Posts Tagged ‘nuclear power’

LinkSwarm For August 18, 2023

Friday, August 18th, 2023

San Diego tries enforcing the law, a sampler of the lies Obama told about his life, Blade-Runners take on Big Brother’s cameras, a nuke rises in Texas, and a Cthuloid horror swims the chilly waters of Antarctica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • San Diego tries “this one weird trick” to deal with homeless problem: Enforcing the law.

    Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.

    The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”

    Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.

    Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.

    Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.

    Do you think Austin’s government might start enforcing the city’s camping ban? Of course not. Then how are they supposed to rake off the graft? (Hat tip: Instapundit, who offers some takeaways worth highlighting:

    1. The homeless respond to policy and incentives like anyone else. The mere announcement of a future camping ban (plus some enforcement of other existing rules) rapidly cleared out major problem areas.
    2. The provision of shelter or housing is neither necessary nor sufficient to accomplish these clear-outs. Of the people asked to leave Balboa Park on the first day of enforcement (issuance of warnings), none accepted offers of shelter.
    3. The NGOs that have colonized the homeless problem have neither the incentive nor the knowledge to solve it. The head of one shelter was confused by the magical disappearance of his potential clients. “Where did they go?”

    )

  • Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz explains why the latest Trump indictment is a joke.
  • Charles F. McGonigal, a former FBI agent pushing the Russian collusion fantasy pleads guilty to Russian collusion. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Hunter Biden’s tax charges dismissed, but only as a prelude to filing more serious charges against him.
  • Biographer David Garrow reveals some of the many things Obama lied about.

    There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.

    Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

    At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.

    In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

    Snip.

    Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.

    The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.

    Snip.

    Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.

    It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.

    Read the whole thing to see all those facts about Obama that the media ignored…including his fantasies about having sex with men.

  • Yuan hits 16 year low against the dollar.
    

  • The origins of the global warming scam.

    Members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.

    In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.

    Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”

  • Social Justice strikes again: Woke Hawaiian Official Stalled Release Of ‘Revered Water’ Until It Was Too Late To Save Maui.”

    According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.

    His office has not yet commented on the delay of water resources.

    How much damage could have been prevented with the extra water is not yet known. However, the question of “Why?” needs to be addressed in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history. Though bureaucratic red tape might be the most obvious suggestion, a recent interview with M. Kaleo Manual offers some interesting and disturbing insight. Manuel waxes philosophical on “water equity” (“equity” being a pervasive woke buzzword) and an ancient “reverence” of water as god-like. He uses these beliefs to support his rationale for keeping tight controls over Hawaiian water supplies; not as a resource to be used, but as a holistic privilege offered by the government.

  • Economist who named BRICS says the idea of a common BRICS currency is “embarrassing.”

    “It’s just ridiculous,” [Lord Jim O’Neill] told the Financial Times in an interview on Monday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”

    The economist spoke ahead of the 15th BRICS summit next week, where the nations will meet to decide whether to expand membership to other countries and may also float the idea of the common currency.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Blade Runners” take out new London monitoring cameras. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • What’s the matter with Sweden?

    The following story was related to me by a former Governor of Minnesota, who was of Norwegian descent. A number of years ago, a Norwegian dignitary (the Prime Minister, I think) visited Minnesota. Talking to our governor, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about Minnesota’s crime rate, saying that there was much less crime in Norway. Minnesota’s governor replied, “We don’t have a crime problem with our Norwegians, either.”

    That anecdote came to mind when I read, in the London Times, “Sweden’s slide from peaceful welfare state to Europe’s gun-killings capital.”

    Today, Sweden is Europe’s capital of gun homicide. Last year, according to the Swedish national council for crime prevention, 63 people were shot and killed: more than double the European average and, per capita, multitudes higher than London or Paris.

    … The effect on Swedish society has been striking. As well as the lives lost, the violence has brought down a government, changed laws and policies, and become the biggest talking point in a country that once prided itself on its reputation as a peaceful welfare state.

    Violent crime will do that, although, to be fair, Sweden’s homicide rate is considerably lower than ours. But it is now significantly higher than homicide rates in quite a few other European countries, including Norway. Why is that? Have Swedes suddenly started getting violent? No.

    It has also kicked the hornet’s nest of integration. Today, one fifth of all people living in Sweden were born outside the country.

  • Dow Chemical is planning to build a small nuclear reactor to power their plant in Calhoun County. Good for them. The TRISO-X fuel they’re using sounds like it will be a pebble bed reactor design.
  • “Target Sales Dipped in Last Quarter Due to Pride Backlash.”
  • Is Adobe sell AI-generated stock art based on artist’s work?
  • Jihadi dumbass kills himself while cleaning his gun.
  • William Friedkin, RIP.
  • Enjoy contemplating this horrifying Cthuloid abomination swimming in antarctic waters.
  • A guide to the things considered disrespectful when working in a Japanese office. Like “going home on time.”
  • Is there any UK tradition more glorious than tossing hot pennies off a high building for the joy of seeing poor people burn their hands grabbing them?
  • “Country Music Industry Confused By Man Actually From Country Making Actual Music.”
  • “Prince Immediately Regrets Waking Rachel Zegler With A Kiss After She Starts Ranting About The Patriarchy.”
  • Good boy!
  • LinkSwarm For May 19, 2023

    Friday, May 19th, 2023

    The Russian Collusion Hoax is now officially bunk, Budweiser’s self-inflicted freefall continues, blue city commercial real estate bites the moose, and a whole lot of shocked face to go around. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • John Durham finally delivers his report sinking the Russian collusion hoax.

    The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.

    Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.

    He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.

    Compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the dossier is an unverified collection of opposition research accusing then-candidate Trump and his campaign aides of collaborating with Kremlin officials. The FBI used the dossier to secure a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, though its central claims were subsequently disproven by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

    The report notes that the FBI was quick to investigate Trump, while it proceeded cautiously with allegations against Clinton.

    The 316-page report sent to Congress was nearly four years in the making. It concluded that neither federal law enforcement nor intelligence officials “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” which the FBI “swiftly opened.”

    The report accuses federal officials of acting “without appropriate objectivity or restraint.” Peter Strzok, then the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, opened the investigation “immediately” at the direction of Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director. “Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump,” the report states.

    It states that former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith “committed a criminal offense by fabricating language in an email that was material to the FBI obtaining a FISA surveillance order.”

    Durham wrote that FBI officials continued to seek FISA surveillance while acknowledging that “they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities. And certain personnel disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination.”

    “Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham wrote.

    Read the full Durham Report here.

    So how many hacks are going to give back their Pulitzer Prizes?

  • Speaking of which:

  • “Media Admits They Lied About That Russia Collusion Thing But Are Totally Telling The Truth About Everything Else.”
    

  • “Gov. Newsom Announces California Budget Deficit Bigger than Projected.” Legal Insurrection has already used the “unexpectedly” here, so I’ll just note that Newsom is the far lefty a whole lot of Democratic Party power players want to substitute for Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024.
  • Soros-Backed Group Pushes Chicago Mayor To Slash Funding for ‘Racist’ Police Force.” Of course they do. Chicago Democrats are going to get what they voted for, gooder and harder. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • NIH Renews Funds for ‘Bat Coronavirus’ Research despite Energy Department, FBI’s Lab-Leak Conclusion.” That’s like catching Mrs. O’Leary’s cow after she’s burned down Chicago, strapping lit fireworks to her body and letting her loose in the dynamite factory.
  • The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know.”
  • “Man Who Assaulted Congressional Staffers Had Previously Been Let off by Soros-Funded Prosecutor.” There’s not enough shocked face in the world…
  • Seattle-area official defends nominating sex offender to committee that includes one of his victims. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “New York, San Francisco Office Buildings Are Absolute Ghost Towns.”

    “Things are so bad, in fact, that 26 Empire State Buildings could fit into New York City’s empty office space, as occupancy in the city is hovering around 50% of prepandemic levels.”

    “In San Francisco, the downtown area is experiencing its worst office vacancy crisis on record – with 31% of space available for lease or sublease, the SF Chronicle reports.”

  • “DeSantis Defunds ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Bureaucracies in Florida Public Universities.” Trump did a lot of things right as President, but he never fought social justice warrior madness with the same ferocity that DeSantis has in Florida.
  • Speaking of DeSantis, he’s expected to launch a 2024 Presidential campaign next week.
  • Also 2024 race news: Biden may not even be on the primary ballot in New Hampshire. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Bud Light finds out there’s no bottom to their tranny pander pit. “Sales volumes of Bud Light fell by 23.6 percent in the week ended on May 6, according to retail scanner numbers cited by Beer Business Daily that are based on Nielsen IQ data. That’s a drop from the 23.3 percent slide Bud Light suffered in the final week of April.”
  • Finnish nuclear plant coming online drops spot energy prices by 75%.
  • Russia’s energy revenue falls by 47%.
  • Child mutilation ban passes Texas House.
  • “24 Republican governors pledge to assist Texas in securing its border.

    Republican governors released a joint statement on Tuesday pledging to assist Texas in securing its border with Mexico.

    In response to Gov. Greg Abbott’s request for assistance, twenty-four Republican governors committed to helping secure the 1,254-mile-border and commended the Texas Republican for the recent actions he was forced to take due to the failures of the Biden administration’s open-border policies, according to the Washington Examiner.

    “The federal government’s response handling the expiration of Title 42 has represented a complete failure of the Biden Administration,” the joint statement reads. “While the federal government has abdicated its duties, Republican governors stand ready to protect the U.S.-Mexico border and keep families safe.”

    “All states have suffered from the effects of deadly illegal drugs coming across the border, and every state is a border state due to the devastating influx of drugs in our communities. Republican governors are leading the way to address the border crisis by increasing fentanyl sentencing and increasing support for law enforcement interdiction of drugs, among other measures,” they continued.

    “Texas Governor Greg Abbott has exemplified leadership at a critical time, leading the way with Operation Lone Star, and deploying the Texas Tactical Border Force to prevent illegal crossings and keep the border secure. We support the efforts to secure the border led by Governor Abbott.”

    On Tuesday afternoon, Abbott sent an urgent request to all of the nation’s governors asking them to band together to defeat the invasion at the US/Mexico border, something he said impacts every community in the United States.

    “The flood of illegal border activity invited by the Biden Administration flows directly across the southern border into Texas communities, but this crisis does not stop in our state. Emboldened Mexican drug cartels and other transnational criminal enterprises profit off this chaos, smuggling people and dangerous drugs like fentanyl into communities nationwide,” Abbott wrote.

    “In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” he requested.

    While no Democratic governors responded to the letter, twenty-four Republicans pledged to help from states which include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

  • “Yes, Migrants Believe Biden Has Rolled Out A Big Welcome Mat.”

    Jorge Mijares left Venezuela months ago — last November, he says. He’s been in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, for four weeks. But he planned to cross over Thursday night, as Title 42 immigration restrictions ended.

    “I have the app,” said Mijares, 54. “I’m just waiting for it to tell me when to go.”

    He’s not concerned about the Biden administration’s warnings against migration. After all, he has many friends who have made it across — safely.

    There’s an app that tells you how to break U.S. immigration laws. Of course there is. Silly of me to be even slightly surprised. “The street finds its own uses for things” as the now-elderly cyberpunks used to say…

  • Twisted Sisiter’s Dee Snider is not down with your tranny madness. You submitted this with a better “we’re not going to take it” pun.
  • Speaking of tranny madness: Cross-dressing serial thief Samuel Brinton arrested as a fugitive from justice.
  • “Toronto ‘Anti-Capitalist’ Pay-When-You-Can Cafe Shuts Down After Just One Year.”

  • Chutzpah: Taking a paycheck for not working for 15 years. Boss Level Chutzpah: Suing for a raise for not working.
  • Meet Scary Barbie, the star-shredding black hole.
  • “Poll: Most Democrats In Favor Of Welcoming Immigrants Into Someone Else’s Neighborhood.”
  • “Dad Punishes Misbehaving Son By Giving Him Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.”
  • LinkSwarm for September 2, 2022

    Friday, September 2nd, 2022

    Biden goes all Nuremberg Rally, more transexual madness, Gibson’s Bakery wins final victory, states subcontract their energy policies to crazy California, and more really stupid criminals. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • You would think that Biden’s team might have better sense than to dress his set like it’s Darth Maul’s bedroom:

    

  • What happens when people in the federal government are incompetent and refuse to do their job? Usually nothing. Or they get promoted. But in Florida? Governor DeSantis fires their asses.

    On Friday, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he would be suspending four members of the Broward County School Board for their “incompetence, neglect of duty, and misuse of authority” at Marjory Stonemason Douglass High School.

    In a press release, the governor’s office stated that Patricia Good, Donna Korn, Ann Murray and Laurie Rich Levinson had been suspended following the recommendations of the Twentieth Statewide Grand Jury. DeSantis has been particularly active in education, going as far as endorsing school board members in their races across the state, and enacting laws on curriculum transparency and parental rights.

    “Even four years after the events of February 14, 2018, the final report of the Grand Jury found that a safety-related alarm that could have possibly saved lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School ‘was and is such a low priority that it remains uninstalled at multiple schools,’ and ‘students continue to be educated in unsafe, aging, decrepit, moldy buildings that were supposed to have been renovated years ago,’” the press release states.

    “These are inexcusable actions by school board members who have shown a pattern of emboldening unacceptable behavior, including fraud and mismanagement, across the district,” the press release continued.

    “It is my duty to suspend people from office when there is clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance,” said DeSantis. “The findings of the Statewide Grand Jury affirm the work of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School Safety Commission. We are grateful to the members of the jury who have dedicated countless hours to this mission and we hope this suspension brings the Parkland community another step towards justice. This action is in the best interest of the residents and students of Broward County and all citizens of Florida.”

    In their place, DeSantis has appointed Torey Alston, former Commissioner of the Broward County Board of County Commissioners and President of Indelible Solutions, Manual “Nandy” A. Serrano, member of the Florida Sports Foundation Board of Directors, Ryan Reiter, a US Marine Corps Veteran and Director of Government Relations for Kaufman Lynn Construction, and Kevin Tynan, Attorney with Richardson and Tynan, who previously served on the Broward County School Board and South Broward Hospital District, to take the suspended members’ places.

  • Undercover mom shocked by official transexual propaganda depravity.

    Rachel, a Brooklyn mom with a gender-dysphoric child…went undercover as a pre-teen in the chat, searching for resources for detransitioners. She found none.

    Instead, she opened a “Pandora’s box” of sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. She shared screenshots of the chat with National Review.

    Rachel says she looked to the Trevor Project in desperation, “when I thought my child was going to kill herself.” The organization frequently claims that LGBT youth are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. It claims to be a refuge for these people with its crisis services including TrevorLifeline, TrevorText, and TrevorChat.

    Under the advice of a “highly credentialed” medical and mental-health team, Rachel and her husband decided to socially transition their child a few years ago, she told National Review. After that, her child was hospitalized three times for self-harm and suicidality, including at least one suicide attempt. In New York, due to a ban on psychotherapy, so-called gender affirmation was the only legal option they could pursue, she said.

    They were at their wit’s end, until her spouse sat her down and presented her with a PowerPoint, showing statistics that people who transition are, by a huge factor, much more likely than the general public to commit suicide.

    “My jaw hit the floor. I said, ‘Oh my God we’ve been lied to’,” she says.

    Since then, Rachel, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, has been dedicated to exposing the child gender-transition craze, which she argues is driven by “predatory medicine” incentivized by the government.

    In TrevorSpace, she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger, she said.

    She documented kids talking about how to buy binders, an undergarment that constricts breasts, behind their parents’ backs. “I know the way people usually do this is by ordering it to a friend’s house or something of the sort, but I don’t have anyone to do that with,” wrote a girl whose account says she’s under 18. “I have money and know where I want to get it from and all that. I just need a means of getting it.” Another user suggested she have the binder sent to a post office where she could pick it up without her parents’ knowledge. Other users were referred to eBay to purchase a packer, or an artificial appendage meant to mimic a penis.

    When people sign up for TrevorSpace, they have the option of placing themselves within the age ranges of “under 18” or “18-25.” The community is open to people 13-24, according to the site. There is no system in place to confirm a person’s age, Rebecca says and National Review confirmed. She also said she noticed entries from people claiming to be over 25 too, as well as guest accounts with no age listed.

    Other teens, presumably girls transitioning to boys, testified to the effectiveness of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter medication that stimulates facial hair growth. “Can I get and use Minoxidil without my parents knowing?” a girl asked.

    The kids Rachel followed on TrevorSpace spanned a diverse spectrum of gender disorientation, some confident in their belief that they were the opposite sex and some just gender curious. But, as Rachel observed, they were all pointed in one direction: gender transition. In a significant number of cases, adults gave minors this validation.

  • “5th Circuit Rules Govt Cannot Punish Religious Hospitals for Refusing to Perform Abortions, Gender Transitions.”
  • Queer Theory is Queer Marxism.”
  • Gibson’s Bakery finally wins complete victory in their case, as Ohio’s Supreme Court refused to hear Oberlin College’s appeal. “It means the Gibsons now can collect approximately $36 million.”
  • Argentina’s Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner survives an assassination attempt when the assailant’s gun jams.
  • Californians Told Not to Charge Electric Cars Days After Gas Car Sales Ban.”
  • Speaking of California’s delusional green agenda, a whole lot of Democrat-controlled states have adopted California’s green insanity by proxy, Virginia among them.
  • Poland is not going to get any recovery funds until they start electing leftwing politicians.
  • Anti-Immigrant, Eurosceptic Sweden Democrats Set To Become Nation’s 2nd Largest Party.”
  • Another day, another high profile Kamala Harris aide leaving. “Herbie Ziskend, a senior communications adviser, announced that he is leaving Harris’s side for the West Wing, where he will be the new White House deputy communications director.”
  • Bill Maher Slams Libs Defending Censorship Of Hunter Laptop: ‘He was selling the influence of his father, Joe Biden.'”
  • Joe Rogan tells listeners to ‘vote Republican,’ bashes Dems’ COVID-19 ‘errors.’” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.
  • “Some people collect Pokemon cards, but this guy collects felonies.”
  • French tax agency deploys AI to find high ranking government official who are embezzling. Ha, just kidding! They’re using it to find and tax unreported pools.
  • Greg Gutfeld is driving the enemy before him and hearing the lamentations of Stephen Colbert. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Texas Applies to Build Molten Salt Nuclear by 2025.”
  • Russian drone hacked midflight by Ukrainians.
  • The last Luftwaffe raid against the UK happened April 21, 1945, less than two weeks before Hitler committed suicide, and some three weeks before VE Day. The planes took off from occupied Stavanger, Norway, and it didn’t work out well for the Germans…
  • Critical Drinker is is not impressed with The Rings of Power. “It’s shiite.”
  • “Harvard To Pay Elizabeth Warren $400,000 To Teach Class On Why College Is So Expensive.”
  • You’d think the recent rains would have washed more dust out of the air…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Kherson Counteroffensive: Day Two

    Tuesday, August 30th, 2022

    Ukraine’s Kherson counteroffensive appears to be making significant headway. The Institute for the Study of War has some summary goodness.

    Ukrainian military officials announced the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast on August 29. Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces have broken through the first line of defenses in unspecified areas of Kherson Oblast and are seeking to take advantage of the disruption of Russian ground lines of communication caused by Ukrainian HIMARS strikes over many weeks. Ukrainian officials did not confirm liberating any settlements, but some Russian milbloggers and unnamed sources speaking with Western outlets stated that Ukrainian forces liberated several settlements west and northwest of Kherson City, near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border. The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD), Russian proxies, and some Russian milbloggers denounced the Ukrainian announcement of the counteroffensive as “propaganda.”

    Many Russian milbloggers nevertheless reported a wide variety of Ukrainian attacks along the entire line of contact, and the information space will likely become confused for a time due to panic among Russian sources. Russian outlets have also vaguely mentioned evacuations of civilians from Kherson Oblast, but then noted that occupation authorities in Kherson Oblast are calling on residents to seek shelter rather than flee. ISW will report on the Ukrainian counteroffensive in a new section below.

    Let’s snip to that.

    Ukrainian military officials announced that Ukrainian forces began a counteroffensive operation in Kherson Oblast on August 29 after severely disrupting Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) for weeks. Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Gumenyuk stated that Ukrainian forces “began counteroffensive actions in many directions” and have broken through the first line of defense in an unspecified area. The Ukrainian operational group “Kakhovka” stated that Ukrainian forces have cut Russian GLOCs across the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast and called the situation a “brilliant chance to return [Ukrainian] territories.” The “Kakhovka” group also reported that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 109th Regiment and Russian airborne troops have left their positions in an unspecified area of Kherson Oblast, and Ukrainian wires claimed that these elements withdrew from their positions around Kherson City. The DNR 109th Regiment had previously published an appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in late June identifying itself as a forcibly mobilized unit, complaining that it had not been rotated away from the front line for rest, and decrying poor conditions on the frontlines. Ukrainian military officials also released a DNR document dated July 24 that ordered the redeployment of the 109th, 113th, and 125th DNR regiments to Arkhanhelske, Vysokopillya, Zolota Balka, and Davydiv Brid in northwestern Kherson Oblast. “Kakhovka” also shared footage reportedly of a Russian serviceman seeking shelter on the ground amidst heavy artillery shelling while saying that Ukrainian forces have broken the first line of defense on August 29. Ukrainian officials did not discuss the directionality of Ukrainian counteroffensives.

    Ukrainian and Russian officials called for civilians to evacuate or seek shelter in western Kherson Oblast on August 28-29. Ukrainian Kherson Oblast officials called on civilians to leave Kherson Oblast to get out of the way of Ukrainian forces and directed those choosing to stay in Kherson Oblast to seek shelter away from Russian military equipment. Occupation authorities of Nova Kakhkovka, where Ukrainian forces have frequently targeted Russian military infrastructure and GLOCS, called on civilians to seek shelter due to extensive Ukrainian strikes on August 28-29. Russian sources reported that Nova Kakhova occupation authorities do not plan to issue evacuation orders. Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov stated that Russian forces evacuated their military hospital in Melitopol on August 29, indicating further fear of intensified Ukrainian activity even in rear occupied areas.

    Paragraph of Russian “counteroffensive failed, everything is fine, nothing to see here, return to your homes” blather snipped.

    Russian and Western sources claimed that Ukrainian forces liberated five settlements during the first day of the counteroffensive, but Ukrainian sources have not announced the liberation of any settlements at the time of this publication. An unnamed military official of an unspecified country told CNN that Ukrainian forces liberated Pravdyne (approximately 34km northwest of Kherson City), Novodmytrivka, and Tomyna Balka (both about 23km due west of Kherson City). The official also stated that Ukrainian forces liberated Arkhanhelske on the eastern bank of Inhulets River and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border. ISW cannot independently verify CNN’s report and will update its maps if and when more sources confirm the report. The Ukrainian official report about the withdrawal of the 109th regiment that operates in northwestern Kherson Oblast may suggest that Ukrainians have crossed the Inhulets River into Arkhanhelske. Several Russian milbloggers amplified a report from the Telegram-based milblogger Grey Zone (about 276,000 followers) that Ukrainian forces advanced 6km from their bridgehead over the Inhulets River and seized the Sukhyi Stavok settlement (approximately 7km west of Russian GLOCs along the T2207 highway). Ukrainian Former Head of Foreign Intelligence Service Mykola Malomuzh made similar remarks about the liberation of Sukhyi Stavok.

    Ukrainian forces also continued to conduct missile strikes on Russian ammunition depots, GLOCs, and strongholds on August 28 and August 29. Beryslav Raion Military Administration Head Volodymyr Litvinov reported that Ukrainian forces struck Russian manpower and equipment concentration point at the Beryslav Machine-Building Plant, resulting in a large fire at the plant. Odesa Oblast Military Administration Spokesperson Serhiy Bratchuk also reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian command post near the North Crimean Canal just east of Nova Kakhovka, a Russian river crossing in Lvove (west of Nova Kakhovka along the Dnipro River), and an ammunition depot in Havrylivka (approximately 33km south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border). Ukrainian Telegram channels also published footage reportedly showing a strike on the Antonivsky Bridge and a nearby barge. Social media users published footage of reportedly Ukrainian strikes on a Russian ammunition depot in Nova Kakhovka. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command noted that Ukrainian forces launched eight airstrikes at Russian strongholds and manpower and equipment concentration points along the line of contact on August 28.

    Russian forces are continuing efforts to restore their damaged GLOCs over the Dnipro River. Satellite imagery shows that Russian forces are attempting to build a pontoon crossing near the Antonivsky Bridge, which appeared to be halfway finished as of August 27. Geolocated satellite imagery also showed that the Kakhovka Bridge is still out of service with strike holes on the critical junctures of the bridge. Satellite imagery indicated that Russian forces are continuing to move military equipment mostly north toward Kherson City via the pontoon ferry. Satellite imagery showed the movement of 100 Russian military vehicles as of August 25, with few moving south. Such transfer of equipment via ferries is inefficient and vulnerable to further Ukrainian strikes. Russian forces reportedly continue to experience difficulties maintaining other GLOCs to southern Ukraine. Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko stated that Russian logistics efforts relying on Mariupol rail transit will likely falter in the following days due to lack of electricity, damage to station cranes, and flooding that hinders rail operation in Mariupol.

    Deutches Welle has a meaty segment on the conflict:

    Some takeaways:

  • Ukraine seem to have three main prongs for their counterattack:
    • West of Kherson
    • The land bridge that collects it to Mykolaiv
    • “Further north, near the Kakhovka dam.” (For certain values of “near.”)
  • Still shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. (Lots of time spent on this.)
  • Germany is sending Ukraine Vulcano (though the DW announcers pronounce it “volcano”) high precision artillery shells.
  • Ukrainian commander Yurii Bereza says that HIMARS and precision howitzer munitions have been a great equalizer.
  • More than 90 billion Euros pledged to Ukraine. Biggest donors are 1. U.S. (far and away the biggest), 2. UK, 3. EU, 4. Poland, 5. Germany. (Yeah, I know the last two are in the EU.)
  • There’s a lot of talk over Germany going soft due to gas shortages, but German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sounds pretty hardline here, talking about “Russia’s brutal war of aggression.”
  • Private foreign donors have also allowed Ukraine to buy millions in drones.
  • Concerns over rapid depletion of EU weapons supplies. (Also a concern in the US.)
  • Ben Hedges, former commander of U.S. forces in Europe, thinks Ukraine has done a good job of shaping the battlespace and building up forces for the counteroffensive.
  • “The Russians have not yet fixed the many problems [that] were on display back in February and March. Especially their command and control framework …It’s still a mess.”
  • “The logistical system is fragile, it’s exhausted, it’s gotten weaker by the week.”
  • On Putin announcing a 10% increase in troop levels: “I’d bet a large sum of money that there’s not 137,000 Russians willing to step up and join the military.”
  • “There’s a history in Russia of serious inflation in numbers. They’ve never had what they said they had. This is a classic means of corruption, to claim a certain number to draw salaries, when in fact you’re only paying half to three-quarters of that.”
  • “It’s an unhealthy population decreasing in size.”
  • Even if Putin gets the additional troops he wants, it will be months before they show up with equipment.
  • Not only was the Antonivsky Bridge hit again, but the in-progress pontoon bridge was also hit, as was a ferry.

    Ukraine says that all the bridges across the Dnipro River near Kherson are “unusable.” They do appear to have been badly damaged, but I’d take “unusable” with a grain of salt.

    Ukraine also reportedly hit the Russian military headquarters in Kherson. Given Russia’s rigid top-down command structure, that’s potentially a huge blow.

    In-cockpit combat aircraft footage from a Ukrainian Mig-29 in Kherson theater:

    Some tweets:

    As always, the fog of war/grains of salt caveats apply…

    Edited To Update: Here’s a Ukrainian map guy covering the various thrusts of Ukrainian attacks in more detail.

    LinkSwarm for August 26, 2022

    Friday, August 26th, 2022

    Democrats behaving badly, Russian tanks behaving badly, and CNN thinking people don’t hate them. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Three Democratic cities are suffering the slowest recovery from Flu Manchu.

    The progressive approach to law enforcement in certain major US cities, supported by George Soros and others, has been a complete failure as residents’ quality of life has collapsed. Soaring violent crime and controversial open-air drug markets plague the downtown areas of San Francisco, Cleveland, and Portland, transforming these areas into wastelands.

    A recent study commissioned by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley found that San Francisco’s downtown activity was only 31% this spring (between March and May) compared to pre-Covid levels. Cleveland was at 36%, and Portland was at 41%.

    Meanwhile, after the pandemic, Salt Lake City, Utah, Bakersfield, California, and Columbus, Ohio, experienced the most massive booms in downtown activity.

  • Kurt Schlichter wants our GOP grandees to realize that it’s not 2005 anymore.

    Oh, Mike Pence, you soft, naive little man. Oh, Tim Scott, you kind and friendly gentleman. I like you both. I really do. I would love you to be my neighbors. If I ran short of sugar or charcoal, you’d square me away. Not so much bourbon, but whatever. If I asked you to help me move or give me a ride to the airport, you suckers would be all in because you are nice guys. And that’s your problem and the problem of Republicans like you. You are nice guys in a time that calls for ruthless killers who want to destroy our enemies and leave them on their backs, figuratively cockroaching on the floor.

    We want vengeance and victory. You want hugs. I guess that’s nice. Hugworld would be pleasant, but it’s the hardcore bomb throwers who get us to that stage by pummeling our enemies into submission. You find that unsavory, disconcerting, unseemly. You would prefer a world of comity, collegiality, and unicorns. And that ain’t happening until we warrior cons have broken our enemy – yeah, I used the “E” word – and exacted our payback and thereby ensured that their pain is so great that they will not dare even dream of repeating this nonsense again for a generation for fear of our righteous wrath.

    Your problem is that you live on forever in a world that no longer exists, if it ever did. You live in a world where there are norms. You live in a world of rules and guardrails, where the institutions are at least nominally neutral and where we all share some basic premises that provide common ground. But we don’t. They hate America. They hate believing Christians and Jews. They hate the idea of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to due process, and not killing babies three seconds before they poke their heads out. They think kids should be mutilated to conform to gender delusions. They want us normals disarmed, disenfranchised, and, more often than you softies will admit, deceased.

    Snip.

    It’s time to accept reality and embrace the suck. The suck is that we are in a fight. It’s not going to be over when we pass a few laws or overturn some terrible precedents; those are necessary but far from sufficient actions. No, we are in a long and brutal political struggle where the stakes are our liberty, and while you want to figuratively clutch your pearls and worry about whether this is who we are, we know who we are. And we are the guys and gals who want to figuratively don our plate armor, sharpen our broadswords, and get some, Knight Templar-style.

    Mike Pence, Tim Scott, I like you. And I would love to live in your world. But that world exists only in your imagination, and I and the rest of us in the base are stuck here on Planet Earth. You guys can’t be president because you are not wartime consiglieres. You are both Tom Hagan, reliable and soft Tom Hagan, when we are Michael and we need a Sonny to go after the Barzinis and Tartaglias of the left.

    It’s sad that your dreams of the presidency in 2024 must die, but you don’t get it, and you can’t fake it. This was a test, and you failed. If you are still imagining that there might be some set of facts awaiting public disclosure that makes it okay to send guys with guns to invade the domicile of your primo political opponent, if you still can’t bring yourself to demand that the disgraced FBI be defunded and dismantled so it can never try to frame another GOP politician, then you are not up to the job. You don’t get to be president because you don’t know what time it is.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Chicago Public Schools come out in favor of rioting and looting.
  • Evidently posting this image to Twitter will get you banned.

  • Antonovsky Bridge Hit Again.”
  • Russia puts on a tank biathlon with some of their loser friends. Hilarity ensues.
  • CNN is suffering from delusions of grandeur.

    One thing about leftist culture that never ceases to amaze is their ability to take a failure and pretend that it was actually a success. This attitude is perhaps an extension of their penchant for propaganda – They lie so much about everything that they end up falling victim to their own disinformation. They tell their enemies they are winning even when they are losing, and then they actually start to believe it themselves.

    It’s a bit like the old rule for drug dealers – Everything falls apart when you start smoking the drugs you sell.

    For CNN and outlets like them, the problem is that you can’t run from reality forever. If no one wants to watch your content then you can’t force them to do so. Leftists wish they could use force, but they can’t, so instead they try to use gaslighting and shame. This has translated into the typical tactics we see today from the media, which include race baiting and accusations of bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, fascism, etc. These tactics really took center stage from 2016 onward and they haven’t worked yet, but the political left continues to beat that dead horse in the hopes that it will one day win the Kentucky Derby.

    They NEED regular consumers to watch their content, but they look down their noses at regular consumers and see them as untouchable peasants. So, they don’t make content for the peasant, they make content for themselves and their friends. This is not a recipe for a successful media network.

    In a recent article on the CNN issue, Vox (a far-left outlet) remarked on Brian Stelter being fired and his show being shut down even though he still had three more years on a six-figure contract. David Zaslav, an executive from Discovery, has taken oversight of Warner Brothers and its properties and has been making extensive cuts to save money and streamline the bloated company. Vox’s position really illustrates the deeper problem within leftist media:

    “Stelter, who reportedly made close to $1 million a year, was an easy cut: His show, along with his daily media newsletter, was a big deal in media circles…but not a huge draw for normals.”

    By using the term “normals” one might conclude that Vox sees themselves and and other journalists as “extraordinary” when compared to the rest of us. Or, maybe they are just “abnormal” – It’s hard to say. The statement is possibly a mistaken admission of how leftist journalists truly view the world, and their view is stunted. They see their work as vital to the masses because their PEERS and Twitter buddies see it as vital to the masses. But mainstream journalists are too far detached from the world and reality to make objective judgment calls. They see themselves as the saviors of humanity, but no one else sees them that way.

    The audience numbers talk. The money talks. It doesn’t matter how important you think you are – You don’t own the audience, the audience owns you.

    CNN has been a consistent loser in terms of audience numbers and ratings; their ratings have plummeted while their profits continue to slump over the past few years. The CNN+ project was supposed to draw in millions of viewers but only generated 150,000 subscribers, and of those subscribers only 10,000 were regular watchers.

    In other words, CNN+ would have been crushed by average YouTuber numbers and their projections for at least 29 million “super fans” were absolutely incompetent. This is why the project was shut down within weeks by David Zaslav – It was an embarrassment from the start, built on inflated delusions of grandeur.

    Forget “delusions of grandeur,” CNN suffers from “delusions of not being widely loathed.”

    And what is CNN really built on? What has been the company’s foundation for years? It’s only product has been anti-conservative agit-prop. That’s it. That’s all they have. This might work financially if the extreme left was as prevalent as they pretend, but if we look at the numbers and the cash flow, they are actually a tiny portion of the population puffed up and screaming as loud as they can to appear big and formidable. CNN is failing because there is an unsustainable audience for their product.

  • “Arizona ‘Has Had Enough,’ Starts Stacking Shipping Containers In Border Wall Gaps.” Good.
  • Federal court strikes down Texas gun law…and for once its good news. “A federal judge has struck down a Texas law preventing individuals aged 18 to 20 years from carrying handguns in public, in the first major court ruling on Second Amendment rights since the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.” Cudos to Judge Mark Pittman for getting it right.
  • Japan pulls a 180°, ew-embraces nuclear power.
  • Remember how the left slobbered all over Gravity Payments CEO for giving everyone a $70 salary? Well, he just resigned after a rape allegation. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Democrat boycott of Goya Foods actually increased sales.
  • Democratic State Rep. Sergio Munoz Jr. to pay $1.2 million in damages for legal malpractice. Namely not mentioning that he and the judge presiding over a divorce case he was involved with had previously been law partners.
  • “Light wood framing is the hamburger of the building industry.”
  • Nobody will win the streaming wars.”
  • “‘Rings Of Power’ Showrunners Clarify That Any Resemblance To The Works Of Tolkien Is Purely Coincidental.”
  • Russo-Ukrainian War Update for February 24, 2022

    Thursday, February 24th, 2022

    And the war came.

    BBC correspondents heard loud bangs in the capital Kyiv, as well as Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Blasts have also been heard in the southern port city of Odesa.

    Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had carried out missile strikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure and on border guards.

    Russia’s defence ministry has denied attacking Ukrainian cities – saying it was targeting military infrastructure, air defence and air forces with “high-precision weapons”.

    Tanks and troops have poured into Ukraine at points along its eastern, southern and northern borders, Ukraine says.

    Russian military convoys have crossed from Belarus into Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, and from Russia into the Sumy region, which is also in the north, Ukraine’s border guard service (DPSU) said.

    Belarus is a long-time ally of Russia. Analysts describe the small country as Russia’s “client state”.

    Convoys have also entered the eastern Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, and moved into the Kherson region from Crimea – a territory that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

    If multiple Russian convoys just crossed the border without significant opposition from ground troops (either tanks or hidden soldiers with antitank and RPGs) it’s quite the indictment of Ukrainian war-planning.

    The Russian offensive was preceded by artillery fire and there were injuries to border guards, the DPSU said.

    There have also been reports of troops landing by sea at the Black Sea port cities of Mariupol and Odesa in the south. A British resident of Odesa told the BBC many people were leaving.

    As I mentioned last night, Putin’s fiction that this is “a military operation in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region” is an obvious lie. Here’s a tweet highlighting the wide range of Russia’s operations:

    Here’s a snapshot of the Livemap of the Russian invasion:

    Ukrainians are discovering that modern warfare isn’t a great respecter of conventions:

    (Some of the footage circulating on Twitter is evidently from previous conflicts. Hopefully the above are not among them, but if they are let me know.)

    There are conflicting reports on whether Antonov International Airport on the outskirts of Kiev is currently in Russian hands or not. The fighting there has reportedly gone back and forth.

    More from National Review:

    At least 16 cities in Ukraine are reporting explosions. Footage of cruise missiles flying over Ukrainian heads is appearing on social media. Apparently, a Russian soldier parachuting into Ukraine has posted video of himself on TikTok. There are reports that Belarusian military forces have joined the Russian forces in attacks on Ukrainian border guards.

    We are witnessing, on our television screens and through the web, the largest land war in Europe since 1945, an unprovoked attack by an autocratic superpower with nuclear weapons against a flawed but independent democracy that had committed no crime or provocation. The world is less safe today than it was at the start of the week. Many Ukrainians are already dead, some Russian forces have likely also been killed, and a lot more people will die in the near future.

    This is exactly the nightmare scenario that U.S., NATO, and European Union policy aimed to prevent; short of a Russian invasion of NATO member states, this is the worst-case scenario. This is not another relatively small-scale, minimal-conflict land grab like the Russian seizure and occupation of Crimea in 2014. This is the full wrath of the Russian war machine coming down like a ton of bricks on a country of 80 million people.

    Russian forces are also trying to take the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

    Some links and observations:

  • Ukraine spent about one-fifth of its 2021 budget on security and self-defense, $9.6 billion of $47.65 billion. That’s not nothing, but it clearly wasn’t enough to deter Putin.
  • The grandees of the Democratic Party are treating the situation with the exact level of gravitas you would expect:

  • Here’s an essay by Stephen M. Walt on how this war came from liberal western policy delusions:

    At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.

    Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.

    After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer relevant and liberal ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct. As the Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffmann told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in 1993, realism is “utter nonsense today.” U.S. and European officials believed that liberal democracy, open markets, the rule of law, and other liberal values were spreading like wildfire and a global liberal order lay within reach. They assumed, as then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton put it in 1992, that “the cynical calculus of pure power politics” had no place in the modern world and an emerging liberal order would yield many decades of democratic peace. Instead of competing for power and security, the world’s nations would concentrate on getting rich in an increasingly open, harmonious, rules-based liberal order, one shaped and guarded by the benevolent power of the United States.

    Had this rosy vision been accurate, spreading democracy and extending U.S. security guarantees into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence would have posed few risks. But that outcome was unlikely, as any good realist could have told you. Indeed, opponents of enlargement were quick to warn that Russia would inevitably regard NATO enlargement as a threat and going ahead with it would poison relations with Moscow. That is why several prominent U.S. experts—including diplomat George Kennan, author Michael Mandelbaum, and former defense secretary William Perry—opposed enlargement from the start. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were initially opposed for the same reasons, though both later shifted their positions and joined the pro-enlargement bandwagon.

    Proponents of expansion won the debate by claiming it would help consolidate the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe and create a “vast zone of peace” across all of Europe. In their view, it didn’t matter that some of NATO’s new members were of little or no military value to the alliance and might be hard to defend because peace would be so robust and enduring that any pledge to protect those new allies would never have to be honored.

    Moreover, they insisted that NATO’s benign intentions were self-evident and it would be easy to persuade Moscow not to worry as NATO crept closer to the Russian border. This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered, of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the case.

    One need not buy all of Walt’s assertions to realize that liberal foreign policy wonks got Russia badly wrong.

  • More on the point of traditional liberal foreign policy tools no longer working:

    One of the problems with using economic sanctions as your primary tool of deterrence in foreign policy is that eventually you’ll run into a hostile foe or force that does not care about trading with the U.S. or even money at all. In fact, it is fair to wonder how much money motivates any of America’s current foes.

    The Taliban certainly don’t particularly care about money; they think they’re on a mission from Allah. Iran has been hit with just about every sanction in the book, and no doubt it’s had an impact on the Iranian economy, but the mullahs don’t seem to care much. Kim Jong-un and the North Korean regime have been sanctioned many, many times, and they just keep getting better and better at evading them. The U.S. and China are too economically intertwined to easily enact sanctions that are serious enough to alter the decision-making in Beijing.

    And then there’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia — a government that foresaw the types of moves the West was likely to make, and prepared accordingly:

    Russia has drastically reduced its use of dollars, and therefore Washington’s leverage. It has stockpiled enormous currency reserves, and trimmed its budgets, to keep its economy and government services going even under isolation. It has reoriented trade and sought to replace Western imports.

    But even more than that, for a greedy kleptocrat, Putin doesn’t seem primarily motivated by money or his country’s economic prospects. Putin’s address yesterday was a long stream of grievances, and it is clear that what really enrages him is that Russia is not as powerful as it was when he was a younger man and the Soviet Union existed.

  • Many have called for Russia to be removed from SWIFT.

    The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is a cooperative of financial institutions formed in 1973 and headquartered in Belgium. It is overseen by the National Bank of Belgium with cooperation from other major central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank.

    But SWIFT is not a traditional bank and does not transfer funds. Rather, it acts as a secure messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, alerting banks when transactions are going to occur. (For instance, American banks have a unique SWIFT code that customers use for incoming wire transfers in U.S. dollars.)

    In 2021, SWIFT said it recorded an average of 42 million messages per day, an 11 percent increase from the year before. In 2020, Russia accounted for 1.5 percent of transactions.

    For the U.S. and its European allies, cutting Russia out of the SWIFT financial system would be one of the toughest financial steps they could take, damaging Russia’s economy immediately and in the long term. The move could cut Russia off from most international financial transactions, including profits from oil and gas production, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the country’s revenue.

    “But doing so, which some financial analysts have likened to a ‘nuclear option,’ would be an unprecedented move against one of the world’s largest economies.”

    No, a financial sanction for one nation invading another is not a “nuclear option.” When it comes to war, the nuclear option is literally the nuclear option.

  • A history of how Obama and Biden dismantled sanctions and deterrence against Putin’s Russia. “It’s no surprise that Putin invaded during Obama’s and Biden’s presidencies instead of Trump’s.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ben Shapiro dings the soft, materialist West:

  • Putin’s Big Ukrainian Adventure isn’t doing wonders for the Russian stock market.

  • Two final pieces from the Newspaper of Record: “Biden Announces He Will Move To Unfollow Putin On Twitter.”
  • “Biden Warns Russia That If They Don’t Stop He Will Deploy Deadly Trans Admiral.”
  • Though Russian forces are quite formidable on paper (especially now that Russia has reportedly achieved air superiority over most of Ukraine), a whole lot of variables are at play in this war. How well maintained is all those old Soviet weapons Russian has lying around? How much of it has been modernized? How long can they sustain this rapid pace of operation? How much has Soviet doctrine changed following what they learned in Grozny? Soviet/Russian experience in counter-insurgency operations has generally not been a happy one. How stiff a resistance can Ukraine put up against the Russian invasion?

    Finally, what is Putin’s real goal: Ukraine acquiescing to his previous territorial conquests, Findlandization and agreement never to join NATO, incorporation of all Russian-speaking areas into Russia proper, installing a Russian-friendly puppet government, or actual outright conquest of all of Ukraine? Which he’s aiming for will determine how much pain he’s willing to let Russia endure and how difficult the military task will be.

    More to come, I’m sure.

    Kazakhstan, Hunter Biden And…A Bio Weapons Lab?

    Monday, January 10th, 2022

    What are my qualifications to write about Kazakhstan? Well, before the situation there boiled over last week:

    1. I knew it was an ex-Soviet republic, so…
    2. I knew it existed before Borat.
    3. I can find it on a map.
    4. I knew it was a majority Muslim nation, which made the Soviet Afghan War Very Unpopular there.

    So it’s a one-eyed, squinty, myopic man in the land of the blind sort of thing, but there’s a a whole lot of Kazakh news breaking, so let’s tuck in.

    ZeroHedge has additional information on its importance to Russia, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t.

    Mass protests and anti-government violence have left dozens dead. Russia is deploying 3,000 paratroopers after Kazakh security forces were overrun. The largest city, Almaty, looks like a warzone. To appreciate why Russia is willing to deploy troops to Kazakhstan, it’s critical to understand the depth of Russia’s vital national interests inside the country. This isn’t just any former Soviet republic. It’s almost as important to Russia as Belarus or Ukraine.

    First, Russia and Kazakhstan have the largest continuous land border on planet earth. If Kazakhstan destabilizes, a significant fraction of the country’s 19 million residents could become refugees streaming across the border. Russia is not willing to let that happen.

    Second, roughly one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnic Russians. Kazakh nationalists are overwhelmingly Muslims, who resent the Orthodox-Christian Russian minority. Russia believes that civil war would entail a non-trivial risk of anti-Russian ethnic cleansing.

    Third, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the heart of the Soviet space program. Russia still uses it as its primary space-launch facility. The Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East will lessen that dependence, but it still isn’t complete.

    Fourth, Russia conducts its Anti-Ballistic Missile testing at the Sary-Shagan test site within Kazakhstan. This is where ongoing development of the S-550 ABM system is occurring, one of the foundations of Russia’s national security.

    Fifth, Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle is intimately linked to Kazakhstan. Russian-backed Uranium mining operations are active in the country. Uranium from Kazakhstan is enriched in Novouralsk, Russia and then returned to Kazakhstan for use in Chinese nuclear-fuel assemblies.

    Collectively, these security interests make Kazakhstan a region that Russia is willing to stabilize with force. The 3,000 troops it has already committed are not the maximum it is willing to deploy. If necessary, these will only be the first wave of RU forces in the country.

    3,000 troops for a country roughly three times as large as Afghanistan is not going to pacify a country if the country doesn’t want to be pacified.

    All that provides a thorny geopolitical problem for Kazakhstan’s neighbors (including China, where it borders Xinjiang, and for which it it would provide the ideal base for any Uigher insurgency), but isn’t why I’m writing about it. No, what caught my attention is The Hunter Biden connection:

    Among the boldest and eye-brow raising political moves by embattled Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev within the past days that grabbed international headlines was his ordering the arrest of Kazakhstan’s powerful former intelligence chief, Karim Massimov, on the charge of high treason.

    Indicating that amid widespread fuel price unrest which quickly became aimed squarely at toppling Tokayav’s rule there’s a simultaneous power struggle within the government, Massimov had headed the National Security Committee (KNB) up until his Thursday sudden removal and detention. Massimov had served as the prior longtime strongman ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev’s prime minister and has long been considered his “right hand man”.

    Nazarbayev was essentially “president for life,” an Ex-Communist Party leader who transitioned to ruling the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union until resigning during a wave of protests in 2019.

    Shortly after, a photo has resurfaced, currently subject of widespread speculation which shows Joe Biden and Hunter Biden posing with the now detained Kazakh security chief Karim Massimov, along with well-connected oligarch Kenes Rakishev.

    With Hunter, it always seems to be oligarchs all the way down. I can only assume they have the best cocaine and teenage prostitutes.

    Further an email and communications have surfaced, previously subject of extensive reporting in The Daily Mail, and related to prior extensive commentary and questions concerning Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ – that appears to confirm that Hunter Biden and Massimov were “close friends”. Reporting at the time indicated that “when Biden was vice president, Hunter worked as a go-between between for Rakishev from 2012 until 2014. And further the emails were from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing that Hunter made contact with Rakishev. And more: “Per the report, Hunter successfully got a $1million investment from Rakishev to a politically-connected filmmaker.”

    According to a 2020 article in The New York Post written when the photo first began gaining attention among Western pundits, “The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.” Concerning his relationship with Kazakh oligarchs and power-brokers, the NYPost story had detailed further:

    …Hunter Biden’s alleged work with Rakishev, claiming he dined regularly with the Kazakh businessman and attempted to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington, DC, and a Nevada mining company.

    But Rakishev, who enjoys close ties to Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president, reportedly ran into trouble when Western business partners realized that the opaque origins of his reported $300 million fortune could become a “liability,” the Mail reported.

    This brings up a slew of questions, starting with: What is the nature of the ties between the Biden family and Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president and his circle of oligarchs and powerful security officials?

    That’s a darn good question.

    But today’s Kazakhstan revelations took a strange turn, when the government claimed that a U.S.-funded bio-weapons lab hadn’t been seized by protestors.

    Wait. A what???

    Officials in Kazakhstan have denied that a controversial ‘military biological laboratory’ was seized in the recent unrest, which has so far claimed 160 lives since starting on January 2.

    It is not clear if the 164 deaths refer only to civilians or if law enforcement deaths are included, but the number – provided by the health ministry to state news channel Khabar-24 – are a significant rise from previous tallies.

    Kazakh authorities said earlier on Sunday that 16 police or national guard members had been killed.

    Russian media highlighted claims that the US-funded facility near Almaty was compromised, resulting in a possible leak of dangerous pathogens.

    The airport, mayor’s office and secret services buildings fell briefly into the hands of rioters during a wave of protests backed by shadowy armed cells.

    The secret bio-laboratory funded by the US defence department – which has links to Russian and Chinese scientists – was also compromised in the disturbances, according to social media claims that it was seized.

    ‘This is not true. The facility is being guarded,’ said the health ministry which is responsible for the Central Reference Laboratory, in Almaty.

    Official Russian news agency TASS had highlighted alleged social media reports that it was taken over by ‘unidentified people’ and ‘specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab so a leak of dangerous pathogens could have occurred’.

    The laboratory’s existence has been controversial and in 2020 the country formally denied that it was being used to make biological weapons.

    At the time, the Kazakh government stated: ‘No biological weapons development is underway in Kazakhstan – and no research is conducted against any other states.’

    It was built in 2017 and is used for the study of outbreaks of particularly dangerous infections.

    Dangerous pathogens are stored here, it is reported.

    2017 date aside, there was already an ex-Soviet pathogens facility in the general vicinity (Almaty = Alma-Ata), so my suspicion is that it’s a more modern facility for an existing lab team.

    Maybe it’s not a bio-weapons lab. Maybe it’s just studying pathogens to better fight them.

    Just like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    So: It’s totally a bioweapons lab.

    Both the United States and Kazakhstan are signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention, which outlaws “the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons.”

    Is the CDC actually funding/working with a biological lab in Kazakhstan?

    No.

    It’s helping/funding 17 labs in Kazakhstan.

    CDC strengthens clinical and laboratory capacity to minimize biosecurity threats in the Central Asia region through collaboration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its Cooperative Biological Engagement. CDC works with public health laboratories across Kazakhstan to build a robust and sustainable network of quality management systems, standard operating procedures, training requirements, disease surveillance and testing capacity, and necessary legal and regulatory framework. CDC and the Kazakhstan MOH also partner with hospitals to improve surveillance and testing of especially dangerous pathogens and antimicrobial drug-resistant pathogens.
    webicon-magnify

    CDC assisted all 17 regional laboratories within the National Center for Expertise in Kazakhstan to achieve ISO 15189 standard certification for laboratory quality management.

    That’s all from Infowars. Oh wait, did I say Infowars? I meant the CDC’s own website.

    Maybe we owe Alex Jones an apology.

    This is breaking story that sprawls out in dozens of directions, but I think Dr. Fauci has even more ‘splainin’ to do…

    LinkSwarm for January 7, 2022

    Friday, January 7th, 2022

    More Democrats behaving badly and Kazakhstan in flames. Enjoy the first LinkSwarm of 2022!

  • How Democrats running the New York City Department of Correction turned control over to the correctional officers union and they let the inmates run the jail.

    For years, mayors and correction commissioners have allowed jail managers to place the least experienced officers in charge of detainee dorms and cells, posts that are critical for keeping order but viewed by many as the least desirable assignments in the system. The managers, who base staffing decisions on seniority, department custom and office politics, have also filled the jobs with guards who have fallen out of favor with administrators, reinforcing the idea that they are punishment posts to be avoided.

    When those guards in the housing units have fallen ill, gotten injured or been barred from contact with incarcerated people for other reasons, other rules adopted by city leaders have made finding replacements unusually difficult.

    Every mayoral administration since John Lindsay’s in the 1970s has signed union contracts granting unlimited sick leave to guards and the city’s other uniformed workers. And records and interviews suggest that abusing it can carry few consequences: It can take more than a year for the department to bring discipline charges against an officer who is caught abusing sick leave.

    On a Thursday in October, one Rikers jail had 572 guards on its work schedule — more than enough to fill the 363 open posts.

    But 17 guards were serving suspensions or had stopped showing up for work.

    Another 117 guards were on vacation, long-term leave or off doing temporary duties.

    Then there were those marked “indefinitely sick” — 136 guards who had been out for 30 days or more but were still on the payroll thanks to generous union benefits.

    That tipped the balance, leaving just 302 guards to fill the 363 posts, and forcing double shifts across the jail.

    When they have been told that such policies could lead to dangerous breakdowns, city leaders have not acted on the warnings. As recently as February 2018, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top criminal justice adviser presented the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, with a memo that stated that high rates of absenteeism among guards might be driving a rise in jail violence — and recommended steps to stabilize staffing and reduce violent incidents. The de Blasio administration took none of them, and the memo has not been made public.

    And when conditions have spiraled out of control on Rikers in recent years, jail managers have favored quick fixes over deeper policy changes. Under scrutiny in 2014 amid reports of brutality by guards, the managers concentrated members of the Bloods gang in some units, the Crips in others, and still other gangs in other areas, hoping the practice would cut down on fights among rival groups. It did not work. Not only did incidents where guards used force rise, but some gangs were positioned to take over housing areas when the pandemic swept through and caused staffing problems.

    The mismanagement over the years has left the people charged with running the jail system feeling powerless.

    Putting criminals in charge of things does seem like the Democratic Party’s go-to move in a lot of areas…

  • The Zoom Class gets Flu Manchu.

    For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.

    The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.

    It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population in that way, deciding what can open and what can’t, who must work and who must not, what we can and can’t do, all based on our station in life.

    It now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.

    That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they’re being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, haven’t protected against infection.

    All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still, the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization, much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.

    A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with COVID, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: Yes, and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it’s time we change our tune.

    Snip.

    The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That’s a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean, while the virus circulated season after season.

    It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that didn’t happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.

    Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it’s suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.

    Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people—based on one pathogen—contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape.”

    In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

    Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

    Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American Left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

    Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.

    A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.

  • Trump has has taken up permanent rent-free residence in their heads: “MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House’ mentions Trump more than twice as often as Biden.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • This is infuriating: Oregon Business Owner Ordered to Remove American Flag Mural on Private Property. He should tell them to get stuffed and sue them for everything they’ve got. (Hat tip: Victoria Taft.)
  • What it’s like to own a ranch near the Mexican border:

    “I find some kind of sign every single day that someone has been on my ranch,” says Schuster. “Every time I leave my house, there’s some kind of indication that someone has been on my ranch.”

    Law enforcement has been called to the Schuster property five times in the past year to respond to incidents where illegal border crossers have knocked on their door or approached their house.

    Operation Lone Star, a state effort that has seen additional Texas DPS officers sent to border counties, has been a blessing to the county, according to Schuster, and a relief to the local sheriff and his small crew of deputies. Schuster believes that the DPS patrols on the highways have been a deterrent to the illegal border crossers who use the highways and then bail out to run onto private property.

    However, Schuster says the problems will persist for as long as this open border policy continues.

    “I don’t know all the politics of it and how all that works, but we’re gonna have to do something, because my parents worked hard to buy this land. People have said, ‘Well, if you’re scared on your own land, you just move.’ It doesn’t work that way,” said Schuster. “This is our land. And they worked hard, and they bought it, and you can’t give up on that land. It’s your legacy. It’s your legacy for your children. And so, it’s not like you just have a house in town, and you could just sell it and move to another community. When you have a ranch, you can’t do that.”

    Schuster added, “In the last year, our life has been turned completely upside down. It is something that we just had never foreseen.”

    She said that beginning last January, “the number of illegals coming through has been unbelievable. The group sizes are big. You know, growing up on a ranch, around ranching, we’ve always had illegals coming through. Never saw women before, or children. Men come through, maybe two or three; if you saw [a] group of five, that was a big group. We’ve got groups of like 45 coming through.”

    The sizable groups are not the only issue with this increased traffic. “​​They’re very disruptive. We’ve never seen that before,” said Schuster. “The people that have come across primarily from Mexico for work, going from point A to point B looking for a job, did not intentionally tear up our water systems. The debris that they’re leaving behind is unbelievable. I’m picking up trash on my ranch daily, they’re leaving gates open, livestock is getting mixed up, or maybe water gaps between me and my neighbor.”

    An incident over the summer left Schuster shocked when some of the illegal border crossers intentionally broke a water line. “I lost about 10,000 gallons of water this summer,” said Schuster. “It probably took me at least six weeks to gain that much water back.”

    According to Schuster, “they could’ve reached over—it wasn’t enclosed—and gotten a drink. But they just took a rock and beat this line until they broke it. That’s mean. That’s just malicious.”

    Security and safety have taken major precedence in the Schuster family’s life. Game cameras on the doors, rarely going out in the pre-dawn hours, working out of an enclosed truck instead of an open UTV on the ranch, and never leaving the house without a pistol have all become standard practice for the whole family.

  • “‘Jaw-Dropping’ Gains for GOP in Florida as COVID Refugees Register RED.”

    Twitter user TimDCpolitico took Florida’s voter rolls from March 31 of 2020 and compared them to the latest figures. The results, he says, are “jaw-dropping,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe them.

    Out of over 14 million registered voters, last year Democrats held the edge with 37.38% of registrations compared to the GOP’s 35.28%. (The remaining four million or so — around 26% — were independents or members of minor parties.)

    Democrats held a two-point advantage, but higher Republican turnout has made the state safely red in the last two presidential elections.

    Snip.

    66 out of Florida’s 67 counties shifted towards the red. Three hardcore Democrat counties — Broward (!!!), Jefferson, and Madison — might in some races be considered additional battlegrounds Dems will have to defend.

    A fourth, Calhoun, went from dark blue to light red.

    That’s impressive.

    What should have Democrats strapping on a pair of Extra Absorbent Depends (Endorsed by Presidentish Joe Biden!) is that they lost more than 50,000 registrations in the same time period — even as the state’s population has grown.

  • “GOP expands effort for South Texas dominance to local races.”

    Republicans have gone all in on South Texas, but they’re not content for domination of state and congressional seats. They want local government, too.

    One GOP group, Project Red Texas, spent the weeks before the December filing deadline to run in the March primary election traveling the region and recruiting candidates to run for county offices, offering to pay their filing fees. The group ended up helping get 125 candidates on the ballot across 25 counties, according to its leader, veteran party operative Wayne Hamilton. He said the group paid for “well over” half the filing fees.

    The first step on the road to winning is actually showing up.

  • Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, they’re having something somewhere between civil unrest and full-blown revolution over fuel prices.
  • China is “univestable.”

    Investors may want to think twice about putting their money to work in China, contends DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach.

    “China is uninvestible, in my opinion, at this point,” the bond king told Yahoo Finance in an interview at his California estate. “I’ve never invested in China long or short. Why is that? I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the relationship between the United States and China anymore. I think that investments in China could be confiscated. I think there’s a risk of that.”

    Snip.

    The ongoing crackdown on the operations of big Chinese internet companies such as Didi by the government has rocked investors in the space. The clamping down on the country’s biggest tech names has now led to a tightening of listing requirements by the Chinese government.

    To that end, Didi plans to delist from the New York Stock Exchange later this year not too long after a disastrous IPO (in large part because of Chinese authorities).

    Meanwhile, the long reach of China’s government also hammered after-school tutoring companies such as TAL Education Group — shares of the name plunged about 95% in 2021.

    All of this is in addition to China’s ongoing fight against the rise of cryptocurrencies.

    The investing headwinds in the country show up in how the country’s key indexes performed in 2021.

    For instance, the Golden Dragon Index — which tracks the performance of mid- and large-cap Chinese stocks — plunged about 49% in 2021. The Wall Street Journal points out the total value of China’s onshore stocks rose 20% in 2021, underperforming the S&P 500’s advance.

    And none of that touches the insanely overleveraged real estate market there…

  • EU finally admits that nuclear and natural gas are “green” energy sources.
  • Democrat township commissioner charged with rape of 15-year-old boy in Philadelphia Darby Township Commissioner Marvin E. Smith has been charged with rape, sexual assault, luring, and related offenses.”
  • Another day, another high-profile Kamala Harris staffer leaving. “Vincent Evans, the veep’s deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, has quit to take on a role on Capitol Hill.”
  • Austinites (and anyone who uses metered parking) beware:

  • Tim Pool swatted during live broadcast. (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec on GETTR.)
  • Jury finds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four federal wire fraud related charges.
  • Don’t forget how Joe Biden praised Holmes before she was busted.
  • Related:

  • Ian Miles Cheong banned from PayPal:

  • On the convergence of Genesis and the Sex Pistols.

    Seeing Collins contorted in a wheeled chair, like Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House, while his two bandmates swayed on either side of him, painlessly upright in elegant, soft grey fashions like Farrow and Ball in human form, bordered on the grotesque. It resembled a satire on the ineradicable nature of privilege and class, rather than evidence of the dynamic tension every band needs to achieve creative synthesis. It was everything the NME said punk disdained. But I can’t imagine John Lydon taking any pleasure in this at all.

    To say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions. And, frankly, I’m not qualified to offer much insight into either. But I suspect that he is at least more willing to let us see his human side now. His wife of over 40 years, Nora Forster, has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three and he has committed himself to her full-time care. In 2010, Forster’s daughter Ariane—better known as Ari Up, lead singer of female post-punk outfit The Slits—died of breast cancer aged just 48. Lydon knows something about human frailty, mortality, and loss.

    I have the sense that after many years, not on the field of combat but behind the bare timber of the cheapest proscenium arch, the paint is wearing off both these Punch dolls. Both were iconic and pugnacious in their day, but human, all too human, too. Today, it is not prog, let alone Genesis, that attracts Lydon’s ire, but what he perceives to be the betrayal of his ex-bandmates, who have sold out the Pistols’ musical legacy to a TV show—people that do indeed, as he sneered in PiL, see it as nothing more than product.

    Lydon was years ahead of his time, on everything from the Savile row to the shark-infested waters in which he was swimming, but I doubt he will take much pleasure in seeing a fellow grafter—and émigré—working through pain to give his fans a chance to say one last farewell, to him and to each other. He might even feel a twinge of grudging kinship. They may not have reached the churchyard quite yet, but their paths are beginning to converge, as all must in the end. And, meanwhile, as the years wear on, who can be sure Her Majesty—God Save Her—won’t bury the bloody lot of them?

  • “‘Psycho’ squirrel’s 48-hour Christmas rampage terrorizes town, injures 18.”
  • Live in Austin and thinking of adopting a dog? Now is a good time.
  • Ted Cruz has had a weird week. After the braindead boner of calling January 6 riot participants “domestic terrorists,” he had to issue a huge Mea Culpa on Tucker Carlson. Oh, and he also issued this:

  • Buy something from the Don Rickles estate, you hockey puck!
  • Ooops!

  • Texas Energy Outage Postmortem

    Wednesday, March 10th, 2021

    I finally had time to finish this postmortem post on the Texas winter storm energy grid crisis. I’ve got a ton of pieces to get through, so let’s dig in.

  • How the energy grid fell apart:

    Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.

    The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.

    Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.

    This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.

    In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.

    We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.

    Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.

    Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.

  • More:

    Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.

    “Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.

    What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.

    Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.

    Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

    “There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”

  • “Yes, Green Energy Failures Helped Cause Texas Blackout Disaster.”

    As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?

    But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.

    The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.

    Snip.

    On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.

    Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.

    We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.

  • Could lawmakers have prevent the blackouts?

    “By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.

    “Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”

    Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.

    But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.

    “We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”

  • How the Texas outage started with bad policy:

    For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.

    When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.

    Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.

    So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.

    Here’s the long story.

    Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.

    However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.

    Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)

  • Here’s an informative thread on how the Texas energy market is set up and how some of the system was offline when the worst hit:

    I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.

  • Chuck Devore:

  • More on how renewables helped create the crisis:

    Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”

  • More on the same theme:

    The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.

    That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.

    But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.

    This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.

  • The truth about those frozen wind turbines:

    One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.

    Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.

    Snip.

    As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.

    The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.

    To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…

    Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.

    Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.

    Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.

  • In chart form:

  • What can clean energy advocates say when wind turbines freeze?

    Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.

    California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.

    Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.

  • More on eliminating wind subsidies and the road forward:

    Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.

    It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.

    We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.

  • Austin’s useless City Council being their usual useless selves: “Austin Energy’s biomass power plant in East Texas, which the city purchased in 2019 for $460 million, sat idle and produced no power during one of the worst winter energy crises in state history.” Well, at least it was providing Austinites jobs? Nope. It’s near Nacogdoches.
  • It did indeed suck to live without power for days on end.
  • A Texas Public Policy Foundation symposiums on the outage.
  • Heh:

  • Also, I got my electric bill for February and…it’s a totally normal February electric bill. It helps to have natural gas heat…