Posts Tagged ‘Michael Flynn’

LinkSwarm for November 27, 2020

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

This Black Friday LinkSwarm is coming to you absolutely free!

  • President Donald Trump pardons former National Security advisor Michael Flynn. Good. He was railroaded and then held prisoner by a rogue judge long after the Department of Justice ordered him released.
  • The thing that really bothers the establishment about Trump is all his supporters they prefer to pretend don’t exist:

    Election Day definitively confirmed the existence of hidden Trump voters. Undetected by polls and long denied by the establishment media, Trump’s surprising surge had to come from somewhere. Either these supporters were hiding from pollsters or pollsters were hiding them. Regardless, their existence raises disturbing questions about the role played by the establishment media and pollsters in influencing this election.

    Election Day provided the startling revelation that a contest that supposedly had been over for months, actually would not be decided for days, and perhaps longer. In reality, the “blowout” proved a nail-biter. More unsettling is the fact that the race probably had been this close all along and that the false impression likely influenced the outcome.

    As recently as October 12 the RealClearPolitics average of national polling had Biden at 52.3 percent and Trump at 41.7 percent. The average on Election Day was 51.2 percent to 44 percent. As of November 18, the actual popular vote figures are Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 47.2 percent.

    From his October 12 level, Trump’s support increased over 13 percent. How could an error of such magnitude occur? Clearly a lot of hidden Trump voters came from somewhere. The question is whether they were hiding or were hidden.

    Whether this was a sin of omission or one of commission has enormous implications for America’s elections. After years’ worth of concern about whether there had been Russian interference in our elections, it bears considering whether America has just fallen victim to internal tampering to a far greater degree.

    The establishment media’s preferred answer to how the polls failed to detect millions of Trump voters is that the error was stupid, not sinister. “Whoops, we just missed them” — despite this being pollsters’ business, their assurance that they had “fixed” their polls’ problems from 2016, and the mistake being of incredible size. As results show, 2020’s error is greater than 2016’s.

    The establishment media has readily blamed the pollsters, essentially exonerating itself by saying that it was just reporting what it was told. Yet neglected is the fact that the polls’ results were confirming the establishment media’s own bias. This bias has been repeatedly cited for decades and has never been clearer than over the last four years. As testament to the miraculous coincidence of pro-Biden polls and establishment media’s pro-Biden bias, consider the reverse: Would the establishment media have so readily regurgitated polling data showing the race as close as it turned out to be?

  • An obituary for the Trump-era press:

    We say goodbye, then, to journalists elevating as worthy of public notice obvious liars and lunatics, including convicted felon Michael Avenatti, gossip columnist Michael Wolff, mental health quack Bandy Lee, and conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch — all because they oppose the administration.

    Goodbye to weekly “bombshells” that land with a “splat!” instead of a “boom!”

    Goodbye to near-daily input from presidential historians turned political assassins.

    Goodbye to members of the press acting as if the cover artwork of the latest edition of a prestige news magazine is in some way provocative, stunning, or even particularly interesting.

    Goodbye to White House correspondents pretending as if they are reporting from an active war zone or claiming they feel safer covering authoritarian regimes.

    Goodbye to the Holocaust being invoked against the administration on a near-daily basis.

    Etc. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • If Biden makes it to the White House, get ready for more green crony graft. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Governor Abbott sends the Texas Rangers to Dallas.

    Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas Rangers and other officials to help the City of Dallas respond to a spike in murders and other violent crimes that has gripped the city.

    Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to send help to the Dallas Police Department (DPD) which will include special agents, state troopers, two helicopters, and two patrol planes.

    “The rise in violent crime in the City of Dallas is unacceptable, and the Texas Department of Public Safety will assist the Dallas Police Department in their efforts to protect the community and reduce this surge in crime.”

  • Fifth circuit to judge to Planned Parenthood: No, you don’t have a right to Texas taxpayer money. Not yours.
  • Six MS-13 Gang Members Indicted in Houston for Murder Could Face Death Penalty.” Good.
  • Why does the media keep trying to make a saint of commie Angela Davis?
  • Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell fined $1,000 for violating his own stay at home order to visit his grandson’s birthday party. Not quite a lobbyist-funded trip to The French Laundry, but still not a good look…
  • Austin leftwing journalists go after (checks notes) moms and sex trafficking victims for daring to oppose police budget cuts. Next up: The cishetronormative oppression of apple pie.
  • What real hope and change looks like in the Middle East:

  • More on the same theme:

  • Social Justice Warriors have to get rid of meritocracy because it doesn’t let them discriminate against Asians.
  • How Erdogan’s Turkey destroyed the value of the Lira.
  • “Google, Facebook and Twitter threaten to leave Pakistan over crackdown on speech offensive to Islam.”
  • The modern welfare state in action: “Dutch Doctors Can Now Drug Dementia Patients Before Killing Them to Prevent Resistance.”
  • “Walmart-exclusive router and others sold on Amazon & eBay contain hidden backdoors to control devices.”
  • Over at Penguin books, the inmates are trying to run the asylum with staffers in “revolt” over publishing Jordan Peterson’s new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
  • Fleas from rescued squirrels bit Johnny Rotten’s sex pistol. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • Florida man who wrestled puppy from an alligator speaks.

  • Dancing Weasel.
  • Like a boss:

  • Most Shocking fodder.
  • I don’t know how I missed this rare actually funny Funny or Die bit when it came out in 2013. “Try parodying one of my songs now, you stupid bastard!”
  • “State Governor Frees All Drug Dealers To Provide Prison Space For Families Celebrating Thanksgiving.”
  • “Never Trumpers To Be Granted Special VIP Section Of Gulags When Dems Take Over.”
  • “Just Hours After Being Placed In Cuomo’s Possession, Emmy Statue Dies Of COVID.”
  • Joseph Stalin To Receive International Emmy For His Outstanding Hunger Relief Efforts.”
  • Not news: Dog reunited with owner thanks to microchip. News: After seven years.
  • Nice one, Muttly:

  • LinkSwarm for October 2, 2020

    Friday, October 2nd, 2020

    Welcome to the October country, one of my favorite months! It being 2020, things lean rather more heavily on tricks than treats…

  • Two important points from Tuesday’s debate:

    (1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.

    (2) Trump may have announced that he’s about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Is CIA Director Gina Haspel personally blocking the release of Russiagate documents?
  • New documents show that the goal of the Flynn investigation wasn’t a search for truth, it was to get him fired.
  • So, who had “Armenian Azerbaijani War Over Nagorno Karabakh” on their 2020 bingo card? Here’s a map I swiped from Wikipedia:

    And here’s the Livemap.

  • France has accused Turkey of sending Syrian jihadists there to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan. Remember that Turkey killed over 1.5 million Armenians during the rise of the Young Turks as part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, so the bad blood there goes back a long ways.
  • Virginia passes law decreeing that Christians have no right to that pesky First Amendment and must align their theology with the tranny mafia or face fines. Is your Church government approved, comrade? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Top Obama FBI official wants a commission to rule out any presidential candidates who threaten to bust their scams. Of course, he uses different language… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Has a member of Mueller’s team flipped for Durham?
  • Australian blogger examines Wuhan coronavirus data:

    Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments – probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.

  • Kuwait’s ruler Emir Sheikh Sabah dead at 91.
  • “Clare Bronfman Becomes First NXIVM Sex-Slave Trafficker to Get Jail Time.” Namely six years and nine months. You know it’s a crazy year when you don’t have time to pay attention rich, powerful weirdos being tried for running a sex cult…
  • Coinbase SJW babies: We have to be woke! Coinbase CEO: There’s the door.
  • Hopefully Spotify will do the same to staffers demanding the right to censor Joe Rogan.
  • What things irritate the left the most during a nomination fight? Republicans nominating blacks, women, or Hispanics. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Things generating irrational hatred in Trump Derangement Syndrome suffers this week is (rolls dice)…bales of hay in Rappahannock County, Virginia, population 7,252.
  • The Texas House District 148 battle features a fight between a Hispanic Republican against a Democratic candidate with even more ties than usual to communism. “During a July 2018 presentation, “The Art and Science of Building the Communist Party,” Chairman of the Houston chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Bernard Sampson boasted that his club had placed four communist party members on the Texas ballot, including Morales-Shaw who he specifically identified as a member of his group.”
  • NBA conference finals down 40% since last year, despite involving the Lakers.

    I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. We’re disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.

    I didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.

    My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.

    I guess I’m not alone.

    Conservative America’s divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of America’s public schools. And so forth.

  • New South Korean mini nuclear reactor that can’t melt down approved for use in the United States. First plant is scheduled to come online in Utah, but not until 2029. Faster, please.
  • How to disable the nightmarish bullshit that is the WordPress “Block” Editor.
  • And here’s the post I was tempted to write: “Fuck You WordPress, Yet Again (Block Editor).”
  • Ireland’s Supreme Court rules that Subway bread isn’t. You would think that if it used that much sugar it would taste better. Then again, I’m not sure I’ve bought a Subway sandwich since the heyday of the $5 Footlong era…
  • “See Inside a 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Most Expensive Rolls-Royce Ever Made.”
  • There would be an amusing Tweet here about a guy riding a wall of death with a lion, but some bastard hacked Iowahawk’s account.
  • The good news is that he’s back, the bad news is that right now he’s lacking all tweets after May 22. I hope they get that fixed soon.
  • Enjoy a movie review of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
  • “Amy Coney Barrett Holds Press Conference In Handmaid’s Tale Costume Just To Mess With Liberals.”
  • “Democrats Prepare To Give Republicans Free Ad Footage Of Them Attacking Successful, Religious Mother Of 7.”
  • “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • “‘Coexist’ Molotov Cocktails Now Available.”
  • Looks like someone is worried about the competition:

  • LinkSwarm for September 25, 2020

    Friday, September 25th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to the first LinkSwarm of fall! Strangely enough, we’re already getting some fall in our fall in Texas, as opposed to our usual Ever So Slightly Less Hot Late Summer. This week: Still more riots, Supreme Court pick news, more ugly truths about Crossfire Hurricane, and Lebanon goes boom again. Plus a bit of news that goes to eleven.

  • Yet another rash of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, this one ostensibly over the return of a single non-murder charge in the Breonna Taylor killing case.
  • Speaking of those idiots:

  • “Why Amy Coney Barrett is hands-down best pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

    Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.

    Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

    Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman — a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of ­impeaching the president — hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.

    “She was one of the two best lawyers” of the 40 clerks “and arguably the single best.” Feldman concluded: “She was legally prepared enough to go on the court 20 years ago.”

    When Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, every single one of those 40 fellow clerks endorsed her as a “first-rate” thinker, ­including such vehemently anti-Trump figures as Neal Katyal, solicitor general under Team Obama. The entire Notre Dame law faculty likewise endorsed her, “and that includes people who identify as liberal,” as Snead was quick to note.

    She is recognized as an expert on how judges are supposed to interpret statutes — a crucial role, as demonstrated by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s bizarre recent reading of “gender identity” into a civil rights statute enacted in the 1960s. She has also thought deeply about the relationship among the branches of government, a gnarly and seriously important area of law.

    To these achievements Barrett marries a vibrant Christian faith. For the evangelicals and Catholics the president needs to turn out in November, her pro-life bona fides are on display not just in her activities and statements, but also in her own family: She is a mother of seven, including one biological child with intellectual disabilities and two adopted from Haiti.

    Yes, Democrats and their ­media allies will attack and demonize her — viciously. But that’s no reason to nominate other candidates who have no record on life issues. As one conservative activist told me, “the left is going to burn everything down no matter whom we pick, so we might as well get the right person on the court.”

  • And why she’s the odds-on favorite.
  • Democrats worry that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is too old and senile to handle a Supreme Court nomination fight. Of course, they put it in slightly more delicate terms:

    Feinstein sometimes gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked. Her appearance is frail. And Feinstein’s genteel demeanor, which seems like it belongs to a bygone Senate era, can lead to trouble with an increasingly hard-line Democratic base uninterested in collegiality or bipartisan platitudes.

    Just this week, Feinstein infuriated progressives after declaring her opposition to ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster — a top goal of party activists if Democrats win full control of the Congress and White House in November. Some on the left called on her to resign over the comments, although other Democratic moderates have expressed similar views.

    It’s hard to pick which is the more interesting angle here: The hard-left planning to push for their suicidal court-packing/filibuster ending agenda, or the old guard of elderly Democrats hanging on to power ghastly Ringwraiths. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Democrats: “We have the following list of demands for this Suprem-” Republicans: “Sorry, we remember your outrageous smear job on Kavanaugh. Suck it!” Also, remember this:

    There were electoral consequences, with every “incumbent Senate Democrat in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination” losing his or her re-election bid. Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Bill Nelson of Florida were all replaced by their Republican opponents, while Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia saved his seat by backing Kavanaugh. That fall-out handed Republicans the votes they now need to push through a new nominee to the Supreme Court before Nov. 3, 2020.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Trump wants the Supreme Court at full strength to thwart any Democratic attempts to steal the election. Foresight. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “The ‘primary sub-source’ for the Steele dossier was suspected of being a possible Russian agent and a ‘threat to national security,’ according to newly declassified FBI documents.”
  • The goal of the Michael Flynn investigation wasn’t enhancing national security, but to get Flynn fired. “The explosive new documents support Flynn’s latest claims that Obama-era Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials had conspired to set him up from the beginning and that they never had any legitimate basis for investigating him.”
  • “Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the agency’s potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI text messages show.”
  • More on the same subject. I get the impression that there’s so much information coming out about malfeasance during Crossfire Hurricane/FISAgate that I can’t keep up with it all…
  • “Gov. Abbott proposes increased penalty, mandatory jail time for 6 riot-related offenses.”
  • It’s not just Texas: Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis just proposed similar anti-riot legislation. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • For construction workers, not just a V-shaped recovery, but a Super-V.

  • Hezbollah arms depot in Lebanese town of Ayn Qana blows up real good.
  • Follow-up: Wirecard’s business was “almost entirely fraudulent.”
  • Arkansas Kroger’s fires Christian employees for refusing to wear a gay rights pin.
  • Ratings for NBA conference finals way down.
  • “‘This Is Spinal Tap’ Creators Reach Settlement On Long-Running Court Battle Over Rights And Income.” Good. Studios shouldn’t screw creators out of rightfully owed money, even if it is Meathead.
  • Today’s market to be hit by crazy high valuations is…(spins wheel)…rare plants? Now if only it would hit science fiction first editions I would be set!

  • Microsoft buys Bethesda.
  • Boom:

  • Child brought down by wild pack! Oh the humanity!

  • LinkSwarm for July 31, 2020

    Friday, July 31st, 2020

    Idiot rioters and their identifying tattoos, more elected Democrats behaving badly, and a higher than usual helping of cute animals. Enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Borepatch points out that U.S. Wuhan coronavirus deaths hit post-March lows. Also, all U.S. deaths are now far below the norms.

    This was not just a bad flu. The data are crystal clear on that.

    However, the data did not justify shutting down the economy. The data did not justify preventing you from saying goodbye to Grandma on her deathbed. The data did not justify prohibiting public gatherings at funerals. The data did not justify shutting down Sunday church. The data did not justify shutting down the schools. The data don’t justify mandatory mask wearing. The data don’t justify the hype.

  • Did Sweden’s herd immunity gambit work?
  • Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and onetime Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain dies of Wuhan coronavirus.
  • DC Circuit court decides to have an en banc hearing to consider whether it wants to continue screwing General Flynn.
  • George Soros-backed St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies for using guns to protect their homes, illegally took several trips took several trips paid for by activist groups that she failed to disclose. Fair and Just Prosecution is the name of the activist group in question.
  • Tennessee Democratic state senator Katrina Robinson was charged with swindling $600,000 in federal funds to pay for her wedding and a lavish lifestyle.
  • Why did Breonna Taylor die? Partially because of a police raid gone wrong, and partially because she was a drug-dealer’s ex-girlfriend:

    “Say Her Name” is one of the slogans that activists have connected to this Louisville shooting, but if we want to understand why police shot Breonna Taylor, there is another name that needs to be said — Jamarcus Glover.

    Glover is a 30-year-old narcotics trafficker who police say was dealing crack cocaine and marijuana out of a “trap house” on Elliott Avenue in Louisville’s west side. According to a police affidavit, detectives had Glover and his accomplice Adrian Walker under surveillance, and had seen their car — a red Dodge Charger with Mississippi plates — “make frequent trips” from the Elliott Avenue “trap house” to an apartment 10 miles away on Springfield Drive. Detective Joshua Jaynes wrote in the affidavit that Glover was using the Springfield Drive apartment as his mailing address; Jaynes said he had witnessed Glover pick up a postal package at the apartment; and, citing his “training and experience,” Jaynes stated his belief that Glover “may be keeping narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics” at the Springfield Drive apartment. All of this was stated in an application for a search warrant of the Springfield Drive apartment where Breonna Taylor lived.

    You see, Jamarcus Glover was Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. They broke up a couple years ago, according to a lawyer for Taylor’s family who said she maintained a “passive friendship” with Glover. This “friendship” apparently included allowing Glover to receive his mail at her apartment, and, although there is no evidence that Taylor was ever involved in Glover’s drug operation, the “training and experience” of Detective Jaynes led him to believe there must be some connection. This was convincing enough for Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw, who approved the so-called “no-knock” warrant for Taylor’s apartment, and also approved nearly identical warrants for the four other addresses linked to Glover’s drug operation, including the Elliott Avenue “trap house.”

    Louisville police served all five warrants almost simultaneously, shortly after midnight on March 13. Glover was arrested at the Elliott Avenue address, but the raid on Taylor’s apartment went horribly wrong. Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was part of the five-man squad assigned to serve the warrant on the Springfield Drive address, said the squad was told in a preliminary briefing that this was a “soft target” because Taylor was believed to be alone in the apartment. Therefore, Sgt. Mattingly said, the decision was made for officers to knock on the door and announce themselves as police, despite the authorization for a “no-knock” entry. Sgt. Mattingly knocked for about a minute, he said, before the supervising lieutenant ordered them to “hit it,” using a battering ram to breach the door.

    Inside the apartment, however, Breonna Taylor was not alone. She had a new boyfriend visiting her, and they were watching a movie in her bedroom. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker (no relation to Glover’s accomplice Adrian Walker) had a legally owned pistol, and when he heard somebody pounding on the front door, he grabbed his weapon. Why? Because he was “scared to death,” believing that the person pounding on the door might be Taylor’s drug-dealer ex-boyfriend. Walker and Taylor emerged from the bedroom into the hallway of the apartment and, Walker said, Taylor called out, “Who is it?”

    The next thing that happened, in Walker’s description of the incident, is the door “comes off its hinges” — the police are busting in, but he doesn’t know it’s the police. If you’re dating a drug dealer’s ex-girlfriend and somebody busts through your door at 12:30 in the morning, what do you do?

    Walker fired a shot, hitting Sgt. Mattingly in the thigh, and Sgt. Mattingly immediately returned fire, getting off six shots. Two other officers also opened fire. In total, police fired at least 22 shots, none of which hit Walker, but Taylor was struck eight times and died on the scene. Although a grand jury indicted Walker on a charge of attempted murder of a police officer, that charge was dismissed in May at the request of Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine.

    Slogans are no replacement for facts.

  • 1-in-5 mail-in ballots tossed out in tight Congressional primary race.”
  • Trader Joe’s changes its mind, refuses to kowtow to cancel culture.
  • Lest people think I always follow President Trump’s policy position, here’s another one I differ on: Russia shouldn’t be let back into the G7 as long as they’re occupying parts of Ukraine.
  • U.S. withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany.
  • Idaho becomes first state to ban men from competing in woman’s sports.
  • Oopsie! Alleged police car arsonist Timothy O’Donnell identified by his neck tattoo. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
  • Speaking of super-genius rioters and tattoos, Edward Thomas Schinzing was arrested on federal arson charges in Portland thanks to the fact he was shirtless and had his own name tattooed across his back.
  • The New York Times sure loves them some UFOs.
    

  • How the press is willfully ignoring the Obamagate spying scandal:

    The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

    It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.

    The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.

    Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.

  • Meet the source for all the most salacious claims in the debunked Steele dossier: Russian-born habitual drunk Igor Danchenko, who used to work for the Brookings Institution.
  • Why no riots in Detroit? Detroit Police Chief James Craig: “We don’t retreat.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Weird or menacing? “People Are Receiving Mysterious Unsolicited Packages Of Seeds In The Mail From China.”
  • From the “facts pulled out of our ass” department:

  • Stupid questions asked: “Why aren’t you gun owners defending antifa from the government?”

    Well, every single gun nut in America has spent their entire adult life being continually mocked, insulted, and belittled by the left. You’ve done nothing but paint us as the bad guys.

    In Hollywood, we’re always evil, stupid, violent, malicious, redneck, racist, murderers. That’s so ingrained in the liberal religion that when “ally” Harvey Weinstein was trying to get out of being a sleazy rapist, his repentance consisted of promising to make more movies about how the NRA is bad.
    In the news, everything is always our fault. If there is a mass murder, we can always count on the vultures to swoop in and blame America’s gun culture. They flog it for weeks on end, 24/7 coverage, hoping for gun control. And if the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative, it drops off the news in mere hours.

    And then at the local, state, and federal level, legally speaking, the left fucks us at every opportunity. You ban everything you can get away with. You ban things that literally make no sense. You ban shit just out of spite.

    When we fight back against gun control laws, you declare we are stupid because only the police should have guns (hey, aren’t those the guys you are protesting right now?)

    “Stupid racist rednecks! We live in a civilized society! Don’t you realize the police will protect us?” until when your democrat cities are on fire, and you call 911 and the operator tells you sorry, the police can’t come to your house right now, please try not to get murdered… How is that strict gun control working out for you?

    Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.

    But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?

    How fucking gullible do you think we are? 😀 Like holy shit. Damn dude!

    Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.

    You’ve already thrown the black community under the bus, cheering as their neighborhoods get burned and yours are safe. Seriously, white liberals are the shittiest “allies” in history, and your moral foundation has the consistency of Play-Doh. Your moral compass is a wind sock.

  • Newly promoted Chicago deputy chief Dion Boyd dead in apparent suicide.
  • Chinese immigrant student sues Fordham University for sanctioning him over a social media post showing him holding a gun on the anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Antifa Member Lectures D-Day Veteran On How To Fight Fascism.”
  • “‘The Violent Riots Are A Myth,’ Says Rep. Nadler As Antifa Sets Fire To Congressional Hearing Room.”
  • “Portland Police Raise Millions By Letting Citizens Throw Tear Gas At Antifa For $5 A Pop.”
  • “Orcs March On Minas Tirith In Mostly Peaceful Protest.”
  • I LOLed:

  • Video game or not, this is pretty impressive:

  • Squirrel Ninja Warrior.
  • In restless dreams I walked alone…

  • “I’ll have the full massage, please.”

  • LinkSwarm for July 3, 2020

    Friday, July 3rd, 2020

    Job numbers boom! Ghislaine Maxwell captured! CHOP chopped! It’s your Friday before Independence Day LinkSwarm!

  • 4.8 million jobs added in June, blowing away all estimates. This is what keeps Democratic strategists up at night: Between lockdowns and riots, they’ve done everything they can to kill the Trump economy, and the Trump economy refuses to die.
  • FBI arrests Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The memes are already coming fast and furious:

  • “FBI Hires Top-Rated Italian Bodyguard Hiluigi Clintonelli To Protect Ghislaine Maxwell.”
  • Was General Flynn attacked because he was getting ready to audit the intelligence community?
  • Speaking of the intelligence community, here’s why that Russian bounty story was crap. And all your liberal Facebook friends shared it because they don’t care whether a story is true or not, as long as it hurts Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Reason will not save you:

    It is not transcendentally stupid for the alleged anti-racism rioters to destroy a Lincoln statue, though, to normal people, it looks like the act of drooling morons. Now, a good number of these cesspeople are drooling morons, but that does not change the fact that trashing POTUS #16’s statuary is brilliant.

    They have confused their targets – us – by casting off the constraints of coherence.

    Oh wait, you thought that these folks were trying to make a point about racism being bad. And you thought, because that’s how those of us who weren’t raised on Instatwitbook, soy, and critical race theory, that if you point out that something is unreasonable then that will cause the person you were instructing to rethink it. After all, trashing some Honest Abe totem in order to illustrate how racism is double-plus-ungood is about a “12” on the 1-10 scale of unreasonability. And yet, you can point that out all day and they don’t care.

    In fact, they laugh at you for doing so.

    It’s not about making sense. It never was. It’s about making you kneel.

    If you look at everything that is going on, the one common denominator is that every action the woke insurgents take is designed to strip you of your ability to defend your interests, or property, or rights, or life. The idea is to leave you utterly vulnerable, totally exposed, at which point they can do with you as they see fit. The nicer ones will merely reeducate you then demand humiliating submission and tribute. History (and their social media feed) teach that others will happily murder you. Doubt me? Just ask your local kulak.

    Stripping you of defenses takes many forms. One form is defunding and abolishing the police. Oh, someone will be wielding force in society. It just won’t be people accountable to or inclined to protect you. Another form is literally stripping you of your defenses. Why is gun control such a fetish for these creeps? Because you with a gun have the ability to not just say “no” but to exact a price from those who wish to compel a “yes.” So, of course, they want to eliminate your ability to have weapons, but they also want to eliminate, as a practical matter, your ability to use them to protect yourself.

    Look at what happened when the pink polo shirt gun guy quite reasonably grabbed his AR-15 as the savages descended on his property and the cops were AWOL. St. Louis’s Soros-bought DA – who last month released all the arrested rioters – threatened to prosecute him. The media is slandering him too. A pack of jackals threatened his property, his family, and even his dog, and he’s the bad guy for not showing his belly? You see the same fake furor every time some citizen has his car surrounded by a feeding frenzy of scumbags and plows through them to escape. Ignore that the slime are now shooting people they try to trap. The idea is to make you give up instead of fight back because if you fight back, the law comes down on you instead of the criminals.

    Soros really is a shrewd investor.

    The law – and the law generally says you can reasonably defend your life and property (please consult your local laws for specifics and get proper training) – means nothing if corrupt Democrats ignore the crimes of leftists and prosecute normals who dare resist the Blue Terror, which is kind of the point. You thought you could rely on the law and on the government to protect you. Nope. And now you can’t protect yourself either.

    And then there’s reason. That’s a defense too. You can use reason, make arguments, present evidence, and convince people. Not if making sense is beside the point.

    You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like “facts” and “evidence.” Yet so many of us see what’s happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy’s latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Let’s do a double-shot of Kurt: “America’s Problem Is Systemic Liberalism“:

    Forget the bizarre and evil concept of national original sin that is the malignant idea that America is built upon “systemic racism.” America’s true systemic flaw, arising at the time of those miserable progressives of yesteryear and continuing up through the miserable progressives of this rotten year, is what we now call “liberalism.”

    Oh, it’s not classical liberalism, with its concern for expanding economic and personal rights – you know, individual liberty. The current inverted mutation of liberalism is all about constricting economic and personal rights and forcing individuals into collective boxes where their individuality is subsumed into an easily exploited and manipulated conformist whole. Want to test out this hypothesis? Look through the endless woke tweets of your favorite hack journalist, pinko pol, or Hollywood half-wit, or even go up to some self-described liberal in your own life, and see if you can find one iota of deviation from any of the approved liberal dogma. Good luck. You won’t find a smidgeon of nonconformity. You won’t detect a molecule of dissent. These people are the Borg, if the Borg worked in a giant space coffee house, had Bernie stickers on their spaceships, and could not do a push-up. You can’t reason with them – appealing to reason is futile.

    Systemic liberalism is the real poison in America’s veins, not the fanciful notion pushed by bigots, charlatans, and demagogues, that the American enterprise is dedicated to invidious discrimination on the basis of race.

    It’s all a lie and a scam.

  • Our cities burned so race-hustling poverty pimps could rake off the graft:

    Left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committee—the Real Justice PAC—with an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.

    But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.

    Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC’s data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The third—Middle Seat Consulting—was cofounded by one of the PAC’s original leaders, Hector Sigala.

    “There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly.”

    “For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits what’s called ‘private inurement’ or excessive benefit to an individual from the organization’s coffers,” Walter said. “Real Justice PAC isn’t a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesn’t have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like ‘dark money’ influence—should be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies.”

    Ding, the PAC’s technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms’ state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.

  • Seattle’s lawless CHAZ/CHOP zone finally demolished not due to all the murders, but because the scumbag protestors approached the mayor’s house. We can’t have the rabble bothering the more equal pigs!
  • “Left-Wing CHOP Zone Responsible For 525% Spike In Seattle Crime.”
  • CHAZ as socialism’s test case:

    “If you can’t make it work for four square blocks, how can you make it work nationwide?”

  • Democrats evidently believe people people surrounded by rioters should slow down so those same rioters can kill them:

  • Slowly but surely, all the Social Justice rioters are being brought to actual justice: 44 scumbags arrested in Scottsdale.
  • The antifa ringleader of the attempt to pull over the Andrew jackson statue was also arrested. “Jason Charter was arrested at his home by the FBI and U.S. Park Police on Thursday morning and charged with destruction of federal property.”
  • The Social Justice/#DefundThePolice madness is driving cops out of the profession.
  • The lockdowns were a mistake.
  • Consider this your periodic reminder to not freak out over polls.
  • Also, don’t fall for operation demoralize. “It happens every national election. This time it’s early, only June.”
  • Founder of leftist think tank wants to murder people lawfully defending their homes. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Gee, threatening to stab someone for disagree with Social Justice pities can negatively impact your job prospects. Who knew?
  • UMass Nursing Dean Fired For Saying “Everyone’s Life Matters.” I smell a lawsuit.
  • Our ruling class: “Peter Newell was the former co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity. The 77-year-old from Wood Green, north London, was sentenced last month at Blackfriars Crown Court. He admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16.”
  • British to court to dictator Nicolas Maduro: No, you can’t have Venezuela’s gold. Not yours.
  • Speaking of gold, were there 83 tons of fake gold used as loan collateral in China? It’s smoke and mirrors all the way down.
  • Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon sentenced to five years in prison for fake job scam.
  • India bans Tik-Tok and other Chinese apps.
  • And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of Chinese contracts Indian companies are canceling.
  • China’s reckless border war has pushed India into America’s arms.

    Wary of closer Indo-American ties, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Global Times news outlet published editorials cautioning India from involving itself in U.S.-China tensions and serving as an American pawn against China. Picking up on this notion, Brookings scholar Tanvi Madan believes closer India-U.S. ties triggered the border standoff, with Beijing intending to show India its rightful place.

    Instead, China’s deadly actions might have achieved exactly the opposite—cementing New Delhi’s strategic tilt towards Washington.

  • Speaking of Tik-Tok, on iOS (and probably everywhere) it’s data-stealing malware.

  • And it’s not just Tik-Tok! “Other news apps caught red-handed: ABC News, Al Jazeera English, CBC News, CBS News, CNBC, Fox News, News Break, NPR, ntv Nachrichten, Reuters, Russia Today, Stern Nachrichten, The Economist, and Vice News.”
  • Follow-up: Remember problems with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program? The first four built are all being decommissioned March 31, 2021.
  • “China Never Reported Existence of Coronavirus to World Health Organization.” China lied, people died.
  • “Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows.” Absent other corroborative samples from that timeframe, I would guess it’s a case of sample contamination or a false positive. Still: a data point.
  • “Austin Hospital Withheld Treatment from Disabled Man Who Contracted Coronavirus.” Enjoy your death panels, comrade.
  • To the Democratic Party, Mount Rushmore = White Supremacy. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at instapundit.)
  • “Devin Nunes: 2016 Taught Democrats that ‘It’s Not Enough to Just Have 90% of the Media on Your Side.'”
  • “Richest Liberal Arts School In US Slashes Tuition By 15%, Cancels Athletics Program.” That’s Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
  • Wisconsin enlists school children to wage social justice.
  • Today cancel culture seeks to root out the insidious racism of (checks notes) “kindness yoga.”
  • Club for Growth offers a takedown of The Lincoln Project:

    Grifters gonna grift. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Marx was a racist. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Ice iced, baby. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Redskins Change Name To ‘Lizard People’ To Better Represent Population Of Washington, D.C.”
  • Laughing fox:

  • Have a happy July 4th weekend, everyone!

    LinkSwarm for June 26, 2020

    Friday, June 26th, 2020

    Super-busy week for me, and I’m throwing out links to things like unrest in Seattle because they’re more than a week old.

  • Appeals court to judge attempt to drag Michael Flynn case on: which part of “dismiss this case” was unclear, you idiot?
  • “Nearly 300,000 New Jobs in May Indicate Texas Unemployment in Recovery.” Let’s hope so.
  • She seems nice: “Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that ‘the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.'” (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
  • Tampa police drawn into ambush involving hundreds of people. This is the left today
  • Theoretical phsyicist Dr. Stephen Hsu forced to resign VP position after bogus accusations of sexism and racism:

    “The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation,” Hsu posted on June 12. “The accusations are entirely false — I am neither racist or sexist.”

    “The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.”

  • “‘Tolerant’ Liberals Target Black Republican Tim Scott with Threats and Racist Voicemails.” (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
  • America’s first black billionaire doesn’t think much of Social Justice:

    Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the first black billionaire, mocked Cancel Culture and the “borderline anarchists” who topple statues and monuments, claiming that black people “laugh” at the white people engaging in such violence. Even when white liberals topple a Confederate statue, Johnson insisted, “black people don’t give a damn.”

    “Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it,” Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday. “They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue.”

    The first black billionaire, who has called for $14 trillion in reparations payments to descendants of slavery, argued that vandalism and attacks on statues do not help the black community.

    “It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps,” Johnson insisted.

    He insisted that the rioters tearing down statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them saying, ‘Oh, my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South.’”

    “You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows,” Johnson added. He said these attempts to purge American culture of supposedly offensive monuments and media are “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic.”

    “It absolutely means nothing,” the BET founder insisted.

    “White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn,” he quipped.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Know who else isn’t impressed with Social Justice Warriors? Muhammad Ali’s son.

    “Don’t bust up s**t, don’t trash the place,” Ali Jr. told the Post. “You can peacefully protest. My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘all lives matter.'”

    With regard to the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, Ali Jr. said he believes BLM is “racist” — and his father would have, too.

    “I think it’s racist,” he said. “It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is.”

    “It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that,” he added of the BLM movement.

  • “Chinese Communist Party Snared in a Multidimensional War“:

    Communist China has decided it must crush Hong Kong because it knows the city presents an information-streaming ethnic, geographic, political and ideological alternative to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian police state.

    The CCP police state promises China’s citizens prosperity’s material goodies — cellphones, electric cars — in exchange for silently accepting communist dictates no matter how harsh and malign. Hong Kong, however, is not a promise. It is an existing democratic example of 21st-century Chinese prosperity.

    Why add “information streaming”? Despite the best efforts of the CCP’s censors, cyberbullies, digital surveillance brigades and police threats, what happens in Hong Kong doesn’t stay in Hong Kong. Information about Hong Kong’s political, economic, social and cultural vitality manages to spread throughout mainland China.

    The Chinese people also know Beijing lied about the COVID-19/Wuhan virus. The virus originated in China. Only former Obama administration media flacks argue otherwise. The CCP may have tried, but it failed to control human-to-human stories of mourning families. In February and March, the Chinese people knew why demand for funeral urns had spiked in the Hubei province.

    The preceding four paragraphs sketch the domestic political threat the CCP confronts. Tiananmen Square proves the CCP sees this threat as a war.

    The CCP cannot answer this question: How long can the prosperous tyranny continue to survive trading smartphones and quality American pork for political subservience by the roughly 400 million people in China’s quasi-middle class?

    Snip.

    Recent economic news suggests China is teetering. A China-EU investment and trade deal has snagged. Bloomberg reported defaults “in all sectors” of China’s offshore bond market have exceeded $4 billion, double that during the same period of 2019. First-quarter 2020 percentage profits, capital expenditures and retail sales may be the lowest since the 1990s.

    Big Picture: The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s domestic economy can’t sustain it.

    CCP international aggression magnifies the vulnerabilities. Recent vile aggression abounds.

  • Plus there’s that possible war with India, where China is building up troops on the border.
  • “54 Scientists Given NIH Grants Fired for Failure to Disclose Foreign Ties.” Most to China.
  • Wuhan coronavirus deaths have fallen dramatically since April. A downward trend that continued after the lockdown was lifted. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Moreover: “Least Restrictive States Have Lower CCP Virus Death Rates; Most-Closed States Have Highest.”

    States with the least restrictions on their citizens’ movements and businesses due to the CCP Virus pandemic have the lowest death rates on average from the disease that prompted a national lockdown beginning in mid-March, according to a new study.

    Conversely, the most restrictive states show higher death rates on average from the disease known as COVID-19 caused by the CCP virus and originating in late 2019 in China.

  • You know all that “Wuhan Coronavirus is overwhelming Houston hospitals!” panic? Yeah, not so much. (Hat tip: Aaron Glenn.)
  • More on the subject:

  • Democratic Party lawsuit to reinstate straight ticket voting in Texas fails.
  • Due to the unrest in downtown Seattle, a billion dollar investment company is picking up and moving to Phoenix.
  • Tesla actually seems to be serious about its move to Texas:

    Tesla is said to be in negotiation with Travis County, Texas, home to the state capital, Austin, for property tax abatements on what is said to be up to a $25 billion investment bringing up to 30,000 jobs to the region. Since Texas collects most of its taxes through property taxes, abatements are often offered as an incentive for industry to locate in the state and can be worth millions.

    The proposed Tesla gigafactory in Austin would build the company’s new Cybertruck electric pickup and serve as a second site to build the Model Y SUV.

  • “Truck Drivers Say They Won’t Deliver To Cities with Defunded Police Departments.” Enjoy your Social Justice with a side order of starvation.
  • Sean Parnell is running against Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Conor Lamb. I like the cut of his jib:

  • I’d never heard of Wirecard before last week, but evidently CEO Markus Braun resigned over some massive financial shenanigans that involved missing billions.
  • A few writers you’ve never heard of: “How dare J. K. Rowling question the sacred trans movement by saying there are two sexes! You must drop her immediately and send your staff for ‘reeducation!'” Literary agency: “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s funny! There’s the door!”
  • Humans battle to reclaim Thai town from violent, sex-mad monkeys.
  • Monica Stephens of Steve Jackson Games, RIP.
  • “‘I Think We’ve Found All The Institutions Founded By Racists And We Can Just Stop Looking For Them Now,’ Says Planned Parenthood Spokesperson Nervously.”
  • “Modern-Day Good Samaritan Sees Injured Man On Side Of Road, Angrily Tweets About Republicans.”
  • This one is Evergreen: “Nation’s Liberals Devastated After Learning Hate Crime Didn’t Actually Happen.”
  • I just put out a new book catalog. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
  • Ooopsie!

  • LinkSwarm for June 5, 2020

    Friday, June 5th, 2020

    Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:

  • The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
  • Stating the obvious: “Democrats Are Using Antifa to Foment Revolution.”

    To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.

    Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.

    With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.

    Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.

    When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.

    And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.

    This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.

  • Night falls:

    Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.

    This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.

    Snip.

    The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.

    It cannot.

    It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.

    (Hat tip: Powerline.)

  • “The Minneapolis Disaster has Democrat Fingerprints All Over It“:

    The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.

    Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”

    That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.

    Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.

    Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.

    “I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.

    That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.

    This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.

    George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
  • Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
  • Antifa Loots Austin Target Store in Coordinated Effort, DPS Confirms Special Agents Embedded in the Organization.”

    Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.

    McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.

    He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”

    Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.

    This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.

    I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • DeBlasio’s handling of the Antifa riots was so horrible that even #BlackLivesMatters slammed him.
  • Nothing says you’re dedicated to ending racism like destroying a statue dedicated to black soldiers who fought for the Union during he Civil War. Good job, Boston rioters!
  • “Spontaneous anger”:

  • Rioters try to track police officers to their homes and set their police cars on fire. It doesn’t go well for. Also, judging from their mugshots, I’m guessing they’re not the “white supremacists” we hear so much about…
  • On the other hand:

  • Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
  • Devore also had a piece three years ago recounting his time in the LA riots.
  • Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
  • UK PM Boris Johnson invites three million Hong Kong residents to come to the UK. Smart move.
  • “As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
  • “Federal Appeals Court Blocks Texas Democrats’ Vote-by-Mail Mandate.” Good.
  • Fredo’s Failo.
  • “The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
  • Nature wants to kill you:

  • Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
  • Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
  • “Nike Releases Commemorative Shoe To Honor Looters.”
  • Flashback: “Portland Police: ‘We Wish There Were Some Kind Of Organized, Armed Force That Could Fight Back Against Antifa'”
  • I smiled:

  • LinkSwarm for May 22, 2020

    Friday, May 22nd, 2020

    The Wuhan coronavirus, and China, and deep state shenanigans, oh my! But first a PSA for Texas shoppers:

  • There’s an an “Energy Star” sales tax holiday in Texas Memorial Day weekend. Products you can buy tax free this weekend include:
    • Air conditioners (priced $6,000 or less)
    • Refrigerators (priced $2,000 or less)
    • Ceiling fans
    • Incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs
    • Washers
    • Dishwashers
    • Dehumidifiers

    Why water heaters, dryers and freezers aren’t eligible I couldn’t tell you, but if you needed to get any covered appliances, this weekend is a good time.

  • When was Michael Flynn unmasked? Wrong question. What if he was never masked in the first place?

    There is no such evidence in the unmasking list that acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell provided to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.

    “Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies. Presumptively, the names of Americans should be concealed in these reports, which reflect the surveillance of foreign targets, primarily under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Broadly speaking, FISA governs two kinds of intelligence collection.

    The first is “traditional” FISA — the targeted monitoring of a suspected clandestine operative of a foreign power. If the FBI shows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) probable cause that a person inside the United States is acting as a foreign power’s agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign power’s suspected agent communicates with Americans, the latter are incidentally intercepted even though they are not the targets of the surveillance.

    The second kind of FISA collection occurs under Section 702 of the statute. It brings under FISC jurisdiction various intelligence-collection programs that target categories of non-Americans outside the United States. These foreigners also communicate with Americans, so the latter are incidentally intercepted.

    Under federal law, both kinds of FISA collection are subject to so-called minimization procedures. These aim to safeguard the privacy of Americans who have been incidentally monitored. When raw intelligence is refined into intelligence reports (including transcripts of recorded conversations) that are disseminated to U.S. officials, the identities of these Americans do not appear. Rather, a designation such as “U.S. Person” is substituted — the “mask,” as it were.

    If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question — usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests. This underscores that unmasking — because of its privacy implications, because foreign intelligence must never be a pretext for government spying on Americans — is a big deal that should be done only rarely and carefully.

    With that as background, let’s get back to Flynn.

    For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” monitored. (Kislyak was replaced as ambassador in 2017.) That is, Kislyak was an overt agent of Russia, stationed at its embassy in Washington, so the FBI kept tabs on him. Indeed, the “routine”-surveillance story line was repeated by the New York Times just this week.

    The implication is that Kislyak was probably subjected to traditional FISA surveillance by the FBI; or, since he lived in Russia and traveled to other places when not in America, perhaps he was also a FISA Section 702 target. In either event (or both), Kislyak was interacting with Americans, who were thus incidentally intercepted.

    That, the story goes, is what must have happened to Flynn. Trump’s designated national security advisor was unmasked because, once intelligence agents intercepted the December 29 phone call, they decided it was essential to identify the person with whom the Russian ambassador was discussing sanctions that President Obama had just imposed against Moscow.

    I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynn’s unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call.

    Timeline details and Strzok-Page comms snipped.

    Well, the possibility that first leaps to mind is: Maybe Flynn was a FISA surveillance target. That is, his interception was not incidental. Rather, the FBI was monitoring him under FISA because he was a suspected agent of a foreign power — the theory based on which the bureau opened their counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in August 2016. But that can’t be right. After an exhaustive investigation of the FBI’s abuse of FISA, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that there is no evidence the FBI “requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of . . . Flynn.” (IG Report’s “Executive Summary,” p. vi.)

    It is more likely, then, that the Flynn–Kislyak call was captured by intelligence operations that are not governed by FISA.

    Snip.

    Readers of my book Ball of Collusion know I have argued that the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia probe/political-narrative long predated the FBI’s July 2016 opening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

    The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “How Russiagate Began With Obama’s Iran Deal Domestic Spying Campaign“:

    Barack Obama warned his successor against hiring Michael Flynn. It was Nov. 10, 2016, just two days after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.

    The question of why Obama was so focused on Flynn is especially revealing now. The Department of Justice recently filed to withdraw charges against the retired three-star general for making false statements to the FBI in a Jan. 24, 2017, interview regarding a phone call with a Russian diplomat. The circumstances surrounding the call and subsequent FBI interview have given rise to a vast conspiracy theory that was weaponized to imprison a decorated war hero and a strategic thinker whose battlefield innovations saved countless American lives. There is no evidence that Flynn “colluded” with Russia, and the evidence that Flynn did not make false statements to the FBI has been buried by the bureau, including current Director Christopher Wray.

    So if the Obama administration wasn’t alarmed by Flynn’s nonexistent ties to Russia, why was he Obama’s No. 1 target? Why were officials from the previous administration intercepting his phone calls with the Russian ambassador?

    The answer is that Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate he’d advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran deal—they smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.

    Again, read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Matt Taibbi: “Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties.” I wonder if Taibbi could pinpoint the last time Democrats actually supported civil liberties…
  • “House Dem criticizes her own party for shoving ‘wish list’ stimulus package: ‘It’s not a good look.'”

    Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., criticized her own party’s coronavirus legislation this week as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pressured the Republican-controlled Senate to adopt what Porter described as a Democratic “wish list.”

    “The HEROES Act is dead on arrival,” Porter said Tuesday, referring to the $3 trillion package the House passed last week as a follow-up to the CARES Act. Her comments during an online meeting hosted by the Tustin [Calif.] Democratic Club were first reported by the Washington Examiner.

    “There was no bipartisan negotiation here and no effort at bipartisan negotiation,

    Snip.

    But tucked into the legislation are provisions that rankled the Republicans, including expanding $1,200 checks to certain undocumented immigrants, restoring the full State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) that helps individuals in high-taxed blue states, a $25 billion rescue for the U.S. Postal Service, allowing legal marijuana businesses to access banking services and early voting and vote-by-mail provisions.

    “I did find myself, Porter said, “on the House floor thinking [of] my Republican colleagues who said, ‘This bill is a Democratic wish list written by a handful of Democrats, and shoved down the throats of the rest of the Congress.’

    Restoring SALT is a giveaway to blue state billionaires. Sounds like the marijuana banking part should be passed, but there’s no reason to cram it into a coronavirus relief bill. And the early voting and vote-by-mail provisions are designed to help further voting fraud. Speaking of which:

  • A Philadelphia judge has pled guilty to helping Democrats commit voting fraud:

    A former Judge of Elections in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been charged and pleaded guilty to illegally adding votes for Democrat candidates in judicial races in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

    On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against former Judge of Elections Domenick DeMuro, 73, for stuffing the ballot box for Democrats in exchange for payment by a paid political consultant.

    The charges, and guilty plea, include conspiracy to deprive Philadelphia voters of their civil rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific Democrat candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections and a violation of the Travel Act.

    “The Trump administration’s prosecution of election fraud stands in stark contrast to the total failure of the Obama Justice Department to enforce these laws,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President Christian Adams said in a statement. “Right now, other federal prosecutors are aware of cases of double voting in federal elections as well as noncitizen voting. Attorney General William Barr should prompt those other offices to do their duty and prosecute known election crimes.”

    As Judge of Elections, DeMuro was paid to oversee the election process in the 39th Ward, which encompasses Philadelphia.

    DeMuro’s guilty plea states that he was paid by a political consultant to illegally add votes for particular Democrat candidates in primary judicial races. The political consultant who allegedly paid DeMuro had been hired by those Democrat candidates.

    According to the indictment, the political consultant allegedly solicited payments from Democrat candidates who hired him, classifying them as “consulting fees.” The payments — which ranged from $300 to $5,000 — were then allegedly used to pay Election Board Officials, such as DeMuro, in exchange for those officials illegally adding votes for the consultants’ Democrat candidates.

    (Hat tip: The President of the United States of America.)

  • In addition to certifying fraudulent results to help Democrats, DeMuro also took a hands-on approach to voting fraud: “Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear.” (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)
  • Several posts here suggested that Sweden’s model of reaching herd immunity might be a better method than what we were doing. Now that the data is in: not so much. “Sweden becomes country with highest coronavirus death rate per capita.”
  • Speaking of data, the way media dashboards count the numbers are skewed high. “At the time of Colorado’s announcement on Friday, the CDC-definition tally, used in CNN’s “dashboard” and all the other media reports, stood at 1,150 statewide. But only 878 of those, more than 23 percent less, are identified as deaths due to COVID-19.”
  • Democrats thinks the Wuhan coronavirus crisis will get worse. Of course they do.
  • “CNN Is Willing To Lie About Wuhan Virus in Texas If That’s What It Takes to Crash the Economy.”

    CNN has staked out a position in its coverage of Wuhan virus that can only be explained in one way. They perceive a drawn-out lock down of America as something that will damage President Trump’s reelection chances and therefore it is something to be preserved. The move by a handful of governors to re-open their states to normal life despite the latest pronouncement from the latest M.D. or Ph.D. who fancies himself as Galactic Commander, threatens to reveal the Wuhan virus’s new clothing, so to speak. Therefore, anything that can be done to discredit the incontrovertible data that shows whatever threat Wuhan virus presented is now largely abated must be discredited.

    More tests are being given, and the positives rate is actually declining.

  • Oregon’s Democratic governor Kate Brown: “No shopping in open counties for those in closed counties!”
  • “Why California Is In Trouble – 340,000 Public Employees With $100,000+ Paychecks Cost Taxpayers $45 Billion.” I believe the word you’re looking for is looting
  • Speaking of California: More suicides than coronavirus deaths? I know that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote,” but maybe somebody should run the numbers…
  • Is Tesla planning a Gigafactory near Austin? There are still big tracks of land available out near 130…
  • Wargaming a war between the U.S. and China in 2030. Don’t be so sure they could knock out our carriers with hypersonic missiles, and our drones and submarines would wreck havoc with their trade.
  • Another day, another college professor arrested for spying for China:

    Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine professor and former Cleveland Clinic employee was arrested Wednesday over his alleged ties to China.

    The Justice Department announced that Qing Wang was arrested at his Shaker Heights, Ohio home as part of a joint operation conducted by the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Service Office of the Inspector-General. Wang was charged with wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in grant funding that Wang and his research team at the Cleveland Clinic had received from the National Institutes of Health.

    According to the criminal complaint, Wang failed to disclose affiliations with Chinese universities. He also allegedly failed to disclose that he had received grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China for a nearly identical research project. He held the title Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

    Cleveland Special Agent-in-Charge Eric Smith said this wasn’t “a simple case of omission, ” adding that “Wang deliberately failed to disclose his Chinese grants and foreign positions and even engaged in a pervasive pattern of fraud to avoid criminal culpability.”

  • The 40-year old girlfriend of 74-year old former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst cracked two of his ribs. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Magazine publisher Conde Nast lays off about 100 employees. Maybe the entire Teen Vogue Anal Sex department got laid off. Hopefully there are some good Python courses available in their area…
  • Universally respected mystery expert Otto Penzler was let go as editor of the Best American Mystery Stories of the Year so the publisher could pick stories based on “affirmative action” criteria rather than excellence.
  • When the levee breaks there ain’t no place to—

  • “There’s a sale bankruptcy at Penny’s!”
  • Oopsie!


    

  • “Florida Ruled To Be In Violation Of Science For Not Having More People Die.”
  • “Democrat Governors Warn If Lockdowns Are Lifted They Won’t Get Nearly As Much Time In The Spotlight.”
  • “I Forced A Bot to Read 1,000 Jennifer Rubin Columns And Write A Jennifer Rubin Column of Its Own.” One step closer to the robot uprising…
  • “Not this time, cat!”

  • Should save this one for winter:

  • Antidepressant or Tolkien character?
  • Unmasking the Unmaskers (Including Slow Joe)

    Thursday, May 14th, 2020

    Hey remember how Joe Biden swore up and down he wasn’t behind the Michael Flynn unmasking scandal? Well, guess what?

    Former vice president Joe Biden appears on a declassified list of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn.

    The list, obtained by CBS News, shows that Biden’s office made its request to see Flynn’s identity on January 12, 2017 — the same day that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius broke news of Flynn’s calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. While the NSA says it “cannot confirm” that those listed personally saw the information, the list also names former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, and former FBI director James Comey.

    Wow, it’s like they got the band back together!

    Power in particular sought to obtain Flynn’s redacted identity at least seven times, including twice before Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak, despite swearing under oath she “didn’t recall” doing so, which only makes sense if she’s suffering from Biden-levels of cognitive decline.

    Here’s the actual list in convenient Tweet form:

    Other names on the list:

  • Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough
  • Deputy chief of mission Kelly Degnan (and Trump’s ambassador to Georgia…for now)
  • Director of Obama White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs Patrick Conlon
  • Principal deputy director of National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan
  • Deputy director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration Michael Dempsey
  • Obama Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew
  • Acting assistant secretary of the Treasury Arthur “Danny” McGlynn
  • Acting deputy assistant of the Treasury Mike Neufeld
  • Deputy secretary of the Treasury Sarah Raskin
  • Undersecretary of the Treasury Nathan Sheets
  • Acting undersecretary of the Treasury Adam Szubin
  • NATO advisor Robert Bell
  • Defense adviser for Russia at NATO Lt. Col. Paul Geehreng
  • Deputy defense adviser for NATO James Hursh
  • Deputy chief of U.S. Mission at NATO Lee Litzenberger
  • Deputy secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
  • Permanent NATO representative Douglas Lute
  • Political officer at NATO Scott Parish
  • Political adviser at NATO Tamir Waser
  • Ambassador to Russia John Tefft
  • Ambassador to Turkey John Bass
  • Looks like it was easier to unmask General Flynn than it was to get tickets to Hamilton.

    Why so many people at Treasury for an ostensible national security matter? Why so many at NATO? Did they think Flynn was going to sell Putin defense plans (presumably after killing moose and squirrel)?

    First Biden said “I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” Except that proved to be not true: “I thought you asked me about whether or not I had anything to do with him being prosecuted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Remember that we’ve known most of the details of the scandal for quite some time. Rep. Nunes laid it out in his memo in 2018.

    Speaking of Nunes, he’s talking about criminal indictments for Mueller’s team. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Obamagate is real:

    Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.

    It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.

    What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.

    Want to guess who TeamBiden is spinning the revelation? Would you believe that it’s all because of…racism?

    Boom!

    In any case, it’s time for subpoenas and indictments to start flying…

    LinkSwarm for May 8, 2020

    Friday, May 8th, 2020

    The lockdowns are finally ending for Americans (at least in states without Democratic governors), and the lockdown also ended for Michael Flynn, who was finally freed from his Kafkaesque prosecution:

  • Finally! Justice prevails for Michael Flynn:

    The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.

    The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

    “The Government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017 interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe that Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” the decision states, citing Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea of lying to federal investigators. “Moreover, we do not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr in February to reviewing the case, recommended that it be dropped. Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea in January, saying he “never lied” to FBI agents over his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

    “Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a statement. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.” The DOJ’s filing states that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak “were entirely appropriate on their face.”

    In recent weeks, additional information released in the case has shed scrutiny on the way the case was conducted. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claimed last month in a court filing that Van Grack had made a “side deal” with Flynn’s former defense team that was withheld from the retired Army general, citing heavily-redacted emails that show Flynn’s former lawyers discussing why the deal needed to be “kept secret,” implying that Flynn would be used to testify in further criminal cases.

    Further documents released last week showed handwritten notes from an FBI official questioning the goal of Flynn’s White House interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, suggesting the intent was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

    Another release revealed that Flynn had been the subject of a spinoff surveillance operation under the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe of the 2016 Trump campaign.

    Given all the dirt that has come out about Crossfire Hurricane, AKA the Russian Collusion Hoax, AKA The Plot Against the President, this is not the last we’re going to hear about that conspiracy…

  • The Wuhan coronavirus is the disaster that bankrupt blue cities and states have been waiting for:

    The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.

    They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.

    And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.

  • Hate the continuing lockdowns? Blame Democrats:

    Early estimates of the COVID-19 death rate, cited to justify the lockdowns, have proven far too pessimistic. In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported, at least five studies have placed the death rate below 1 percent, confirming President Donald Trump’s hunch.

    Recent studies have found that far more people than expected have COVID-19 antibodies — meaning the virus has spread faster than previously thought, but also proving that it is far less deadly than previously thought.

    Furthermore, a recent study showed that Democratic governors were three times more likely than Republican governors to impose a lockdown. This would make sense, given the Democratic control over many population centers experiencing large outbreaks: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., for example. However, the study found that “counterintuitively, the percentage of the state’s population infected with COVID-19 had the weakest effect on the governors’ decisions of all the four variables.”

    The study found that the three most significant variables were political affiliation (a heavy slant toward Democrats), “social learning” (governors of states afflicted by COVID-19 later acted much faster than governors of states who were afflicted early on), and “mini-cascades” (the actions of some governors sparked multiple other governors to order lockdowns in the next three days).

    Both social learning and mini-cascades shine a light on how news of the coronavirus’ danger spread. As states with coronavirus hot spots reacted, other states followed suit, preparing for outbreaks of their own.

    Yet the political slant is also extremely significant, especially considering the different ways state and local officials have carried out their lockdowns. Greenville, Miss. Mayor Errick Simmons notoriously defended his ban on drive-in church services that led to parishioners facing $500 fines. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to “permanently” close churches and synagogues unless they comply with his orders — and he issued a disgusting threat to the Jewish community in particular. Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., banned drive-in church services even though Tennessee’s governor permitted them. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear dispatched the State Police against a church hosting a drive-in service. Police in Virginia threatened a pastor with a year in jail for hosting a socially-distanced church service, enacting Gov. Ralph Northam’s order.

    All these political leaders belong to the same party: the Democratic Party. Not all of the onerous coronavirus restrictions that violate religious freedom have been issued by Democrats, but there is a disturbing correlation between the left-wing party and crisis orders that single out churches, synagogues, and mosques. It seems one party is more likely than the other to think of religion as less than “essential,” and much of that animus traces back to the mistaken idea that religion (Christianity in particular) and science are in conflict.

  • We’re finally getting better Kung-Flu data and weekly peak deaths are falling.
  • Michigan’s Democratic Obergrupenfuhrer Gretchen Whitmer extended the state of emergency (and the lockdown) through May 28, despite lacking authority from the legislature to do so.
  • Maine Yanks Licenses From Restaurateur Who Defied Lockdown, Went On Tucker To Castigate Governor.”

    The outrageous tyranny of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her heavy-handed, illogical, and irresponsible Wuhan coronavirus edicts have finally been outdone by another Democrat governor, this time on the east coast.

    Maine governor Janet Mills jumped on the one-size-fits all Wuhan coronavirus bandwagon, and forced a state-wide shutdown order, including in counties that have tiny numbers of infections and zero deaths.

  • “[Of] the five Upper Midwestern states…Minnesota has both the highest unemployment rate and the worst COVID-19 death rate in the region. Heckuva job, Timmy!” That would be Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz.
  • Science 1, Social Justice 0:

    As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over.

    Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?

    On a women’s studies listserve I subscribe to, activity has been almost at a standstill for weeks. You’d think with the endless attention paid to the virus there would be vigorous debate about the need to bring feminist, queer, trans, and other such perspectives to bear, and heated discussions of how to convey this to students via distance learning. Or, at the very least, that criticisms would be voiced of the data showing that men are more vulnerable to the virus than women. If one is “assigned” the category of male or female at birth—by now a routine formulation aped even by medical organizations– how could an uncaring virus ever make such a distinction?

    Can anything positive come out of the current crisis? Or, is it strictly a negative to be reminded that reality – the actual physical world, in all its threatening materiality – is not a social construction, and that solutions to a virus must engage with that material world, and not merely attack the rhetoric of disease and the identity of those researching it.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Hydroxychloroquine helps some but not all:

    Part of the frustration in dealing with a really bad situation is a ravenous hunger for magic bullet solutions. One reader wrote in, contending that hydroxychloroquine is effective 100 percent of the time if it’s administered early enough, so why not reopen society and give everyone a prescription for hydroxychloroquine at the first sign of the virus?

    Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine actually slow down parts of a patient’s immune system by “interfere with lysosomal activity and autophagy, interact with membrane stability and alter signalling pathways and transcriptional activity, which can result in inhibition of cytokine production and modulation of certain co-stimulatory molecules” — which is a jargon-heavy way of saying it makes your immune system’s cells not work as well together.

    People might wonder why anyone would want to take a drug that weakens their immune system. Hydroxychloroquine can be an effective drug for lupus, because with lupus, the body’s immune system becomes overactive and starts attacking healthy, normal cells. It is also used to treat arthritis, because in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, their immune system attacks the lining of their joints. With patients suffering from malaria, the parasite actually can send out “messages” that distract the body’s immune system, causing it to attack healthy red blood cells and ignore the real threat: “While the immune system is busy defending the organism against fake danger, the real infection proceeds inside red blood cells, allowing the parasite to multiply unhindered at dizzying speed. By the time the immune system discovers its mistake, precious time has been lost, and the infection is much more difficult to contain.” Hydroxychloroquine effectively calms down the immune system and along the way binds to the malaria parasite, breaking it apart.

    The coronavirus identified as SARS-CoV-2 can generate a “cytokine storm” — when the body’s immune system kicks into overdrive and starts attacking healthy cells in important organs. Dr. Randy Cron, an expert on cytokine storms at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times last month that in about 15 percent of coronavirus patients, the body’s defense mechanism of cytokines fight off the invading virus, but then attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver, and may eventually lead to death. As the patient’s body fights its own lungs, fluid gets into the lungs, and the patient dies of acute respiratory distress syndrome.

    From this, you can get a sense of how and why hydroxychloroquine might be effective in some circumstances and not others. If the patient’s immune system is strong enough to fight off the coronavirus, but is at risk of going into overdrive and setting off a cytotkine storm, administering the right amount of hydroxychloroquine might put their immune system back in the Goldilocks zone — strong enough to fight off and defeat the virus, but not so strong that it starts attacking vital organs by mistake. It’s also easy to see why we would only want people taking this drug under a doctor’s recommendation and possibly supervision — take the drug too early, and you suppress the body’s immune system just when it needs that system functioning well to fight off the invading virus. Take the drug too late, and the damage to the vital organs can’t be overcome.

  • “FDA Pulls Approval for Dozens of Mask Makers in China.” They’re garbage that doesn’t meet spec. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hey media: Do you think you could stop publishing the same #NeverTrump piece over and over again?

    Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.

    In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.

    Even as their positions change in response to whatever Trump has said, NeverTrump is known for writing the same column over and over again. It’s usually headlined something like “Why Trump And His Voters Are So Awful That They Forced Me To Leave the GOP But Also Remember To Please Continue Calling Me A Republican To Preserve The TV/Column Gigs That Depend On Me Claiming I’m On The Right Even Though I Am Now Aligned With Democrats, Write Columns About How I Vote For Them, And Generally Work To Help Them Gain More Political Power.”

  • “Democrat On Committee To Oversee Coronavirus Stimulus Payouts Broke Federal Law By Failing To Report Stock Sales.” That would be Florida Representative (and former Clinton Administration official) Donna Shalala.
  • “Illinois governor says churches may not fully reopen for a year or more because of coronavirus.” I don’t think the constitution is going to agree with you there, sport… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Good Samaritan health care workers: I will go to New York to help out with the crush of Wuhan coronavirus cases! Andrew Cuomo: Fark you, have some more taxes.
  • Twitter decides to Big Brother harder.
  • The Supreme Court unanimously bitch-slapped the Ninth Circuit for ruling that a federal statue that makes it illegal to encourage illegal aliens to come to the U.S. was unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg delivered the opinion.
  • “I’m going to eat at these places even harder now. Thanks a lot, #Karen.”
  • Friend-of-the-blog Karl Rehn offers up Ammo 101.
  • As if we didn’t have enough deadly Asian intruders this year, say hello to Murder Hornets.

  • Tengujo, the thinnest paper in the world. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Florida South Carolina woman grabs gator. It turns out exactly how you would expect. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Surprise!

  • I’m going to try to get to the Shelly Luther and Project Veritas stories this weekend.