chevron generation.
Even if you think noncompetes are anti-competitive and unfair to employees, federal Executive-branch agencies should not have the power to rewrite major chunks of ancient contract law because fairness. If it must be done, let the states do it. (In fact, most states already have detailed laws governing noncompetes, which tend to be employee-friendly.)
The FTC’s rule was indefensibly broad. The blanket ban left the agency’s lawyers with almost nothing to work with. The lawyers tried running the ‘parade of horribles’ play, by burying the judge under 100 different examples of obviously unfair contracts. But to counter that play, the plaintiffs only had to find one single contract that made sense.
They did. So the judge asked the FTC a completely predictable question: why did you ban all noncompetes, instead of just the bad kinds? The FTC’s answer was gibberish and gobbledygook, hence illogical.
I bet they won’t appeal, even though FTC spokesperson Victoria Graham said the disappointed agency is “seriously considering a potential appeal.” It was a give-away; too many weasel words: seriously considering and potential appeal. It’s now a post-Chevron world, and they know it.
☕️ COACHED ☙ Thursday, August 22, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Daily DNC update for non-watchers; betting markets begin shifting; FTC loses in agency powers case; WaPo dishes truth about peace talks; Trump expands platform; CNN slips in Kamala truth bomb; more.
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Well, it IS Vermont.
