Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’

Israel-Hamas: Why This Time is Different

Saturday, October 21st, 2023

Casual observers of the Israel-Hamas War (which is to say, probably not anyone reading this blog) may wonder what all the fuss is about, given that various Jihadist groups have been attacking Israel their entire lifetimes. In a rare, mostly readable New York Times piece, Thomas Friedman explains why this time is different.

With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.

And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.

That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.

And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.

In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”

So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.

The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.

Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.

Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.

The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.

Very little about “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” has anything to do with Biden, and a whole lot to do with Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner pioneering diplomacy first with Saudi Arabia (remember the “glowing orb”?) and later with the Abraham Accords. “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” seems to largely consist of a retread of Obama’s “throw large sums of money at Iran and hope they play nice” (and possibly kick some back in the form of graft) wishful thinking.

And by “Palestinians feared being left behind” read “Hamas and Iran becoming even more irrelevant and isolated than they already are.”

So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”

Hamas has always been that crazy, always willing to blow up a pizza parlor or a disco. The only reason they didn’t behead Jewish babies before was insufficient opportunity thanks to Israeli security. Remember that Hamas believes all Jews to be apes and pigs and that their continued existence living on the face of the earth is a literal affront to God. Saudi-Israeli rapprochement may very well have been paymaster Iran’s trigger to greenlight the operation, but it wasn’t Hamas’ primary motivation for killing Jews any more than fish need a reason to swim.

Hamas kills Jews because Hamas exists to kill Jews.

Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.

Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.

Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”

Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.

Friedman is only intermittently interesting. Much of the time he’s merely doling out Trans-Atlantic globalist elite conventional wisdom (global trade, China, climate change), and a guy who’s occasionally three months ahead of the curve who’s plodding pronouncements are treated like Delphic declarations. (Ace of Spades offered up an epic parody that’s still worth your attention.)

Eventually the piece devolves into the inevitable “Netanyahu: Bad!” catechisms that run on the internationalist left’s wetware anytime that can spare cycles from their ever-present Social Justice, Trump Derangement Syndrome and Global Warming Alarmism subroutines. But it was a halfway decent piece up to then.

Now the reviled Netanyahu is leading a unity government in a declared war against Hamas, unlike the Second Lebanon War or Operation Cast Lead.

This time will be different, because Hamas will not be permitted to exist for there to be a next time.

LinkSwarm for August 25, 2023

Friday, August 25th, 2023

More DOJ wrangling over Hunter Biden’s trial, bodies from Maui’s woke catastrophe continues to pile up, Texas sues Planned Parenthood over Medicaid fraud, Andy Ngo wins damages, and Dicks shrinks. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!



  • “‘Quid-Pro F-You Dad’: Hunter’s Lawyers Threatened To Force Joe To Testify Unless Plea Deal Reached.”

    Hunter Biden’s lawyers played heavy with the Department of Justice, effectively threatening to force President Joe Biden to testify in any criminal trial against the First Son if a plea agreement wasn’t reached over his multiple alleged crimes.

    “President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial,” wrote Hunter Biden attorney Chris Clark in a 32-page letter last fall, Politico reports, calling the news that there was enough evidence to charge Hunter an “illegal” leak.

    That letter, along with more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden’s legal team and prosecutors, sheds new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal. That deal would have resolved Biden’s most pressing legal issues — the gun purchase and his failure to pay taxes for several years — and it also could have helped insulate Biden from future prosecution by a Republican-led Justice Department.

    The documents show how the deal collapsed — a sudden turnabout that occurred after Republicans bashed it and a judge raised questions about it. The collapse renewed the prospect that Biden will head to trial as his father ramps up his 2024 reelection bid.

  • “Maui Wildfires Can Be Classified as First Woke-Caused Disaster.”

    The number of people unaccounted for has stubbornly remained at about 1,000, suggesting that the death toll will almost undoubtedly increase.

    As the staggering toll continues to be tallied, it is becoming apparent that the Maui wildfires may reasonably be classified as the first “woke-caused” disaster.

    To begin with, the rush to eliminate carbon emissions may have killed the implementation of effective fire prevention policies.

    Legal Insurrection readers recall my recent reports that downed power lines were being blamed as the initiating case of the fire. At the end of 2019, Hawaiian Electric issued a press release about wildfire risks assessed after hurricane-based winds contributed to a 2018 blaze.

    The Wall Street Journal notes that Hawaiian Electric was well aware of the potential for this situation, but diverted resources away from fire safety support in order to meet state-required green energy mandates.

    In 2015, lawmakers passed legislation mandating that the state derive 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045, the first such requirement in the U.S.

    The company dove into reaching the goals, stating in 2017 that it would reach the benchmark five years ahead of schedule.

    In 2019, under pressure to replace the output of two conventional power plants set to retire, the company sought to contract for 900 megawatts of renewable energy, the most it had pursued at any one time.

    “You have to look at the scope and scale of the transformation within [Hawaiian Electric] that was occurring throughout the system,” said Mina Morita, who chaired the state utilities commission from 2011 to 2015. “While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation.”

    When you have limited capital, choices have to be made. However, Hawaiian Electric may have made different choices if woke legislators adhering to climate change theology didn’t mandate the drive to renewables.

    Equity considerations are apparently another contributing factor in this disaster. A state water official delayed the release of water that landowners wanted to help protect their property from fires, because water is to be revered and not used.

  • Biden’s Justice Department sues Elon Musk’s Space X for not hiring illegal aliens. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Charlotte Pride now says no one will be awarded the 2023 Harvey Milk award for exceptional “LGBT+” advocacy after the announced winner’s past as a convicted child sex offender came to light.” What are the odds? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese Files for Bankruptcy amid Hundreds of Outstanding Sexual-Assault Lawsuits.” Huh, if only there were some reason the San Francisco Archdiocese might have more pedophiles than other archdioceses…
  • Planned Parenthood Medicaid Fraud Lawsuit Could Cost Organization $1.8 Billion.”

    The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood that, depending on the ruling, could reportedly have “devastating consequences” for the abortion-providing organization.

    The case, which was heard on August 15 by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, could determine whether Planned Parenthood will have to pay back upwards of $1.8 billion to the state/federal government.

    If Kacsmaryk rules in favor of the OAG, the large sum that would need to be paid out is, according to Vox, “more than enough to bankrupt Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”

    The Texas OAG filed the lawsuit in 2022 on behalf of Alex Doe, an anonymous realtor, who is alleging that despite the organization being removed from Texas Medicaid it has continued to receive payments from the program.

  • Amarillo City Council: Hey voters, want to pass this bond to help us rebuild a civic center? Voters: Nah. Amarillo City Council: Well, we’re just going to do it anyway. Judge: REJECTED! AGAIN!.
  • Another Babylon Bee prophecy fulfilled: “New York Times publishes op-ed titled ‘Elections Are Bad for Democracy.'”
  • Three of Andy Ngo’s attackers must pay him $100,000 each. “Defendants Corbyn “Katherine” Belyea, Madison “Denny” Lee Allen, and Sammich Overkill Schott-Deputy were found liable by Judge Sinaplasai for assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
  • “Texas State Library to Cut Ties with Controversial American Library Association.” Good.
  • Dicks suffers shrinkage.
  • Real life horror story with a happy ending.
  • Bad: Stealing a package off a porch. Worse: Stealing a porch.
  • Now you can own Bruce Lee’s nunchucks. Assuming you have a spare $30,000 lying around…
  • Yo, dawg, we heard you liked France, so we put a miniature France in your France.
  • “Hilary Makes Landfall, Destroying Over 30,000 Emails.”
  • “CDC Announces Deadly New ‘Electionyearicron’ Covid Variant.”
  • Bachelor party turns into dog rescue party.
  • LinkSwarm for July 14, 2023

    Friday, July 14th, 2023

    More Biden crime family news, Toast Tab burns diners, and a judge blocks the Biden regime censorship. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden DOJ Indicts Whistleblower Prepared To Testify Against Biden Family.”

    Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.

    “I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.

    That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”

    Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.

    Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.

  • Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
  • The U.S. Navy blocks Iran from hijacking two tankers.
  • Dispatches from The Biden Recession: “‘Something Just Snapped’: Consumers Panic Search ‘Pawn Shop Near Me.'”
  • Poland is sending Ukraine Mi-24 Hind helicopters. The Hind is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it was a tough beast in its day.
  • “I’m willing to make a bold prediction and say that by the end of October, Mr. Biden will withdraw his reelection bid, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom will be declared the Democrats’ most viable option for the presidency.” I think he’s wrong. I think they’ll try to have Newsom replace Biden at the convention.
  • Just another week in Baltimore: “30 People Shot, 2 Dead As Block Party In Baltimore Turns Into ‘War Zone.'”
  • CDC Altered Death Certificates to Remove ‘COVID Vaccine’ as Cause.”
  • Nigel Farage is being systematically unbanked.
  • Meta/Facebook’s new Twitter rip-off Threads is filled with “dark design patterns” created to thwart the user’s wishes. (That tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Black Georgia state rep defects from the Democrats to the Republicans over school choice.

    “When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”

    “For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”

  • Nasdaq rebalances.
  • The New York Times is doing such gangbusters business that they just laid off their entire sports department.
  • Garbage restaurant QR code menu app Toast Tab is now taking money directly out of your pockets for a “processing fee.” They’re a garbage company run by garbage people and I hope they go bankrupt.
  • For a mere $950,000, you own the home of the Butthole Surfers in Driftwood, Texas.
  • Happy Bastille Day! Here’s Jerry Pournelle’s timeless essay on the original event.
  • Hollywood Confused By New Movie That Depicts Child Sex Trafficking As Bad.”
  • Star Turn Doggy:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The Democratic Media Complex Really Hates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

    Monday, June 26th, 2023

    I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.

    Some takeaways:

  • There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”

  • “You’d think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the enlightenment!”
  • “NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists.”
  • People magazine didn’t even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him.” Having the entire Kennedy clan hate him would only increase my (admittedly low) estimation of him.
  • When did the Democratic Media Complex start hating him? July of 2005. “That’s the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expending schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.”
  • “The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both [Rolling Stone and Salon] swiftly caved. Both pulled the story, and then disavowed it groveling as they did.” Both of those outlets were already on shaky ground, though neither was as bad as they become later.
  • No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.

  • Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.

    I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.

    I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.

    Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…

    LinkSwarm for August 19, 2022

    Friday, August 19th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm…on Friday! What are the odds?

  • More dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Homebuyers are GONE.” Home sales are cratering nationally, companies that bought up lots of properties are slashing prices, and the number of homes being built is also cratering.
  • From the same guy: The 10 locations housing prices will crash the most. #5? Austin. “This is a market in absolute free-fall.” I know prices in my neighborhood have probably lopped off a good $100,000 or so, forcing me to rely on my vast book holdings to remain a millionaire…
  • Are we witnessing an end to the tranny pander panic?

    The other day, I saw on Twitter someone saying that they are a good liberal and all that, but they are really worried about what they’re seeing regarding the emerging culture of the medical and teaching professions encouraging children to transition to the opposite sex. “But,” said this person, “I don’t want to surrender to a moral panic.”

    I submit to you that a moral panic is precisely the correct response to this egregious phenomenon. That is, what is happening is so hideous, and so widespread, and the reaction by most people to this point has been so muted to non-existent, that if you are not panicking, you are not paying attention.

    Most people are not on Twitter, and if you’re one of these people, you may not be aware of the extent of the insanity. The media are not covering it, of course. It falls to badasses like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik (who runs the Libs Of Tik Tok account), Christina Buttons, and Chris Elston, the guy who runs the Billboard Chris website and Twitter account, to sound the alarm.

    The things they document are not nut-picking (the practice of finding extreme weirdos, and falsely using them as an example of the whole). They are completely mainstream. These are things that, if we had a functional media instead of a Narrative-massaging industry, would be widely reported, and discussed intensely.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Libs of TikTok on how the radical social justice groomer left wants to sever the connection between parents and children.

    The Left’s agenda to groom your children has taken another turn. Various states across America have begun implementing laws and policies to allow children to make healthcare decisions without a parent or guardian’s consent — and the medical industry is promoting it. Many of these states are using these new laws to allow for drastic medical decisions to be made without parental consent including hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, and medicated mental health treatment.

    In Washington, children as young as 13 are now allowed to undergo gender reassignment surgery and other questionable medical treatments without parental consent.

    One Washington dad alleged in a viral TikTok video that a school gave his 15-year-old child antidepressants without informing him. Sounds completely insane and illegal, right? Well . . . it sounds that way, but it isn’t. Under Washington law, this is 100% legal and is allegedly being carried out by schools.

    New York has hopped on the bandwagon of removing parents from the treatment room as well. New York-Presbyterian recently sent out emails to their patients explaining that accounts for 12-17-year-olds must be updated to reflect the adolescent’s personal email address as the primary contact as New York State law allows children “to keep their sensitive medical information private and to consent to some of their own medical treatment.”

    Twelve-year-old children will now have the ability to be the primary decision-maker for many of their medical treatments and procedures. Children will also have the ability to completely revoke medical record access for their parents or guardians. 12-year-old children who can barely do their own laundry now have authority over their healthcare.

    Snip.

    One concerned parent in Kennebunk, Maine shared photos with us of a medical questionnaire for patients 12 years of age and older which read “To be filled out by patient only.” The questionnaire included questions about sexuality, asking children what gender they’re attracted to, and if the child has ever been in a romantic relationship or had sex. Separate questions ask the children if they’ve ever had questions about their gender identity and what their preferred pronouns are.

    The parent spoke to me regarding the questionnaire and stated her child was given the forms right after he turned 13. Naturally, her son was uncomfortable and confused by the questions and asked his mom for help. However, the mom claims the doctor made her leave the room and refused to allow her to be present while her son was answering the questionnaire.

    Why would a doctor need to secretly know the sexual preference and gender identity that a 13-year-old child claims without his mom present? Why would any child be required to share answers to all these invasive questions and bar any parental involvement?

    It’s not just Maine, Arizona, New York, and Washington — the removal of parents from important decisions in their children’s lives is becoming a nationwide policy trend aggressively pushed by the Left.

  • Given how much Libs of TikTok has uncovered of the groomer agenda, it’s no wonder that Facebook has banned her:

  • Austin Fire Department Chaplain Fired over Blog Post Objecting to Males in Women’s Sports.” No surprise to followers of Austin politics, given the way their union has been taken over by the radical left.
  • Related: “Twitter Is Objectively Pro-Groomer.”
  • “Sanctuary cities not enjoying actually being used as sanctuaries.”

    To the great consternation of liberal Democratic mayors in the northeast, the governors of Texas and Arizona continue to send busloads of illegal migrants to New York and Washington to lessen the burdens on their states and draw more attention to the Biden border crisis. This has put the municipal governments of these self-defined sanctuary cities in a bit of a tough position politically. They are supposed to represent bastions of hope for the migrants and freedom from the “oppression” of ICE and the Border Patrol. But now that the migrants are arriving in larger numbers and doing so in a very public way, it’s becoming clear that this is a problem that the mayors were not prepared to handle. As Charles Lipson explains in Newsweek today, these so-called sanctuary city claims were clearly more of a case of virtue signaling than anything else, but when the cost of invoking such policies began to rise, the backlash came quickly.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • New Minnesota union contract requires laying off teachers based on race rather than ability or seniority. Can you say illegal? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Longtime CNN anchor, leftwing tool and known potato Brian Stelters had his show cancelled and was laid off. There’s not a violin small enough.

  • How the left abandoned Salman Rushdie.

    I still don’t understand Obama’s deep infatuation with Iran’s mullahs, or why he sent them pallets-full of currency, or why he desperately wanted to get nuclear technology to Iran. But I suspect his enthusiasm for providing nuclear technology to Iran was in equal proportion to his enmity toward Israel.

    So how was the American left supposed to keep championing Mr. Rushdie when Barack Obama, their Lightbringer, was such a fan of the mullahs who wanted Rushdie dead? Barack Obama had taken American tax dollars and sent it to the mullahs so that they could then turn around and use that money to pay the bounty to whomever successfully pulled off the fatwa against Rushdie. To stay true to Obama, America’s liberal elites had to now ally themselves with the men trying to murder Rushdie.

    Conservatives, of course, always supported Rushdie’s right to free speech and always decried the fatwa on him. But for those who matter most in elite society, the fatwa now reflected poorly on Rushdie, not those who imposed the fatwa.

    Rushdie was abandoned by the left, because they were now aligned with the mullahs who wanted him dead.

  • Over in London, unions are working on their Winter of Discontent cosplay by launching a Tube strike.
  • Families are getting the hell out of north Portland due to the huge increase in drug-addicted transients ts infecting their neighborhood. This is your city on social justice.
  • Turkey’s wild and crazy president Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues his innovative “lower interest rates during hyperinflation” gambit. Result? The Lira has crashed to an all time low.
  • Remember San Angelo police chief Tim Vasquez, who accepted bribes via gigs for his Earth, Wind & Fire cover band Funky Munky? Well he just got sentenced to 15 years in the slammer. I guess he’s no longer a shining star…
  • Also on the crime beat: Charges filed in Whitey Bulger whacking. “Fotios Geas, Paul J. DeCologero and Sean McKinnon have been charged with crimes related to the murder of Whitey Bulger.”
  • New York Times decides it can’t run an editorial by a black Republican senator unless it gets the permission of the white Democratic majority leader first.
  • More New York Times editorial judgment on display: “NYT Cuts Ties With Reporter Who Called For ‘Killing,’ ‘Burning’ Jews ‘Like What Hitler Did.’” The surprise is that they actually fired her. How do you think that conversation went? “Sure, lots of us have called for death to the Jews, but the ‘burning’ part just crosses the line…”
  • Boom:

  • “20-Year-Old Student Acquires 6% Of Bed Bath & Beyond, Makes $110 Million In 3 Weeks.”
  • Annnnnd….then he dumped it all.
  • “You’ll never catch me alive, coppers!”

  • LinkSwarm for July 23, 2022

    Saturday, July 23rd, 2022

    Paying people not to work makes them worse off, Democrats sleepwalk toward disaster, another would-be assassin of a Republican congressman walks away without bail, more Democratic judicial officials who refuse to obey the law, and a disturbing number of pedophiles in our school systems. Welcome to a special Saturday LinkSwarm!

  • News flash: Universal basic Income makes recipients lives worse.

    The “experts” didn’t expect it to turn out this way. An experiment conducted by Harvard University and University of Exeter social scientists found no-strings-attached handouts harmed low-income recipients rather than help them.

    Funded by an anonymous nonprofit, the study centered on an experiment in which 2,073 low-income people were randomly selected to receive a single, unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 low-income study subjects received no money from the study.

    The experiment was conducted from July 2020 to May 2021. On average, the subjects were earning roughly $950 a month while receiving another $530 in food stamps and other government benefits. A little over half were unemployed and 80% had children.

    Over a 15-week period, participants were periodically surveyed about their financial, physical and mental health. Across a wide range of financial and non-financial attributes, researchers found no positive effects on those who received free money — but plenty of negative ones.

    For a few weeks, people who received the extra money spent more than the control group — $182 a week for the people who received $500, and $574 a week for the ones given $2,000.

    The additional spending didn’t bolster their financial health. The handout recipients reported the same rate of overdraft fees, late-payment charges and cash advances as did those who didn’t receive the extra money. And it was all downhill from there. The handout recipients reported:

    • Less earned income
    • Less job satisfaction
    • Lower work performance
    • More financial stress
    • Less liquidity
    • Worse sleep
    • Worse physical health
    • More anxiety
    • More loneliness

    The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes:

    “It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.

    Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.”

  • The Democratic Party’s embrace of social justice lunacy has them sleepwalking toward disaster:

    The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.

    The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:

    Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom.

    Snip.

    First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.

    Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.

    The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”

    Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?

    Democrats can’t rebuke their social justice warrior radicals because the shock-troops of that “fringe” has taken control of vast swathes of the party machinery. The SJW faction is willing to endure electoral disaster as along as it lets them sieze full control of the party machinery and thus all the spigots party patronage.

  • How bad is it? Ruy Teixeira, whose “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is is so central to Democratic administrations refusing to enforce border controls, is leaving the Center for American Progress because it’s gotten too radical.

    Ruy Teixeira, a prominent scholar at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), is leaving his job for a conservative organization because of liberals’ obsession with race, gender and other identity issues, according to Politico.

    The obsession with identity politics at CAP made it difficult for him to do work involving class and economics, he told the outlet, so he’s leaving for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Left-leaning think tanks have given in to demands of junior staffers and made it difficult for scholars to discuss crime, immigration and other issues beyond a narrow set of default assumptions, according to Teixeira.

    The culture within left-leaning organizations “sends me running screaming from the left,” Teixeira told Politico. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land … the fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”

  • Attack a Republican congressman? Enjoy your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. “A 43-year-old man [David G. Jakubonis] accused of attacking Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) with a sharp object at a campaign stop in upstate New York on Thursday evening was charged with a felony and released from custody just hours after his arrest, police said…Jakubonis was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and was released on his own recognizance.”
  • The groomer plague is not your imagination. “At least 181 K-12 teachers, principals, and staff have been arrested for child sex crimes in the United States so far this year.”
  • “Self-Proclaimed Socialist Judge in Harris County Facing Removal by Judicial Conduct Commission. Judge Franklin Bynum allegedly ordered the sheriff not to collect DNA samples required by law and repeatedly dismissed domestic and family violence cases for no probable cause.”
  • Cost of living index for cities worldwide. Weirdly, Austin is still pretty affordable in relation to purchasing power compared to most of the world. Also weirdly, New York City is the index city…
  • “Man found dead in Georgia house used by black nationalist communist group ‘Black Hammer.'”
  • Things the media doesn’t want you to know: “10-Year-Old Rape Victim’s Mom Is in Domestic Relationship With Child’s Alleged Illegal Alien Rapist.”
    

  • Soros-backed Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has hired the highest paid attorney in the country to fight against being forced to obey the law.

    Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:

    In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.

    Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is “draconian,” creates “a dangerous precedent” and amounts to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”

    “The district attorney overstates his authority,” the Second Appellate District ruling reads. “He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.”

    Don’t the peasants know that laws are for the little people?

  • Good. “San Francisco’s New DA Goes On Firing Spree After Voters Recall Soros-Backed Predecessor…”The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
  • “Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who had worked at Southwest Airlines for 20 years but was fired in 2017 because she had publicly opposed the use of her union dues to fund pro-abortion protests, has now won a $5.1 million lawsuit against both Southwest and her union.” Good. Coerced speech violates the First Amendment. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Kill someone in self-defense? GoFundMe will close your account. Get Darwinated after shooting at police? GoFundMe is A-OK with your family raising money off your dimwitted corpse.
  • “Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz blames Dem-run cities for store closures.” As well he should. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Mario Draghi resigns as Italy’s prime minister after losing a no-confidence vote, which will trigger a new election.
  • How do we know Ray Epps is a fed? Because the New York Times is going to great lengths to defend him.
  • North Carolina town hires new woke city manager. Result: Town’s entire police force quits. Bonus: She was fired from her last job. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Beto O’Rourke gets a $1 million donation from George Soros. Well, at least that’s $1 million that won’t go toward burning down small businesses and defunding the police. Also, remember how Democrats are always saying they want to get money out of politics? They never mean it.
  • “I’m a big fan of American airlines. They’re screwing us around a whole lot on this trip.” Plus: Monster Trucks!
  • The small part of Yellowstone national park where you can theoretically get away with murder.
  • An amazing 1949 Cadillac Fastback restomod.
  • Whoa!
  • Boing!

  • LinkSwarm for December 24, 2021

    Friday, December 24th, 2021

    Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! For some reason, corrupt scumbags seem to be a theme of this LinkSwarm.

  • This week marks the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an evil empire who’s passing made the world a better place. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and even George H. W. Bush all had key roles in bringing the Cold War to a successful close.
  • Biden’s vaccine mandates go before the Supreme Court. There’s a good chance they lose there on federalism grounds, even as the Supremes have avoided overturning state vaccine mandates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Tom Cotton has a modest proposal: “Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.”

    Last year, our nation experienced the largest increase in murder in American history and the largest number of drug overdose deaths ever recorded. This carnage continues today and is not distributed equally. Instead, it is concentrated in cities and localities where radical, left-wing, George Soros progressives have captured state and district attorney offices. These legal arsonists condemn our rule of law as “systemically racist” and have not simply abused prosecutorial discretion, they have embraced prosecutorial nullification. As a result, a contagion of crime has infected virtually every neighborhood under their charge.

    Soros prosecutors refuse to enforce laws against shoplifting, drug trafficking, and entire categories of felonies and misdemeanors. In Chicago, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx allows theft under $1,000 to go unpunished. In Manhattan, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. refuses to enforce laws against prostitution. In Baltimore, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has unilaterally declared the war on drugs “over” and is refusing to criminally charge drug users in the middle of the worst drug crisis in American history. For a time, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon even stopped enforcing laws against disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and making criminal threats.

    All of these cities have paid a terrible price for these insane policies. Last year, the number of homicides in Chicago rose by 56%, and more than 1,000 Cook County residents have been murdered in 2021. In New York City, murder increased 47% and shootings soared 97%. In 2020, the murder rate in Baltimore was higher than El Salvador’s or Guatemala’s — nations from which citizens often attempt to claim asylum purely based on gang violence and murder—and this year murder in Baltimore is on track to be even higher. Murder in Los Angeles rose 36% last year and is on track to rise another 17% this year.

    Soon after taking office in Boston, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachel Rollins published a list of 15 crimes that she would refuse to prosecute except under special circumstances. Among the charges on her “do not prosecute” list was drug trafficking, malicious destruction of property, trespassing, driving with a revoked license, and resisting arrest. Rollins also declared that she was “going to battle” against the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and has slandered Boston police officers as “murderers” before accusing the department of “white fragility.”

    Unsurprisingly, Boston’s violent crime rate surged shortly after Rollins took over, as the number of murders in Boston skyrocketed by 38% in 2020. As Rollins implemented leniency for drug trafficking, opioid overdose deaths increased by 32% in Suffolk County. As a reward for her ineptitude and extremism, President Biden nominated her to run the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts, the very office she had gone “to battle” against only months before. Every Democrat in the Senate voted to confirm her.

    Another Soros prosecutor, Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner, came to office after suing the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times as a private citizen. He began his tenure by purging dozens of veteran prosecutors in his office and then slashed his jurisdiction’s prison population by over 30%. In most cases, Krasner also refuses to seek bail for accused criminals and has maintained a highly antagonistic relationship with the police, once accusing the Fraternal Order of Police lodge president of being “with the Proud Boys.”

    The number of homicides in Philadelphia has increased every year that Krasner has been DA. Last year, the murder rate rose 40% and this year it reached an all-time high.

    In San Francisco, the voters elected the son of two cop-killing terrorists as their district attorney. Chesa Boudin (pictured) has since unleashed chaos on the streets of a once-great city and inaugurated what the San Francisco mayor labelled the “reign of criminals.” San Francisco’s homelessness crisis has spiraled out of control, smash-and-grab looters are such a menace that the city had to close its downtown during Black Friday, and shoplifters have closed down retailers throughout the city. Since Boudin took over, car theft has increased by 27%, murder by 29%, arson by 36%, and burglary soared 38%.

    The liberal mayor of San Francisco, as if struck by amnesia of her own tenure and complicity in the crime wave, recently emerged to condemn her city’s appalling rise in crime. Speaker Nancy Pelosi also condemned the disorder and “attitude of lawlessness” in her city. However, in one of the great examples of “see no evil, hear no evil,” Speaker Pelosi pretended to be baffled by what could have caused the crime wave. The answer is obvious: Liberal extremists like Nancy Pelosi and Chesa Boudin caused this crisis.

    Conclusion: “The Republican Party must then join with independents and common-sense Democrats to wage an unrelenting war on crime. That war must begin with a campaign to recall, remove, and replace every last Soros prosecutor. Throw the bums out.”

  • Even CNN is wondering if Biden’s senile.
  • One rule for you, another for them. “California Dems Sip Champagne, Violate State Mask Mandate While Celebrating Successful Gerrymander.”
  • “According to data from Nielsen/MRI Fusion, Fox News is watched by more Democrats than CNN and by more Independents than both MSNBC and CNN.” Average network news viewers want truth, not a force-fed Narrative at odds with reality. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • More on why Build Back Better sucked:

  • Two defund the police state Democratic congresscritters carjacked. “In late December, two Democratic politicians were carjacked just hours apart in Philadelphia and Chicago. Ironically, both women – Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and Illinois State Senator Kimberly Lightford – supported slashing police budgets and other reform measures, which many Republicans have blamed as the cause of the rapid increase in crime.” It would take a heart of stone not to laugh…
  • So you want to move to a red state.

    In the now three and a half years since I have decamped with my family from Los Angeles to Nashville—some have called us “early adopters”—I have spent considerable time on phone, email and texts with old friends and acquaintances in New York and California who are asking me what it’s like. Am I happy? Should they move? What’s best—Florida, Tennessee, Texas or someplace else?

    Although answering the question “should they move?” for someone else is rather like answering for them should they marry or divorce—it’s too big a decision and really none of your business—that doesn’t stop me from almost universally saying yes.

    I do this because I have been in L.A. and NY lately and know them to have turned into the ghosts of their former selves—basically hellholes.

    I haven’t been to Chicago for a few years, but it seems to be, if anything, worse. And when I was in L.A., covering the late, lamented Larry Elder campaign, I didn’t even want to go to San Francisco. That was a Golden Gate Bridge too far.

    It’s not just the pervasive homelessness and the escalating Clockwork Orange-like ultra-violence, the actual souls of the cities that I knew very well—born in NY and lived decades in LA—seem to have vanished.

    Who wants to sing “New York, New York” or “I Love L.A.” anymore? And can you imagine leaving your heart in San Francisco? What has happened is a true American tragedy—and it’s not just because of COVID, although that helped. The cancer has been growing for a long time.

    It could be said you should stay to help resuscitate these cities although I would argue you do more for them by leaving, making those governing the cities—universally Democrats, as everybody knows—and even more those dopey enough to have voted for that governance, wake up.

    But even in red states, the culture war continues…

  • Hundred of holiday flights have been cancelled due to “staffing shortages.” How’s that vaccine mandate working out for you, Biden voters?
  • Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, infamous for refusing to approve concealed carry permits, is indicted on multiple misconduct charges:

    Sheriff Smith is being indicted for:

    • Count 1: Illegally issuing concealed carry weapon permits (CCW) to VIP’s
    • Count 2: Failing to properly investigate whether non-VIP’s should receive CCW permits
    • Count 3: Keeping non-VIP CCW applications pending indefinitely
    • Count 4: Illegally accepting suite tickets, food, and drinks at Sharks game
    • Count 5: Failing to report Sharks game gifts on financial documents
    • Count 6: Committing perjury by failing to disclose Sharks game gifts
    • Count 7: Failing to cooperate with internal affairs investigation surrounding treatment of Andrew Hogan

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • How bad did New York Corrections screw up for the courts to free someone on 8th Amendment grounds? This bad. Holy crap!

  • Play stupid games, win pink slip prizes: “New York Times fires editor accused of leaving profane voicemails for gun group.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of the New York Times, here’s a video on how Times reporter Ian Urbina ripped off the royalties for over 2,000 songs from 462 different artists. Bonus: Noam Chomsky!
  • “Florida Sheriff Cheers Homeowner Who Shot a Broad Daylight Home Invader.”
  • Short Twitter thread about the fiendship between Alice Cooper and Groucho Marx.
  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health now tops the Amazon non-fiction bestseller list. I haven’t read it, and usual Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caveats apply, but this is the book we have now, and I suspect regular BattleSwarm readers may find some of the same topics covered here within its pages.
  • The Grand Tour lads speak admiringly about how the French are ungovernable.
  • YouTube: You liked that one video on fixing door hinges? Here, have hundreds more!
  • The best of the Internet for 2021.
  • “New York Restaurant Adds Voting Booth So They Can Allow People In Without ID.”
  • “San Francisco To Require Proof Of Vaccination To Poop On The Sidewalk.”
  • If you’re bummed out from all these scumbags, here’s a palate cleansing Christmas puppy:

  • Merry Christmas everyone!

    LinkSwarm for November 12, 2021

    Friday, November 12th, 2021

    Biden takes his Welcome Back Carter cosplay to the next level, fighting the plague of wokeness, and more disasterous Kyle Rittenhouse prosecutor missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • As if high inflation, high unemployment, rising crime, parental unrest over failing schools and a new ABBA album weren’t enough to evoke the late 1970s, now Iranian-backed militias have stormed an American embassy in the Middle East and taken hostages:

    A group of Houthi rebels reportedly stormed the U.S. compound on Wednesday seeking “large quantities of equipment and materials,” according to regional reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The raid comes just five days after the Houthis kidnapped Yemeni nationals who work for the U.S. embassy. “The alleged raid comes after the Houthis kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy from one of the employee’s private residences in Sana’a on November 5,” according to MEMRI. At least 22 other Yemenis were kidnapped by the Houthis in recent weeks, “most of whom worked on the security staff guarding the embassy grounds,” according to MEMRI.

    The State Department confirmed to the Free Beacon that the Yemeni staffers are being detained without explanation and that the Iran-backed militants stole property after breaching the American facility in Sana’a, which housed U.S. embassy staff prior to the suspension of operations there in 2015.

    Next up: Pet Rocks and auras.

  • Today’s columnist decrying wokeness among Democrats is…Maureen Dowd in the New York Times?

    For a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.

    The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?

    There’s some truth in what James Carville told Judy Woodruff: “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.”

    There’s also some truth in what Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat in a tough re-election battle, told The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns about the president: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

    Biden has pursued his two bills with Captain Ahab-like zeal; he pines to be F.D.R. and eclipse Barack Obama, who pushed him aside for Hillary.

    It’s Dowd and the Times, so I can’t say read the whole thing. But even Dowd can smell a dead fish rotting…

  • Kurt Schlicter: “Americans Are Waking Up To The Democrat’s Race Hustle.”

    he smart, moral transcriptionists of our glorious ruling class have discovered what they contend is a terrible crime of wickedness – those rural monsters out there whose skin tone is pale voted for Republicans in astounding numbers. Blatant “whiteness” they call it, a malady that people who aren’t white can suffer from too. Just ask Winsome Sears. And so can the other minority voters who ditched the Democrat plantation in record numbers. But they also contend that voting for Democrats because of your race is great. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, these people are totally hobgoblin-free.

    As a normal person, you will observe that this all makes no sense. That’s incorrect, because it makes perfect sense when you understand that all this race hustling is a garbage scam to secure the liberal establishment’s power. It’s morally illiterate, but the moral angle is part of the scam. See, voting for a Democrat or a Republican, to most folks, is just a thing. It’s morally neutral. Now, many vote for a party by habit. Others vote by the individual or by policies. Keeping the former group and coercing the second are the goals of racializing elections in order to cast casting your vote as a moral imperative.

    Republican, bad.

    Democrat, good.

    Dig through the dross of “privilege” and “whiteness” and you get to the crux of the scam. They use race to turn what should be a choice based on rational self-interest into one based on (alleged) virtue. Suddenly, a vote for the Dem is not something Dems need to earn through competence and quality. It is something they are simply entitled to because they are on the side of righteousness. And this is super convenient because the Democrats just suck. They are terrible. Not even a year in and President * has managed to screw up everything his dusty claws have touched.

    This, you should read the whole thing…

  • Another Virginia post-mortem:

    There were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.

    There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.

    Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.

    “It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.

    And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.

  • This is really bad news: “Metallurgist admits faking steel-test results for Navy subs.”

    A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.

    Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls.

    From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.

    Snip.

    “Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” Carpenter wrote. “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”

    So, she just harmed national security and endangered the lives of American servicemen because she was lazy as fuck. Oh, that makes it all better…

  • Legal Insurrection continues to keep track of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

    Today was the fifth day of the trial by which ADA Thomas Binger’s is seeking to have Kyle Rittenhouse convicted and sentenced to life in prison for having shot three men (two fatally) the night of August 25, 2020 in Kenosha WI, when the city was suffering a tsunami of rioting, looting, and arson following the lawful shooting of a knife-wielding Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers.

    And it would be hard to fully express what a catastrophe this day was for Prosecutor Binger.

    The prosecution’s demise came into the courtroom in the form of its star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, famously struck in the right bicep as he closed on the fallen 17-year-old with a Glock pistol in his hand.

    Grosskreutz is the only survivor from among the three men who were struck by Kyle’s desperately fired rounds, and the only one of Kyle’s attackers available to testify for the State in this prosecution (the fourth primary attacker, “jump kick man,” had the unbelievably good fortune to be missed twice by the 17-year-old, and has since disappeared off the face of the Earth).

    Grosskreutz is fortunate that modern American courtrooms don’t do trial by combat, because otherwise he’d have been carried out of the courtroom mortality wounded by his own testimony.

  • One person waking up: Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian.

    Kasparian said she thought Rittenhouse first chased after Joseph Rosenbaum, sparking the incident that ended with the teen fatally shooting Rosenbaum. However, it was Rosenbaum who chased after Rittenhouse. Moreover, a gun was fired from a third party just seconds before Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum.

    “I was wrong about that, okay, so I want to correct the record,” Kasparian said on her news show. “Look, these details matter, because if you’re going to make an argument that you acted in self-defense, there needs to be some proof that there was an imminent threat.”

  • Some Rittenhouse trial tweets:

  • “The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.”
  • Democrats might do better electorally if they weren’t so rabidly hostile to the Second Amendment.

    Based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe its time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far,though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.

    Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”

    Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.

    Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.

    While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.

    Spoiler: Democrats aren’t going to change course because they are radically, institutionally hostile to civilian gun ownership.

  • What. The. Hell. “Police Visited a Person Who Criticized AOC on Twitter.”
  • Problem: Too many minority students fail tests. California solution: Toss aside objective standards and eliminate tests. That’s like this solution:

  • “Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat.” They’re currently threatening to burn new York City some more. “Democrats at the highest levels have been giving BLM cover since the group was founded. They either excuse BLM’s violence as some part of a protracted mea culpa, or they deny that the violence is happening at all.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • MIT caves to wokeness.

    The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.

    We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”

    Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)

    We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.

  • The war against Critical Race Theory Texas classrooms takes a scalp.

    The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students.

    The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees voted Monday to part ways with the principal, James Whitfield, who was suspended this year at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Fort Worth area.

    The school board had voted in September not to renew Whitfield’s contract, NBC Dallas-Forth Worth reported.

    Whitfield is the principles who accused residents of “systemic racism” and demanded students “commit to being an anti-racist.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

  • Enes Kanter refuses to sweep Chinese oppression under the rug:

  • General Electric is splitting into three companies, “aviation, healthcare and energy.”
  • Toshiba is also breaking itself into three parts, infrastructure, semiconductors and devices. Toshiba used to be one of the top semicodnuctor companies in the world in the 1980s, but I thought they had spun off semi operations as Kioxia in 2018.
  • YouTube disables dislike button because they don’t approve of you being able to dislike things they don’t want you to dislike.
  • F. W. de Klerk, the South African leader who freed Mandela and ended Apartheid, dead at 85.
  • What happens when you apply pitch correction to Robert Plant? Abomination.
  • Cloudflare lava lamps.
  • Library addition: A new book on the Tiger tank.
    

  • “I shall call him Mini-Me!”

  • LinkSwarm for June 18, 2021

    Friday, June 18th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Hunter Biden channels Hunter S. Thompson (and not in a good way), Slow Joe stumbles around the G7, a top Chinese intelligence official defects, and Gillette inflicts toxic unprofitability on Proctor & Gamble.
    

  • Study shows that yes, indeed, Andrew Cuomo killed the elderly.
    

  • Kurt Schlichter is not impressed with Joe Biden:

    It’s beyond any reasonable dispute that the slack-jawed old pervert staggering through this punchline presidency is getting more senile by the day. All the while, his cackling understudy is biding her time everywhere but at the border, getting huffy at being questioned, and generally failing at a job historically assigned to morons as a role where they could do little damage. The only people who dig their hep jive – yeah, go on and believe the 79 percent approval numbers among people now paying $5 a gallon for unleaded – are the talking tubers of cable news. But even the tater thots of Brian Stelter, who is a potato, can’t dispel the growing sense of unease that watching these incompetent weirdos brings.

    This epoch is the interregnum, a caretaker presidency presided over by a human asterisk who cares only about his post-lid bowl of mush and being wrapped in a shawl, set in front of the tee-vee, and allowed to watch his stories. The only thing moving less expeditiously than his bowels is his ridiculous legislative agenda, and all the prunes in the world aren’t going to help clear out that particular constipation, not with Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema refusing to commit ritual political suicide on the altar of coastal leftist dreams.

    The progs were so close, just a vote or two away, to the unrestrained power they thought they could flex and thereby secure their control forever. But * is no Franklin Roosevelt. Nor is he Teddy Roosevelt. Nor Eleanor Roosevelt, though he could be if he really, really wanted to be. He’s not even Melvin Roosevelt. Instead, Grandpa Badfinger is a rickety joke, bumping elbows with his younger fellow-incompetents at the G7, wandering about mindlessly chasing moths until his ridiculous wife, with her ridiculous “Dr.”, wrangles him back into the hapless pack. You look at this sorry set of leaders of the formerly-free world and the vibe you get is “exhaustion.” There’s no energy, no drive, no hope. Boris Johnson, formerly a man, explained to a bored UK that that “nations coming out of the pandemic need to ‘build back better’ in a ‘greener,’ ‘more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.’” Hack clichés are their solution, but these relics have nothing else. They are weak and stupid and they represent a spent elite that cares about nothing except just a little more time holding fast to their uncertain sinecures.

    You can feel the tension beneath the surface, the sense that something is coming, a great changing. Oh, the elite at Davos fantasizes about a “Great Reset,” but they mean it literally – they want to reset the world back to how it was set when they were young and had energy and people hadn’t yet noticed that their venality and incompetence was matched only by their insanely inflated sense of their own abilities. But why would they be any better at pulling that off than they are at anything else? When the shattering disruption comes, they are the ones who will be disrupted, they and the whole post-War establishment our betters thought would last a thousand years and that won’t make it past 80. The elite aren’t, not even close, and we all know it now and we all sense that their Jenga tower o’ power can’t keep from toppling over even as they pull more and more blocks out of it, shredding norms (just this once – it’s always “just this once”) to keep their grip.

    But what comes next? Something big, but the question is “What?” The only thing for certain is that the people running things now won’t like it. It’s been said here many times that Donald Trump was not our last chance, but theirs, our final fair warning to our failed elite from back when, at some level, we still thought the ruling caste acknowledged that we normals had at least some theoretical right to participate in our own government. But such illusions, to the extent they had endured, got shattered last November. We heard for four years how the 2016 election had been hacked, stolen, whatever the hyperbole du jour was, and the minute they could proclaim His Asteriskness president questioning elections became treason. But we saw the cheating, and we saw the judicial and executive sleight-of-hand that changed the rules in ways a real Supreme Court would have objected to, and we saw the informal rigging of the election through the lies and covering-up of the professional, licensed, and registered janitors of narrative journalism.

    Now it’s all about holding onto power no matter what the cost. The corrupt feds toss trespassers into solitary while letting Antifa/BLM scumbags walk. Their tech buddies desperately try to play whack-a-mole with the unapproved ideas that keep popping up. The garbage media celebrates noted onanists while it ignores the Snortunate Son’s latest entry on his CV of shame – he’s added racial epithets to his remarkable and remarkably unremarked-upon record of tapping the tills of Slavic oligarchs, tapping rando strippers, and re-imagining the classic 80s novel of coke-fueled excess as Bright Lights, Big Guy (who gets his 10%).

    It can’t last. Maybe if these puffy clowns were pros they could keep their boots on our throats forever, but they don’t own boots – too cis – and their Guccis and Birkenstocks just don’t have the same heft. They are weak, and stupid, and they are not even cunning enough to ensure that the cops and military, who would be expected to provide their final protective fire when accountability comes to overrun them, are prepared to do their dirty work.

  • Our venal ruling class: “President Biden and first lady Jill Biden kicked out the British media — to get the pub garden table they wanted.”
  • Hunter Biden is selling his “artwork” for up to half a million dollars to anonymous buyers. It’s like they want to rub the money-laundering in the faces of ordinary Americans…
  • Hunter is such an epic scumbag that he was banned from the Chateau Marmont (AKA “the hotel John Belushi ODed in”) for “drug use.” That’s like being banned from Studio 54 for doing too much cocaine…
  • Speaking of Hunter, congratulations to old friend Diana Fleischman for appearing on Gutfeld to talk about Hunter and other things. “Given the nepotism he’s been given, this is the least harmful way he could be using it…he’s making art at home and blowing through straws rather than sucking through them like he usually does.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Mike the Musicologist.)
  • Did China’s top counterintelligence officer just defect?

    Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

    Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

    (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)

  • The FBI has evidently decide it can just seize whatever valuables it wants:

    When FBI agents asked for permission to rip hundreds of safe deposit boxes from the walls of a Beverly Hills business and haul them away, U.S. Magistrate Steve Kim set some strict limits on the raid.

    The business, U.S. Private Vaults, had been charged in a sealed indictment with conspiring to sell drugs and launder money. Its customers had not.

    So the FBI could seize the boxes themselves, Kim decided, but had to return what was inside to the owners.

    “This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes,” Kim’s March 17 seizure warrant declared.

    Yet the FBI is now trying to confiscate $86 million in cash and millions of dollars more in jewelry and other valuables that agents found in 369 of the boxes.

    Prosecutors claim the forfeiture is justified because the unnamed box holders were engaged in criminal activity. They have disclosed no evidence to support the allegation.

    I’m so old when that I can remember when the FBI were regarded as incorruptible knights of justice. Those days are long gone…

  • Nine out of ten Republican congressman who voted for the last iteration of the Trump impeachment farce have drawn primary challengers.

    Congressional members Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) all voted to impeach Trump, while the majority of Republicans voted against the impeachment, believing it was unconstitutional and unwarranted.

    Good. (Previously.)

  • “Rep. Richard Hudson and 140 House Members Urge DOJ and ATF to Withdraw Guidance on Stabilizing Braces.” Now we’ll find out if the Biden Administration really does want to turn millions of law-abiding gun owners into felons overnight… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Is Kamala Harris being set up for failure?

    Harris has been crashing and burning in regards to the border for weeks. It’s so bad at this point that even the mainstream media are going after her with the kind of veracity you’d never expect. After all, this is Kamala Harris we are talking about, and critical media coverage isn’t supposed to happen. There’s no way a piece like that gets written by CNN without input from the White House.

    But here’s the thing – all Joe Biden has to do to save Harris is send her to the border. So why hasn’t he?

    Instead, Harris has been left to twist in the wind, thrown into multiple major network interviews without an ability to answer basic inquiries about why she hasn’t gone to personally survey the illegal immigration crisis. There are no actual risks with her going to the border. It’s not like the media are going to suddenly turn on the Biden administration and stop covering up what’s going on. The only real logical conclusion left is that Harris’s disastrous tour wasn’t disastrous by sheer chance.

    Don’t get me wrong, Harris is an absolutely awful politician on her own merits. Every embarrassing flub and hysterical cackle of the last week serves as a reminder of why her own presidential campaign was such a failure. Yet, the Biden administration knows she’s incapable of being a likable, competent figure. Instead of helping her and protecting her, they are hanging the border crisis around her neck and throwing her into the deep end with no floaties on. Further, they are negating to do the one thing that could settle a lot of the questions causing Harris so much consternation – just sending her to the border and getting it over with.

    Meanwhile, Jill Biden is chilling at the G7, rubbing shoulders with royalty and cosplaying as co-president to the glowing reviews of the media. It’s all just too perfect to be a coincidence at this point. I’m convinced – Harris is the fall guy, and she’s being pushed over the cliff by the very administration she serves.

  • “The Rapid Response Team, a unit within the Portland police department, voted unanimously to resign on Wednesday during a meeting with the police union. This follows the criminal indictment of an officer for assault stemming from a riot in August 2020.” (Hat tip: Andy Ngo.)
  • The Biden Department of Education is trying to force transgenderism down America’s throat. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • California is facing a drought, yet they’re pouring fresh water into the ocean. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “The secret behind Amazon’s domination in cloud computing. Amazon Web Services is snapping up former government officials who can help them gain access to lucrative federal contracts.” Not the only reason. Google was slow out of the gate and Microsoft’s Azure offering started out as a nightmare to figure out how to price and use. (“Which of these four types of inscrutable, poorly described storage do you want to outfit to your cloud?”)
  • “Parliaments In Czech Republic And Belgium Pass Motion Condemning Beijing’s Crimes Against Uyghurs.” Good for them.
  • Liberals not only ignore the roots of our democracy, they don’t even know what they are.
  • Australia’s Sky News slams the American media for their tongue bathes of Biden:

  • Instagram doesn’t want you reporting on anti-Semitic crimes.
  • “Joe Rogan Tears Into CNN’s Brian Stelter: ‘Hey Motherf*cker, You’re Supposed To Be A Journalist.'”

    Joe Rogan ripped CNN’s Brian Stelter on Thursday’s installment of The Joe Rogan Experience. Speaking with Kyle Kulinski, Rogan referenced an unspecified segment on CNN about the popularity of many YouTubers and podcasters, who in some cases receive more viewers than large cable networks such as CNN.

    “This is because the market has spoken and your show’s fucking terrible,” said Rogan, addressing the ratings battles. “Brian Stelter’s show keeps slipping and slipping and slipping in the ratings. Same with Don Lemon’s. It’s the same thing. Everybody knows they’re not real. They’re not real humans.”

  • The New York Times folds, removes defamatory statement about The Babylon Bee:

  • Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome strikes again. “The journalist who broke the story about the controversial 2016 tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was found dead Saturday morning, according to police. The body of 45-year-old Christopher Sign, a news anchor for ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, was discovered by Hoover police and fire personnel at around 8 a.m.” His death is “being investigated as a suicide.” Of course it is.
  • Federal Judge Terry Doughty blocked the Biden Administration’s suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal land. “The omission of any rational explanation in cancelling the lease sales, and in enacting the Pause, results in this Court ruling that Plaintiff States also have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of this claim.” Evidently “because we hate reliable energy” and “because we can’t channel graft to Democratic Party cronies” aren’t considered “rational” reasons…
  • Based on the just completed legislative session, this fiscal index ranks Texas State Representatives from most to least fiscally responsible. There’s one for State Senators as well.
  • Supreme Court rejects Texas-led lawsuit to invalidate Obamacare, citing a lack of standing. Much as I want to see ObamaCare stripped from the books entirely, when Clarence Thomas is part of the majority, that suggests there were indeed issues with the filing. Said Thomas: “The plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the harm they suffered is traceable to unlawful conduct. Although this Court has erred twice before in cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • “Gillette’s ‘toxic masculinity’ ad haunts P&G as shaving giant takes $8B writedown.” Get woke, go broke. Everyone involved in that debacle should have been fired.
  • Happy 50th anniversary to Southwest Airlines, who flew their first flight out of Love Field 50 years ago today.
  • Heh:

  • Epic Broadway disaster Spider-Man: Turn off The Dark opened ten years ago. “It opened, after the longest preview period in Broadway history, on June 14, 2011, and went on to lose nearly $100 million.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”
  • “Biden Gets No Pudding Cup Today As Punishment For Taking A Question.”
  • “Elon Musk Excited To Once Again Be Richest Man On Earth While Jeff Bezos Is In Space.”
  • “Dems Shocked, Disappointed To Learn The New Israeli Prime Minister Will Still Be A Jew.”
  • Bath plus skritches:

  • 

    A Big Chunk Of The Internet Went Down This Morning

    Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

    While you were asleep this morning, a big chunk of the Internet briefly went down:

    Among those affected are Amazon, Twitch, Reddit, The Verge, The Guardian, ZDnet, The New York Times, Freetrade, The Financial Times, Pinterest, Kickstarter, Ebay, The Telegraph, CNN, and Imgur. Google searches are also partially impacted, as is the Google Cloud Platform. While Twitter is up, its emoji platform is offline.

    The issue has been traced back to content delivery network Fastly, which is down. The company runs an Edge cloud between companies’ data centers and the end user, reducing latency, protecting from DDoS attacks, and helping them handle traffic spikes.

    Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN), an intermediary that brings data closer to Internet end users so their interactions don’t need to go all the way back to the company’s central servers. This is the market Akamai pioneered, and other companies in the space include CDNetwork and Cloudflare. “Edge computing” is a sort of catch-all term for intermediary cloud services that became one of those buzzwords that VC companies threw money at about two years ago.

    With Amazon down, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that AWS, Amazon’s 800 pound cloud service gorilla, was experience an outage, but it turned out to be Fastly, who evidently fixed the problem at 10:57 UTC (5:57 AM CDT):

    “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” On Twitter, the company added: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”

    The modern Internet is decentralized, widely distributed and pretty efficient, but its very decentralized nature means that there are more moving parts to break, and also more attack surfaces for hackers to exploit. Delivering rich content over the Internet (be it text, images, video or shopping) usually involves dozens, if not hundred of software pieces, protocols, companies, etc. for every web page served up. Any of them can go down. Network engineers design in as much redundancy as possible, but there’s only so much you can do. I worked for a company in 2020 whose computer testing lab went down because antifa rioters in Minneapolis physically destroyed a fiber optic cable.

    All I can tell you is to keep multiple rotating backups of your most valuable data, because anything that can go wrong eventually will…