Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Toward A Definition Of Trans Ideology

The excerpt embedded above from yesterday's Morning Meeting with panelists Mark Halperin, Dan Turrentine, and Sean Spicer is a good indication of how clueless mainstreram commentators have been over trans ideology. At 2:20:

HALPERIN: There are people in MAGA who believe that trans culture, or a strain of trans culture, is violent and wants radical change in this country and is using violence to get it. That's a strong belief amongst many in MAGA, and thqt this has been a story that's been covered up by the left and the media for a long time, and that based on what they know, that's at issue here, and they want to go hard after anything that they think is a violent subculture of the trans community and those that support them. What do you think of that, and what do you think the Democratic party's posture should be on that strong belief held by those people??

TURRENTINE: I don't know of other instances of trans people lashing out like that. Perhaps there are some. I don't know. I mean, obviously this issue has been part of our politics now for the last two years, front and center, and I imagine it's going to be part of our politics for the foreseeable future. I don't see examples of the trans community engaging in violence. I know what people in the trans community feel conmes the other way a lot, but I would; hope there is not this kind of, you know, . . . I think it is going to be part of the debate now.

SPICER: There's two examples right off the top of my head, one is Nashville, two is Catholic Annunciation Church last week in Minnesota.

Well, at least give Halperin credit for raising the issue, but on one hand, Turrentine basically says, "It's news to me," while Spicer -- who is a longtime professional Republican edged out early from Trump 45 -- has only the most basic grasp of it. But even Newsweek was on the case back in 2023:

A United Nations investigator is among several voices raising the alarm about a rise in far-left transgender activists, amid reports of some intimidating and physically assaulting those who disagree with them.

In an interview with the British Daily Mail newspaper on Sunday, Reem Alsalem, the international body's special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said it was an "increasing trend" that she had been observing, calling on officials to protect freedom of speech regarding conversations around gender.

. . . The debate around transgender inclusion has often become heated, with both sides facing incendiary remarks and threats of violence. Some transgender activists have distanced themselves from "extreme" rhetoric.

Trantifa is a portmanteau of "transgender" and "Antifa," the latter being itself a truncation of "anti-fascist" and a left-wing movement that rose to prominence in 2017. The antifa movement has faced criticism from right-wing figures, including Donald Trump, who have accused them of acts of violence.

In March, I was making the point that a remarkable number of anti-Tesla vandals and firebombers were trans. In one post, I linked to a piece at Hot Air that identified three, and I added a fourth, but that was before I saw a fifth, Owen McIntire of Kansas City, MO, whose case I brought up yesterday. In fact, there have been additional shootings, at least one at a school, involving trans perps -- Alec McKinney, a trans 16-year-old, killed one and injured eight at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado in 2019.

In fact, there's no authoritative total of trans-involved school shootings, arsons, or other violent crimes. When I go searching for others, I inevitably find them. The conventional response is along the line of "only 1% of all murders are committed by trans people", but that neglects the very small number of trans people in the population. The number of these who go postal seems to be notable.

The Kirk assassination in Utah has surfaced local trans activist groups that appear to have a violent agenda.

''

Further,

[A]s state law enforcement and FBI now say they are expanding their investigation to identify if there was a network working with Tyler Robinson (which seems obvious based on the Discord chat), attention is now being paid to militant transgender groups and NGO’s in the Utah area who seem to connect to Robinson and his transgender boyfriend Lance Twiggs.

. . . “Armed Queers SLC” and a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) known as “Utah Global Diplomacy,” partly funded by the UN appear to be two groups in the region with connections to the overall militant transgender movement: a preliminary motive being explored by federal investigators.

Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Stephen Miller has indicated that he will pursue the role dark-money-funded NGOs have played in what amounts to domestic terrorism, especially as it appears to have been connected with the Kirk assassination. But basic to the trans self-image appears to be the idea that some type of vengeance needs to be secured:
But against whom? For what? Who "put them in the wrong body", for instance? The overall justification for violence seems elusive indeed -- we can acknowledge that trans people have a tendency toward it, but the reasons seem to be something added after the fact. They basically just want to be violent. Isn't that odd?

posted by test @ September 16, 2025   0 Comments

Monday, September 15, 2025

Just What Is "Gender Affierming Care"? And What Is "Trans Ideology"?

These are questions that nobody's asked in the wake of horrific shootings within just two weeks, the Annunciation Church attack on August 27 and the Charlie Kirk assassination on September 10. The Annunciation shooter, Robin Westman, accordiong to reports, had previously undergone some type of medical treatment for gender transition, although he had apparently discontinued it at some point:

In a twisted handwritten journal he shared on YouTube before the massacre — much of which is encrypted in a homespun code of Russian Cyrillic script and English words — Westman groaned about his long hair and his decision to transition.

“I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself,” he wrote, according to a translation by The Post.

. . . “I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.”

. . . “I regret being trans.. I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that,” he said.

Elsewhere, he wrote:

Gender and weed [redacted] up my head. I wish I never tried experimenting with either. Don’t let your kids smoke weed or change gender until they are like seventeen.

Lance Twiggs, the trans romantic partner of Tyler Robinson, apparently referred to hormone treatment as part of his medical program for transition on social media:

In November 2024, Twiggs posted about his anxiety with injecting cross-sex hormones. Replying to a thread on injection pain, he wrote: “seriously. sometimes it’s just muscle memory, sometimes i gotta get buzzed on something so i’m not too anxious about it.”

In another post, he appears to have at least a general familiarity with hormone treatments:

Old Reddit comments linked to Lance Twiggs under the username “lancelott3” have resurfaced, showing discussions about hormone replacement therapy (HRT). In one post, Twiggs explained that hip growth depends largely on genetics, while HRT can slow beard growth but not fully stop facial hair.

Back in May, I discussed the case of Owen McIntire of Kansas City, MO, who allegedly firebombed a Tesla dealership but was released from custody "due to 'serious and ongoing' medical needs — which include gender-affirming medical care that requires daily medication as well as mental health support, according to KMBC." Just what did his medical treatment consist of? Are there any similarities among the treatments violent trans offenders have received?

Similar questions have been raised over Audrey/Aiden Hale, the female-to-male trans shooter at the Nashville, TN Covenant School, when it was revealed that she had been a mental health patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center from the age of six to the day of her death. That therapy presumably included "gender affirming care", but questions that were raised at the time have never been answered.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican representative for the state of Georgia, tweeted a statement regarding the shooting, implying that the shooter's testosterone level was a reason for the shootings.

"How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?" she tweeted. "Everyone can stop blaming guns now."

Journalist Andy Ngô also suggested that the hormones may have contributed to the crime.

"Was the #Nashville trans mass shooter on cross-sex hormones (in this case, testosterone)? Women committing mass shootings are exceptionally rare, but if Audrey "Aiden" Hale took testosterone, it could explain part of the male-typical mass violence the Christian school tragically experienced," he tweeted.

The Tyler Robinson-Lance Twiggs connection brought renewed attention to the 2024 case of another Washington, UT male-to-female trans offender:

Mia Bailey, 28, was arrested Wednesday and charged with 11 felony counts related to the double homicide of parents Joseph, 70, and Gail Bailey, 69, and the attempted murder of her brother, according to the Washington City Police Department.

"We have some good news. We have the suspect in custody." St. George Police Officer Tiffany Mitchell announced in a Facebook live broadcast, telling residents of the Bloomington Hills and Fort Pierce they were no longer urged to shelter in place. "Everyone is safe. No one else was injured."

. . . Bailey filed a petition to change her name and gender legally in July 2023, according to 5th District Court records reviewed by KSL. She was granted both in August 2023, with the court writing that "there is clear and convincing evidence that [Bailey] has transitioned to the sex sought in the petition and a uniform manner for at least six months," including "evidence of appropriate clinical care or treatment for gender transitioning or change provided by a licensed medical professional."

According to The Gaterway Pundit,

Robinson’s parents and Bailey’s parents both lived in Washington, Utah, approximately 5 minutes apart, in a small town of 27,993 people as of 2020.

. . . Mia Bailey, 28, born Collin Troy Bailey, identifies as transgender and has confessed to fatally shooting his parents, Joseph and Gail Bailey, in their Washington City home at 1039 E. Chinook Drive, St. George, on June 18, 2024.

. . . In a later incident while in custody, Bailey was accused of assaulting two correctional officers in October 2024.

But this brings up another question. Tyler Robinson and Lance Twiggs belonged to what appears to have been close-knit social media groups whose posts suggest foreknowledge of the Kirk shooting:

[A]s details emerge, a web of disturbing connections points to a possible broader conspiracy involving online radicalism, transgender networks, and even hints of foreknowledge among left-wing activists.

Adding to the chilling narrative are Robinson's own flippant jokes made in Discord chats with 20 other users while he was on the run. He reportedly quipped to friends that a "doppelganger" was responsible for the shooting after the FBI released images of the suspect.

. . . On September 9, an account under the handle "NajraGalvz" posted, "Charlie Kirk is coming to my college tomorrow I rlly hope someone evaporates him literally," followed several hours later by, "Lets just say something big will happen tomorrow," accompanied by a grinning dog image.

Earlier, on September 5, a social media user named "Fujoshincel" teased "something BIG coming soon" and urged followers to watch the news; after the shooting on September 10, the same account gloated, "Well that’s that" and "Another Chud Bites the Dust."

A transgender user followed by Robinsom's boyfriend Lance Twiggs on X, and who followed them back, celebrated with "WE F-CKING DID IT" as reports emerged, followed by "LET IT DIE. LET IT DIE" when Kirk was reported to be in critical condition.

According to the Urban Dictionaty, "a 'chud' is a person, usually male, who holds reactionary or far-right sociopolitical views." I asked the web, "What is trans ideology?" "AI" replied,

The term "trans ideology" is a pejorative and misleading phrase used primarily by opponents of transgender rights and visibility to frame gender identity as a political movement rather than an aspect of human diversity. There is no single, unified "trans ideology," but rather a range of academic concepts, social movements, and lived experiences related to gender identity and expression.

I'll agree that there's no single, unified "trans ideology", in large part because the most visible trans people we've begun to recognize are deeply addled. On the other hand, in the manifestos and journals they leave behind, as well as in social media posts to trans-affirming groups, there seems to be a deep sense of aggression against the non-trans-affirming world, to the point that there seems to be a general consensus that parents and other figures who don't accept trans identity should be killed, or at least are the ones at fault for the violence trans people commit.

Certainly we don't see any internalized sense that these views are in any way bizarre. Could recreational drug use, mentioned by both Robin Westman and Lance Twiggs, somehow increase the bad effects of hormone treatment? And why do we see such frequent conjunction of gender affirmng treatment with therapy for serious psychiatric problems, as in the cases of Audrey Hale and Owen McIntire? To what extent was Tyler Robinson, who wasn't trans himself, somehow converted to "trans ideology" so that he shared the view of his trans friends that Christopher Kirk should be killed?

You know what? I think Secretary Kennedy is right to be investigating the unacknowledged effects of vaccines -- but isn't it at least just as important that there be a serious investigation of what passes for "gender affirming care"?

posted by test @ September 15, 2025   0 Comments

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Busted!

Only a short time after YouTube pop psychologist Dr Todd Grande (his degree is an EdD, like Dr Jill Biden's) assured us that the ATF erred when it leaked that the etched inscriptions on the shells in Tyler Robinson's gun were "consistent with transgender and antifascist ideologies", the story began to break that Robinson's roommate, with whom he'd had a "romantic relationship", was a male undergoing trqnsition to female. Grande discussed the message "notices bulges owo what's this" etched on one of the shells. He dismissed it as a trans and "furry" meme that indicates "exaggerated surprise in a sexualized tone" at seeing evidence of male genitalia in a costume, but he assured us that there's nothing that connects this with "transgender ideology". That is, nothing except that Robinson's roommate and romantic partner, Lance Twiggs, was both trans and a "furry". (Grande also reassures us that only a small subset of "furries" have sex with each other while dressed in animal suits.)

Andy Ngo researched Twiggs's social media and reported,

Twiggs was raised in a devout Mormon family but said he left the faith. On the r/exchristian subreddit, he claimed he was expelled from his family home after refusing religious spiritual help.

“[W]as told i was possessed by a demon and then within 30 mins kicked outta the house because i started laughing and wouldn’t go to the bishop for a blessing,” Twiggs wrote. “later found out they just didn’t like me and were looking for a way to get me out of the house, wasn’t even 18 at the time.”

A website was able to contact a Twiggs relative:

“He (Lance Twiggs) is very angry with anyone who is supportive of conservative ideals and Christian values,” alleged the family member.

“As far as I know, he was not going by another name. I just know he was in the process of transitioning. I know he was trying to take different medications,” alleged the relative of Lance, whom the family member had avoided for about four years out of concern over Twiggs’ alleged temperament.

The relative told WRN about having heard second-hand from other family members that Lance had allegedly “wished horrible things on people. I’ve really distanced. There was (allegedly) evil inside and only getting worse.”

Certainly in several recent cases, it's hard to rule out demonic possession, although for Twiggs, I doubt if getting a blessing from a Mormon bishop would be much help. I asked the web, "Do you have to want to cooperate with an exorcism for it to work? "AI" replied,

For an exorcism to be effective, Christian tradition generally requires the afflicted person's cooperation and willingness to be freed from evil influence. An uncooperative or unwilling person may still be subjected to a ritual, but it is considered less likely to succeed, and some views suggest it could even worsen the situation.

Short of someone like Twiggs wanting to rid himself of demons, it seems as though the best option for his family was to go no contact. But this raises two questions for me: first, what was the nature of his influence on Robinson? But second, how sincere is his current cooperation with law enforcement? If he played a big role in encouraging Robinson to shoot Charlie Kirk, how much culpability does he have?

For now, it looks like we'll continue to see new revelations in the case.

posted by test @ September 14, 2025   0 Comments

Saturday, September 13, 2025

It's About Ordinary Decorum

Merriam-Webster defines "decoerum" as "agreement with accepted standards of conduct". In light of the renarkable rash of suspensions and terminations being visited on people who publicly celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination, some people like intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds are saying, "I mave doubts about these firings. . . . The courts can sort it out later, just like they did (sometimes) when so many people on the right were being cancelled."

He concludes maybe the courts will sort it out -- well, he's a law professor. But this isn't really a legal issue. What's happening is that ordinary standards of decorum are being reestablished. If you think about it, before anything else, Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney campaign, in which a leading national brand endorsed transsexualism, was a violation of decorum. You don't talk about people's plumbing in a national media environment; even if children can't drink beer, they see the ads.

So it is, or at least used to be, with de mortuis nil nisi bonum:

The Latin phrase De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est, "Of the dead nothing but good is to be said." — abbreviated Nil nisi bonum — is a mortuary aphorism indicating that it is socially inappropriate for the living to speak ill of the dead who cannot defend or justify themselves.

Before anything else, celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination is indecorous. It indicates that a person lacks ordinary restraint, but beyond that, if the person has any standing in the community, leaving the quetion of employment aside, it's a sign of poor judgment and poor leadership. But if such people in any way represent their employers, it reflects poorly on them as well. Thus Office Depot stepped in a big problem:

Office Depot is facing backlash and even boycott calls after a Michigan store allegedly refused to print a poster of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk for a vigil, with a GOP official blasting the company online and calling the move censorship.

Matthew DePerno, an attorney and Republican activist, said the Kalamazoo County Republican Party ordered the poster at 2:24 p.m. Friday from the Office Depot in Portage, MI, for a vigil honoring Kirk scheduled for that evening.

But around 5:30 p.m., DePerno said a store print supervisor named “Beryl” called and told organizers the order would not be completed because the poster was “propaganda.”

. . . “Hey @officedepot @OfficeMax do you think this is acceptable?” DePerno wrote on X, posting video taken inside the store and a receipt for the canceled order.

The attorney shared a clip of the encounter alongside a photo of a receipt that shows payment of $56.17. It is unclear if Office Depot refunded the money.

DePerno said the group then went to FedEx, where staff apologized and printed the poster free of charge.

It appears that the store manager, who according to the video wasn't at work on that Friday, was unaware of the situation and didn't hear about it until it went viral and corporate got involved, left a mealy-mouthed phone mail message with one of the customers offering to help fulfill the order -- but the prayer vigil had already taken place, and FedEx had already stepped in to print the posters. Office Depot corporate nevertheless issued this obtuse statement:

Upon learning of the incident, we immediately reached out to the customer to address their concerns and seek to fulfill their order to their satisfaction. We have also launched an immediate internal review and, as a result, the associate involved is no longer with the organization.

Clearly this didn't fix things, and a national boycott is starting. All this has The Guardian up in arms:

Reactions on social media to the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk have cost multiple people their jobs as authorities in numerous states clamp down on critical commentary.

Among those to have been fired, suspended or censured in recent days for their opinions include teachers, firefighters, journalists, politicians, a secret service employee and a worker for a prominent NFL team.

. . . Pete Hegseth, the defense [sic] secretary, meanwhile, has ordered staff “to find and identify military members, and any individual associated with the Pentagon, who have mocked or appeared to condone Charlie Kirk’s murder”, NBC News reported Friday.

The outlet, citing two defense department officials, said several members of the military were relieved of their duties because of social media posts – and that “dozens” more, including civilian Pentagon employees, had been “called out on X”.

. . . Two educators in Clay county were removed from their classrooms and placed under state investigation on Thursday, one an elementary school teacher who posted to her personal social media account an article about the shooting, and the words: “This may not be the obituary we were all hoping to wake up to, but it is a close second for me.”

. . . Most of those who have been fired or suspended, however, are people in regular jobs whose comments displeased their employers or were otherwise exposed.

The problem is that even in the examples we see, like the Office Depot supervisor, the employees brought their employers into the dispute. A schoolteacher is a member of the commkunity who is expected to set a personal example, in or out of the classroom. The teacher who posted that she would have preferred the victim were Trump was breaching decorum in a very serious way if nothing else. The same app;lies to college deans or asasociate deans, who owe their prestige in the community to their positions in the institution.

Somehow, sanity is making a comeback.

posted by test @ September 13, 2025   0 Comments

Friday, September 12, 2025

Why They're Celebrating

Via the UK Daily Mail:

Left-wing social media fanatics have celebrated influencer Charlie Kirk's murder - with some comparing him to Adolf Hitler and even suggesting he 'deserved' his fate.

. . . The killing of Donald Trump's ally is the latest example of political violence in the US spanning a range of political ideologies and affecting both major political parties.

I think the source of this is in the US educational system, and the celebrants will turn out to be students and alumni of elite universities, or at least wannabes. It always bothered me from my time as an undergraduate at one such that the subtext of the whole elite-school admissions rat race was to pound into the winners, those who got letters of admission, that they'd been selected via an intensely meritocratic, years-long process. We'll drop the issue that only a fairly small percentage of each entering class is actually selected based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, at least for now.

We're still left with the implcation that elite-school students are special, and they're better. Those students are going to want to believe this -- it feeds their natural adolescent narcissism. But one thing I began to notice after catching up with schoolmates over the years is that none of them outgrew this narcissism as they might have outgrown teen awkwardness or acne. When I ran into them as adults, they were uniformly superior, and not just superior, but superior to certain people, especially Republicans.

To display their superiority, they endorse what have beren called luxury beliefs:

In his excellent memoir, Troubled, the psychologist Rob Henderson recounts the alienating experiences he had as a mature student from a poor background at Yale University. One classmate told him that it was hopelessly outmoded for people who want to raise kids to prefer monogamy. Henderson, who spent much of his early childhood in the foster system, was taken aback. How, he wondered, thinking back to the chaos and heartbreak of his own childhood, could this girl fail to understand how important a stable family structure is to human flourishing? He pressed the classmate, who had grown up in an intact family, on her own life plans. Personally, she responded, she did plan to enter a monogamous marriage.

Henderson soon encountered political ideas that touched on different areas of social life but were, he felt, similarly performative. Students who hail from extremely safe neighborhoods argued that we should abolish the police. Classmates who loved to talk about how much they hate capitalism went on to stellar careers with J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs.

. . . Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider stratum of society, the affluent and highly educated have resorted to different status symbols to signal their superior standing. This is why luxury beliefs—jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population—have substituted for luxury goods.

What I found as an elite-school undergraduate was that almost every course syllabus, almost all the readings, were premised on certain core assumptions: Darwinian theory was scientific truth, to the extent that "evolve" in any context meant "change in a desirable direction". Research on human motivations by figures ranging from Freud to B F Skinner disproved the validity of any religion-based assertions about sin or virtue. The idea of the God of the Old and New Testaments was an evolutionary artifact that to some extent has, but certainly will, atrophy as an element of human nature.

Social or sexual views that might derive from that set of assumptions may be argued within a fairly narrow range, but they definitely implied that notions of traditional sexual morality were at best unevolved. Certainly this element of luxury beliefs appealed most directly to narcissistic adolescents -- not only are you just hot to trot, but you're a crusader at the forefront of human progress! And here we get to the crux of the problem with Charlie Kirk:

He was going onto college campuses and arguing persuasively against luxury beliefs. This may not have been the assassin Tyler Robinson's specific motive -- the most recent reports suggest he held inchoate "antifascist" beliefs -- but I think it's a big reason the elites are celebrating his assassination.

The problem is that although Kirk represented retrograde Republican-style beliefs, his assassination comes at a time when those beliefs are resurgent, and in fact at a time when the elite universities that inculcate those beliefs are on the defensive. The received luxury beliefs on sexual morality that lie at the basis of the whole elite-university curriculum -- I suspect sophomores are still assigned Coming of Age in Samoa --implies that any loosening of traditional sexual paradigms is a step in the direction of progress. Charie Kirk stood against progress, and indeed human evolution itself.

These and similar luxury beliefs are doomed, and deep down, the people celebrating Kirk's assassination know this.

posted by test @ September 12, 2025   0 Comments

Thursday, September 11, 2025

It Looks Like The FBI's Silence Is Deliberate

I was puzzled when, as of last night, all the FBI had released was satatements that they'd detained and released two persons of interest and were asking for support from the public. But heck, I'm just a guy who watches true crime on TV, and I know that's not how this works. This is 2025 on a college campus. I remember 20 years ago listening to students at my alma mater bellyache about having to swipe key cards to get in and out of their dorm buildings. Even then, I had to swipe key cards to get in and out of my hotel rooms, and in fact there was consensus that this was improved security.

Now, I'm sure it's at least ten times worse. Cameras are everywhere, lobbies, hallways, elevators, outside. And as best anyone can tell, this guy got onto a roof to make the shot. How did he get onto a roof? I doubt if just anyone goes up some stairs and out onto the roof of a multi-story college building. At least what we're being told this morning finally suggests law enforcement has been looking in the right places:

Law enforcement officials said Thursday they have recovered the rifle they believe was used to kill conservative political activist Charlie Kirk and found other key evidence as the manhunt for the shooter expands.

The “high powered, bolt-action rifle” was found in a wooded area where the gunman fled after shooting Kirk during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday, FBI special agent Robert Bohls said at a press conference.

Investigators have also collected a “footwear impression, a palm print and forearm imprints for analysis,” the agent, Bohls said.

As I suspected, the investigators were quickly able to get video of the perp's every move, start to finish. Utah DPS Commissioner Beau Mason said at this morning's press conference:

“Through all that work last night, we were able to make a few breakthroughs. We were able to track the movements of the shooter. Starting at 11:52 a.m., the subject arrived on campus, shortly away from campus. We had tracked his movements onto the campus, through the stairwells, up to the roof, across the roof to a shooting location,” he continued. “After the shooting, we were able to track his movements as he moved to the other side of the building, jumped off of the building and fled off of the campus and into a neighborhood. Our investigators have worked through those neighborhoods contacting anybody they can, with doorbell cameras, witnesses, and thoroughly work through those communities trying to identify any leads.”

People magazine reported a description from radio transmissions at the time of the shooting:

The person of interest who authorities believe killed Charlie Kirk was described in law enforcement dispatch audio as wearing all-black clothing and tactical gear, according to audio reviewed by PEOPLE.

The audio described a person in all-black — carrying a black long gun, wearing a black tactical helmet and mask, and possibly a tactical vest and jeans.

Other transmissions mentioned aviator-style glasses, a black bag, black long pants and longer hair.

Authorities immediately found someone who matched this description, but he turned out not to be involved:

Authorities said at a press conference that a person of interest was taken into custody, and that the person was wearing all-black.

So I'm not sure how seriously we can take this description, which actually sounds like something that could have been written by AI trying to limn Inspector Clouseau. The same applies to these remarks from Newsweek:

Former FBI Agent Stuart Kaplan said the shooter likely put a lot of preparation into the attack, telling Fox News' Jesse Watters: "This assassination, different to the attack [on Trump] back in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a very well planned, very well orchestrated plot that was put in motion days before.

"This individual had a plan of escape to elude detection of being out on a rooftop, and also being able to evade and elude law enforcement," added Kaplan. "This assassination of Charlie Kirk to me is indicative of a professional hit, and I'm not so sure we are quickly going to be able to apprehend this individual without some luck."

If I were a professional hit man, the last place I would want to remain anonymous would be a college campus, given the prevalence of cameras. As the investigators mentioned, the cameras tracked his every move, from the time of his arrival to his route to the rooftop, to his eacape to nearby woods. And frankly, who on earth would saunter onto a college campus carrying a black long gun, wearing a black tactical helmet and mask, a tactical vest, aviator glasses, and a black bag -- making him, if nothing else, incredibly easy to track with video? Not, I suspect, a pro. Here's what a professional hit looks like:

Just before 5:30 on a December evening in 1985, mob boss Paul Castellano stepped out of a limo in front of Sparks Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan and was shot to death. The four assassins who gunned him down were conspicuously dressed in trench coats and Russian fur hats. John Gotti, the man who arranged the hit, sat in a car nearby to make sure “Big Paul” was dead.

As someone pointed out on Reddit:

Exactly… multiple people saying they saw a guy dressed in a Cossack and Trenchcoat and then another saying, yeah I saw both of them too, and another saying , wait I saw 4, then another saying, no, I saw six. Confusion abounds.

The four guys in Russian hats and trenchcoats were never identified, which was the whole point. A single guy on a rooftop, no matter how he's dressed, is far too easy to trace. In fact, notwithsanding the former FBI agent, I would go as far as to say this was a disorganized killer along the line of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Butler shooter, or maybe even Robin Westman, the Annunciation Church killer. According to the Wall Street Journal this morning,

Investigators found ammunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology inside the rifle, sources said. A Justice Department official said the investigation was still in its preliminary stages.

This, if true, would almost point to the killer being a Crooks-Westman wannabe. I can't imagine the Wall Street Journal would print this without careful confirmation. But I also think the FBI so far isn't telling all it knows, and of course, there's nothing untoward about that when the investigation is ongoing.

posted by test @ September 11, 2025   0 Comments

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

The Big Hoax: The Bureau Of Labor Statistics

So far, only Byron York at the Washington Examiner grasps the importance of yesterday's revelation:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the number of jobs it says were created in the year between April 2024 and March 2025. Until now, the official line was that the economy created 1.758 million jobs in that period. Now, the BLS says only 847,000 jobs were created, less than half what was originally thought. That is a stunning downward revision of 911,000 jobs.

The new numbers upended much of what everyone, regardless of political party, thought about the economy. Democrats maintained that President Joe Biden handed off a strong economy to President Donald Trump, who then weakened it. Republicans maintained that Biden handed off a weak economy to Trump, who then strengthened it. Now, it appears that from a jobs standpoint, the economy has been weaker than thought the whole time.

. . . Last year, there was another story like this one, in which we learned that from April 2023 to March 2024, the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had originally said, wiping out most of the economy’s gains. The number was finalized at about 600,000 jobs, fewer than originally estimated, but the gap between early reports and reality was huge.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse commented,

[This] puts President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the BLS into context.

Legacy media portrays Trump as impulse-driven and narcissistic, but it's hard to avoid thinking his instincts in this area have been correct. Byron York concludes,

The great and the good rose to denounce Trump. That’s what they do. But now, with the latest huge revisions on top of the previous huge revisions, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is something terribly wrong with how the BLS counts the number of jobs created each month. That is not to say that Erika McEntarfer was trying to win the election for Kamala Harris, or that she was acting out of bald political bias. It is just to say that something is wrong.

. . . This is important because many people in many corners of the economy rely on the BLS data. Businesspeople base business decisions on it. Government officials base governmental decisions on it. Politicians base political decisions on it.

Or put a little differently, the Federal Reserve has been setting interest rates based on garbage data, and it looks like they'll be among the last people ever to acknowledge this. What interests me here is the similarity to the underlying issue in The Big Short: the discrepancies between reality and the accepted metrics -- in that case, the ratings of the bond agencies, in this case, employment statistics -- are noticeable, measurable, and at least to some, predictable.

In a statement posted to X, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the revision underscores that Trump “inherited a far worse economy than reported and he’s right to say the Fed is choking off growth with high rates.”

While the preliminary revision announced Tuesday was higher than economic experts anticipated, many expected a sizable write-down. The Fed also factors in an array of metrics when setting policy — most notably inflation numbers — and board members know to bake in some leeway to account for possible changes in BLS numbers. (Fed Gov. Christopher Waller, a potential candidate to replace Powell, said in a recent speech that he expected the annual revision to eliminate around 60,000 jobs per month from the 12-month average.)

The contrarian investors in The Big Short saw the opportunity to profit from the discrepancy between the AAA ratings for mortgate-backed securities and the actual risks posed by the credit ratings of the underlying borrowers.

I can only assume that someone can come up with some type of financial instrument that would allow an investor to arbitrage the discrepancy between BLS employment reports and reality. On the other hand, such discrepancies suggest that wise decisions can be made in areas other than just financial investment -- for instance, if as Byron York says above, government officials base governmental decisions on BLS data. Politicians base political decisions on BLS data.

Which government officials should we trust? Which politicians should we trust? After all, civic trust is a form of investment. As the contrarian Mark Baum said to his staff after interviewing an overoptimistic investment banker, "Short everything he's touched!" We're entitled to distrust every government official and politician on the wrong side of this spread. What we've been seeing over and over is that Trump's instincts have been correct.

posted by test @ September 10, 2025   0 Comments