Is there anything more … Soviet … than a bank that lends money to companies making things no one wants to buy?
That’s the missing puzzle piece we needed on why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up, and Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has found it, persuasively arguing that yes, the failure of the bank was indeed premised on ESG, which descended into wokester lending priorities, creating the abnormal conditions that left the bank ripe for a meltdown.
“We were just sitting there”
In the last 5 years, Big Tech firms came under heavy pressure to publicize the racial and gender demographics of their workforce and to improve their numbers. That’s hard when your workforce is mostly white, Asian and Indian. This story may shed some light on how Facebook went about improving its numbers.
A drag queen has triggered a backlash for teaching children about controversial conversion therapy.
Aida H Dee, the persona behind Drag Queen Story Hour UK (DQSH), was invited to lecture 11-year-olds at Lewis School Pengam in Wales about the practice, suicide statistics and “queerness”.
But concerns have been raised over the “spectacular safeguarding fail” given that the drag queen recently helped raise money for the funeral of a child rapist “taken unjustly”, has posted on social media about “orgies” and said that “love has no age”.
In the latest Twitter Files report published on Friday, journalist and author Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter partnered with the Virality Project, which warned the social media platform that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts were retweeting the CDC, and ironically ran searches for the term “surveillance state” while looking for more information to censor.
Politicians haven’t just lost control of the Channel: the huge scale of legal immigration is being allowed to continue with little scrutiny
There was something horribly ironic about Gary Lineker claiming to “speak up for those poor souls who have no voice” on the question of immigration, after effectively trying to silence dissenters with comparisons to 1930s Germany. He was right in one sense – there is a group of people who don’t have a voice on this issue – but they certainly aren’t the ones Gary’s advocating for.
No, it’s the silent majority with legitimate concerns about mass, uncontrolled migration who have been cut out of the debate by elites who consider it crass to want to manage Britain’s borders. They are the ones hounded and patronised into submission by supposedly “tolerant” liberals who use their sense of moral superiority to justify political browbeating. And this tactic, which has been hugely successful in shutting down the national debate, helps to explain why the Conservative Party has failed to get a grip on post-Brexit immigration.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to say Friday if he would make an attempt by Pierre Poilievre‘s Conservatives to force his chief of staff to testify on foreign election interference a matter of confidence.
MP are expected to vote as early as Tuesday on a Conservative-sponsored motion calling on Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford to testify at one or the other of two House of Commons committees investigating allegations of election interference. That vote could test the strength of the deal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh made last year with Trudeau to support the Liberal minority government on matters of confidence.
Jaggy ain’t gonna give up his meal ticket.
Joly calls out Israel judiciary reform and ‘unilateral actions’ that undermine peace
OTTAWA – Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly is pushing Israel to drop its reform of the country’s judiciary after two months of mass protests.
An official readout of a conversation Joly had with her Israeli counterpart Eli Cohen says that she “underscored Canada’s support of democracy, the rule of law and the institutions that uphold them.”
A Global Affairs Canada source familiar with the conversation says Joly specifically noted Israel’s judicial reform and said the country should only implement changes supported by the public.
San Francisco’s reparations plans are divisive, demeaning and insane.
To see how destructive identity politics can be, how toxic and divisive, look no further than San Francisco’s crazy reparations idea. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors appointed a panel to consider whether reparations should be paid to the city’s black residents for the historic crimes of slavery and racism. The panel decreed that, yes, they should be. Every eligible black citizen of San Francisco should get $5million each, it said. They should also get $97,000 a year for the rest of their lives and be able to buy homes in the city for $1. Incredibly, the Board of Supervisors is seriously considering the recommendations rather than hurling them into the trashcan of crackpot ideas that deserve not a split second’s contemplation, which is where they should be.
When I joined the public service many years ago, I swore an oath.
Not to party or to person, but to my country, to its democratic institutions and to my fellow Canadians.
When I first became aware of the significance of the threat posed by outside interference to our democratic institutions, I worked – as have many unnamed and tireless colleagues – to equip our leaders with the knowledge and the tools needed to take action against it.
This trans activist wants to talk to kids and dm with them on tiktok. He wants to tell kids that he’s fighting for their “right” to get puberty blockers and sex change surgery pic.twitter.com/fHWzNa1coR
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 16, 2023
EAGLE PASS, Texas—Local officials keep a refrigerated truck to hold the bodies of migrants who drown in the currents of the Rio Grande while trying to cross the border into the U.S.
Across the river, families having picnics or walking along the waterfront promenade of Piedras Negras, Mexico, say they sometimes see bodies floating by or bobbing among the reeds under a bridge. “We had times when we received four or five bodies a week,” said Hugo González, owner of Funerarias González in Piedras Negras. “At one point, there were a lot of corpses and there was nowhere to put them. We just didn’t have enough refrigerators at the funeral home.”
Several years back I asked what it would take to halt the diversity, inclusion, equity obsession in America.
What would it take to get back to excellence and competence as the only criteria for employment?
Perhaps it would require the bridges to start falling down.
Though I suspect that if they did then certain people would claim they’d only fallen because of “structural racism.”
Islam is replacing both Christianity in Belgium and atheism in Sweden in a weakened West.
“It was the week before Xmas, midday on a mild, almost hot Monday, and the muezzins of West London were chanting the glory of Allah and how there was no God but Him…”. Thus opens “1985”, the prophetic novel by Anthony Burgess, the author of “A Clockwork Orange”. He wrote it in 1978 and it looks like the portrait of Europe in 2023…
The Islamic call to prayer (Adhan) is now resounding in Stockholm, reports Samnytt news. The Adhan was recorded in the capital. In Sweden, three mosques have received permission from the authorities to use loudspeakers to broadcast prayers in Botkyrka, Karlskrona and Växjö. But no permits for Muslim prayer calls have been issued in Stockholm. Despite this, Swedes in the capital have repeatedly witnessed the Adhan being imposed on non-Muslims.
More than 150 Indian students have been told to leave the country by the Canadian Border Security Agency (CBSA), which says they arrived in the country on forged college admission letters.
The students say they were unaware of the forgeries and insist they were duped by their immigration consultation agency in India that provided them the document.
Many who received the eviction letters are now embarrassed to come forward – living in a Western country is seen as a matter of prestige by many Indian families, especially in the state of Punjab where Dimple K is from.
“My mind is dark. I cannot move forward, nor go back,” said Dimple. She has been living in Canada on a student visa since 2017.
On March 10, Chinese President and Communist Party General-Secretary Xi Jinping brokered a surprise agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reestablish diplomatic relations between the two countries, effectively knocking the US off the Middle Eastern chessboard and showing himself as a power-broker on the world stage.
Xi is, in fact, on his way to Russia, possibly as soon as next week, with a 12-point peace plan — ostensibly to see if he can pull off the same wizardry with Ukraine, but more likely to nail down plans to seize Taiwan.
