Posts Tagged ‘feminists’

LinkSwarm For November 10, 2023

Friday, November 10th, 2023

Republicans subpoena Biden Crime Family members, Israel is handily kicking Hamas’ ass in Gaza, Jezebel goes down in flames, and The Marvels looks to be doing as badly as everyone expected. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • House GOP subpoenas Hunter Biden alongside suite of Biden family members.”

    Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden have been subpoenaed Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee, which took the remarkable step of seeking depositions from family members of President Biden amid its impeachment inquiry.

    As part of the request, the committee asked for James Biden’s wife, Sarah Biden, as well as Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen, to sit for transcribed interviews. The panel also asks for interviews with Hallie Biden, the widow of Beau Biden, and her sister Elizabeth Secundy.

    The subpoenas come weeks after the Oversight Committee demanded both Hunter and James Biden’s personal bank records, and also include a subpoena for Hunter Biden’s former business partner Rob Walker.

    The panel is also requesting to speak with Tony Bobulinski, whom Hunter Biden’s attorney have accused of lying to the FBI.

    The release from House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said he “plans to send additional subpoenas and transcribed interview requests later this week.”

    If James Biden is a potential felony suspect (which he is), I doubt the House can compel his wife to testify.

  • “Hunter Biden Wants To Sic Daddy’s DOJ On Whisteblower Biz Partner.” Of course he does.
    

  • Despite the expert opinions of all those expert commentators, Israel appears to be handily kicking Hamas’ ass.

    The IDF’s tactical success so far in its nearly two-week-old ground incursion into Gaza – cutting the north from the south and entering Gaza City with limited troop casualties – has surprised some observers. There have been 32 Israeli troops killed during the incursion, according to The Times of Israel, which is far fewer than anticipated. The IDF said it is killing fighters and destroying scores of tunnel shafts and other Hamas infrastructure during its advance that has reached the Mediterranean Sea coast. Still, the mounting casualty toll and displacement of civilians remains a grave cause for concern as outrage grows and calls for a ceasefire increase.

    Snip.

    While good analysis of any major news story should not accept on face value any claims by the participants, it most certainly must not accept the claims of a source known to lie. And yet, the mainstream press and the experts it has relied on have accepted and continue to accept what Hamas tells them, with no skepticism, to the point that several media sources (Reuters, CNN, AP, and the New York Times) allowed themselves to be used by Hamas as propaganda outlets. Their blind passion to get the story combined with their willingness to repeatedly accept the words of an organization not only known to repeatedly lie but to rape, torture, and slaughter women, children, and babies caused them to misread the situation badly.

    Others might not be so kind, and will instead say this poor analysis was because many of these news organizations and the experts they relied on have taken sides. They see Hamas as the good guy and victim, and Israel as the bad guy and oppressor. Thus, their analysis is warped because they assume Israel is lying and Hamas is telling them the truth.

    This conclusion is certainly possible with some news organizations and some experts, but it is a mistake to rely on it entirely. For example, many of the military experts quoted in the articles above were from Israel itself. Yet they too were fooled, and thought Hamas was stronger than it is.

    Muslim fanaticism and Jew-hatred are poor substitutes for planning, training, doctrine and logistics.

  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin will not run for reelection. That’s pretty much a lock for Republicans to flip next year in a state that went for Trump over Biden by 49 points in 2020.
  • If the 2024 Presidential election were held today, Trump would win over 300 electoral votes. “Five out of six swing states that Joe Biden won in 2020 show Trump winning well outside the margin of error.” Usual poll caveats apply.
  • UNRWA Staffers, Teachers Celebrated Hamas Massacre of Israeli Civilians.” Of course they did.
  • Five Nordic nations agree to share flights deporting illegal aliens. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Pennsylvania voting machines shut down after displaying flipped votes for judges in Northampton County.” This looks more like a bug than a felony, as votes between candidates were swapped, not simply switched from a Democrat to a Republican.
  • Former Soros-backed Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby convicted on purjury charges.
  • Green Charter Township, Michigan board: “Here, have a Chinese battery company.” Voters: “Here, have a pink slip.” All of them were voted out.

  • Leftwing rage monkey Cenk Uygur thinks he’s running for President, despite being constitutionally ineligible.
  • WeWork files for bankruptcy. I thought there might have been a pre-Flu Manchu use case for making a profitable business of co-working spaces, but even that wasn’t possible for WeWork, since they lease rather than own all their space. This means they’re just a middleman in an economy that increasingly eliminates middlemen, and there’s nothing special about their model that actual landlords can’t do better.
  • Feminist blog Jezebel shutting down after failing to find buyer.”

    There aren’t enough Nelsons in the world… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of Nelson-worthy news: Fake meat company Beyond Meat is laying off workers. Seems like Vegetarianism is a luxury good people will are willing to go without in the Biden Recession. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Right now, The Marvels is tracking to have one of the lowest openings in the entire MCU, with just around $60 million. To put that into perspective, Captain Marvel opened with $153.4 million in 2019.”
  • Oh, and as you might imagine, Critical Drinker is not impressed. “People aren’t even angry anymore, they just don’t care. The original Captain Marvel was a divisive movie that inspired debate and controversy, but this one falls victim to a far more Insidious problem: absolute apathy. This really is how the MCU dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
  • Speaking of the Drinker, he referenced this extensive Variety piece on MCU troubles. There’s a lot to chew on here, including how the Blade reboot “morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons.” (I’m guessing the Variety stylebook forbids using the word “woke.”) But the most interesting bit was the disasterous incompetence surrounding the She-Hulk TV series:

    But some internal sources suggest [Victoria] Alonso was a scapegoat and point to the “She-Hulk” VFX issues as a symptom of a deeper rot — namely a lack of oversight on script development. In the original arc of “She-Hulk,” a flashback of star Tatiana Maslany’s transformation into her Hulk character didn’t take place until Episode 8, the penultimate episode. But after Marvel’s brain trust watched footage, it realized the scene needed to happen in the pilot episode so that audiences could see more of the character’s backstory early. That meant that the VFX team was tasked with fixing the mess in postproduction.

    “The so-called bad VFX we see was because of half-baked scripts,” says one person involved with “She-Hulk.” “That is not Victoria. That is Kevin. And even above Kevin. Those issues should be addressed in preproduction. The timeline is not allowing the Marvel executives to sit with the material.”

    All the while, Marvel was bleeding money, with a single episode of “She-Hulk” costing some $25 million, dwarfing the budget of a final-season episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones, ” but without a similar Zeitgeist bang. The August 2022 series premiere at the El Capitan Theatre foreshadowed what was to come six months later at the “Quantumania” bow: the “She-Hulk” special effects were out of focus in multiple scenes.

  • Important safety tip: If you’re choosing a victim to rob at knife-point, try not to pick an Ex-MMA fighter.
  • Tentative agreement reached in actor’s strike.
  • Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s disco musical about Imelda Marcos will be closing on Broadway. The first sign the production was in trouble: It was a disco musical about Imelda Marcos. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Researchers Discover Miracle Cure For Gender Dysphoria Called ‘Deleting TikTok.'”
  • I don’t mean to cause no fuss/But can I ride your doggy bus?

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Vice Media Lays Off Writers

    Monday, August 30th, 2021

    Vice Media is laying off workers, so let’s have a moment of silenceOK that’s enough.

    Aw, who am I kidding? Break out the tiny violin!

    “Thursday’s layoffs mainly came from Refinery29.”

    I had honestly forgotten that Vice owned that feminist well of suck.

    Vice had done some interesting work early on, but had gradually morphed into a hard-left Gawker-lite. Indeed, having either on your resume should be as toxic to future employment prospects as having Gawker itself on there.

    And here’s a great zinger from The Babylon Bee’s managing editor:

    LinkSwarm For June 12, 2020

    Friday, June 12th, 2020

    Riots! Guns! Social Justice Warriors! Animated police dogs! Today’s LinkSwarm is packed to its furry ears…

  • The fire this time:

    This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.

    You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.

    When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.

    There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.

    The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.

    Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.

    We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.

    All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.

    The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.

  • Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
  • Looters in California stole a forklift to break into stores.
  • When Democratic Party race-pandering backfires.
  • There’s previous little evidence that black lives matter to Democratic politicians:

    Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.

    If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.

    They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”

    They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is ­entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.

    But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Secondary evidences suggest that the Wuhan Coronavirus was already ravaging Wuhan in September and October of last year.
  • Texas suffers a jump in number of Wuhan coronavirus cases reported. But is it real?

    Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.

    Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.

    Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.

    Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.

    Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.

  • The Bonfire of Wokeness claims the founder and editor of feminist Refinery29. Remember, you can never, ever be woke enough…
  • Andrew Sullivan gagged for having non-PC thoughts. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Thou Shalt Not Criticise Black Lives Matter

    To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.

    For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.

  • Well, this is just great: “FCC failed to monitor Chinese telecoms for almost 20 years.”
  • Meant to post this last week: “Whitmer Lifts Stay-at-Home Order Now That People Need to Go Out and Riot.”
  • Canadian professor fired for pointing out that biological sex is real. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Social Justice Warriors at Cornell are trying to get Legal insurrection’s William Jacobson fired for #wrongthink.
  • You know what really sucks? Having your store looted. “They tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying…I’m black, look what you did to my store.”
  • Black gun owners guard businesses to protect against looting in Minneapolis.”
  • Eleven times gun owners defended life and property.
  • The gun debate is over.

    We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later

    The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.

    There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.

    Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.

  • West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
  • San Diego County government ordered hotels not to take guests unless they were “essential” workers. This strikes me as an unconstitutional taking…
  • Work privilege:

  • San Francisco’s mass transit agency announces it will no longer transport San Francisco police to riots.
  • The Republican National Convention has been moved to Jacksonville.
  • Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:

    The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.

    They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.

    Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • It’s a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization:

    “These ideas are wrong.”

  • Wokeness comes for the New York Times:

    For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.

    Snip.

    The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.

    It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.

  • Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:

    “One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”

  • Important questions:

  • Welcome to the Year Zero:

  • President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.

    President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.

    The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

    The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.

    “The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.

    Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.

    What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?

  • The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
  • Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
  • Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
  • Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
  • Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”

  • Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
  • “Democrats Propose Replacing All Police With Traveling Bands Of Hippies Singing ‘Imagine.'”
  • And speaking of damn dirty hippies, Dwight has this CBS scoop from 1967.
  • World War II bomber story: Two planes, one crash landing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Dave Chappelle vs. Social Justice Warriors

    Wednesday, August 28th, 2019

    Netflix just released a new Dave Chappelle comedy special, Sticks and Stones. Guess who he takes aim at?

    Chappelle humorously critiques school mass shooting drills, Jussie Smollett, the excesses of the #MeToo movement, and LGBTQ activists—or “the alphabet people” as he calls them—for thinking they should be immune from mockery.”

    The Margaret Dumonts of the Social Justice Warrior left are already condemning him for “misogyny” and “transphobia,” which instantly rocketed the special up my “must see” list.

    LinkSwarm for August 23, 2019

    Friday, August 23rd, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Why evangelicals support Trump:

    Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”

    That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.

    Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.

    Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.

    Snip.

    Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.

    Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.

    Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.

    First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.

    He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

    Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.

    Well, it’s about time!

    It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.

    Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.

    Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.

    No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Man goes to car dealership, finds it booming:

    “It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.

    He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”

    If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
    The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.

    The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.

  • The Trump Administration ends catch-and-release.
  • The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:

    Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.

    We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.

    Snip.

    In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.

    They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.

    But it won’t.

    It’s all a lie and a scam.

    And we know it.

  • How Boris Yeltsin defeated the 1991 Communist coup. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)
  • “The Department of Justice says one of its own “repeatedly” helped the Bloods street gang protect its interests by identifying and exposing informants and cooperating witnesses.”

    Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.

    If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.

  • Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
  • Israel reportedly hit a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq. According to Wikipedia, Israel has 16 F-35s total.
  • Hong Kong’s leaderless protests:

    Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.

    Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.

  • WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
  • Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Still true: “Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
  • “Trump Executive Order Cancels Student Loan Debt for Disabled Veterans.” Bet none of them have degrees in feminist critical theory, either…
  • Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
  • “Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.”

    They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.

    And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.

    Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.

    With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.

  • “Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
  • Reporter discovers, much to her surprise, that, yes, you do have to pass a background check before buying a gun. She fails.
  • The army wants microwave weapons against drones.
  • “Man Accused Of Shooting 6 Philadelphia Police Officers Was Federal Informant.” (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
  • Gregory Benford says that the Epstein smear against Marvin Minsky is baseless. (Hat tip: Instapundit, which is a backup source if you can’t get to Greg’s Facebook page.)
  • Borepatch says that red flag laws are malicious:

    False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.

    But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.

    This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.

    To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.

    And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.

    Malice.

  • Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
  • President Trump may have failed to buy Greenland, but we can all learn from the failures of Greenland’s public housing.
  • Lt. Governor Dan Patrick frowns on Bonnen’s shenanigans. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
  • Republican John Lee wins seat on LA City Council, beating Green New Deal supporter.
  • What it’s like to be a roughneck in west Texas.
  • Miss Nevada banned from competing for Miss America over supporting President Trump.
  • First picture of light as both a wave and a particle.
  • “When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”

    I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.

    As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.

  • LinkSwarm for July 5, 2019

    Friday, July 5th, 2019

    I hope everyone had fun blowing things up on July 4th. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm

  • How President Donald Trump is kicking Iran’s ass without war:

    Iran’s official press has recently bragged about its military prowess when downing a US drone worth about $130 million, touting it as a nasty black eye for the world’s military superpower.

    But a recent Reuters report said Iran’s oil exports are down to a scant 300,000 barrels per day. In April 2018, before Trump exited the Iran deal, which provided the country with sanctions relief in exchange for its commitment to not build nuclear weapons or their key components, Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day.

    At today’s rate per barrel, the Trump-induced decline in exports has probably cost Iran $120 million a day from oil alone — almost the cost of the US’s pricey drone.

    For the US, losing a drone is costly and destabilizing [?-LP] but not really a big deal for a country with a $718 billion annual defense budget. In Iran, the currency has crashed, and the country has become gripped by protests and strikes. And it has felt a crackdown on the financial freedom for all of its citizens.

  • Speaking of sanctioning Iran: “British Marines Seize Oil Tanker Headed For Syria.”
  • Martin Peretz reflects on the two towering achievements brought about by the Oslo Accords since 1993, namely “jack” and “squat”:

    For years even after the failure of Oslo and of the 2000 summit at Camp David, D.C. notables and even some prominent Zionists had photos with Arafat displayed on their credenzas.

    That sociology stuck in my mind. It testified to the tenaciousness in certain left-liberal circles of an idealizing impulse—one that altered the judgments of normally lucid people, leading them to make heroes of figures like Arafat who didn’t fit the bill. They justified this impulse with the old progressive belief in rational political improvement—a respectable belief when it’s applied in context, a misleading one when the context is altered to fit the wish. Their willed naiveté struck me, and not just on Oslo, as the place where effective progressivism goes to die.

    Snip.

    The counterpoint to this accommodation of Iran was the marginalization of Israel—the cutting-down-by-proxy of the country to what Obama saw as its physical and psychological size. True, it wasn’t a financial marginalization—as his defenders have said ad nauseam, Obama allowed Israel to buy more weapons than any other president before him. But by centering his policy on compromising with Iran, the one major Mideast power that had yet to reach some détente with Israel, and allowing Israel’s other enemy Assad to murder unimpeded, Obama shifted the strategic ground under Israel’s feet. Rhetorically, he did even more: He used the president’s bully pulpit to dramatically change the terms on which conversations about Israel would be conducted among Democrats and the world.

    You can draw a line from his tepid 2009 justification of Israel to the speech he sent his towering shikying’l John Kerry to give to the United Nations in 2016: a refusal to block a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its support of right-wing settlements in the West Bank. A lot of people—myself included—oppose some of the outlier settlements, without seeing them as a major cause of the current impasse. But Kerry’s speech made them equal—or greater than equal—problems to the Palestinian leadership’s endemic corruption, its weakness in the face of Hamas and refusal to accept peace offers made by four Israeli prime ministers from 1993 to 2009. (Actually, the Palestinians haven’t made a territorial compromise in 52 years—that is long enough for the Israelis to grow impatient.) Kerry’s speech, itself an instance of sacrificing the reality to the ideal through the principle of making Israeli and Palestinian histories equivalent, shifted the terms of the debate.

    That rhetorical shift, coupled with Obama’s highly publicized, ultimately corrosive enmity towards Bibi Netanyahu—a partisan leader with a surer grasp of regional realities than the American president had—helped create the Democrats’ current political condition, which is not just counterproductively idealizing but supportive of the party’s most destructive foreign policy impulses. A party that defines itself by the chances it gives to marginalized groups always has, on its edges, radicals pushing in toward the center who define their politics by the principle of marginalization: the boiled-down Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. When the center of the party shows weakness, the radicals naturally move in, and that’s what Obama’s rationalists allowed them to do: By shifting the party from its center and creating a rhetoric of false equivalence, they gave the hard leftists an opportunity they were only too happy to take.

  • “Netanyahu: Israel preparing for wide-scale campaign in Gaza.”
  • The Trump Administration is treating illegal aliens horribly. And by “horribly,” I mean “demonstrably better than the Obama Administration.”
  • Eastern Europe doesn’t have an immigration problem, it has an emigration problem.

    In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.

    In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.

    Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.

    Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?

    It’s not just highly skilled labor. When I visited London, it seemed that at least half the workers in restaurants and hotels were from eastern Europe.

  • Dwight found an amazing story of corruption in the Honolulu DS’s office. (One guess as to which party controls Hawaii.) The list of sleazy crimes Katherine Kealoha engaged in is staggering.
  • Engineer convicted of smuggling military computer chips to China.

    Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).

    The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.

    Last time I checked, finding electrical engineers with experience designing RF circuits for mixed signal ICs is hard. I bet finding those that can design MMICs is even harder…

  • Speaking of Chinese espionage, it turns out that Cisco inadvertently embedded Huawei signing certificates deep within some of their switches. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Amy Coney Barrett Strikes a Blow against Campus Kangaroo Courts:”

    Whenever I read a court opinion describing a campus sexual-assault proceeding, I routinely find myself shocked at the staggering unfairness and ridiculous bias of campus kangaroo courts. Driven by the need to find more men guilty — and rationalized by a #BelieveWomen ideology — campus administrators have systematically discarded every fundamental notion of due process in American law.

    Across the nation, courts on the right and on the left are saying no. They’re blocking biased sexual-assault adjudications, protecting basic fairness, and restoring a degree of sanity to colleges’ procedures. On Friday it was the turn of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to protect the Fourteenth Amendment, and an all-woman panel, led by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, established a precedent that could be used against woke college administrators nationwide.

    The facts of the case are extraordinary. After a female college student accused her ex-boyfriend of groping her in her sleep, Purdue University conducted an investigation and adjudication so amateurish and biased that it’s frankly difficult to imagine that human adults could believe it was fair or adequate. The plaintiff (John Doe) alleged that he was “not provided with any of the evidence on which decisionmakers relied in determining his guilt and punishment,” his ex-girlfriend didn’t even appear before the hearing committee, he had “no opportunity to cross-examine” his accuser, the committee found his accuser credible even though it did not talk to her in person, the accuser did not even write her own statement or provide a sworn allegation, and the committee did not allow the plaintiff “to present any evidence, including witnesses.”

    After that farce of a process, Purdue found the student guilty and suspended him for a year. The suspension meant the automatic loss of the student’s Navy ROTC scholarship and expulsion from the ROTC program. Incredibly, the lower court dismissed the student’s claims. He appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and a unanimous panel resurrected his lawsuit.

    The conclusion is that campuses are are blaming men as a class and this is a clear violation of Title IX. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “I have never met antisemitism in Britain…until now.”

    I generally come to Britain from my home in Portugal whenever a new work of mine is released to give talks at bookshops, libraries and literary festivals. My publisher’s attempts to interest event organisers in me aren’t always successful, of course. But this year, for the first time, I have been turned down for being Jewish. A little context. Peter Owen Publishers launched my new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, in mid-April. An old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months earlier.

    In early March, he called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that he had just been turned down by two cultural organisations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he said. “They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.”

    Snip.

    Has the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement played a role in deepening this atmosphere of fear? That’s what my friends in the UK tell me. They also speak bitterly of the unwillingness of the Labour party to take a firm stand against antisemitic discourse. If cultural organisations are afraid of hosting events for Jewish writers, then Britain has taken a big step backwards.

    Let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them, I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. And my most well-known books take place in Portugal and Poland. It’s true my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel.

    Of course, that piece is from that notorious bastion of right-wing belief, The Guardian

  • Broward Count Sheriffs office loses accreditation.
  • On the Betsy Ross Flag:

  • Guadalajara hit by several inches of golfball-sized global warming.
  • Mad magazine is shutting down.
  • Does the Navy have patents for UFO-like craft? Sure looks like it, but I suspect we’re just farking with the Chinese…
  • Think Progress is a money-losing rathole.
  • Invasion of the killer alien tick. (Hat tip: Woodpile Report.)
  • Attention everyone: Mess with our Blue Bell and we are coming for you. Signed, Texas.
  • Florida man find out the hard way that cocaine and fugu don’t mix. And they’re not great for you separately, either… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Hillary Proposes Reparations To Anyone Who Ever Lost A Presidential Election To Trump.”
  • LinkSwarm for May 24, 2019

    Friday, May 24th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Texas legislative news, foreign elections, and a surprising amount on analog synthesizers…

  • Theresa May is out as British Prime Minister effective June 7. The only reason she’s not the worst prime minister of the last century is that she didn’t give Czechoslovakia to Hitler…
  • May’s refusal to offer the UK a real Brexit may result in the Tories being crushed by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party:

    Even before [EU Parliamentary] election results are known on Sunday, therefore, there’s a growing sense that the Brexit party may be a permanent factor in British politics. Opinion polls on how people would vote in a general election show that the party would do less well than in European elections but still run about level with the Tories and Labour. There are deep divisions on policy apart from Brexit that have allowed critics to argue that the party would fall apart once its main goal had been achieved. But the divisions don’t seem deeper than those of other parties, and power or its prospect is itself a unifying social glue. Farage’s rallies around the country are hugely successful — packed, good-humored, more diverse socially and politically than those of the other parties, full of confidence and optimism, and notably without rancor. As with Trump’s election rallies, people seem to find them enjoyable as well as genuinely serious. A kind of Brexit party spirit already exists with many different types of people happy to be together on the bandwagon. It seems less class-bound than any of the existing parties.

    And if the Brexit party wins one-third or more of Britain’s votes this week from a standing start, it will change British politics. Such a result would have the effect of a second referendum victory for Leave. It simply would not be possible for Parliament and the mainstream parties to push through a Brexit that doesn’t get the effective consent of Farage and his party. If such a thing is attempted, it will be seen to be anti-democratic and will have to be abandoned quite quickly. It would force the EU to confront the fact that there is little chance of getting a deal like May’s withdrawal deal accepted, and that even if one were to make it into the statute book, it could never be effectively implemented. In those circumstances the EU might simply throw up its collective hands and declare that the U.K. has left without a deal.

    The third effect of a Farage success in the European elections would be to realign political parties and, in particular, to place the Conservative party in mortal peril. Voting for a political party is a matter of both loyalty and habit. For lifelong Tories, the idea of voting for another party is anathema. Most people who think about it never actually get around to doing it. But the Tories have certainly given their traditional supporters and those new supporters who voted for them in order to achieve Brexit good reason to leave them on this occasion. Many will do so this week. And as with adultery, betraying your party for another is much easier the second time around.

  • Well:

  • You know who doesn’t want to impeach President Donald Trump? House Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)
  • But she may not be able to hold off her lunatic party much longer.
  • And all that despite ample evidence that voters are opposed to the whole charade. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Democrats lying about preexisting conditions again:

  • “A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally.”
  • Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a rarity: an actual pro-life Democrat. When Edwards’ wife was “20 weeks pregnant with their first child, a doctor discovered their daughter had spina bifida and encouraged an abortion. The Edwardses refused. Now, daughter Samantha is married and working as a school counselor, and Edwards finds himself an outlier in polarized abortion politics.”
  • A succinct summary from across the pond:

  • If you look at what China is targeting in retaliatory tariffs, it’s obvious their hand is incredibly weak:

    But based on what we know, what’s even more revealing about China’s choices are the U.S.-made products that haven’t made any tariff list. They include civilian aircraft and their engines and parts, which had a 2018 export total of $17.73 billion. They include semiconductors and their components, which last year had China shipments that totaled several billion additional dollars. They include the equipment needed to manufacture and inspect semiconductors and their parts, which racked up at least $850 million in 2018 exports to China; devices for conducting chemical and physical analyses (with $912 million in China exports last year); laser equipment ($304 million), motor vehicles, auto parts, and plastics resins and polymers (which each produced billions in exports to China); and billions of dollars’ worth of other products that the Chinese either can’t (yet) make or can’t make in the amounts that they need—or that consist of goods preferred by Chinese consumers over their Made in China counterparts.

    As I’ve said before, semiconductor equipment is an area where it’s all but impossible for the Chinese to do without American technology.

  • Narendra Modi wins reelection in India. Forcing Pakistan to stand down over Kashmir probably clinched the victory for him. Modi’s Hindu ethononationalism is not good for India in the long-run, but he’s probably someone President Trump can trust to be a staunch ally against Islamic terrorism. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The election was an outright disaster for Rahul Gandhi, “the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and leader of India’s Congress party,” which is down to 52 seats as opposed to 303 for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. (Remember that Indira Gandhi was the daughter on India’s first prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and is not related to Mahatma Gandhi.)
  • The Morganza Spillway on the Mississippi to be opened for only the third time in history. The Morganza Spillway is located downstream of the Old River Control Structure.
  • “60% of male managers are ‘uncomfortable‘ working around women,” a 32% increase over last year. You mean they don’t want false accusations of sexual harassment to derail their careers? Way to go feminists! Once again you’ve made things worse for women living in the real world!
  • People have known that Chinese manufacturer Huawei has been stealing American intellectual property for at least seven years. Former congressman Mike Rogers: “If I were an American company today, and I’ll tell you this as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and you are looking at Huawei, I would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America.”
  • Social Justice Warriors are ruining Young Adult publishing.
  • How computer security is actually handled in the wild:

  • UK foreign minister to Iran: “Bitch, you try to throw down on T-Dog, he gonna go HAM upside yo dome!” Of course I’m paraphrasing a bit…
  • Good news! It looks like Texas taxpayers will finally be getting some meaningful property tax relief, to the tune of $5 billion, or half the projected surplus. (Kids, if you have any friends in California or Illinois, try to explain to them what a “budget surplus” is.) This follows months of waffling.
  • Good news! Texas passes constitutional amendment banning a state income tax, which will go before voters in November.
  • Bad news! Texas House kills election integrity bill.
  • Bad news! Texas House refuses to pass a taxpayer-funded lobbying ban.
  • Laredo passes Los Angeles as America’s largest port. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
  • Coordinated Instagram troll farm attack on Trump. So the next time you see a Trump-Putin meme, be sure to post that link and ask “How the trolling, Trolly McTrollFace?”
  • Speaking of trolls: Twitter Permanently Bans Anti-Trump Krassenstein Brothers” for “operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions.” The overwhelming majority of conservatives I follow think Twitter should lift the ban so these idiots can keep talking, but it will be nice to no longer see these morons as the top reply on every Trump tweet.
  • Antifa activist ordered to pay Judicial Watch’s legal fees.
  • Speaking of legal fees, Harvey Weinstein will reportedly pay $44 million to settle various sexual harassment/etc. lawsuits, the money evidently coming from insurance, but will still face criminal prosecution over at least two sexual assault allegations.
  • “Florida man hid legless fugitive girlfriend in plastic tote.” She sounds like a real winner: “Anderson was wanted for failing to appear in court on charges including false imprisonment related to a 2015 incident when she allegedly held people hostage at a Burger King with a BB gun. It ended in a shooting with police and she lost both legs.”
  • Speaking of lunatics: “Trump is the devil!” Genuine loon, or suicide by cop? You make the call. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • All teaching “white privilege” does is make leftists more contemptuous of poor white people. Which pretty much explains the Democratic Party’s decline in a nutshell…
  • Austin Mayor Steve Adler rolls out the welcome mat for antisemetic Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.
  • Followup: “Medieval Sex Cult at Center of German Crossbow Murder Mystery. Police now say a German sex guru specializing in medieval bondage directed lesbian sex slaves in bizarre murder-suicide.”
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez frets over colonial cauliflower in her own garden. She really is an idiot. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Moogseum.
  • And speaking of analog synthesizers, they had features you don’t find on modern digital versions, like secret caches of LSD. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Facebook Claims Party Celebrating Candace Owens’s Suspension Was ‘An Honest Mistake.'”
  • A Song of Vanilla Ice and Fire.
  • LinkSwarm for April 12, 2019

    Friday, April 12th, 2019

    At long last, the FISA abuse/FBI spying on the Trump campaign scandal is finally being dragged into the light again. At the same time, Wikileaks head honcho Julian Assange has been extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy arrested, pending extradition to the U.S. Coincidence? I report, you decide. “The US department of justice confirmed he has been charged with computer crimes, and added in a statement that if convicted he will face up to five years in prison.” Dang dude, if he had turned himself in when indicted, he’d already be out by now and working the talk show circuit.

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm, and remember that you have to finish doing your taxes this weekend.

  • Stating the obvious: “Barr is right, spying on Trump campaign did occur.”

    The baffling thing was why they were baffled. Barr’s statement was accurate and supported by publicly known facts.

    First, what Barr said. “I think spying did occur,” he told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “But the question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting it was not adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

    That is entirely accurate. It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau’s application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and “the Russian government’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign.

    Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page’s electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page’s emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign.

    So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure. Is a wiretap “spying”? It is hard to imagine a practice, whether approved by a court or not, more associated with spying.

    Anyone reading this blog (or any non-MSM news source) knew that Obama’s Justice Department was spying on Trump over two years ago. At this point it’s about as surprising as hearing that James Harden is good at basketball…

  • Barr Confirms Multiple Intel Agencies Implicated In Anti-Trump Spy Operation.” (Hat tip: J.J. Sefton at Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • In the same vein:

    Democrats seem both angry and frightened, and their kneejerk and perhaps even somewhat panicked response right now is to try to destroy Barr.

    You can feel the frisson of fear they emanate. They waited two years for the blow of the Mueller report to fall on Trump, and now other investigative blows may fall on them. The Mueller report combined with Barr’s appointment could end up being a sort of ironic boomerang (whether or not boomerangs can be ironic I leave to you to decide).

    How could this have happened? they must be thinking. How could the worm have turned? But they are spinning in the usual manner, hoping that—as so often has happened in the past—their confederates in the press will work their magic to make all of it go away and boomerang back to Republicans instead.

    But whatever comes of it all, if anything, Democrats cannot believe that at least right now their dreams have turned to dust and they taste, instead of the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

    That’s from Neo, formerly NeoNeocon. I can see why she’d want to change the name, given how many neocons became #NeverTrump lunatics. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Newly released email from Platte River Networks, the firm that serviced the Emailgate server used by Hillary Clinton: “Its all part of the Hillary coverup operation.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Who’s Worse – Julian Assange or the NY Times and Washington Post?

    Deeply sourced? What a laugh. As we now know post-Mueller Report, these “respected” journalists were simply trafficking in collusion lies whispered to them by biased informants. In other words, they were a bunch of gullible, over-zealous propagandists. For that they received their Pulitzers, as yet unreturned, needless to say (just as the Pulitzer for Walter Duranty still hangs on the NY Times’ wall despite decades of pleas from Ukrainians whose countrymen’s mass murder by Stalin was bowdlerized by Duranty).

    So, in other words, these mainstream media reporters have gotten off with nary a slap on the wrist (indeed received fame and fortune) for lying while Julian Assange may be headed for prison for telling the truth. There’s a bit of irony in that, no?

  • Iraqi special forces launch an operation against islamic State remnants in the Hamrin Mountains. If you looked at the livemap, the Hamrin Mountains were the tiny sliver of ISIS-held territory between Tikrit and Kirkuk. No population centers, just some remote mountainous caves.
  • Avenatti indicted on 36 charges of tax dodging, perjury, theft from clients.”

    Avenatti stole millions of dollars from five clients and used a tangled web of shell companies and bank accounts to cover up the theft, the Santa Ana grand jury alleged in an indictment that prosecutors made public Thursday.

    One of the clients, Geoffrey Ernest Johnson, was a mentally ill paraplegic on disability who won a $4-million settlement of a suit against Los Angeles County. The money was wired to Avenatti in January 2015, but he hid it from Johnson for years, according to the indictment.

    In 2017, Avenatti received $2.75 million in proceeds from another client’s legal settlement, but concealed that too, the indictment says. The next day, he put $2.5 million of that money into the purchase of a private jet for Passport 420, LLC, a company he effectively owned, according to prosecutors.

    You can read the indictment itself here. Hey, remember the MSM treating Creepy Porn Lawyer like a rock star? Pepperidge Farm remembers:

  • When California Democratic Representative Ted Lieu went after Candace Owens, he probably had no idea he’d just make her star shine brighter. “She was a liberal, but during the #GamerGate controversy, she was ‘doxxed’ by the Left, and had a road-to-Damascus awakening: ‘I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.'”
  • Wendy Davis is going to run for congress against Rep. Chip Roy. In one way this makes sense, as Roy narrowly won over Joseph Kopser by 2% in 2018. However, Kopser was (by Democratic standards) a well-heeled businessman moderate. I don’t actually see Abortion Barbie being nearly as competitive after the walloping she took in 2014. Also of interest is her running for an Austin-to-San Antonio district rather than somewhere near her previous base of Fort Worth. (I emailed the Kopser for Congress address to ask if he’s running again, but the contact address is no longer valid.)
  • Fritz Hollings, RIP. Hollings was one of the last conservative southern Democrats, and co-sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act, which temporarily limited spending growth until congress gutted it in 1990.
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin supports the reelection of Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.
  • Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath lives in Tennessee.
  • “Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned China that his soldiers [are] occupying the island of Thitu in the South China Sea, which is currently surrounded by some 275 Chinese fishing militia and Coast Guard vessels.”
  • Why we need the electoral college:

    he core function of the Electoral College is to require presidential candidates to appeal to the voters of a sufficient number of large and smaller states, rather than just try to run up big margins in a handful of the biggest states, cities, or regions. Critics ignore the important value served by having a president whose base of support is spread over a broad, diverse array of regions of the country (even a president as polarizing as Donald Trump won seven of the ten largest states and places as diverse as Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas).

    In a nation as wide and varied as ours, it would be destabilizing to have a president elected over the objections of most of the states. Our American system as a whole — both by design and by experience — demands the patient building of broad, diverse political coalitions over time to effect significant change. The presidency works together with the Senate and House to make that a necessity. The Senate, of course, is also a target of the Electoral College’s critics, but eliminating the equal suffrage of states requires the support of every single state. A president elected without regard to state support is more likely to face a dysfunctional level of opposition in the Senate.

    Consider an illustrative example. Most of us, I think, would agree that 54 percent of the vote is a pretty good benchmark for a decisive election victory — not a landslide, but a no-questions-asked comfortable majority. That’s bigger than Donald Trump’s victory in Texas in 2016; Trump won 18 states with 54 percent or more of the vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton won 10 plus D.C., and the other 22 states were closer than that. Nationally, just 16 elections since 1824 have been won by a candidate who cleared 54 percent of the vote — the last was Ronald Reagan in 1984 — and all of them were regarded as decisive wins at the time.

    Picture a two-candidate election with 2016’s turnout. The Republican wins 54 percent of the vote in 48 states, losing only California, New York, and D.C. That’s a landslide victory, right? But then imagine that the Republican nominee who managed this feat was so unpopular in California, New York, and D.C. that he or she loses all three by a 75 percent–to–25 percent margin. That 451–87 landslide in the Electoral College, built on eight-point wins in 48 states, would also be a popular-vote defeat, with 50.7 percent of the vote for the Democrat to 49.3 percent for the Republican. Out of a total of about 137 million votes, that’s a popular-vote margin of victory of 1.95 million votes for a candidate who was decisively rejected in 48 of the 50 states.

    Who should win that election? This is not just a matter of coloring in a lot of empty red land on a map: each of these 48 states is an independent entity that has its own governor, legislature, laws, and courts, and sends two senators to Washington. The whole idea of a country called the United States is that those individual communities are supposed to matter.

  • Can Jewish Exodus from Democratic Party keep Florida red in 2020?”
  • Five debunked feminist myths. Including that hoary 77¢ canard.
  • “On Thursday, Google canceled its AI ethics board after 2,476 employees signed a petition urging the company to remove Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James for opposing transgender activism. An anonymous Google employee told PJ Media the corporate culture resembles the stifling of debate on college campuses, and warned that Google’s caving to pressure on this issue will only embolden activists.”
  • Eurocrats issue absurd takedown commands under a new “terrorist content” law. Include all of Project Gutenberg.
  • A follow-up to last week’s LinkSwarm piece about Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh’s bribes-via-bulk-children’s book-orders scam: Critical Carlos reviews Healthy Holly. And don’t miss the video.
  • Via regular blog reader Howard comes this handy map of fake hate crimes.
  • That “far right extremist crimes are on the rise” talking point is absolute bunk.
  • More than 60 groups are considering suing SPLC. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Antifa gonna antifa:

  • “Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint.”
  • Casino Profits Collapse In Atlantic City.”
  • Pollen haboob. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • The word for the color orange didn’t exist in English until the introduction of the fruit.
  • “Oh no, not the bees! They’re in my eyes!
  • You just missed the 50th anniversary of the Japanese Penis Festival. (Hat tip: Ordy Packard on Twitter.)
  • LinkSwarm for February 1, 2019

    Friday, February 1st, 2019

    I know many of you don’t want to hear it, but here in Texas we’re enjoying a comparatively mild winter…

  • Why President Donald Trump will win the wall fight:

    Trump has, however, suggested that he may well go the emergency route if Pelosi and Schumer remain intransigent: “We can call a national emergency. I haven’t done it. I may do it.… It’s another way of doing it.” The standard line trotted out by the Democrats and the media when the President alludes to an emergency declaration is that a phalanx of pettifoggers will contrive to tie it up in the courts indefinitely. This has even been repeated by conservative pundits. According to Professor Turley, however, “Courts generally have deferred to the judgments of presidents on the basis for such national emergencies, and dozens of such declarations have been made without serious judicial review.”

    All of which means that there is no practical way for the Democrats to stop Trump from getting his wall. He will make a sound, statesmanlike case for it to the nation during the State of the Union address — just 10 days before the deadline to avoid another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi will be scowling behind him, still smarting from the beating she received in the polls from the last shutdown and the hectoring to which she has no doubt been subjected from vulnerable members whose constituents are tired of, “NO.” Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the Dem SOTU response and characterize Trump’s wall using the usual tired clichés about racism.

    In other words, Trump will have been presidential. He will have delivered all manner of good news about the economy, deregulation, health care, foreign policy, and will have laid out a plan for the wall. The Democrats will have offered identity politics, obstruction, investigations, and magical thinking on policy. Pelosi will at length decide it’s smarter to ignore the crazies in her caucus, give Trump something that he can call a “win” on the wall, and move on to something else… anything else. And all the TDS victims and Never Trumpers will demand to know what happened to their bête noire.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • What a fully-funded border protection system looks like.
  • Shot: “Trump has opportunity to flip the 9th Circuit, so why isn’t he?”
  • Chaser: “Trump heard the conservative media outcry, nominates three judges for 9th Circuit.” That’s some swift course-correction…
  • Charlie Martin looks at big media’s very bad week.
  • Newseum closing. “Look on my works, ye mighty…”
  • Old and Busted: “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The New Coldness: Mail delivery in Minnesota cancelled due to cold.
  • Related:

    In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years. In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago – over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).

    Stop and think about that – if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn’t there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently? What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.

  • Heh:

  • “A shocking report from the Texas Secretary of State last week revealed 95,000 individuals identified in the Texas Department of Public Safety database as non-U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Texas — and 58,000 of those have voted in one or more Texas election since 1996.”
  • Newly seated Texas congressman Chip Roy isn’t backing down.
  • Four Houston police officers shot serving a narcotics warrant in southeast Houston.
  • Houston Police union honcho says that hands up, don’t shoot is to blame. Sounds like there may be a lot of blame to go around, including the possibility of excessive force for a narcotics raid.
  • Cop killer executed after thirty years on death row.
  • Texans may enjoy real property tax reform soon. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you have a speaker working for conservative goals, rather than against them…
  • “Public documents obtained by a Portland attorney reveal that Portland Public School staff, planned, executed and paid for what the media and the school district branded as a ‘student’ anti-Second Amendment protest last March 14th.” Sounds like they should be charged with embezzlement. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Worth a chuckle:

  • The negative startup economics of Buzzfeed:

    In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!

    BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment.

  • Heh:

  • “The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There’s a reason they have shakedown cruises, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll work out the bugs and get the electromagnetic catapult systems working properly. But at $13 billion, the cost-benefit analysis of additional aircraft carriers starts to get very tricky vs. say, four cheaper ships capable of launching 1,000 semi-autonomous drones each. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Rand Paul’s attacker finds out that assaulting people over political differences is a money-losing proposition.
  • Did Israeli scientists develop a cure for cancer? Let’s hope so…
  • Was Michael Jackson a child diddler?
  • Three Charged for Working With Serial Swatter.”
  • Robert Stacy McCain talks about Tom Wolfe, Junior Johnson, and the decline of journalism:

    Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.

    If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”

    The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.

    He also quotes part of my favorite passage from Wolfe’s celebrated essay, about courage being one of Appalachia’s exportable commodities:

    In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.

  • The coming Google+pocalypse.
  • Feminists aren’t just angry, they ignore facts that disagree with their preexisting anger.
  • This guy should make you feel a lot better about your own obscure collecting hobby.
  • Daily Kos: Man, We Sure Love Us Some Old White Heterosexual Millionaires!

    Wednesday, January 9th, 2019

    Lefty site DailyKos has released their first Presidential straw poll of 2019. Results?


    ELIZABETH WARREN 22%
    BETO O’ROURKE 15
    KAMALA HARRIS 14
    JOE BIDEN 14
    BERNIE SANDERS 11
    UNSURE 9
    OTHER 9
    CORY BOOKER 3
    JULIAN CASTRO 1
    KRISTEN GILLIBRAND 1

    So: Of their top five choices, all are straight, four are white millionaires, three are men, three will be over the age of 71 on January 20, 2021, two will be 78 or older, and none are Hispanic.

    The outliers are Kamala Harris, 55, with a net worth of $3,310,537 (a neat trick for someone who has been continuously in government positions since 1990), and Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, 46, with an estimated worth of only $9 million. (Forbes wants us to know that his father-in-law, William Sanders, is probably only worth a mere $500 million. Also, as far as I can tell, William Sanders is not related to Bernie Sanders.)

    The low ranking of Bernie Sanders may be a surprise to those who don’t follow every twist and turn of leftwing politics, but Kos deliberately drove out the Bernie Brigades in 2016 for the high crime of complaining about Hillary rigging the primary.

    So too is the high standing of Warren, whose “Hey, I’m just a common person drinking beer” Instagram video drew such ridicule, surprising.

    For all that Democrats swear up and down they’re the party of “people of color,” and the heavy influence of SJW “intersectionality” on the party’s rhetoric, four out of their top five Presidential candidates sure don’t show it.

    Maybe the real driver of the Democratic Party isn’t intersectionality, but middle-aged feminists looking for the next Hillary. (And maybe the young feminists find O’Rourke “dreamy.”)

    Or maybe I just don’t know enough about Daily Kos biases relative to the rest of the left in 2019. 2016 showed that lots of accepted wisdom about who shows up to vote for who in presidential election primaries was wrong.

    Or maybe straw polls this far out are simply meaningless. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Ben Carson were mopping up straw poll victories back in 2015…