UN Convenes Climate Conference in Brothels

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The Brazilian rainforest is so endangered that the latest UN climate conference will take place there. Along the way to saving the planet, a four lane highway had to be cut through tens of thousands of acres of protected and endangered rainforest. Endangered by its protectors.

(But the good news, according to the Brazilian government, is that it’s a “sustainable highway.)

And if that’s not enough, fleets of jets will soon descend on the Brazilian rainforest as an estimated 45,000 attendees will show up to party, socialize, conference, and listen to lectures about how this time the planet is really on the edge of destruction. Please pass the canapes.

COP30, as the conference is known, hasn’t saved the planet in 29 conferences, but maybe the 30th one will do the trick, at least if the delegates can find someplace to stay in the rainforest.

The Brazilian government is announcing that individual rooms are available for planet-savers from other countries for as high as $600. Over the summer, the UN held ‘emergency talks’ not over saving the planet, but over the cost of hotel rooms to save the planet from $600 rooms.

‘Poorer’ African nations warned that they couldn’t afford the cost of the hotel rooms (but they can usually afford gold watches, elaborate palaces and private armies) and would not come unless the costs came down. With the fate of the planet at stake, UN negotiators held several ‘urgent’ meetings to discuss plans for lowering the costs of a hotel room to save the planet.

Unfortunately the only way to lower the costs of the planet-saving hotel rooms would be chopping down even more rainforest to build more hotel rooms. Sometimes you have to destroy the rainforest to save the rainforest, or destroy the rainforest to make it cheaper to host African delegates to discuss saving the rainforest from umm… the people destroying the rainforest.

By then it was too late to build new hotels, but two massive cruise ships were dispatched to the Brazilian rainforest to provide African delegates with cheap cabins to stay in. For the planet.

The MSC Seaview, a 1,000 foot cruise ship with 18 decks, massive pool, four-story glass-walled atrium, disco, theater and full-sized bowling alleys, and the Costa Diadema, that has a 4D theater, a spa across 4 decks and a crew of over 1,000, were dispatched to save the planet by hosting the African diplomats to discuss reducing emissions from things like cruise ships.

It would take the average person 100 years to produce as many ‘emissions’ as these cruise ships do in one hour. But sometimes you just have to pollute to stop polluting the planet.

These cabins on cruise ships going nowhere (an apt metaphor for both the UN and its serial climate conferences, currently up to 30 and counting) will be going for a mere $220.

While the Africans were appeased, the Europeans were still furious over the high price of hotel rooms and refused to book rooms at $600 a night. Not even for the sake of saving the planet.

The Brazilian government rushed to find cheaper motels and Airbnbs to save the conference and thus save the planet, and the Europeans relented, but cut back their delegations so that fewer diplomats will be coming to save the planet. And that might actually save the planet.

But since this is Brazil, for those truly passionate about saving the planet, many of the arrivals will have to make do with ‘love motels’ that in America are usually known as the sorts of places that charge by the hour.

As the New York Times described it, the ‘love motels’ are preparing “rooms that range from the sensual to the raunchy for a different kind of guest: diplomats and climate scientists, civil servants and environmental activists” and “taking out anything too erotic“ which suggests that they have no understanding of what diplomats and ‘civil servants’ actually do at conferences.

Diplomats and ‘climate scientists’ will be given the option of having the “erotic chair — a metal-and-leather contraption resembling a dentist’s chair that was bolted to the floor for safety” taken out. At another hotel, “an oversized framed picture of a person’s rear end” was taken down. The brothels are doing this in the hopes of charging foreigners as much as $650 a room.

There’s something undeniably fitting about using whorehouses to host UN conference attendees. For all the talk about saving the planet, these conferences are shakedown sessions at which nothing is done for the environment (which is invariably worse off after a mass of glorified tourists converges on some exotic out-of-the-way locale) and the only green is the kind that comes in wallets.

“I’m also listening to ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ by Rihanna nonstop,” Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, the vice chair for the implementation of the UN Climate Convention, told reporters at COP29 which was held in the oil-rich and otherwise bleak hinterlands of Baku.

Juan’s female dog in question was the Western world, and it’s tired of bringing the money to pay off third worlders, whether for expensive rooms in mildly redecorated brothels, for ‘climate offsets’ or for their ‘climate catastrophes’. Much of the talk at the COPs comes down to creating large funds with which to bribe Africa, Asia and Latin America into going along with the latest version of the Chicken Little hoax, from ice ages to global warming to climate change, that a bunch of special interests and their hired ‘scientists’ describe as the ‘climate consensus’.

Third world countries are too busy wiping out endangered species to care about the planet. The only reason they show up to these UN shindigs is to demand ‘compensation’ from the West. The compensation comes in the form of funds set up to help them deal with the supposed effects of ‘global warming’ and in the form of ‘climate offsets’ in which Western nations agree to ‘cut’ emissions, but in practice just pay third world countries to buy some of their non-emissions.

If this sounds confusing, imagine that UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres has promised not to cheat on his wife, but he finds himself staying in a Brazilian ‘love motel’ at a mere $650 a night and decides to use one of the menus to avail himself of a local lady of the evening who is similarly disposed to reducing emissions and saving the planet.

But UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres has taken a firm vow at COP29 to stop cheating on his wife. So he arranges for an ‘adultery’ offset in which he offers $220 to a local gentleman who is not cheating on his wife to offset his adultery. Guterres, now in possession of an ‘adultery offset certificate’ then commits adultery. And when Mrs. Guterres catches him in the act, shows her the certificate and explains that he’s not committing adultery, he’s actually reducing the total amount of planetary adultery by offsetting his adultery with the purchase of someone else’s unused adultery. And this is really a way to end adultery.

If this sounds like a complete immoral fraud, welcome to the business of saving the planet. You not only know more than all the ‘experts’, but you’re not paying $600 for a room in a brothel or paying $600 million in climate offsets to non-industrialized countries to buy their pollution.

Fortunately, President Trump is keeping American diplomats home and out of Brazil. That means we’ll save money on their hotel rooms/brothels and actually save the planet.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Brazil’s Reckless Fiscal Trajectory

April 4, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’m in Brazil for a speech to the Fórum da Liberdade, where I’ll be speaking on “The Future of the Global Order” and explaining the difference between good globalization and bad globalism.

Given the topic dominating the news, I’ll obviously be condemning Trump’s economically illiterate trade policy.

But I’m also going to mention a very important fiscal problem in Brazil, and that’s the focus of today’s column.

Expanding on what I wrote earlier this year, here’s a chart showing how government spending is becoming a much bigger problem.

Given the rapid and worrisome increase in the burden of government spending, Brazil obviously is not complying with fiscal policy’s Golden Rule.

What makes this especially disappointing is that Brazil briefly had a spending cap, but politicians quickly escaped that constraint.

But that’s just part of the problem. IMF data confirms that Brazil also has the biggest fiscal burden of government in all of Latin America.

At the risk of understatement, this is hardly a recipe for future prosperity (notwithstanding what Hillary Clinton once said).

Especially since one of its main competitors, Argentina, is now making dramatic moves to improve its fiscal situation.

I should point out, incidentally, that fiscal policy is not Brazil’s biggest problem. According to Economic Freedom of the World, the country’s worst policy area is red tape.

But I’m a fiscal policy wonk, so I’m going to keep the focus on the nation’s spending problem.

Which brings me to my third and final chart for today.

In the absence of pension reform, Brazil’s fiscal problems almost surely will get worse in the future.

Why? Because demographic trends from the World Bank show that there will be more and more old people and fewer and fewer young workers to support them.

This puts Brazil on a path toward even-bigger government, along with pressure for ever-higher taxes.

Perhaps Brazil should try to avoid this fate by sending a delegation to Santiago and learn about Chile’s pension reform.

But since a supposedly right-of-center government failed to follow my suggestion to do that in 2018, I have no hope that the country’s current leftist leadership will act any differently.

Brazil and the 20th Theorem of Government

January 3, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

The goal of fiscal policy should be limited government and that means complying with the Golden Rule of spending restraint.

When countries control the disease of excessive spending, that also seems to be the only effective way of reducing and eliminating the symptom of red ink.

Sadly, Brazil has not followed this sensible approach. Here’s a chart based on IMF data showing how spending has grown significantly faster than inflation, no matter which base year is used.

Why am I writing about Brazil?

Because that country’s fiscal profligacy may be creating the conditions for a fiscal crisis.

Here are some excerpts from an article by Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute.

Brazil is on an unsustainable debt path as a result of left-leaning President Lula’s public spending largesse. Since the start of his third term in office in January 2023, Brazil’s budget deficit has approximately doubled from almost five percent to 9.5 percent of GDP. …This is raising red flags…

Typically, emerging markets get into trouble when the debt level gets into the 80–90 percent of GDP range. …the Brazilian real has lost more than 20 percent of its value against the dollar taking it to a record low… Meanwhile, this year the Brazilian stock market has lost nearly 10 percent in value…while its credit default spreads have increased by 50 percent to over 200 basis points. …President Lula seems to be in denial.

All of this is further evidence for my 20th Theorem of Government, which was unveiled just a couple of months ago.

While it is possible, at least in theory, for a government to get in fiscal trouble by cutting taxes a lot and to get out of trouble by raising taxes a lot, I’m not aware of any real-world examples.

By contrast, there are lots of real world examples showing that excess spending is a recipe for fiscal trouble and spending restraint is a recipe for fiscal recovery.

I’ve already cited Colombia and France as real world examples. Now we can add Brazil to the mix.

P.S. Government spending is only growing slightly faster than GDP in Brazil. That might be a mitigating factor, but the problem is that Brazil started with an excessive burden of spending, which government consuming more than 40 percent of the nation’s economic output.

P.P.S. What especially tragic about Brazil’s fiscal mess is that it briefly had a spending cap.

Bad Spending Policy Leads to Bad Tax Policy: The Case of Brazil

September 14, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I wrote in 2013 that “for any fiscal policy question, spending restraint is the answer,” which is simply a restatement of my Golden Rule. I’m going to augment that by stating that “whenever there is a fiscal mess, excess spending growth is the cause.”

Today, let’s look at the case of Brazil. Based on data from the IMF’s world economic outlook database, here’s a comparison of economic growth and spending growth in Brazil. As you can see, the burden of government spending has grown more than twice as fast as the private sector.

During this two-decade period, the overall burden of government spending has jumped from 42 percent of GDP to 47 percent of GDP. And debt has increased as well.

I’m citing these disturbing and depressing numbers because Reuters has a report, authored by Bernardo Caram, about some unilateral tax hikes being planned by Brazil’s leftist government.

Brazil’s government is considering tax hikes that do not require congressional approval to balance this year’s budget, two finance ministry sources said on Friday, after officials acknowledged that new revenue measures could be implemented. Taxes in this category could include a levy on financial transactions (IOF), and import and export taxes, which can all be adjusted via presidential decree. On Thursday, the Treasury unveiled a plan for new revenue measures, if necessary, to ensure compliance with the year’s fiscal target of eliminating the primary deficit.

I’ll make a simple prediction. When the dust settles, the Brazilian people will be saddled with more taxes, more spending, and more debt. Just as has happened in Europe.

And I’ll close by reiterating a point I’ve made before, which is that it is impossible in the long run to have good tax policy if a jurisdiction does not have good spending policy.

That’s true internationally. That’s true domestically. And that’s true locally.

 

Brazil’s big cats latest victims of wind turbines

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D. September 22nd, 2023 @ CFACT 120 Comments

To the well-documented slaughter of birds and bats by wind turbines and the growing threat to marine life posed by the proliferation of offshore wind power, we can add the jaguars and pumas of northeastern Brazil being wantonly sacrificed in the name of “clean,” “climate friendly” renewable energy.

The hot, semi-arid, wind-swept Caatinga is a far cry from the steamy, dense jungles of Brazil’s Amazon region to the south. Pumas and Jaguars have adapted to the Caatinga’s harsh environment and thrived there as apex predators since time immemorial. But they are now facing extinction thanks to Chinese and European wind-power developers who are making the region uninhabitable for the big cats. The spinning, 150-foot-long blades atop the outsiders’ wind turbines are scaring the pumas and jaguars away from the area’s scarce sources of water, forcing them to abandon their lairs and roam vast distances across dusty plains in search of life-sustaining rivers and streams.

“The weaker perish along the way. Others venture closer to villages, where locals have started laying traps to protect their small herds of goats and sheep, often their only form of survival in this impoverished region,” The Wall Street Journal reported (Sept. 18).

Environmental Costs

Brazil is expected to become the world’s fourth-largest wind-power producer by 2027, behind China, the U.S., and Germany, according to the Brazilian Wind Power Association. But the country’s embrace of renewable energy is coming with a steep environmental cost. The wind turbines being installed on compacted sand dunes along the country’s northern coast pose a threat to underground reservoirs. Conservationists, many of whom welcomed wind-energy development, are now having second thoughts. And indigenous groups are holding nationwide protests against the installation of wind turbines on lands they claim as their own.

People convicted of killing jaguars, pumas, and other wild animals in Brazil can land in jail for up to 18 months, but enforcement of the law is lax. Wind developers are indirectly killing lots of big cats by driving them out of their habitat, but there have been no prosecutions to date. As for the villagers setting traps for jaguars and pumas trying to escape the wind turbines, they quickly bury or burn the dead animals, and wildlife rangers are none the wiser. Meanwhile, the number of pumas and jaguars in the Caatinga continues to drop.

“While the big cats are still plentiful in the Amazon and in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, those in the Caatinga are unique, having adapted to cope with the intense heat,” the Journal notes. “The disappearance of the felines would throw the region’s ecosystem out of whack, leading to a proliferation of animals that serve as prey, such as the wild boar, deer, and armadillos, said Felipe Melo, a researcher at the Federal University of Pernambuco who has studied the impact of the wind-power industry on the Caatinga.”

Eyes Wide Shut

The notion that installing industrial-scale wind-power facilities along Brazil’s northeastern coast – or any place else, for that matter – will have any effect on the world’s climate is absurd. But the monstrosities, along with their solar-array equivalents, are having a profound and harmful effect on wildlife. All of this is far removed from the posh c suites of wind-power developers in Europe and China who, unlike the big cats and villagers in the Caatinga, have the luxury of closing their eyes to the havoc they are wreaking.

Author

• 
  Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

  Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Busines Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country. He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.

  View all posts

 

'Every city' in Brazil filled with protesters claiming election fraud

Possibly largest demonstration in history 'and the global media is crickets'

  By Art Moore December 1, 2022 

For the 32nd consecutive day, millions of Brazilians are on the streets of cities throughout the nation in perhaps the largest pro-democracy protests in history, contending left-wing presidential challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's declared victory over conservative populist President Jair Bolsonaro was fraudulent.

Brazil's Superior Electoral Court announced Tuesday the certification ceremony of da Silva, a member of the Workers Party, will take place at 2 p.m. on Dec. 12. The inauguration is scheduled for Jan. 1........."More than 80% of judges in Brazil, at first and second instances, do not agree with what the Federal Supreme Court is doing," Coelho said............."This is the largest democratic protest in possibly human history, and the global media is crickets on this," he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight." What's clear, he said, is that the Brazilian people "don't want to be led by a convicted criminal.".................To Read More....

NY Times Claims Brazil Is Turning Into Desert, As Foliage Growth Surges

By James Taylor December 6, 2021

The New York Times published an article Friday titled, “A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land.” The article claims global warming is causing drought in northeastern Brazil, turning the region into a desert. Objective satellite measurements of vegetation, however, show increasing vegetation in northeast Brazil and throughout Brazil as a whole, not the other way around. The Times article is merely another example of agenda-driven fake climate news.

In its subtitle, the article claims, “Brazil’s northeast, long a victim of droughts, is now effectively turning into desert. The cause? Climate change and the landowners who are most affected.” The article adds, “Climate change is intensifying droughts in Brazil’s northeast, leaving the land barren. The phenomenon, called desertification, is happening across the planet.”

NASA satellite instruments have precisely measured the amount of vegetation throughout the Earth since the early 1980s. NASA reported its findings in an article titled “Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds.” According to NASA, “From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Most of the rest of the land shows little change one way or the other, while a very small amount of land shows a decline in vegetation.

As a whole, “The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States,” NASA reports.

In the chart below, provided by NASA, you can see that nearly all of Brazil, including nearly all of northeast Brazil, is enjoying a significant increase in vegetation. Only a few, very small areas of Brazil and northeast Brazil are seeing a decline in vegetation...........To Read More.....

 

Proposed Spending Cap in Brazil Could Be a Key for Economic Recovery and Renaissance

October 12, 2016 by Dan Mitchell @ Sultan Knish Blog Originally published in 2016

 One of the most remarkable developments in the world of fiscal policy is that even left-leaning international bureaucracies are beginning to embrace spending caps as the only effective and successful rule for fiscal policy.

The International Monetary Fund is infamous because senior officials relentlessly advocate for tax hikes, but the professional economists at the organization have concluded in two separate studies (see here and here) that expenditure limits produce good results.

Likewise, the political appointees at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development generally push a pro-tax increase agenda, but professional economists at the Paris-based bureaucracy also have produced studies (see here and here) showing that spending caps are the only approach that leads to good results.

Heck, even the European Central Bank has jumped into the issue with a study that reaches the same conclusion.

This doesn’t mean balanced budget requirements are bad, by the way, but the evidence shows that they aren’t very effective since they allow lots of spending when the economy is expanding (and thus generating tax revenue). But when the economy goes into recession (causing a drop in tax revenue), politicians impose tax hikes in hopes of propping up their previous spending commitments.

With a spending cap, by contrast, fiscal policy is very stable. Politicians know from one year to the next that they can increase spending by some modest amount. They don’t like the fact that they can’t approve big spending increases in the years when the economy is expanding, but that’s offset by the fact that they don’t have to cut spending when there’s a recession and revenues are falling.
From the perspective of taxpayers and the economy, the benefit of a spending cap (assuming it is well designed so that it satisfies Mitchell’s Golden Rule) is that annual budgetary increases are lower than the long-run average growth of the private sector.

And nations that have followed such a policy have achieved very good results. The burden of government spending shrinks as a share of economic output, which naturally also leads to less red ink relative to the size of the private economy.

But it’s difficult to maintain spending discipline for multi-year periods. In most cases, governments that adopt good policy eventually capitulate to pressure from interest groups and start allowing the budget to expand too quickly.

That’s why the ideal policy is to make a spending cap part of a nation’s constitution.

That’s what happened in Switzerland early last decade thanks to a voter referendum. And that’s what has been part of Hong Kong’s Basic Law since it was approved back in 1990.

And while many nations struggle with ever-growing government, both Switzerland and Hong Kong have enjoyed good outcomes and considerable fiscal stability.

Now a Latin American nation may enact a similar reform. Brazil, which is suffering a recession in part because of bad government policies, is trying to boost its economy with market-based reforms. Given my interests, I’m especially excited that it has taken the first step in a much-needed effort to impose a spending cap.

The Brazil Chamber of Deputies on Monday voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would limit government spending to counteract the country’s alarming economic downturn. …The amendment proposal must pass two rounds of voting in the lower House and Senate. Should it be passed, the government would limit spending increases to the rate of inflation… Following approval, the amendment would take effect in 2017.

The specific reform in Brazil would limit spending so it doesn’t grow faster than inflation. And it would apply only to the central government, so the provinces would be unaffected.
Capping central government outlays would be a significant step in the right direction. The central government would consume 16.8 percent of economic output in 2025 with the cap, compared to 20.8 percent of GDP if fiscal policy is left on autopilot.

Of course, there’s no guarantee this reform will become part of the Constitution. It needs to be approved a second time by the Chamber of Deputies (akin to our House of Representatives) and then be approved twice by the Senate.

But the good news is that more than 71 percent of Deputies voted for the measure. And there’s every reason to expect a sufficient number of votes when it come up for a second vote.
Brazil’s Senate, however, may be more of a challenge. Especially since various interest groups are now mobilizing against the proposal.

Advocates of the reform should go over the heads of the interest groups and other pro-spending lobbies and educate the Brazilian people. They should make two arguments that hopefully will be appealing even to those who don’t understand economic policy.

First, a spending cap doesn’t require spending cuts in a downturn. Outlays can continue to grow according to the formula. This should be a compelling argument for Keynesians who think government spending somehow stimulates growth (and also may appease those who simply think it is “harsh” to reduce spending when the economy is in recession).

Second, by preventing big spending increases during the boom years, a spending cap is a self-imposed constraint to protect against “Goldfish Government,” which should be an effective argument for those who are familiar with the underlying fiscal and demographic trends that already have caused so much chaos and misery in nations such as Greece.

P.S. While I haven’t been a fan of Brazilian economic policy in past years, I actually defended that nation when Hillary Clinton applauded Brazil for being more statist than it actually is.

P.P.S. Being less statist than Hillary is not exactly something to brag about, so I will note that Brazil deserves credit for moving in the right direction on gun rights and also having some semi-honest left-wing politicians.

 

Hacking the Hacks

By Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments Sunday, February 02, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

What’s a four-letter word meaning digital intrusion and clueless liar with a press pass?

Nothing brings out the hacks like hacking takes. In the brave new digital age, hacking is everywhere and nowhere. The two kinds of hacks interface with stolen messages being passed along by hackers to hacks for their informational operations. The hacks usually claim not to know what the hackers were doing.

Sometimes the hacking was invented by the hacks.

The great collision of hack and hacker right now is all about the claim that Jeff Bezos, CEO of
Amazon, richest man alive, and, most importantly, owner of the Washington Post, had his sleazy affair exposed (resulting in the most expensive divorce settlement in human history) because he cares about human rights. The latest tawdry effort to ennoble the pictures of the WaPo owner’s private parts as a tool of foreign policy has enlisted the UN to accuse the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia of hacking his iPhoneX.

The collision of hack and hackery begins with a report by a UN Special Rapporteur (apparently you have to be a billionaire to get the UN to help you cover up your adulterous affair with a sleazy LA anchorwoman) which describes an "in-depth forensic level examination" of the phone and admits that it found no malware, no malicious software, and no evidence of jail-breaking tools.

Federal prosecutors soon let it slip that, as everyone had already known, the pictures came from the CEO’s mistress who passed them on to her brother, who then probably passed them to the tabloids.

But the UN and the media weren’t having any of it, and insisted that the Saudi crown prince personally hacked Jeff’s phone using Zionist software. Or, as the UN report puts it, "it is later established with reasonable certainty that the video's downloader infects Mr. Bezos' phone with malicious code." Earlier, the report had admitted that, "the contents of the downloader cannot be practically determined."

How can you establish with any kind of certainty the contents of software you didn’t examine?

In its truly pathetic conclusion, the report insists that, “Facebook confirms that ‘sending a specifically crafted MP4 [video] file to a WhatsApp user’ is a method for installing malicious spyware, exactly as was sent to Mr. Bezos." Except that the report had already admitted that it found no malicious code in the promotional video file that had been sent by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to Lauren Sanchez’s lover.

The UN report finds with “reasonable certainty” that a video downloader that experts couldn’t examine sent a specially crafted MP4 file just like the one they examined and found nothing special about.

The UN report blames "mobile spyware" from "NSO Group's Pegasus". The NSO Group is an Israeli-American security firm that helps friendly governments spy on terrorists and enemies. But Pegasus got into WhatsApp accounts with a “zero click” exploit. Nothing as clumsy as a tainted video file.

To buy the hacking story that the hacks are selling, you have to believe in a Saudi-Zionist conspiracy to steal pictures of Jeff’s private parts by using tactics as crude as any teenage Pakistani script kiddie. And yet, despite these crude efforts, the best experts Bezos could command have found no trace of them.

Occam’s Razor weeps.

If only Carlos Danger, who also claimed that he had been hacked, owned a major paper and the UN.

Meanwhile over in Brazil, the hackery of the hacks collided with actual hacking. And media hacks are outraged that one of their own, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who once defended Hamas and Hezbollah, was accused of guiding and inciting a hack of private messages between public officials, including a heroic judge turned Minister of Justice, who were investigating leftist corruption.

Operation Car Wash in Brazil had uncovered truly monumental corruption that brought down the hierarchy of the Workers’ Party (PT) which had been robbing the country blind through Petrobras.

Petrobras, the megacorp whose largest owner is the Brazilian government, had been turned into the private piggy bank of the friends of the working class with money flowing between corporations, oligarchs, and officials, which went into their pockets and funded the political campaigns of the Left.

Rather than exposing corruption, The Intercept’s top leftist hack had allegedly colluded with hackers to hack into the messages of the investigative judge who had helped bring down the leftist mafia. But the same international media which ignored the massive scale of the Petrobas corruption, has rushed out identical editorials clamoring that Greenwald is being persecuted for exposing Brazil’s corruption.

That’s like claiming that Jimmy Hoffa was killed and buried in cement to promote ethics in construction.

Greenwald isn’t just a radical hack funded by Pierre Omidyar, a mini-Soros Franco-Persian billionaire, his boyfriend, David Miranda, is a congressman from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). PSOL has formed coalitions with Communist and Marxist parties and is an occasional ally and rival of the larger Workers’ Party (PT) which also has Communist partners. Good thing the media won’t report that.

Set aside the question of the degree of Greenwald’s collusion with the hackers, one of whom had been previously accused of raping a teenage girl, and this is at best a case of interfering with an investigation. Greenwald was undermining the credibility of the investigation that had exposed the leftist mafia running Brazil while improving the political fortunes of his political allies on the Left. Including his lover.

That’s not exposing corruption. That is corruption.

Just to prove the point, Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “The Bolsonaro government is pursuing state retaliation against Glenn Greenwald because of his work as a journalist to expose public abuse and corruption. Brazil should drop the charges immediately and stop its attacks on a free and open press.”

Greenwald was actually retaliating against a public official who was exposing abuse and corruption. The hacked messages he got his little hands on, at worst, accuse investigators of bias. That’s nothing compared to the massive amounts of bribes and corruption surrounding Operation Car Wash.

Nor does a leftist hack, working with hackers, who is funded by a foreign billionaire embody a free press.

The Intercept is a radical billionaire’s private influence operation. What financial interests might benefit from bringing down a conservative government and putting the Petrobas mafia back in power?

That’s a question that the media will carefully avoid approaching with a million-foot pole.

But what can the hacks tell us about the ethics of hacking? From the cases of Bezos and Greenwald, we can conclude that the media thinks that hacking conservatives is ethical, but not the owner of the Washington Post. The media hasn’t stopped fuming over the publication of the DNC emails, but was happy enough when Elliot Broidy, a Republican fundraiser and Trump ally, was hacked by Qatar.

Just as Bezos’ Washington Post colluded with Qatar, so did the media outlets who had Broidy’s emails carefully fed and spun to them by Qatari interests and lobbyists. That’s how the hacks of the press do it.

The media had no objections when Sarah Palin’s email was hacked. Hacks frantically scurried through searching for anything they could use. But when Colin Powell’s hacked emails revealed an affair, the media slowly backed away. Powell, by then, was an Obama ally and no longer a Republican. The hack that exposed the emails of Sidney Blumenthal was ignored despite the troubling light that the emails cast on the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton. Certainly no one in the media called it exposing corruption.

What’s the difference between Broidy and Blumenthal’s emails? Politics. Hacking a Trump ally or a Bolsonaro ally is journalism. Hacking a Hillary ally is an act of war. Against whom? Against the Left.

This is the age of informational warfare where media hacks and state hackers collude to create narratives. Espionage and fake news have come together as opposition research. Political parties hire foreign agents, state hackers pretend to be human rights activists, and the digital fog of war blinds all.

Out of this paranoid hall of mirrors where everything is backward, come bizarre stories that are clearly false and which exist only as informational warfare, narratives that have no relationship to reality, confirmed by experts who ignore the facts, because the old walls between truth and lies are gone. Journalism is dead. In its place is something else. A shadowy network of firms like Fusion GPS. A dark world of opposition research and narratives run by campaign operatives, security firms, intelligence agencies, and media operatives funded by billionaires who pretend to be everything they’re not.

And in that darkness, the hack and hacker have become one.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.

Why Some Nations are Rich and Others are Poor

Thomas Jackson, American Renaissance, August 1993

Why are Europe and the United States rich while Africa and Latin America are poor? How a person answers this question is an almost fool-proof indication of his politics. Until recently, the most common view was that white countries grew rich by exploiting poor, non-white ones. On university campuses there are still Marxists who roar about imperialism and neo-colonialism, but most people have begun to realize that economics is not thievery.

Lawrence Harrison, author of Who Prospers?, confesses that in 1962, when he first went to work for USAID, he thought that Latin America was poor because of American “neglect.” He also recalls that when President John Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress in 1961 nearly everyone believed that Latin America would blossom as quickly and gratifyingly as Europe did under the Marshall Plan.

Mr. Harrison now believes that the reason poor countries stay poor is not because rich ones squeeze them but because they are hobbled by unhelpful mores and folkways, which he rather grandly calls “cultures.” In an era in which it is fashionable to pretend that all “cultures” are equally valid, it is a minor milestone to point out that the folkways of certain peoples are inferior to others.

Mr. Harrison’s analysis suffers from his unwillingness to violate certain taboos, but to speak of “culture” is an enormous improvement over blaming imperialism. Many of the foolish ideas that have influenced our immigration and foreign policies have grown out of the myth that overseas squalor is somehow all our fault. Mr. Harrison tries to avoid blaming anyone for anything, but a vital message gets through despite his scruples: We are not responsible for the failures of others............To Read More.....

Bolsonaro is off to a great start

January 12, 2019 By Silvio Canto, Jr.

During the presidential campaign, many of my Brazilian friends voted for Mr. Bolsonaro but doubted that he'd keep his campaign promises. I got the Portuguese version of "all politicians make promises, you know." Yes, all politicians say things during the campaign that come back to haunt them, from "Mexico will pay for the wall" to "I will close Guantanamo." Down in Brazil, President Bolsonaro ran a Trump-like campaign by promising to end support for Cuban doctors, get tough on Venezuela, get very tough on criminals, and stop migrants from coming into the country. So far, he is fulfilling his promise about Cuban doctors and isolating Venezuela. Let's add another one, as reported in The New York Times: ..........Read more

Brazil's New Top Diplomat: Climate Change is a Marxist Hoax

By Michael W. Chapman | November 28, 2018   Brazil's newly appointed foreign minister, Ernesto Frago Araujo, who starts his new job in January under President Jair Bolsonaro, has stated that the climate change issue was invented by "cultural Marxists" to help push a globalist agenda that is anti-growth and anti-Christian, reported The Guardian and the Daily Mail.  

The Bolsonaro administration will take over Brazil's government on January 1, 2019. Bolsonaro selected Araujo to be minister of foreign affairs on Nov. 14. Araujo is a career diplomat who currently heads Brazil's department for U.S. and Canadian affairs. His blog, Metapolitica 17 -- Against Globalism, is here.  ...........To Read More.....

Remember how Brazil, Ecuador and Peru condemned Arizona over illegal immigration in 2010?

By Monica Showalter August 19, 2018

Remember how Arizona Governor Jan Brewer got piled on by 17 Latin American nations in 2010, condemning her state for attempting to enforce federal immigration law based on the reality that Arizona was being overrun by illegals and the Obama administration was doing nothing? It was bad enough that the Obama administration sued her state to end the law, something it only did with partial success.  But then Latin states such as Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador joined the fun, piously weighing in to sign on to a highly questionable Friend of the Court brief led by Mexico, condemning Arizona for trying to enforce U.S. immigration law.

Scroll forward to 2018. Now the shoe is on the other tootsie.

Because right now, those are the very nations pulling up the drawbridge to illegals as their own countries get inundated by vast human waves of Venezuelans flooding over their borders without papers..............While I pity the plight of these sick Venezuelan refugees from socialism and fully support the U.S. mercy mission, there is also the main issue of why these countries don't want to be overrun.

Like the illegals who rolled into Arizona that Colombia and the others had such tough words for, quite a few of these people are criminals who have wrought havoc on the countries they invaded. It's gotten so bad that in one Brazilian town, the locals literally ran them all out of town.  Which was exactly what happened in Arizona.......... Read more  
 

Bureaucrat Pensions and America’s Brazilian Future

April 19, 2017 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

When I write about poorly designed entitlement programs, I will warn about America’s Greek future. Simply stated, we will suffer the same chaos and disarray now plaguing Greece if we don’t engage in serious reform.

Ideally sooner rather than later.

But when I write about state governments, perhaps it would be more appropriate to warn about a Brazilian future. That’s because many American states have made unaffordable and unfunded promises to give lavish benefits to retired bureaucrats, a topic that I’ve addressed on numerous occasions.

 

And why does that mean a Brazilian future? Because as Greece is already suffering the inevitable consequences of a bloated welfare state, Brazil is already suffering the inevitable consequences of a pension system that treats bureaucrats as a protected and cossetted class. Here are some excerpts from a sobering report in the Wall Street Journal.

Twenty years before Michel Temer became president of Brazil, he did something millions of his compatriots do, at great cost to the country’s coffers: He retired at age 55 and started collecting a generous pension. Delaying that moment until age 65 is at the center of Mr. Temer’s proposed economic overhaul. …making that happen is seen as a make-or-break test of whether the government can get its arms around mounting economic problems like rising debt, low investment and a stubborn recession now entering its third year. New pension rules are considered central to fixing an insolvent system.

It’s easy to understand why the system is bankrupt when you read the details.

…some retirees receive pensions before age 50 and surviving spouses can receive full pensions of the deceased while still drawing their own. The generosity of Brazil’s pension system is legendary—and, economists say, troubling as the country’s fertility rate plummets and life expectancy climbs. João Mansur, a long-time state legislator in Paraná state, served as interim governor there for 39 days in 1973, a stint that qualified him to retire with a $8,000 monthly pension. …Other former public workers who retire not only reap nearly the same income they got while on the job, but also see their checks get bumped up whenever those still working in the same job category get raises. …Retirement outlays will eat up 43% of the $422-billion national budget this year. …Demographics are playing against a generous system created in great part to bridge Brazil’s infamous social gap. Official statistics say there are 11 retirees for every 100 working-age Brazilians; that will rise to 44 per 100 by 2060.

Fixing this mess won’t be easy.

Brazil’s constitution must be amended to allow its pension system to be restructured… Mr. Temer has already been forced to make a series of major compromises, including exempting state and local government employees from the overhaul. …legislators have sought to further water down Mr. Temer’s proposals, by for instance maintaining the lower retirement ages for women and dragging out the transition from the old social-security regime to the new one.

In other words, Brazilian politicians are in the same position Greek politicians were in back in 2003. There’s a catastrophically bad fiscal forecast and the only issue is whether reforms will happen before a crisis actually begins. If you really want to be pessimistic, it’s even possible that Brazil has passed the tipping point of too much government dependency.

In any event, it appears that legislators prefer to kick the pension can down the road – even though that will make the problem harder to solve. Assuming they ever want to solve it.
Which is exactly what’s happening at the state level in America.
Consider these passages from a recent Bloomberg column.

Unfunded pension obligations have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007. Credit rating firms have begun downgrading states and municipalities whose pensions risk overwhelming their budgets. New Jersey and the cities of Chicago, Houston and Dallas are some of the issuers in the crosshairs. …unlike their private peers, public pensions discount their liabilities using the rate of returns they assume their overall portfolio will generate. …Put differently, companies have been forced to set aside something closer to what it will really cost to service their obligations as opposed to the fantasy figures allowed among public pensions. …many cities and potentially states would buckle under the weight of more realistic assumed rates of return. By some estimates, unfunded liabilities would triple to upwards of $6 trillion if the prevailing yields on Treasuries were used.

But this looming disaster will not hit all states equally.

Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation which shows a tiny handful of states actually have funded their pensions (in other words, they may provide extravagant benefits, but at least they’ve set aside enough money to finance them). Most states, though, have big shortfalls.

The lighter the color, the bigger the financing gap.

To get a sense of the states that have a very good economic outlook, look for a combination of zero income taxes and small unfunded liabilities.

South Dakota (best tax system and negative pension liability!) gets the top marks, followed by Tennessee and Florida. Honorable mention for the state of Washington.

And is anyone surprised that Illinois is tied for last place? Or that Connecticut and New Jersey are near the bottom? Kentucky’s awful position, by contrast, is somewhat unexpected.

P.S. Brazil’s government may kick the can down the road on pension reform, but at least they added a spending cap to their constitution.

Will we find The Clinton Foundation in the Odebrecht scandal sweeping Latin America?

By Silvio Canto, Jr. March 9, 2017

It started in Brazil and it is now moving into just about every other country in the region. We are not talking about "zika" but rather "Odebrecht"! Let me share this story from the Washington Post:        

Odebrecht made a humble start in Brazil’s muggy northeast, where in 1944, founder Norberto Odebrecht launched a neighborhood construction firm with global ambitions. “He believed in a model based on trusting people,” said one former Odebrecht executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. “He said, ‘If I choose them well, the sky’s the limit.’ ”  

The sky was indeed the limit as the company began to make money the old-fashioned way. Then Brazil's crony capitalism got in the way and Mr. Odebrecht figured out that bribing politicians was a good way of getting ahead and keeping the regulators out of your business......Read More....