The mayor of Myrtle Beach, S.C., called out the federal government’s handling of the suspected Chinese spy balloon that drifted across the U.S. before being shot down off the Carolina coast on Saturday.
“Lots of you noticed some unplanned fireworks over Myrtle Beach today,” Mayor Brenda Bethune wrote in a Facebook post Saturday night. “While this was done in a manner that ensured the safety of our citizens, I do have concerns about how the federal government can allow a foreign adversary to fly uninterrupted from Montana to our doorstep.”
Bethune added that she hoped to “hear from our federal government how this happened and how they will prevent this, or anything like it, from happening again.”
Bethune’s remarks come after U.S. officials shot down the Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast Saturday afternoon and the Federal Aviation Administration paused flights from three airports in North Carolina and South Carolina due to security concerns.
The U.S. military is currently working to recover debris and intelligence information from the spy balloon.
U.S. officials confirmed the existence of the spy balloon on Thursday, saying that it was first spotted hovering over Montana the day before. Chinese officials acknowledged that the balloon was theirs but claimed the purpose of the device was meteorological research.
The incident has heightened tensions between the two countries, resulting in Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponing his trip to Beijing on Friday and a senior State Department official calling the incident a “clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law.”
The Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement the U.S.’s decision to shoot down the balloon was “a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice,” adding it has the right to make “further responses that are necessary” in relation to the incident.
Leon Panetta,a former defense secretary in theObama administration, questioned theBiden administration’s response to the suspected Chinese spy balloon that drifted across the U.S. before being shot down off the Carolina coast on Saturday.
During an appearance on CNN “Newsroom,” Panetta told host Jim Acosta that U.S. officials should’ve taken steps sooner and been more transparent with the American public about the balloon as President Biden “allowed it to simply cross over the country.”
“So the question obviously is, Pentagon said that there were risks here, I understand that argument that there were debris risks,” Panetta said. “At the same time. I think we should have acted earlier if our suspicions were valid, that this was in fact, on an intelligence mission.”
Biden reportedly ordered the balloon to be shot down on Wednesday, but those orders were not carried out until it was above the ocean. Panetta, who also served as CIA director under Obama, said that information should have been conveyed to Americans.
“It would have prevented some of the criticism that occurred later, and the American people I think are entitled to know just exactly what our adversaries are up to,” Panetta said. “So I think greater transparency would have helped the White House as well.”
Biden faces a rash of criticism over the weekend, mostly from Republicans who said he acted too slowly in shooting down the balloon, allowing it to drift over areas with sensitive military sites.
The incident comes amid high tensions between Washington and Beijing, and as Democrats and Republicans seek to take actions to curb the Chinese threat, both militarily and economically.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his trip to Beijing on Friday and a senior State Department official calling the incident a “clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law.”
U.S. fighter jets finally shot down the suspected spy balloon off the Carolina coast Saturday afternoon and the Federal Aviation Administration paused flights from three airports in North Carolina and South Carolina due to security concerns.
The U.S. military is currently working to recover debris and intelligence information from the spy balloon.
Panetta told Acosta that he hopes U.S. officials will tell their Chinese counterparts in the future that this type of incident “cannot happen again” and “that we will indeed shoot it down much earlier than we did this time around.”
Russia and Iran plan toestablish a joint drone manufacturing facility inside Russia, according to a weekend Wall Street Journal report, which comes following US and European efforts to target Iranian-made drones going to Russia with sanctions.
The Iranian kamikaze drones which have for many months now been pummeling Ukraine's energy infrastructure, such as the Shahed-136 drones, cost as little as $20,000 to make. According the WSJ a plant established on Russian soil to ramp up Iranian-designed drone production would result in an additional 6,000 of them rolling of the line, for deployment by Russian forces in Ukraine.
Reportedly the agreement to establish manufacturing operations in Russia was inked with Iran back in November, when the Iranian drones and their devastating attacks in Ukraine were focus of international media attention and condemnation.
But the new plans for a drone factory could result in new, more effective UAVs, reports WSJ further. "As part of their emerging military alliance, the officials said, a high-level Iranian delegation flew to Russia in early January to visit the planned site for the factory and hammer out details to get the project up-and-running," according to the report.
"The two countries are aiming to build a faster drone that could pose new challenges for Ukrainian air defenses, the officials said."
It's also an effort to sidestep what the US administration called its plans to "choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones" as US forces help "Ukraine’s military to target the sites where the drones are being prepared for launch," according to prior statements from officials in The New York Times.
Ukrainian forces regularly announce that their anti-air defenses intercept inbound Iranian drones. This has possibly happened many dozens or perhaps hundreds of times, and yet it remains that the anti-air systems needed for such intercepts are many times more expensive than the relatively cheap but effective drones by comparison.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has been a hotly debated topic over the last few years. The seemingly unquestioned march towards corporate utopia has met with resistance among those who oppose the idea that government oligarchs should dictate the affairs of private business firms. The long-term effects of the ESG movement are largely ignored by the mainstream.
ESG is largely justified on the basis that corporations and financial institutions should be socially responsible. They should work obsessively to address the perceived menaces of climate change, racism, sexism, and a host of subjects. Our benevolent political and economic elite define what is virtuous and what is not for a grateful public.
Corporations are compelled to enact policies that will reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, eliminate perceived negative economic outcomes against aggrieved groups, and be “sustainable,” as well as other virtuous goals. It matters little to the “select group of human beings,” as John Kerry called them, who are tasked with “saving the planet” that many of their solutions to these existential challenges are far more harmful than their worst-case scenarios.
The Friedman Doctrine, named after the eminent Chicago School economist, states that the sole responsibility of businesses is to maximize long-term shareholder value. I was exposed to this view in 1980 when I attended the University of Toronto’s Master of Business Administration program. I was surprised by the moral certainty and simplicity implied by the statement.
I remember our professor being challenged by my class on two fronts. One was the issue of charitable donations. That argument was quickly dispatched when it was pointed out that corporate CEO’s had no moral right to give away shareholders’ money. It was not theirs to give. If the benevolent CEO wanted to make charitable donations out of his own pocket he was free to do so. Shareholders had this same ability.
The other argument we put forward appeared a more difficult one for our professor to argue against, or so I believed. What about “social responsibility”? Surely, companies should not pollute, produce dangerous products, or underpay their employees. Without going into minute details, he argued that corporations were subject to the discipline of the marketplace, laws, and regulations (albeit at that time over-regulation). Underpay your workers? They would be hired by others willing to pay them more and your business would suffer due to poor employee productivity. Dump toxins into lakes and rivers? There were laws against that and the bad publicity would harm profitability. It would be counterproductive for a company seeking long-term shareholder value to produce hazardous products.
What is clear is that the Friedman Doctrine, also called shareholder theory, maximizes not only long-term shareholder value, but economic utility as a whole. If the senior management of firms did not maximize shareholder value they would be in breach of their duties. I contend that if the Friedman Doctrine maximizes economic utility, then ESG syllogistically yields suboptimal outcomes. In fact, the negative effects of ESG will be catastrophic. Those who doubt that contention have never noticed the correlation between a nation’s average income per person and life expectancy. ESG will literally kill people, if it is not already doing so.
ESG is socialism by stealth insofar as it enables central government economic planning without having to publicly acknowledge such and deal with the unpleasant repercussions of property confiscation. In the past, democracies could merely nationalize companies by forcing shareholders to sell their shares to the government. This was done frequently with products and services which politicians deemed essential, like utilities. In some cases, such as post offices, governments would simply provide a service that the public sector could not compete with due to heavy government subsidies or legislation to prevent private competition.
Totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union would simply steal the property of owners for the public good and then attempt to manage those entities. Absent the need to compete, satisfy the consumer, appoint managers based on merit or earn a profit, these entities performed poorly. Any pushback was met with a trip to Siberia or a bullet to the head. Some socialistically inclined totalitarian regimes realized that it was far more efficient to allow the private management system to remain and be coerced, violently if necessary, to do the will of the government. Profits could easily be confiscated covertly by a system of corruption, or merely taxed away.
In a sense, ESG is a novel and brilliant way to place private corporations under the yolk of government. No longer would governments have to deal with having to pay shareholders a fair price. They would not have to use the threat of physical violence to coerce managers to do their bidding. The supporters of ESG merely had to bully companies into adopting policies that destroyed shareholder value by psychologically manipulating employees, shareholders, and the public into believing that these activities were virtuous.
Of course, all too many corporate leaders learned to “love their enslavement.” Why wouldn’t they? Instead of competing in a brutal capitalistic world, they had their markets protected by government dictate creating defacto monopolies and oligopolies. Senior managers would be heavily compensated for playing along, creating a billionaire and multi-millionaire parasite class.
Of course, this brave new world of “stakeholder capitalism” comes at a terrible cost. Economic efficiency declines precipitously. Also, this form of socialism is a huge transfer of wealth to senior managers and corrupt politicians at the expense of shareholders. Whereas as the old Soviet Union engaged in murderous robbery, and the methodology of fascist regimes were more akin to blackmail, stakeholder capitalism resembles a confidence game. In a confidence game, suckers willfully hand over their money in the hopes that the con man will give them a positive return.
ESG is an economic and moral affront to the very concept of private ownership. Shareholders are robbed. Their pension plans end up with less value than they otherwise would have. The managers they entrusted with their wealth, whether they are company executives or portfolio managers of their retirement funds, are betraying them. Yet those people will grow fabulously wealthy, not by excellence but by government edict. Government officials decide the winners and losers in a charade that resembles capitalism the way professional wrestling resembles authentic combat sports.
It is difficult to assess the numeric affect ESG will have on GDP over the next generation. It is early days and we hope and expect that this terrible idea will join the ranks of other missteps like Lysenkoism and apartheid. We will be significantly poorer in a generation than we would be without ESG. Therefore, life expectancy will be significantly lower than if we avoided ESG, especially for the poor in both developed and less developed nations.
ESG will literally kill millions. To a narcissistic and Machiavellian elite, however, this would be a small price to pay for personal wealth, diversity, and the average global temperature being half a degree less than predicted by climate change models.
The Biden administration’s new Department of Labor (DOL) rule allowing 401(k) managers to invest in Environmental Social Governance (ESG) funds will harm two-thirds of America’s retirement accounts, according to Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Feb. 1.
Kobach said that the Jan. 30 change was being done “in the name of this left-wing partisan agenda.”
He said, “There should be no partisan agenda when it comes to investing our funds. It should be done based purely on financial return without any regard to whether it helps left-wing causes or right-wing causes.”
Kansas is one of the 25 states suing the Biden administration over its rule allowing 401(k) managers leeway to invest in ESG funds by stipulating that the managers can decide to invest by considering “nonpecuniary benefits.”
Meaning they can make investing decisions where the benefits aren’t related to financial gain.
Republican Kris Kobach is Kansas’s attorney general. (Courtesy of Kobach campaign)
“What this latest rule does is it basically says you can consider these non-pecuniary factors when deciding where to invest the retirees’ funds,” Kobach said.
“And our lawsuit says, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that violates the express terms of [the Employee Retirement Income Security Act] ERISA,’ which is the 1973 Act that President [Gerald Ford] signed into law that is designed to protect the employee retirement savings in these funds.
“And we’re saying, ‘Look, you, as an agency—and it’s the Department of Labor under Biden that’s doing this—as an agency, you can enact regulations, but your regulations cannot contradict the exact express terms of the law.
“Section 404 A of the law says very clearly that [401(k) managers] have to act for the economic benefit of the retiree, for the person whose assets are being invested.”
An ‘Illegal Rule’
According to Kobach, the new ESG rule is illegal as it didn’t go through Congress.
“It’s illegal … an agency cannot contradict the terms of the law that gives the agency the authority to act,” Kobach said.
“If President Biden wanted to do this, he should try to change the law. He should try to change the terms of the ERISA statute and allow ESG considerations to weigh into the investment of these funds.
“I think that would be a horrible idea because it would mean we would gain less return on our retirement assets. But he can’t do this unilaterally. As an executive, he can’t use his agency’s regulatory authority to do this. He has to go through Congress to do it.”
Circling back to the impact of the ESG rule, Kobach added, “[The rule] basically means that [fund managers] can take into account things other than financial value, financial return, or pecuniary interests.
Financial Return Only
“So, it opens up the door for the investment adviser who thinks, ‘Well, you know, I think, you know, saving the Earth from climate change is a long-term interest that my investment strategy ought to consider.’
“Well, that’s not what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re supposed to be looking at the financial return and the financial return only.”
Kobach added about the impact on retirement accounts, “What that means in real terms is that companies that have anything to do with oil or fossil fuels, anything to do with firearms, anything to do, increasingly now with things like agriculture, and the beef industry, are going to be excluded.
“And that means that in almost every case, the return on investment for those funds is going to be lower because you’re taking investment options off the table.”
Kobach said he’s confident the states’ case against Biden will succeed.
Bipartisan Pushback
In addition to the states’ lawsuit challenging the legality of the Biden administration’s new ESG rule, every GOP Senator—plus Democrat Joe Manchin (W.Va.)—signed on to a disapproval resolution, protesting against the DOL directive.
The resolution alleges that the Biden administration is putting the pensions of 152 million Americans at risk to support “climate and social justice.”
“A number of studies have shown that ESG investing policies have worse rates of return. For example, a study by UCLA and NYU found that over the past five years, ESG funds underperformed the broader market, averaging a 6.3 percent return compared to 8.9 percent return respectively.
“Additionally, in comparison to other investment plans, ESG investors generally end up paying higher costs for worse performance,” a statement from Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) says.
Facebook and Instagram have threatened to restrict or ban Project Veritas from their platforms, both owned by Meta, after a journalist confronted a senior YouTube official about the removal of a video about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines.
On Friday, the nonprofit journalism organization Project Veritas published footage that appears to show one of its reporters confronting YouTube’s vice president of Global Trust and Safety, Matt Halprin.
The video shows the reporter approaching Halprin in public regarding YouTube’s removal of a video featuring a senior Pfizer official, unaware he was being recorded, discussing how the company is considering mutating the COVID-19 virus to develop new vaccines proactively.
Halprin refused to answer the reporter’s inquiries and instead told the reporter not to touch him while also threatening to call the police, before walking away.
Facebook and Instagram warned Project Veritas that its video of Halprin violates “Community Standards.”
“We have these standards because we want everyone to feel safe, respected, and welcome,” the warning said. “If your content goes against our Community Standards again, your account may be restricted or disabled.”
Project Veritas also announced Friday that it had been “wrongfully locked out” of its Twitter account for two hours over a post that featured the video of one of its journalists questioning Halprin. The organization said it received a warning from Twitter that the post was “abuse and harassment.”
Twitter later apologized for the move, calling it an “error,” according to a screenshot shared by O’Keefe.
In this image from video, YouTube’s vice president of Global Trust and Safety Matt Halprin avoids inquiries by Project Veritas reporter Christian Hartsock about removing a video from YouTube. (Courtesy of Project Veritas)
Halprin Video
Halprin appeared to be out for a walk or run on a suburban street when he was confronted by Project Veritas journalist Christian Hartsock.
When Hartsock introduced himself as a reporter from Project Veritas, Halprin immediately seemed to recognize the organization and quickly walked away.
“Why did you ban our videotape of a Pfizer director talking about mutating viruses?” Hartsock asked, following Halprin. “How much is Pfizer paying you to run cover for them? Is YouTube brought to us by Pfizer?” he added, getting no responses.
Halprin, who was dressed in a hooded sweatshirt, pulled the hood over his mouth.
“Matt, you’re the global head of trust and safety at YouTube. Why don’t you trust the public with a matter that absolutely concerns their safety?” Hartsock asked.
Hartsock told Halprin that millions would see this interview and “your cowardice,” challenging him to “be brave” and answer some of the questions. Halprin batted away the microphone, remaining silent.
“They’re going to see your absolute contempt for the public trust and they’re going to see your absolute disregard for public safety. Are you sure this is how you wish to portray yourself?” Hartsock asked while walking alongside Halprin.
Hartsock asked Halprin if he knows how much ad revenue YouTube takes in from Pfizer. “How much was at stake?” he asked.
“A Pfizer director talking about mutating viruses, and you don’t want the American public or the world to know about it. Why not?” Hartsock asked, following the question up by asking if Halprin has “any ethical responsibility” to people all around the world.
“Why does the public not deserve to see that videotape?” Hartsock asked.
Halprin remained silent throughout the inquiries, only speaking at one point to say: “You touched me. That’s not something you want to do.” Hartsock asked if that was a threat, to which Halprin responded: “No. I just said I’d call the police if you accost me.”
Walker Video
The Project Veritas video that YouTube removed was originally released on Jan. 25. It showed Dr. Jordon Walker, a director of research and development at Pfizer, telling an undercover reporter for Project Veritas that the pharmaceutical company was exploring the idea of mutating COVID-19 to preemptively develop new vaccines.
However, Walker acknowledged the risk and noted that scientists at Pfizer were being cautious in their approach.
“One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so we could create—preemptively develop new vaccines, right?” Walker said.
“If we’re going to do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine—no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating [expletive] viruses,” he added.
In this image from video, Pfizer Director of Research and Development Dr. Jordon Walker speaks about mutating COVID-19. (Courtesy of Project Veritas)
Walker suggested that the company was proceeding slowly and being controlled, so as not to advertise its intentions and avoid creating an unintended mutation. He also stated his belief that COVID-19 would continue to be a source of revenue for Pfizer.
“Obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much. I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations,” Walker said. “You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest,” he also said, adding that COVID-19 is going to be “a cash cow for us for a while going forward.”
Bowen Yang played the deflated bag of gas, who was swatting away seagulls in the ocean after falling from great heights.
Well, you got me. Congrats, you shot a balloon,” Yang told MSNBC’s Katy Tur, played by Chloe Fineman.
“I entertain you people for four days and then get shot by Biden? I can’t believe I’m Joe’s Osama,” Yang said.
“Everyone’s being surveilled constantly, but it’s always ‘shoot the balloon!,’ never ‘unplug Alexa,'” he complained.
A Pentagon official and aviation expert played by Kenan Thompson — armed with a small party balloon as a prop — stopped by the newscast to gravely discuss the popping mission.
“The balloon was somehow able to get past our West Coast anti-balloon defense system: the Seattle Space Needle,” Thompson said.
Chloe Fineman played MSNBC’s Katy Tur.YouTube/SNLKenan Thompson joked about the ballon getting past the “West Coast anti-balloon defense system: the Seattle Space Needle.”YouTube/SNL
“Once it was here, we were able to keep an eye on it with our sophisticated tracking technology of going like this,” Thompson deadpanned as he tilted his head upwards.
The story was revisited on “Weekend Update,” as anchor Colin Jost cracked that the whole ordeal was history’s most complicated gender reveal party.
“And bad news for China, it’s a girl,” he joked, alluding to the country’s longtime one-child policy, that resulted in mass infanticide.
“I can’t believe I’m Joe’s Osama,” Yang joked.YouTube/SNL
Host Pedro Pascal gave a big shout out to his native Chile, but asked his 34 first cousins that still live there to stop sharing his phone number with strangers.
Musical guest Coldplay and Jacob Collier performed a mashup of their songs “Human Heart” and “Fix You.” The band also played “The Astronaut,” backed by the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers choir.
The show was set to return to the airwaves on Feb. 25 with host Woody Harrelson and musical guest Jack White.
