Posts Tagged ‘sanctuary cities’

NYC’s Illegal Alien Debit Card Scam

Sunday, March 10th, 2024

There’s a scam sweeping New York City. And by “New York City,” I mean “the New York City mayor’s office.” Instead of feeding the illegal aliens New York has lured there as a “sanctuary city,” Eric Adams has decided to just hand out preloaded debit cards.

These are theoretically to replace buying food for them. Theoretically.

Handing out free money to illegal aliens paid for with citizen taxpayer dollars is unconscionable enough.

But let me ask the obvious question that no one seems to be asking: How do we know these debit cards will actually be handed out to illegal aliens? How do we know it won’t just be handed out to friends of Eric Adams, leftwing activists, etc.? At least with real food there are receipts. I’m betting there is not a rigorous, auditable, traceable system where the illegal aliens are required to show ID and sign off on receiving the cards.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that no two-factor authentication is going on here. Being cash-equivalent debit cards, I’m also guessing there’s no way to keep them from being used in liquor stores.

Here Adams is declaring there he’s going to start handing the 21st century equivalent of “walking around money” and we just have to trust him when he says its going to the illegal aliens so they can buy food.

Yet another reason Democrats love illegal aliens is that, like the homeless, they have no support network to speak up for them when welfare state goodies get diverted into the pockets of leftwing activists.

The Illegal Alien Bus War

Thursday, January 11th, 2024

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s strategy of bussing illegal aliens to sanctuary cities is having its desired effect, namely sharing the pain of the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce border controls with the blue cities that encourage such behavior.

  • By declaring themselves a “sanctuary city,” New York brought this catastrophe on themselves. Here’s New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul rhapsodizing about all those “benefits” illegal aliens would bring New York City:

    As you know, the Statue of Liberty is inscribed. It says “Give me your tired, you’re poor, your huddled young [sic] masses yearning to be [sic] free/The wretched refuse to [sic] a teeming shore.” That statement encapsulizes our values. We want people to come here, despite where they came from from, where despite the circumstances that drove them to this country, into this state, we see, say, you are welcome here. We are welcome with open arms, and we’ll work to keep you safe. We’ll not only house you, but we’ll protect you. And the richness of the culture and the diversity and the food and the restaurants that we know are going to be coming, uh, because of these efforts are, are are beyond measure. It’s just, it’s an extraordinary part of our story and it’s woven into the story of New York and it makes us more vibrant.

    That “vibrant” includes higher crime rates, soaring budgets and kicking Americans out of their schools and dwellings to make room for the illegal aliens Democrats are desperate to flood the country with. And since when did anyone, illegal alien or otherwise, have a right to free housing at the taxpayer’s expense?

  • So too says New York City Democratic mayor Eric Adams: “New York City is the welcoming mat for the entire globe.”
  • Nate the Lawyer: “So the city of New York wanted migrants? Texas and Arizona sent them migrants.”
  • Abbott: “It was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all of the chaos, and all the problems that come with it. Now the rest of America is understanding exactly what is going on.”
  • Nate the Lawyer: “So we’re all on the same page. New York: ‘We love migrants, we want migrants, we need migrants.’ Texas and Arizona: ‘We have millions of migrants, we’ll send them to you, then, since you want the migrants.’ And now all hell is broken loose in New York and they don’t want the migrants anymore.”
  • Adams has declared a state of emergency, saying the city is burning through $1 billion this fiscal year on illegal aliens, leaving no funding for other issues.”
  • Adams: “If these Trends continue we will be over 100,000 in the year.” Aw, you didn’t seem worried about millions flooding into Texas, but 100,000 arrive in the city you welcomed them into and it’s the end times.
  • Adams: “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.” Then shouldn’t you repeal the sanctuary city law?
  • Now Hochul is saying don’t come to New York City.
  • Nate the Lawyer: “New York City has decided to pass laws and regulations to close its own border to stop migrant buses from coming into the city and even going as far as to sue the bus companies to stop them from bringing migrants into the city.”
  • “Why is it good enough for New York to close their, border but not good enough for the country to close their border? It’s almost like they’re saying ‘We’re okay with the migrants coming into the country and being someone else’s problem but they can’t come to New York.” That’s exactly what they’re saying: “Illegal alien costs for thee, but not for me.”
  • Some weather discussion snipped.
  • They pushed illegal aliens into a school for shelter and sent the kids home. “That has a lot of parents fighting mad.”
  • Without schools as babysitters, parents have to stay home.
  • “Migrants are literally killing each other to stay in the shelters.”
  • “The immigration system is is destroyed it’s messed up, and I am extremely happy that the liberals in the Northeast are experiencing the fruits of their labor…They begged for migrants, they wanted migrants, and it was all great to have an open border policy when you didn’t have to pay for it. Now they have to pay for it.”
  • As previously reported, there are long dates for court waits for “asylum seekers.”
  • “I think that more and more and more migrants should go to New York, and then hopefully the Democrats will realize that, hey, just allowing millions of people to come across the border isn’t really a great idea, because we can’t take care of it.”
  • “And I also want to hammer home the point that it was all great when it was someone else’s problem, but it’s horror show, it’s a state of emergency, it’s immoral when it’s their problem.”
  • Indeed.

    Are Chicago Citizens Tired Of Ranking Lower On Democratic Party Priorities Than Illegal Aliens?

    Thursday, October 19th, 2023

    Have Chicago residents finally had enough of rankling lower on the totem pole than the illegal aliens that seem a top priority of the Democratic Party?

    “You want to take the little scraps of resources that we have and put us at the bottom of the bar? That’s not fair!”

  • “Illinois warns to prepare for up to 25 buses of migrants a day as state pleads for help from the federal government. And now the good people of the city of Chicago have had enough.”
  • “Now the good people of the city of Chicago have had enough and said this needs to stop, and these woke policies of open borders and ‘we want to be a sanctuary city’ needs to end.”
  • Illinois is one 11 states that have declared themselves a “sanctuary state,” i.e. they passed laws prohibiting some forms of cooperation with ICE and won’t hold the fact that they’re illegal aliens against them when doling out government welfare state goodies.
  • Under Lori Lightfoot, the city would actually interfere with ICE conducting raids.
  • Other Democrats, like Senator Dick Durbin, were all on-board with the pro-illegal alien agenda.
  • “Now, because of Chicago’s love of immigrants and welcoming nature, Texas was like ‘Well, hey, if the immigrants are coming here and you guys want the immigrants and we don’t want them, let’s just send them to you. You guys can obviously take care of the millions and millions of immigrants coming across the border.’ So they started bussing immigrants to Chicago.”
  • Naturally Lightfoot called Abbott’s bussing strategy “racist” and “Xenophobic.”
  • “Guess what’s going on in Chicago now? Well, it’s turned into a quote unquote migrant crisis, and now the governor is asking the federal government to step in and ‘Stop! We have too many! We have too many! It was okay when it was going on in Texas, but it’s going on in Illinois and we need money, resources, and the border to be closed!'”
  • “The governor directly asked President Biden to intervene in the border busing program that has brought thousands of migrants to Chicago. He went on to call the situation ‘untenable’ and again asked for expedited work authorizations. He said the state is struggling to find more housing for the migrants as tensions rise throughout the city.”
  • “In Chicago, you have poor black and brown people who are American citizens, and they needed help and weren’t getting the help from the city. But now the city all of a sudden can spend tens of millions of dollars on illegal immigrants coming to the city to shelter them, house them, feed them and clothe them. So the city residents are like ‘What the hell, bro? What about us? We’ve already been here! This is ridiculous!'”
  • “The Southside has been underresourced, underfunded for years for decades. We have schools that need to be reopened, we have buildings that are abandoned that need to be business operated.” Yet I’m willing to be that during those years and decades of underfunding, you and your friends kept pulling that “D” lever no matter what. And Democrats know you’re not going to stop voting for them, so why should they work to solve your problems when they know they’ll get your vote anyway?
  • “The true kicker here is because people who live in Chicago who are poor who don’t have those resources are wondering ‘Well, hell, when I’m homeless here in Chicago, they weren’t building new tent cities for me, they weren’t putting me in hotels.’ It was kind of like well, be damned good luck to you, but now you get somebody coming from Venezuela, now we’re opening up the pocketbook for them?”
  • “The people of Chicago seem to be finally waking up. But we’ll only see when there’s the next election because, are they going to vote for this mayor? Are they going to vote for this city council? Because those are the people who are screwing them.”
  • Of course those are the people who are screwing them. And of course they’re going to vote for them again. Their entire focus seems to be “Other people are getting goodies from the government, and I want those goodies!” Not: “How can I make safer communities for private enterprise to invest in and provide jobs?”

    Those people will never stop voting for Democrats. And Democrats know it. So they have no incentive to dispense crumbs from their graft machine when there are new victimhood identity politics groups to pander to.

    LinkSwarm for September 22, 2023

    Friday, September 22nd, 2023

    My Hunter Biden corruption evidence, a Democratic Senator catches federal corruption charges, more blue cities suffering from Biden’s open border policies, California goes looking for cops in Texas, and a new Bill Burr movie looms. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Now we know at least one of the people bribing Joe Biden buying Hunter Biden’s “artwork.”

    The person who paid as much as six figures for “artwork” by an untrained painter also received a prestigious government appointment from the artist’s father, President Joe Biden.

    Now congressional investigators want to know if Biden’s decision to name Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad was in any way related to her purchase of artwork by Hunter Biden, a middle-aged man who paints as a hobby.

    House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is now asking Naftali and White House Counsel Stuart Delery to answer questions as to whether the Biden family is using Hunter’s “art” as a means of selling White House access.

    The White House has previously claimed the identity of Hunter Biden art purchasers would be concealed to prevent any undue influence, but nothing prevents the purchaser from identifying themselves to Joe Biden when seeking an appointment, and now at least one purchaser has been identified as someone who sought White House access.

  • Democratic Senator Robert Menendez and his wife indicted on federal corruption charges.

    Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted on corruption charges by federal prosecutors on Friday morning in a Manhattan court in an influence-peddling scheme involving Egypt.

    The unsealed indictment revealed that Menendez’s wife, Nadine, New Jersey real estate mogul Fred Daibes, and two other business associates are being charged along side the lawmaker.

    Led by Southern District of New York attorney Damian Williams, in June 2022, investigators conducted a search of Menendez’s residence in New Jersey and found $100,000 worth of gold bars, nearly half a million dollars in cash, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” and a brand new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible.

    “Menedez and Nadine Menedez agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menedez’s power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect and enrich” his allies “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt,” the indictment reads. “Among other actions, Menendez provided sensitive U.S. government information and took other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt,” the filing notes.

  • More money for illegal aliens means less money for other New York City functions.

    New York City will cut overtime pay for its police officers and three other agencies to help reduce costs driven by the city’s unprecedented migrant crisis, City Hall announced Monday.

    Jacques Jiha, the budget director for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, told the city’s police, fire, corrections, and sanitations departments in a Saturday memo to each submit an overtime pay reduction plan “to reduce year-to-year OT spending.”

    He also wrote the four departments must submit monthly reports “to track overtime spending and their progress in meeting the reduction target” once Adams issues the order.

    Jiha also noted the current assistance provided by President Joe Biden and New York governor Kathy Hochul is not enough, prompting City Hall’s decision to cut overtime pay among other financial measures.

    “The amount of aid we have received from the federal government and the state has been grossly inadequate and there has been no progress on a statewide or national decompression strategy,” Jhia wrote in the memo, first reported by Politico. “The city can no longer continue to shoulder these skyrocketing costs and balance the budget without making very difficult choices.”

    Crime has risen in New York in recent months as more than 100,000 illegal immigrants have poured into the city.

    The leader of a police union said the overtime pay cuts will lead to fewer cops patrolling the streets, resulting in more staffing shortages.

    “It is going to be impossible for the NYPD to significantly reduce overtime unless it fixes its staffing crisis,” Patrick Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association, told the New York Post. “We are still thousands of cops short, and we’re struggling to drive crime back to pre-2020 levels without adequate personnel.”

    “If City Hall wants to save money without jeopardizing public safety, it needs to invest in keeping experienced cops on the job,” he said.

  • The Homeless Illegal Alien Industrial Complex pays very, very well in Chicago:

  • Ukraine destroys Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters.
  • “The Biden admin cut the razor wire Gov. Greg Abbott put along the Rio Grande, so Abbott immediately sent the Texas National Guard to put up even more.”
  • Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson switches to the Republican Party. “While Dallas has thrived, elsewhere Democratic policies have exacerbated crime and homelessness.”

    “I have been mayor of Dallas for more than four years. During that time, my priority has been to make the city safer, stronger and more vibrant,” Johnson wrote in his article.

    “That meant saying no to those who wanted to defund the police. It meant fighting for lower taxes and a friendlier business climate. And it meant investing in family friendly infrastructure such as better parks and trails.”

    Johnson said he does not plan to alter his “approach” to being mayor but is switching his party affiliation.

    “When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican,” Johnson said.

    The mayor was a leading opponent of calls to decrease funding for the Dallas Police Department after the 2020 demonstrations against police violence. Johnson proposed cutting salaries at city hall instead.

    In his announcement, he also touted Dallas’ decreasing crime rate and the Dallas City Council’s reduction of the property tax rate.

    While city mayors are nonpartisan officeholders in Texas, Johnson was a Democrat during his nearly five terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

    This is both unexpected and big news. Lots of Hispanic politicians in Texas have switched to the GOP, but this is the first case I can remember of a high profile black Texas Democratic politician switching to the GOP.

  • Exercise helps prevent Alzheimer’s thanks to a hormone called irisin.
  • Antifa rioter sentenced.

    A 35-year-old Renton man was sentenced on Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court to 40 months in prison for his role in a plot to burn the Seattle Police Officers Guild building in downtown Seattle during the September 2020 protests.

    The defendant, Justin Christopher Moore, pleaded guilty in September 2022.

    At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Lauren King said, “What you did showed a complete disregard for human life. Our ability to peacefully assemble is a fundamental right to our society. Your acts of violence can deter people from exercising that fundamental right.”

    According to records filed in the case, Moore made and carried a box of 12 Molotov cocktails in a protest march to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building on Sept. 7, 2020. Ultimately the marchers were moved away from the building in downtown Seattle. Police smelled gasoline and grew concerned about the intentions of protesters. The box containing the 12 gasoline devices was found in the parking lot next to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building.

    Using video from that day and from other protests, as well as information from the electronic devices of other co-conspirators, Moore was confirmed as the person seen carrying the box of destructive devices.

    In June 2021, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Moore’s residence. They seized clothing that is consistent with the images of what Moore was wearing when he carried the Molotov cocktails. From the basement storage area, they also recovered numerous items that are consistent with manufacturing explosive devices. Law enforcement recovered a notebook in which Moore had made entries related to the manufacturing of destructive devices and the ingredients necessary.

  • University of North Texas tries to cancel musicology professor. Professor wins in court. Again.

    The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down another defeat to the University of North Texas and a victory to Allen Harris in a lawsuit defending the First Amendment rights of Professor Timothy Jackson, after UNT shut down his journal, The Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The decision can be located here.

    In January of last year, Allen Harris had already prevailed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The District Court Judge Amos Mazzant rejected UNT’s motion to dismiss the complaint of Professor Timothy Jackson in a strong decision available here.

    Ordinarily, the case would then proceed to discovery and eventually to trial. But UNT invoked its right to a special appeal (called an interlocutory appeal) that is allowed only to the state under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. At first, Texas was expected to make an argument defending UNT’s right to do whatever it wanted with Timothy Jackson’s journal.

    The Journal of Schenkerian Studies is dedicated to a late 19th/early 20th-century Austrian-Jewish music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and his systematic, graphic methods of music analysis. In July 2020, Timothy Jackson defended Schenker in the pages of the Journal from an attack by Hunter College Professor Philip Ewell. Professor Ewell labeled Schenker a “racist” and, indeed, the entire tradition of Western classical music as “systemically racist.” This dispute would have remained a typical academic tempest in a teapot, but the University of North Texas swiftly condemned Jackson’s defense of Schenker and classical music. At UNT, defending classical music and its theory against charges of “racism” is a “thought crime.”

    Graduate students quickly condemned Professor Jackson for “racist actions” and various other derelictions that they claimed hurt their feelings. Calls for Professor Jackson to be fired quickly escalated, and the vast majority of Jackson’s fellow faculty members jumped on the bandwagon. Sixteen of them signed a graduate student petition calling for his ouster and for censorship of the Journal. Discovery revealed that at least one did so without even reading or understanding what the petition said.

    The most important thing at the University of North Texas was to demonstrate pious commitment to “anti-Racism,” no matter how irrational or lacking in substance–or contrary to evidence. As the Dean of the College of Music admitted in open court, the Journal was “put on ice.”

    In July 2020, Professor Jackson stood alone against this tide. Had the case been allowed to proceed after Mazzant’s strong decision on the motion to dismiss, the Journal would likely be back in publication by now. Yet censorship is so important at the University of North Texas that the state exercised its right to a special appeal in order to halt discovery in its tracks.

    Some technical legal analysis omitted.

    The ruling is a clear warning to do-nothing boards of trustees and boards of regents that they have an affirmative duty to ensure that public universities uphold constitutional rights in education. From now on, they will also enjoy a no qualified immunity from personal suit, at least in the Fifth Circuit. UNT’s Board of Regents had direct governing authority over all UNT officials. They too can therefore be held accountable under the Ex Parte Young for sitting idly by while career university bureaucrats trampled Professor Jackson’s free speech.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Regulations (California and federal) are crushing the trucking industry.

    Unfortunately, the federal government continues its misguided attempts to control an industry regulators know little to nothing about. But today’s attempts tend to focus more on something they understand even less than trucking: technology.

    The electronic logging device (ELD) has been around since the late 1980s. The devices were first adopted by large nationwide fleets to simplify managing their plethora of drivers, and eventually became a way to lower insurance costs. Manufacturers and employers claimed the devices prevented drivers from driving longer than legally allowed, therefore reducing the number of tractor-trailer-related crashes. It was under the latter premise that the DOT mandated that all trucks be equipped with ELDs no later than the end of 2017. Unfortunately, fatal accidents involving tractor-trailers have seen a recent increase following a sharp decline. This correlation suggests that mandating ELDs has not had the promised or intended safety improvements.

    More recently, environmental regulations requiring manufacturers to reduce emissions gave us the diesel particulate filter (DPF), an exhaust treatment system that replaces a standard muffler. While there is no current federal mandate requiring a DPF, the filters are required by the 2008 California Statewide Truck and Bus Rule, which has incentivized many nationwide fleets to adopt them. The problem with DPFs is the filter system clogs. A lot.

    When DPFs go down, trucks roll to a stop. Truckers report having to have a DPF serviced as often as every 5,000 miles, which means lots of lost productivity and stranded cargo. I’ve had four breakdowns over the past two years, and three were due to my DPF. A tow truck driver I spoke to on one of those occasions told me half of his business comes from malfunctioning DPFs. Repairs are a specialized affair, and replacements can cost up to $2,000. When my truck isn’t moving, I’m not earning. And these regulators have required that my truck stand still far too often.

    Next up on the government’s list of ways to make truckers’ lives miserable are proposed speed limiters. Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, wants to limit all tractor-trailers to the same speed. Imagine being stuck behind a pair of tractor trailers side by side, who can’t speed up to pass each other. It’s relatively rare right now, but it will become the norm. Every single interstate nationwide will be populated by moving roadblocks, inspiring road rage and blocking critical services. What happens when the fire truck or ambulance is stuck behind these unbreakable pairs?

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Gavin Newsom throws in the towel, lifts ban on travel to states passing anti-transexual and antigroomer laws.
  • Also in the California “Hall of Ls,” after ruing its own police department through defunding, San Francisco is trying to hire cops in Texas.

    San Francisco slashed its police department’s budget by $120 million in 2020. Almost immediately, crime rose in the city. Crime has gotten so bad in San Francisco, that residents are reportedly leaving their car doors unlocked, so crooks won’t smash their windows.

    Mayor London Breed promised to reverse her “defund” policy by restoring and increasing the police budget. However, the city is struggling to recruit qualified officers. Recently, the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff’s Association accused the mayor of continuing to make cuts to the sheriff’s department.

    Despite this, the city went to four universities in Texas to recruit police officers. This appears to be the first time San Francisco looked for candidates outside of California.

    Those four universities are Texas Southern University, Sam Houston State University, Prairie View A&M University, and Texas A&M University.

  • Murder suspect who broke into a Georgia home find out that gun beats knife. “Once he is released from the hospital, he will be confronted with charges including burglary, home invasion, and theft by receiving in Georgia, as well as murder charges in Ohio.”
  • Cisco to Buy Splunk for $28 Billion.
  • Bill Burr has a new film called Old Dads coming to Netflix next month. Looks promising. “Just go on Twitter and share the story where you’re the hero.” Knowing Burr, there will be something here to offend everyone…
  • “Auto CEOs Struggling With Whether To Replace Striking Workers With Robots Or Mexicans.”
  • Now that’s a memorable wedding:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • LinkSwarm for September 15, 2023

    Friday, September 15th, 2023

    The Biden economy continues to batter ordinary Americans, CIA’s bribing experts to protect China and the deep state, Ukraine makes Russian ships and air defense systems in Crimea go boom, UAW goes on strike, and sanctuary city chickens come home to roost. Plus a personal update at the end. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Joe Biden continues to work his special brand of magic on the economy: “Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession.”

    Nominally, households earned more money in 2022 than they did in 2021. But thanks to inflation caused by Bidenomics, real household income (that is, income adjusted for inflation) not only fell, but fell by an amount not seen since the Great Recession.

    According to Census Bureau numbers released Tuesday, median household income fell from $76,330 in 2021 to $74,580 in 2022, a decline of 2.3%. This is the biggest drop in real household income since 2010, when it fell 2.6%. Even at the height of the pandemic, when millions of people couldn’t work, real income only fell 2.2%.

    The decline in real income was driven entirely by near-record-high inflation. According to the Census Bureau, inflation rose 7.8% between 2021 and 2022, which was the largest inflation increase since 1981.

    Isn’t not being able to feed your family a small price to pay for our elites not having to deal with mean tweets? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The deep state at work: “CIA Bribed Analysts To Change Lab-Leak Conclusions.”

    A ‘senior-level’ CIA whistleblower has come forward to allege that the agency bribed analysts to change their opinion that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the NY Post.

    The whistleblower told House committee leaders that his agency ‘ tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans,’ according to a Tuesday letter from the chairmen of two House subcommittees investigating the pandemic response and US intelligence, Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH).

    The pair have requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s Covid-19 Discovery Team by Sept. 26.

    “According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” reads the letter from the House panel chairmen.

    “The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.

    “The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” the letters continue, adding that the analysts were “experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”

  • Hunter Biden indicted on federal gun charges. A whole lot of observers think this is just an excuse to avoid indicting him (and his father) on bribery and corruption charges.
  • Ukraine seems to be systemically destroying Russian air defense systems in occupied Crimea and going after all of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
  • Trump supports Paxton.
  • Abbott’s busses won the border battle.

    Washington refused to fully fund construction of a wall along the Mexican border as Congress obeyed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — whom Republicans bow to — and the galaxy of gangs, drug cartels, pedos, Chinese spies, terrorists and Methodists who back Democrats. There are some overlaps. My point is, Democrats cannot destroy the nation without help.

    There seemed to be no stopping the onslaught. What to do? What to do? What to do?

    Well, they were messing with Texas and as Texans say, don’t mess with Texas.

    Its governor’s press office said in June, “In April 2022, Governor Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to charter buses to transport migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. The Governor added New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia as additional drop-off locations last year and most recently added Denver as a busing destination last month. Since beginning the migrant busing strategy last spring, more than 21,600 migrants have been transported to these self-declared sanctuary cities while providing much-needed relief to Texas’ overwhelmed border communities.”

    Battles are usually fought with horses, tanks or aeroplanes. Greg Abbott used buses. As of June, he shipped 500 busloads of illegal aliens to sanctuary cities. The shipments continue.

    You want ’em, you got ’em.

    It turns out, sanctuary cities don’t want them.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
    

  • Virginia Democratic statehouse candidate Susanna Gibson is complaining that there are videos of her having sex with her husband online. Gee, how did they get online? “Gibson had an account on Chaturbate, a legal website where viewers can watch live webcam performances that feature nudity and sexual activity…The videos show Gibson and her husband, John David Gibson, having sex and at times looking into the camera and asking viewers for donations in the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘tips’ to watch a private show.” It did not take Columbo to crack this case. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might bolt the party that’s trying to screw him over.

    The Democrat Party has a latent disaster on its hand vis a vis one RFK Jr.

    On the one hand, they are fully dedicated to sabotaging his campaign. Under no circumstances whatsoever will he be permitted to win the nomination.

    Even if he had 80%+ support from the electorate, the sick truth is that party leadership (influenced by the consultant and donor classes) would rather lose with Brandon than win with RFK Jr. because of what he’s liable to do to the Deep State and D.C. largesse were he ever to assume office. It would be a proverbial bloodbath for the administrative state and all of the grifters who feed on it.

    On the other hand, they need to keep RFK Jr. within the Democrat Party fold because if he were to go rogue and run third party — which he, frankly, should have been doing all along — it would be a veritable death knell for the Brandon entity’s prospects in 2024, which are wafer-thin as it is.

    Whatever perceived threat Cornel West poses to Brandon’s re-election with his Green Party run, magnify that threat by 10x, 100x and you’re in the ballpark of what RFK Jr. would do to the party. It’s not outlandish to speculate that a strong third-party run by RFK Jr. might literally break the Democrat Party for years or possibly forever. That’s how sick of the party’s BS its own members, not to mention independents and non-voters (the largest, unserviced voting bloc in the country), are.

    RFK Jr. has already proven himself nearly bulletproof from relentless Democrat Party and corporate state media attacks — arguably on the same level in this regard as “Teflon” Don.

  • “Hays County district clerk files petition to remove DA, citing new Texas law.”

    There’s a petition to have the Hays County district attorney removed from office.

    The person who filed it? The Hays County district clerk.

    The petition was filed by Hays County District Clerk Avrey Anderson on Tuesday, Sept. 12. I

    It alleged that Hays County DA Kelly Higgins implemented and executed a policy or policies that refused to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense under state law.

    The petition said DA Higgins has made public declarations that he would not prosecute the following:

    • simple drug possession offenses
    • simple cannabis possession offenses
    • procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case that they are treating transgenders
    • procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case they are performing abortions

    According to the court documents filed, there’s been an excessive amount of felony possession of cannabis, methamphetamine and cocaine cases being declined for “random and nonspecific reasons.”

    I know one of the first questions in your mind: Is Higgins a Soros-backed DA? Answer cloudy. She got $2,000 from Chip Shields in Portland, OR. Shields founded Better People, a pro ex-con thing, but I can’t find a direct Soros link to Higgins. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Things that make you go Hmmmm: “A representative of the Harris County attorney’s office told a district court judge that the county would use all legal means to prevent the deposition of the deputy director of election technology Jason Bruce.”
  • UAW goes on strike over wages, pensions…and mandating electric cars.
  • Let the child sex mutilation lawsuits begin.
  • Goodbye, Mittens.
  • National Review looks back at Simon and Garfunkel. Don’t agree with everything here, but they did make some great music Back In The Day…
  • 14-year-old son died after attempting the ‘One Chip Challenge.’ You don’t want to jump into that sort of thing without building up your resistance first. Me, I’m pretty sure I could do it, especially if I could find a way to make money off it. Maybe I could get 100,00 people to pledge a buck for every one I eat, and then then see how many I can eat on a live-stream…
  • Ever wanted to hear The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz do an album of REM covers? Yeah, me neither, but here’s “Shiny Happy People.”
  • Ooopsie! (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Democrats Complain That Illegal Immigrants Are Destroying Their Sanctuary Cities.”
  • “Experts Believe Aaron Rodgers Ankle Injury A Result Of Being Unvaccinated.”
  • Boing! Boing! Boing!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Also, my most recent job just ended. So here’s the tip jar, if you’re so inclined:





    I don’t usual rattle the jar, because I make good money when employed, and I’m hardly destitute, but every bit helps. If you know of any remote Senior Technical Writer positions, let me know.

    LinkSwarm for October 7, 2022

    Friday, October 7th, 2022

    I hope all BattleSwarm readers are safe from the Joe Biden Armageddon thus far. Today’s LinkSwarm features Democrats disdaining the rules followed by the little people, the UN is delusional enough to think they can run the world and defy the laws of economics, and petting dogs is good for you.

  • The UN is demanding that central banks forget everything everyone learned about inflation in the 1970s and institute price controls instead of raising interest rates.

    UNCTAD, the UN agency dealing with global trade, demanding *all* central banks stop rate hikes and instead switch to price controls. They argue, “policymakers appear to be hoping that a short sharp monetary shock – along the lines, if not of the same magnitude, as that pursued… under Paul Volker – will be sufficient to anchor inflationary expectations without triggering recession. Sifting through the economic entrails of a bygone era is unlikely, however, to provide the forward guidance needed for a softer landing given the deep structural and behavioural changes that have taken place in many economies, particularly those related to financialization, market concentration and labour’s bargaining power.”

    I am not playing tennis with them either, but note the radicalism. Indeed, their latest report also argues, “supply-chain disruptions and labour shortages require appropriate industrial policies to increase the supply of key items in the medium term; this must be accompanied by sustained global policy coordination and (liquidity) support to help countries fund and manage these changes.” So, industrial policy. And Fed swap-lines. Expect both ahead.

    They also ask why we haven’t regulated shadow-banking, and why we allow speculators in global commodity markets who have nothing to do with underlying trade. On the latter they note, “Market surveillance authorities could be mandated to intervene directly in exchange trading on an occasional basis by buying or selling derivatives contracts with a view to averting price collapses or deflating price bubbles.” I expect nothing but that ahead – and geopolitically driven to boot.

    This boils down to: “Hey, we need to institute economic policies proven to fail, because otherwise lots of rich people will lose money!” Wage and price controls were tried in the 1970s and they failed miserably. The longer governments try to defy the market, the more terrible the snapback when those efforts fail.
    

  • Speaking of the UN, they think they own science.
  • Ukraine troops are using spoofed tracking systems and deception to infiltrate Russian lines. (Hat tip: .357 Magnum.)
  • “NYT ‘Right Wing Conspiracy Theory’ Comes True In Less Than 24 Hours.”

    On Tuesday, the New York Times framed a story circulating on the right over a software company’s connection with the Chinese Communist Party as a “right-wing conspiracy theory.”

    “At an invitation-only conference in August at a secret location southeast of Phoenix, a group of election deniers unspooled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential outcome,” was the Times’ original lede (via the Daily Caller).

    In it, the Times wrote that “right-wing” election deniers in Arizona had fabricated a conspiracy theory that election software company Konnech had secret ties to the CCP, and was passing them information on around two million US poll workers.

    “In the two years since former President Donald J. Trump lost his re-election bid, conspiracy theorists have subjected election officials and private companies that play a major role in elections to a barrage of outlandish voter fraud claims,” reads the article. “But the attacks on Konnech demonstrate how far-right election deniers are also giving more attention to new and more secondary companies and groups. Their claims often find a receptive online audience, which then uses the assertions to raise doubts about the integrity of American elections.”

    The next morning, Konnech executive Eugene Yu was arrested for the alleged theft of poll workers’ personal information.

  • New Orleans’ Democrat mayor wants you to know that laws are for the little people.

    New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is facing the threat of a recall election and it’s not just the city’s rising crime that has petition signers enraged.

    The two people behind the petition are both Democrats demanding the Democrat mayor leave office for her “failure to put New Orleans first and execute the responsibilities of the position,” according to Fox News.

    In 2021, more than 150 officers left the New Orleans Police Department, despite a surge in murders and carjackings. Carjackings so far this year stand at 217, an increase of over 200 percent since 2019, according to the Metropolitan Crime Commission weekly bulletin.

    But it’s the mayor’s exorbitant travel spending that has people up in arms.

    She traveled to sister cities Ascona, Switzerland, and Juan Antibes-les-Pins on the French Riviera this summer, costing the City of New Orleans close to $45,000, including first-class international airfare with lie-flat seating.

    The city’s travel policy requires employees to pay the difference in cost for work-related airfare upgrades, stating “employees are required to purchase the lowest airfare available … employees who choose an upgrade from coach, economy, or business class flights are solely responsible for the difference in cost,” Fox News reported.

    But Cantrell hasn’t paid the near $30,000 bill from her first-class international flight upgrades over the summer.

    She has claimed the visits are an investment in the city and necessary for her safety.

    “My travel accommodations are a matter of safety, not of luxury,” The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported. “As all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded and we are left to navigate alone. As the mother of a young child whom I live for, I am going to protect myself by any reasonable means in order to ensure I am there to see her grow into the strong woman I am raising her to be. Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn’t understand the world Black women walk in.”

    Yes, I’m sure the men and women who walk the streets of New Orleans at night have never know unthinkable fear of having to fly coach to Switzerland.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Federal Law Does Not Exempt LGBT Employees From Bathroom, Dress Code, Policies, Judge Rules…A U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) policy document from June 2021 overreached in its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling forbidding employment discrimination based on sexual preference and gender identity, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas found. Texas sued over the guidance.”
  • Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: “Biden hates Republicans so much, he would rather give oil money to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia than Texas.”
  • Related: “Politico reports that Democrats are ‘seething’ about the decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day.”

    Well, fellas, if you don’t want OPEC+ to be in a position where it can influence U.S. gasoline prices a month before the election, you need policies that minimize the U.S. market’s dependence upon the global oil market. This means maximizing U.S. oil production and expanding U.S. refinery capacity.

    It would be a mild exaggeration to declare that the Biden administration hascompletely stopped issuing leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters, but only a mild one. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, “President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.” It’s not a complete halt, but it’s very close to one. This means that the U.S. is almost entirely dependent upon oil production from private lands.

    The good news is that there’s still a lot of oil beneath private lands. As of July, the U.S. was producing 11.8 million barrels per day, an increase from the 11.1 million barrels per day produced in January 2021, the month President Biden took office. But before the pandemic hit in early 2020, the U.S. was producing 12.8 million barrels per day, and it even hit 13 million barrels per day in November 2019. We have the proven ability to produce about 1.2 million more barrels per day than we are, if we want to do so and our public policies encourage it. But right now, they do not.

    The Biden administration keeps insisting that it’s doing everything it can to bring gas prices down, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which is now at its lowest level in 40 years. But what’s in the SPR is oil, not gasoline, and oil must still be refined. You can’t just pump the stuff out of the ground and put it in your car.

    U.S. refineries are running at full capacity, or just short of full capacity. This is why oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases got sent to Europe and Asia, because they had the room and equipment to turn it into actual usable fuel. The U.S. currently has no more spare ability to turn the oil from the reserve into stuff that will actually make your car move; yelling at the oil companies isn’t going to change what is fundamentally an engineering problem.

    And Democrats absolutely refuse to let anyone build new oil refineries.

  • Possibility: Nortstream2 explosion could have just happened because Russians suck at maintenance.

    Multiple sources have confirmed that Nord 2 was full of natural gas; that it was full for at least months; and that said natural gas had never moved.

    It. Just. Sat. There. For — allegedly — months.

    During normal operations of a pipeline, you run a pig through fairly regularly. A “pig” is a bit of equipment pushed by the gas flow, and as it moves along it shoves water and hydrate slurry down to where it can be removed; and it scrapes compounds off the inside walls (hydrogen sulphide, I’m looking at you) that might be are probably eating your pipe.

    Note the part above where the pigs are pushed by the gas. The gas in Nordstream 2 never moved. That means no pig ever went down the line to shove water out, move hydrate slurry, or stop H2S from corroding the steel of the pipeline.

    As I said in the previous post — and I will continue to say — none of this rules out intentional Acts of War. There are idiots enough in that region that sabotage can’t be discounted.

    How-some-ever … hydrate plugs.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • “A lot of folks are running the White House. Joe Biden just isn’t one of them.” “Biden is surrounded with longtime D.C. power players, such as Ron Klain, Susan Rice, Anita Dunn, John Podesta, Gene Sperling – a veritable “who’s who” of Beltway knife fights and insider skullduggery. Throughout their long careers, they’ve never sought credit or voter approval. Just power.”
  • “NYC Mayor Declares State of Emergency over Influx of Illegal Immigrants. [New York City mayor Eric Adams] said at least 17,000 asylum seekers have arrived in the city by bus from other parts of the country since April.” Oh, a million illegal aliens come over the border into Texas and it’s no big deal, but 17,000 show up in your “sanctuary city” and suddenly it’s a problem!
  • “Vermont High School Girls Volleyball Team Banned From Locker Room For Objecting To Changing With Biological Male.”
  • “NYU Fires Chemistry Professor After Students Launch Petition Claiming His Course is Too Hard.” The lesson here seems to be that businesses shouldn’t hire NYU grads…
  • “Meta ordered to pay $175M for copying Green Beret veteran’s app.”
  • Chris Cuomo loses to Paw Patrol. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • British blogger eats on £1 for a single day and has a very tough time of of it, even with foraging and scavenged condiments. Despite the dollar-pound exchange rate being so favorable, I don’t think I could do that on $1 a day shopping at HEB, and even if you made it $1.25, it would have to be three meals of ramen. Also, I don’t think I can even buy a single carrot at HEB (if I had wanted to), spaghetti is considerably more than 23¢ for 500 grams. $5 for $5, that I could do, and $30 for 30 days would be grim but very doable (price, pasta, and beans).
  • Dispatches from Sad Trombonia: “$1.5 Million Floating Home Prototype Sinks Into The Water Just As It’s Unveiled.”
  • Epic basketball player name.
  • Petting a dog can be good for your brain.” Agrees:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • LinkSwarm for August 19, 2022

    Friday, August 19th, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

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

  • How the left abandoned Salman Rushdie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Texas vs. California Update for April 5, 2021

    Monday, April 5th, 2021

    After a long hiatus, the Texas vs. California update is back!

    The update, focusing on news about the two biggest states in the union, and contrasting the the red and blue state models of governance for each, was a regular staple of the blog a few years ago, but as I got busy I fell behind, and the links kept piling up. As a result, this update is extra huge and some of the news here is very old indeed, with some links dating back to 2017. Recently I’ve been updating and triaging so I can finally publish this. I’ve tried to put the newest and most important stories at the top, but there is stil some old news of note further down.

  • New Yorkers and Californians can’t stop moving to Texas:

    According to a new U.S. Census Bureau report, of the 15 fastest-growing cities larger than 50,000 people, seven are in Texas including the top three: Frisco, New Braunfels, and Pflugerville. Frisco’s growth rate was 8.2 percent, some 11 times faster than the national rate of 0.7 percent.

    Of the cities with the greatest population gain from July 1, 2016 to July 1, 2017, San Antonio, Texas, took the prize, adding some 66 people every day. Texas had the most cities in the top 15 of this category as well with five making the list and three of the top five overall in addition to San Antonio: Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, and Austin.

    San Antonio now has more than 1.5 million people and ranks as the nation’s seventh-largest city, just behind Philadelphia. Fort Worth, meanwhile, knocked Indianapolis, Ind., out of the top-15 with a population of 874,168. Houston is America’s fourth-largest city and is also the most diverse large city in the nation.

  • In fact, Texas was he number one state for net in-migration in 2020, while California lost the third most residents of any state.

  • Why high tech companies are leaving California:

    In a stunning procession in December, California lost the leadership of three iconic firms — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle and Tesla — all to Texas, which this year even took the Rose Bowl’s place in hosting the college football playoff. In addition, many California tech firms, including Uber and Lyft, as well as Apple, have been shifting jobs outside the state.

    This has been widely described as California’s “tech exodus.” Though it’s still less than a torrent and more a steady, long-term drip, it augurs some very bad trends. In recent years, California has been losing market share of innovative industries compared with 11 states with high concentrations of innovation-oriented firms, according to research by Ken Murphy, a professor at UC Irvine’s business school.

    Since 2005, California’s share of the number of firms in the innovation sector (composed of 13 of the nation’s highest-tech, highest R&D advanced industries) has shrunk while competitors like Florida, Oregon, Arizona and Utah have expanded their share slightly.

    The pandemic-induced push to move work online could hasten this shift. With 2 out of 3 tech workers willing to leave the Bay Area if they could work remotely, Big Tech could readily spread talent and wealth to other states.

    Increasingly, California’s cities must compete with metro areas in Texas, Tennessee and even parts of the Midwest. Housing prices are a particularly critical concern: California has all three of the most unaffordable metro regions for first-time home buyers, according to a recent AEI survey, and six of the top 10. The flow of tech workers during the pandemic has gone to places like Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Raleigh, N.C., and away from big coastal cities with higher living costs.

    Software-based tech companies can access knowledge workers outside California, and often at lower costs. At the same time, states like Texas and Arizona have been sought to replicate the California formula for tech industry growth — public university expansion, more suburban housing and public investment in downtowns, all meant to appeal to workers and their bosses.

    Snip.

    But more recently, as the tech industry becomes more virtual and services-based, the companies’ workforces have less of a need to all be in one place. While these companies create vast wealth for a relatively small group of people, this is not a formula for broad-based economic prosperity.

    In contrast to the old Silicon Valley, the Bay Area has become “a region of segregated innovation,” as described by CityLab, where the upper class waxes, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in poverty that is unshakable.

    The state leadership’s cavalier response when major employers depart is to assume that California will continue to create new businesses to replace the high-paying jobs lost.

    Yes, venture capital is piling into tech startups, driven by the low cost of money and pandemic disruption, and the state is expecting $26 billion more in revenue this year in part because of the roaring initial public offering market. But brushing off recent departures as part of a routine industrial cycle is naive and allows politicians to avoid making choices that would keep entrepreneurs, their businesses and good jobs in California.

    California already has the nation’s highest income tax, with the top marginal tax rate at 13.3%. A new proposal, Assembly Bill 1253, would add three new tiers of surcharges on people earning $1 million a year and above. Lawmakers also introduced Assembly Bill 2088, which would apply a 0.4% wealth tax on net worth above $30 million. Neither bill passed the Legislature last month, but both may come back in the new legislative session.

    Tech companies may be adept at avoiding taxes, but their top managers, investors and most skilled employees could see these measures as more reasons to leave — particularly when competing states like Texas, Tennessee, Nevada and Florida have zero state income taxes.

    Another law, Assembly Bill 5, which limits contract employees, could prove damaging to small startup business that cannot afford many full-time workers. And for some industries, particularly those involved in energy-intensive industries like cloud computing and advanced manufacturing, California’s energy prices — one of the highest in the continental U.S. and double the cost in places like Texas — are another incentive to move commercial activities elsewhere.

  • Indeed, California is so desperate for tax revenue that they want to tax residents even after they’ve left the state:

    As the catastrophic state of California’s finances finally begins to set in among politicians, anti-tech media personalities, and far left cultural influencers, the narrative on California’s techxodus — that is, the migration of California’s technology industry out of the state — has shifted from mockery, and “we’ll be better off without you,” to a far more sober, and increasingly-desperate “leaving California is immoral.”

    As it is simply too embarrassing for politicians to admit the state needs the technology industry after more than a decade of antagonizing the men and women who built it, and as it is political suicide for incumbent politicians in a one-party state to admit that every one of the problems we’re facing has been created by our elected leaders, a moral argument for tech’s responsibility to California, and specifically the Bay Area, has recently been produced. It goes something like this: young ambitious people moved to the state, and struck gold. But rather than “give back” to the land, they’re leaving with resources they “took” from the region. Like the milkshake guy from There Will Be Blood, sucking oil from the earth. Like the evil army people from Avatar, and their unquenchable thirst for unobtanium.

    Snip.

    “Extracted,” she says. Smh. A week or so later, in the psychotic San Francisco Board meeting where our local representatives voted 10 to 1 to officially condemn Mark Zuckerberg for donating 75 million dollars to a hospital (really, this happened), the word came up again. When the floor was opened to the public, an activist downplayed what was, as Teddy Schleifer reports, “the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever,” and accused Zuckerberg of “extraction.” Our local politicians did not think this strange.

    Snip.

    I take extreme issue with the notion that industry leaders have taken something from the “community,” defined here as the “talent,” the “incubators,” and the “mentors.” This is precisely the opposite of reality. The men and women leaving are the talent, they have started the incubators, they have built the companies, they have funded the startup ecosystem, and they have mentored countless young people. This is the “network.” They are the network. Technology workers do not “extract” value from the region, they are what makes the region valuable.

    California is beautiful — San Francisco is truly, I think, one of the most beautiful cities in the world — but the soil isn’t made of magic, there’s no such thing as digging for microcode, and the Bay Area’s nativist, anti-immigration political climate has certainly not created the tech community, which is populated largely by immigrants, be they from out of the state or out of the country.

    Among many things, including talent, opportunity, and soft power, the technology industry has brought tremendous tax revenue to the Bay Area. The budget of San Francisco literally doubled this decade, from around six billion to over twelve billion dollars. With our government’s incredible, historic abundance of wealth, the Board of Supervisors has presided over: a dramatic increase in homelessness, drug abuse, crime — now including home invasion — and a crippling cost of living that can be directly ascribed to the local landed gentry’s obsession with blocking new construction. This latter piece is important, as it appears to be the only thing our Board cares about. This is because significantly increasing the local housing supply would decrease the value of the multi-million dollar homes almost every single one of our Supervisors owns, and we could never have that.

    These past ten years I often wondered where the city’s money went. Could the leadership really be this stupid, or was there corruption? Turns out both. We’ve recently discovered our politicians are literally criminals, but they’re also bad at crime.

    Snip.

    The Bay Area housing, homeless, and drug crises are all exacerbated by the state government, which is as incapable of managing its finances as it is incapable of managing its public land; we are now teetering on the edge of true financial ruin in a state of endemic, constant wildfire. But let’s take a closer look at this issue of money. On one hand we have insane, nativist property tax codes, which punish new homeowners at the expense of longtime landlords, and on the other our income taxes have skyrocketed. Since income taxes are structured progressively, the state has backed itself into a position of extreme uncertainty, as the top one percent of earners pay half the state’s taxes — while politicians argue the state’s wealthiest men and women, who already pay more in taxes than the wealthiest men and women of any other state and most free countries in the world, are not paying their “fair share.” As if rudimentary economic threats were not enough, politicians have made cultural platforms of their anti-technology, anti-industry attitudes, and have done everything in their power to drive our top one percent of earners out of the state. In this, our politicians are succeeding.

    Such success in driving top earners from the state only further exacerbates the state’s political disasters, with our government of bloated, corrupt services now starving for income. This has in turn increased the political appetite for all manner of draconian, anti-business practices among politicians with no apparent ability to conceive of the second order effects of their legislation, a deficiency in basic intelligence that led, for example, to the unmitigated disaster that was AB5. In other words, everything is structured to further deteriorate.

  • “S.F. restaurant owners say rise in property crime is making dire situation worse.”

    Beleaguered San Francisco restaurants are struggling with a recent citywide rise in burglaries, including a slew of brazen break-ins at popular restaurants between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. It’s a situation many restaurant owners say is exacerbating an already bleak outlook for the local food scene.

    San Francisco Police Department data shows burglaries in the city climbed from 4,918 reported incidents a year ago to 7,248 as of Dec. 27. The data does not specifically show how many restaurants have been affected, but the rise in burglaries is reflected in the stories being told by business owners in interviews and on social media. It’s a hard reality for local restaurants that have now gone almost 10 months with diminished revenue, forced hibernation periods, and only occasional approval for indoor and outdoor dining service.

    In mid-December alone, San Francisco’s nostalgic Toy Boat Dessert Cafe posted on Instagram about having had its door kicked in during an attempted burglary. Also in the Richmond District, Cassava took to social media to post about losing roughly $3,000 worth of equipment, including iPads, after a break-in. And Epic Steak and Waterbar on the Embarcadero each lost a similar amount when thieves stole alcohol and damaged property.

    Owners say the shelter-in-place order provides thieves with opportunities to break into businesses. Streets are empty because people are staying home. The ghost-town effect is increased as a growing number of restaurants and other businesses are either permanently or temporarily closed. The break-ins are all the more painful when restaurants aren’t even bringing in income to cover the cost to repair or replace stolen or damaged items.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of government officials being stupid crooks: “SF City Administrator Naomi Kelly Resigns Over Bribery Allegations. Husband Harlan Kelly, SF PUC Manager, had been arrested after accepting international trips, vacation to China, meals, jewelry, and personal car services.” As with the Biden clan, graft, corruption and shady links to China all seem to be part of the family trade for Democratic power families…
  • How California’s catch and release approach to crime kills.

    Jerry Lyons, 31, had spent his entire adult life committing crimes. He had dozens of arrests in California — attempted robbery, burglary, evading police, driving a stolen vehicle, weapons charges, drug charges, shoplifting, trespassing, etc. — but kept getting turned loose until Thursday, when he finally killed somebody. Sheria Musyoka, 26, was an immigrant from Kenya who had graduated from Dartmouth and moved to San Francisco with his wife and three-year-old son. Lyons was behind the wheel of a stolen car when he killed Musyoka.

  • 2018: Poverty in California:

    Despite improvements, the official poverty rate remains high.

    According to official poverty statistics, 14.3% of Californians lacked enough resources—about $24,300 per year for a family of four—to meet basic needs in 2016. The rate has declined significantly from 15.3% in 2015, but it is well above the most recent low of 12.4% in 2007. Moreover, the official poverty line does not account for California’s housing costs or other critical family expenses and resources.

    Poverty in California is even higher when factoring in key family needs and resources.
    The California Poverty Measure (CPM), a joint research effort by PPIC and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, is a more comprehensive approach to gauging poverty in California. It accounts for the cost of living and a range of family needs and resources, including social safety net benefits. According to the CPM, 19.4% of Californians (about 7.4 million) lacked enough resources to meet basic needs in 2016—about $31,000 per year for a family of four, nearly $7,000 higher than the official poverty line. Poverty was highest among children (21.3%) and lower among adults age 18–64 (18.8%) and those age 65 and older (18.7%). The overall poverty rate went unchanged between 2015 and 2016, following two years of decreases.

    About four in ten Californians are living in or near poverty.

    Nearly one in five (18.9%) Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line (up to one and a half times above it). All told, two-fifths (38.2%) of state residents were poor or near poor in 2016. But the share of Californians in families with less than half the resources needed to meet basic needs was 5.6%, a deep poverty rate that is smaller than official poverty statistics indicate.

  • 2018: “LA Doubled Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime.” Bonus: Homeless people were behind many of the big California fires.
  • Los Angeles is seeking a $3.9 billion coronavirus bailout. “Last year, roughly 20,000 city employees’ average pay exceeded $147,000, costing taxpayers $3 billion, Open the Books auditors found. Nearly 2,000 employees out-earned California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s salary of $202,000.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • “2 out of 3 tech workers would leave SF permanently if they could work remotely.”
  • “In California, Illegals Come First; Californians Don’t Matter.”

    The number of homeless Californians in the Los Angeles county has reached 58,936, New York Times reported this weekend.

    But Californians don’t seem to be the priority of democratic governor Gavin Newsom.

    Under an agreement between Gov. Newsom and Democrats in the state legislature, low-income adults between the ages of 19 and 25 living in California illegally would be eligible for California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.

    State officials estimate that will be about 90,000 people at a cost of $98m a year.

    This decision will make California the first state in the US to pay for illegal immigrants to have full health benefits.

  • Gavin Newsom’s Property Taxes Are Chronically Delinquent and There’s No Excuse.”

    For the 2018-2019 tax year, the bill was sent to the Newsoms on September 28, 2018. The two installments were due in December 2018 and April 2019, and the bill became delinquent on July 1, 2019. They finally paid their second installment, along with about $3,000 in penalties, on September 3, 2019. This is significant because the Newsoms’ Fair Oaks mansion was purchased for $3.7 million cash in November 2018. Newsom’s spokesman claims it was the Newsoms’ cash even though there is no documentation of that; the home was purchased in the name of Gavin Newsom’s cousin and longtime PlumpJack business partner, Jeremy Scherer.

    If the Newsoms had $3.7 million in cash lying around, why wait to pay $22,000 in property taxes until the next year and incur a $3,000 penalty? Wealthy people aren’t in the habit of paying thousands of dollars in penalties.

    In 2018 the Newsoms were sent a supplemental property tax bill on May 15, covering a revaluation and some school and health bonds. That bill was due in two installments; the installments became delinquent June 30 and October 31, respectively.

    He finally paid them on December 10, 2018, along with $750 in penalties.

    The last time their property tax bill was paid on time was when they received the “sweetheart” cashout refinancing deal in December 2017 ($3,225,000 cashout on a home worth $3,500,000) – presumably because the bank would only close the loan if the property taxes were paid at the same time.

  • “Many people are moving from California to Texas. The cost of living, as well as high taxes and red tape, are precipitating the push.”

    “EVERYONE IS FROM California. Are they kicking y’all out?” asks a curious bureaucrat at the Department of Public Safety in Plano, a city near Dallas. In the previous week she had helped 20 people from California apply for a Texas driving licence. Those keeping score in the contest between the two states do not have to look far to notch up points for Texas. On the way to the state Capitol building in Austin to interview Greg Abbott, the governor, your correspondent discovered that her driver had recently relocated from southern California to start a family in a more affordable city.

    Between 2007 and 2016 a net 1m American residents, or 2.5% of the state’s population, left California for another state. Texas was the most popular destination, attracting more than a quarter of them. More Americans have left California than moved there every year since 1990, though immigrants still arrive from abroad.

    Companies are also moving. Last year McKesson, a medical-supplies company, and Core-Mark, a supplier to convenience stores, shifted their headquarters from California to Texas, as did Jamba Juice, a smoothie company. Many Californian firms are also adding jobs outside the Golden State. Charles Schwab, a financial-brokerage firm based in San Francisco, received more than $6m in incentives from Texas, and by the end of this year will have more employees there than in California.

    What explains the one-way traffic? There are four reasons for California’s weaker position. First, it has become very expensive, especially for housing. “If there’s one risk factor in this state, it’s affordability,” says Gavin Newsom, California’s governor. “The thing we most pride ourselves on—the California dream, a notion of social mobility that we export around the world—is in peril.” A third of Californians are thinking of moving out of state because of the high cost of housing, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, a non-profit research firm. Most of those leaving California for Texas earn less than $50,000 a year and have only a high-school education…

    The middle class is also struggling. In California home-ownership rates are at their lowest level since the 1940s and among the lowest in America, with black and Hispanic families particularly hard hit. In the past ten years around 75,000 new housing units received permits annually, only 40% of the projected need. “From the perspective of a young, upwardly mobile family, California is nearly impossible, unless you have rich parents, rob a bank, or get money from your firm going public,” says Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University, who believes that the state is experiencing a new kind of “feudalism”, where the ultra-rich thrive and others suffer.

    As a symbol of how out-of-reach the once accessible state has become, last year the small house that was the setting for “The Brady Bunch”, a television show in the 1970s about a middle-class Californian family, sold for a whopping $3.5m, nearly double its asking price. Companies expanding elsewhere find that many employees are happy to give it a go in a state where they can afford to buy a house and raise a family.

    The states also have wildly different tax regimes, which is a second reason for Texas gaining favour as a destination. With a top rate of 13.3%, California has the highest state income-tax rate for top earners. Texas does not charge residents a state income tax. Instead, they pay higher property taxes to local governments, and the state gets most of its money from a sales tax. Because of recent changes to the tax code, residents of California and other high-tax states will no longer be able to deduct all of their state and local taxes from federal payments, which could further dampen people’s willingness to remain in the state.

    Taxes on businesses are increasing, too. In the past six elections California voters have approved more than 800 local taxes on businesses and residents, according to Larry Kosmont of Kosmont Companies, an economic advisory firm. (This does not include voters’ decision to raise the income-tax rate on the state’s highest earners.) For example, last year voters in San Francisco approved the controversial Proposition C, which taxes businesses with more than $50m in gross revenues to fund services for the homeless. Companies with fat profit margins can afford higher taxes, but lower-margin businesses cannot, and these are the ones most likely to consider an alternative location.

    Third, Texas has pursued a concerted strategy of wooing and cultivating businesses, whereas California has not. This began with Rick Perry, who served as Texas’s governor from 2000 to 2015. He travelled to California and other states on “hunting trips” to poach businesses, ran ads on radio encouraging people and companies to move, and offered large incentives to create jobs in Texas. Mr Abbott has continued with these pro-business policies and still operates a “deal-closing fund” to incentivise businesses to come. He is a cheerleader for his state’s advantages, including low costs, a central location with good airports and a convenient time zone for doing business with both coasts. He describes Texas as “the quintessential free-enterprise state”.

  • Midland County, Texas was the fastest growing county in America in 2018.
  • “Meet the Dallas-area woman shepherding a ‘Move to Texas from California!’ migration.”

    Here’s what the “liberal Californians, go home” crowd misses: The vast majority of West Coast dwellers who make up Bailey’s more than 11,500 Facebook followers lean conservative.

    And after spending a few days perusing Bailey’s page, I’d say this comment best sums up its audience: “We fell in love with Texas immediately … we’re conservative Christians who love God, country, freedom, family, gun rights and barbeque.”

    Bailey said cost of living and taxes are hot buttons for commenters, but so are gridlocked roads, the homeless and illegal immigration.

    The Realtor welcomes people of all political stripes onto her page — after all, she’s in this to make money. And she and her husband, Scott, identify as libertarian.

  • 2019: Can California be saved?

    Our state debt is over $1.5t. We have the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Oh, and we are a sanctuary state that protects all manner of illegal immigrants, no matter how serious the crimes they’ve committed. Think Jose Garcia Zanate who killed Kate Steinle. He had been deported seven times but was out and about on the streets of San Francisco with the blessings of SF law enforcement; they aim to protect the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding. ICE is the enemy in sanctuary cities and states, the thugs are victims.

    State taxes in California are the highest in the nation, as are our sales taxes. We fall nearly last in education. We have the most homeless, the most illegal migrants. The state spends $30.b on illegal immigration per year. Like all cities run by progressives, our entire state is a disaster of Democratic making. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego have been overrun by homeless people, most of them drug addicted and/or mentally ill. Entire areas of these cities are befouled by used needles, feces, trash, garbage, rats and now diseases long-thought to be extinct in the West. Persons who work in downtown Los Angeles have contracted typhus! As true in other cites long run by Democrats (Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, Flint) it is the implementation of ridiculous utopian Marxist policies so beloved by progressives that has destroyed these once grand cities. Socialist strategies always fail. Democrats cheat, (ballot harvesting) are re-elected, and the state continues to decline. Venezuela is the current example of the massive failure of socialism on the world stage. What is happening there is beyond tragic; the people are starving in every sense of the word. But will our own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemn socialism? Absolutely not. She, Bernie Sanders and their fellow travelers mean to take this country the way of Venezuela, the road California has already been on for too long; possibly too long to ever recover. This state is slowly becoming a third-world nation. But, as in Venezuela, the rich and politically powerful stay rich, keep their mansions and their private planes unperturbed by the devastation they generate.

  • How California could be saved:

    First, the problem of corruption must be addressed. It’s no secret that public unions rule the legislative process in this state. They’re even funding the redecorating of the Lieutenant Governor’s office, using money confiscated from the state’s lowest-paid workers. De-funding the unions through an “Uncheck the Box” campaign aimed informing union workers that they can opt out of union dues (opt-outs made possible by the Janus decision) should be a top priority for activist groups in the state. De-funding the unions will have a positive domino effect on everything in California.

    Corruption in the regulatory process, at the state and local levels, is rampant and an open secret. Lately the Los Angeles Times has done a great job of investigating the problems with homelessness and trash piles, but their investigations stop short of fully placing blame where it belongs. People who are truly fed up with the condition of our state need to put their money where their mouth is and fund true investigative reporting (because you know Silicon Valley won’t be capitalizing any non-socialist journalistic startups).

    Next, laws which prioritize criminals, homeless bums (as opposed to those who are homeless because of mental illness), and illegal immigrants over the state’s children and families must be revised or abolished. Did you know that a homeless bum’s shopping cart (which they stole from some business somewhere) is considered their “home” or “property” and cannot be taken away from them? Homeless people with true mental illness should be treated with the dignity they deserve (as Kurt Schlichter said on KABC today), and not left on the streets to fend for themselves.

    The true causes of the third-world conditions in Los Angeles and San Francisco must be addressed. Some well-meaning laws or programs relating to homelessness are causing negative unintended consequences. In Los Angeles, some of the blame for the massive trash piles can be placed directly on City Hall – their RecycLA program resulted in massive increases in sanitation costs for businesses and missed pickups.

    The state’s ballot harvesting law must be amended. Currently anyone – without ID or training – can pick up a ballot from any voter and turn it in to elections officials. The harvester has to sign their name to the outside of the ballot, but there is no process for elections officials to verify that the person turning in the ballot is the person who signed the outside, or that the name they used is actually their real name. The process is ripe for fraud.

    These are all from 2019, and we’re no closer to any of them being implemented…

  • Get paid to move your business out of California.
  • “Data company Harmonate announced it will relocate its corporate headquarters from San Jose, California, to Austin.”
  • Military eyeware provider Wiley X moving from livermore, California to Frisco in Texas.
  • In fact, a nunch of companies are moving to the Metroplex:

    Lion Real Estate Group LLC, which has about 150 employees and $1 billion in assets under management, is moving its headquarters into office space at 3811 Turtle Creek Blvd., the company’s co-founders said in an exclusive interview with the Dallas Business Journal in January. The fast-growing real estate firm focuses on multifamily investment and is relocating its corporate headquarters to Dallas from Los Angeles.

    The company will keep its Los Angeles office to support West Coast operations.

    Lion Real Estate Group’s decision to relocate its headquarters to Dallas aligns with Lion’s strategy of acquiring multifamily assets outside of the urban core, both in Texas and in other high-growth cities across the Sunbelt and Southeast, said Jeff Weller, co-founder and managing principal of the firm…

    The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has retained Colliers International to help it scout space for a new corporate headquarters in DFW or elsewhere in Texas in the event it opts to pull the trigger on a prospective relocation from Northern Virginia.

    The nonprofit intends to restructure as a Texas-based organization and has formed a committee to explore the prospect, which could include a headquarters move.

    In court documents, the NRA asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, the venue for its Chapter 11 reorganization, for permission to retain Colliers to help it find office space for rent or purchase. The search will mostly likely be focused on the “Dallas-Fort Worth region,” the court documents say.

    The first few months of 2021 has sustained the momentum the area saw in 2020 when several companies decided to relocate to North Texas. Last year, one of the biggest corporate relocations to DFW was CBRE Group Inc. (NYSE: CBRE), the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, which moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas.

    Financial services giant Charles Schwab moved its San Francisco headquarters to the North Texas community of Westlake at the start of this year, in a relocation announced in 2020.

    Hundreds of small and midsize firms like Lion Real Estate and Wiley X have relocated to DFW over the last few years.

    According to Dallas Regional Chamber, there are 102 major corporations considering headquarters relocation or expansion to North Texas currently.

  • “Texas is tops in the U.S. for commercial development impact,” contributing more than $65 billion to the Texas economy. (Usual DMN paywell disclaimer.)
  • “Jim Breyer, CEO of venture capital and private equity investor Breyer Capital, announced in August 2020 that Breyer Capital would be opening a second office in Austin. While Breyer Capital’s original office and interest in Silicon Valley remain, Breyer himself has also moved to Austin and is investing in what he sees as the city’s potential as an emerging tech hub.”
  • Speaking of which, here he is on why Austin will be the next Silicon Valley:

    after lots of planning and due diligence, I decided that Austin was the best place for the next era of my venture capital and venture philanthropy career. With early, but compelling, signals that Austin is emerging as the next great tech hub, I couldn’t be more excited to play a role in helping another part of the country reach its potential. I believe there is an opportunity to get in near the ground floor and build something truly enduring.

    Other friends from the Bay Area, like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have made similar moves, along with many other tech industry leaders, so I’m not surprised that a so-called “Bay Area exodus” has become a widely reported trend.

    But instead of focusing on the positives of Austin, many exodus narratives have focused on problems with the Bay Area. While critics make some fair points about rising living costs and government overreach, I would argue that Silicon Valley and Austin both have bright futures ahead. The things that made Silicon Valley special are not going anywhere. The Bay Area will continue to be a global hub of innovation that attracts courageous entrepreneurs, benefits from world-class institutions and nurtures talent from leading tech companies — even as Austin offers a remarkable new frontier of opportunity.

    New Austinites all have different reasons for why they moved here, of course. My decision to start Breyer Capital Austin, for example, has more to do with Austin’s strengths than any of the Bay Area’s flaws.
    For starters, Austin, more than any other city in the country, encourages a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Because the city has catered to so many types of professionals, and not just technologists, the depth of talent here is unique. Artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and professors, all at the top of their trade, frequently choose to build things together. By breaking down silos and embracing novel approaches to company-building, Austin’s diverse entrepreneurs will usher in a new era of growth for the city, state and country. I couldn’t be more excited to be investing in health care AI companies and fin-tech companies that have a consumer media backbone. The best founding teams are multifaceted and versatile, and Austin has every type of entrepreneur that a great company needs. This kind of interdisciplinary entrepreneurship will help Austin companies flourish.

    Austin has attracted and will continue to attract young, brilliant talent because of its comparative affordability, outdoor culture and professional development opportunities. This vast pool of expertise is contributing to a remarkably robust climate of innovation. With Tesla, Facebook, Apple, Google, Oracle and other leading companies moving to or expanding in Austin, the entrepreneurial ecosystem will be bolstered when talent from these companies breaks away to start new ventures. Some of my best investments have been in entrepreneurs who gained valuable experience at an outstanding established company before starting their own. Five years from now, Austin will benefit from many tech company alums eager to leverage their expertise to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

  • “Why some tech companies and billionaires are leaving California.”

    While it may be an overstatement to say California is hemorrhaging people, some of the state’s major companies and wealthiest residents are leaving for states like Texas, Arizona and Florida. In 2020, Oracle, Palantir and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise were among the companies that announced they’re relocating their headquarters out of the Golden State. Wealthy individuals from the tech industry moving recently include Larry Ellison, Drew Houston, Joe Lonsdale and Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man.

    California’s population and job growth have both slowed to a trickle, with many citing concerns about high taxes, cost of living and heavy regulations. With the rise of remote work in 2020, over 135,000 more people left California than moved in — the third largest net migration loss ever recorded for the state. Although some big names have committed to stay, one recent survey found that two of every three Bay Area workers would leave the area permanently if they could continue to work from home indefinitely.

  • “As California Declines, Texas Is The Heir Apparent To Big-Tech Looking To Flee Progressive Laws.” (Hat tip: Color Me Red.)
  • Retireees are fleeing California as well:

    It’s not just businesses that are moving out of California. Retirees are leaving in growing numbers.

    For whatever reason they move, the retiree exodus is taking knowledge, wealth, patrons of the arts and potential philanthropy out of communities in the Golden State to the benefit of other places.

    The trend dovetails with larger concerns about California’s affordability, business climate and economic disparities.

    “It’s not just retirees moving. It’s companies. It’s rich people and poor people,” said Sanjay Varshney, professor of finance at California State University Sacramento and founder of Goldenstone Wealth Management LLC in El Dorado Hills.

    Poorer people are leaving the state because “they can’t make ends meet” with the high cost of living and housing, he said. “And extremely wealthy people are moving because they are fed up.”

    Varshney said a migration of wealthy people are leaving the Bay Area in particular, and “you are seeing that with people like Elon Musk and corporations like Oracle, Tesla and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”

    Retirees can easily leave California, as they are no longer tied to jobs in the state. “Retirees are a very mobile part of the population,” Varshney said

    The trend appears to be growing. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System tracks where it sends benefits, and more of its members no longer call California home. Some 85% of CalPERS retirees lived in the state 2013. That dropped to 84% in 2018 and to 82.3% in 2020, according to the pension system.

    The Greater Sacramento Economic Council’s mission is to attract companies to relocate to the Sacramento area. By the time companies decide to move out of the Bay Area, they are often soured on California taxes and regulations, and they tend to move out of the state completely, said Barry Broome, Greater Sacramento’s CEO.

    The same can be said for individuals, he said.

    “A lot of this is tax,” Broome said. California has higher business taxes and higher individual tax rates than most other states.

  • What the radical left has done to San Francisco.

    To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.

    The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

    And yet, it’s not really American inequality. It’s the kind of inequality produced by failed leftist policies. Picture today’s San Francisco:

    Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.

    Manjoo emphasizes that San Francisco is run entirely by Democrats. It has become difficult to blame it on Republicans when there are no Republicans.

  • “Two deaths a day: S.F. drug overdoses fueled by fentanyl are spiking.”
  • California to settle claims that it can’t even teach students to read.
  • “Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control.”

    The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing.

    The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.

    Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.

    What century is this?

    Is it the 21st century in the largest city of a state that ranks among the world’s most robust economies, or did someone turn back the calendar a few hundred years?

    We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news and an army of rodents is on the move.

    On Thursday I saw a county health inspector on rat patrol between 7th and 8th streets on skid row. He was carrying a clipboard and said he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents, and I asked where:

    “Everywhere,” he said.

    Well, it’s nice to know somebody is doing something, but you don’t need a clipboard. I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.

    The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.

    Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it. Every time sanitation crews knock down one mess, another dumpsite springs up nearby.

  • “Top California high-speed rail executive under investigation in ethics probe.”
  • Those having children are leaving California in droves:

    California is the great role model for America, particularly if you read the Eastern press. Yet few boosters have yet to confront the fact that the state is continuing to hemorrhage people at a higher rate, with particular losses among the family-formation age demographic critical to California’s future.

    Since the recovery began in 2010, California’s net domestic out-migration, according to the American community survey, has almost tripled to 140,000 annually. Over that time, the state has lost half a million net migrants with the bulk of that coming from the Los Angeles-Orange County area.

    In contrast, during the first years of the decade the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, enjoyed a renaissance of in-migration, something not seen since before 2000. But that is changing. A recent Redfin report suggests that the Bay Area, the focal point of California’s boom, now leads the country in outbound home searches, which could suggest a further worsening of the trend.

    One of the perennial debates about migration, particularly in California, is the nature of the outmigration. The state’s boosters, and the administration itself, like to talk as if California is simply giving itself an enema — expelling its waste — while making itself an irresistible beacon to the “best and brightest.”

    The reality, however, is more complicated than that. An analysis of IRS data from 2015-16, the latest available, shows that while roughly half those leaving the state made under $50,000 annually, half made above that. Roughly one in four made over $100,000 and another quarter earned a middle-class paycheck between $50,000 and $100,000. We also lose among the wealthiest segment, the people best able to withstand California’s costs, but by much smaller percentages.

    The key issue for California, however, lies with the exodus of people around child-bearing years. The largest group leaving the state — some 28 percent — is 35 to 44, the prime ages for families. Another third come from those 26 to 34 and 45 to 54, also often the age of parents.

    (Hat tip: TPPF.)

  • Texas is among the most recession-proof states in the country:

    Every day, Texans are reminded why letting liberal democrats take over this state would be a terrible idea.

    In a new report released by S&P Global Ratings, Texas has been ranked among the most recession-proof states in the country, according to a variety of factors.

    Texas’ fiscal strength stems from conservative state legislators’ insistence against implementing a personal income tax or increasing other taxes. Also important has been the push by Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to slow the rate of spending growth and refusal to dip into the state’s “rainy day fund” for non-emergency spending.

  • Dispatches from San Francisco’s decline:

    Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close. In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible: It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence. To the untrained eye, it looks magical: a city of the future, a city of gasps. Then, slowly, it reveals itself to be a city of lies, one that dismisses the idea of city living.

    Snip.

    Running a venture-capital fund that invests as early as possible in startups, I now see fewer and fewer companies choosing to come launch here. When we opened our doors in 2015, maybe 80 percent of our investments were in Bay Area companies. Last year [2018], half of them were, and we expect to see that number decrease even more in the years ahead. Andreessen-Horowitz, the famed Silicon Valley VC firm, has announced that it’s becoming more or less a hedge fund, presumably to focus on later-stage opportunities. Peter Thiel, who had lived here since the mid 90s, has now decamped to Los Angeles, and says there is a less than 50 percent chance the next great tech company will arise in an increasingly expensive, conformist Silicon Valley.

    “Silicon Valley is now more fashion than opportunity,” Thiel told the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “The heads are the same.”

    Lack of independent thought aside, the Economist has identified the source of the problem: You can’t build a successful startup from a garage if a garage costs a million bucks. The flow of new creations is being choked off first and foremost because there are fewer cheap places for new things to start.

    The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco recently hit $3690 per month, 30 percent greater than in New York City. Over the last decade, the Bay Area has added 722,000 jobs but built only 106,000 new homes. Proposition M, passed in the 1980s to avoid “Manhattanization,” limits the supply of office space. The city’s average Class A asking rent has risen 124 percent since 2010 to over $80 per square foot.

    The legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs once remarked that new ideas come from old buildings, the types of places you can alter without permission because no one cares about them. This is one reason why so many garage startups and garage bands and artists spilling paint in discarded warehouse lofts have left their mark on the world. The true creative class can’t afford to rent expensive new studios.

    But in San Francisco, the true creative class can’t afford to rent any space anymore.

    Snip.

    Up and down the city’s disorienting hills, you notice homeless men and women — junkies, winos, the dispossessed — passed out in the vestibules of empty storefronts on otherwise busy streets. Encampments of tents sprout in every shadowy corner: under highway overpasses, down alleys. Streets are peppered with used syringes. Strolling the sidewalks, you smell the faint malodorous traces of human excrement and soiled clothing. Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.

    The confused mumble, the incoherent finger-pointing tirade, the twitch, the cold daemonic stare, the drunken stumble and drool — these are the rhythms of a city on the edge of a schizophrenic explosion.

  • A list of rules for making it home in California:

    1) Assume that a state with among the highest income, sales and gas taxes has commensurately among the nation’s worst roads. Therefore, do not become depressed by blood alleys, potholes, bullet-holed and graffiti stained road signs, or roads unchanged from a half-century ago when the population was less than half of what it is today. You are an adventurer on the frontier, not a complacent commuter or traveler. Approach the next few hours as a challenge rather than a nightmare. Envision a California road trip like Odysseus did his on voyage on the Aegean.

    2) It is wiser not to use the restrooms on any California cross-country drive. Excrement can be many places other than in the toilet. Also, fill up before starting. Don’t count on finding gas stations that are not overcrowded or have all their pumps working—even the ones with national affiliations that look as inviting from the off-ramp as Circe’s smile.

    My favorite is one where all the tiny glass windows at the pumps where the electronic instructions guide you are either broken or scratched out. My second favorite one was where the pump had no hose and no sign saying it had no hose. In California, you often fill up by holding the pump handle down nonstop, given the automatic levers are broken or missing. A state law requires emergency free air and water services for all gas station customers; perhaps because it’s mandatory, the air and water dispensers usually do not work.

    3) Assume “Mad Max” conditions at any time. Contraptions can pose as vehicles in the most regulated vehicle state in the nation (there is a reason why the California DMV is dysfunctional). Cars can still tow each other, 1950s-style, with sagging rope. Expect a piece of lumber or a mattress to go Frisbee on every other trip. Anticipate that a quarter of the drivers have bad brakes, worse tires, and ignore or cannot read signs and posted warnings. The person who passes you at 90 miles per hour likely does not have a license, or registration, or insurance—or, perhaps, any of the three.

  • One reason companies are abandoning California in droves: “A Mountain View tech CEO is beyond frustrated after he says his vehicles have been broken into four times in the past 18 months while parked in the same city lot.” That was from 2019. I doubt it’s gotten any better.
  • 2018: California wants to run the world’s most expensive bullet train, but can’t even run a competent DMV.
  • Chuck DeVore does his own Texas vs. California comparison. “Texas: Less crime, lower taxes and cleaner air.” (HTPT)
  • More from Chuck DeVore on California’s minimum wage hike:

    In April 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage law into effect.

    As a consequence, the minimum wage went from $10 an hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees on January 1, 2017. On January 1 of this year, the minimum wage was hiked again to $11.00 an hour for larger employers and $10.50 for businesses with 25 or fewer employees.

    Federal jobs data for 2018 suggests that California’s rural manufacturing base might be getting hammered by the higher mandated minimum wage.

    Unless a future governor waives the scheduled increases due to economic weakness, the government mandated hourly wage hikes will keep coming—$1 per hour every year—until they reach $15 an hour four years from now for large employers with smaller employers hitting $15 in 2023. After that, future increases are pegged to national consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers.

    Many factors affect regional job creation and wage growth. Availability of suitable labor, energy and land costs, infrastructure, including access to clean water and well-maintained roads, as well as state and local taxes, the regulatory burden and the lawsuit environment. Measured against these factors, California has significant challenges.

    Snip.

    California’s 2017 retail electric prices were 89 percent higher than in its peer competitor, Texas. California’s gasoline prices remain the highest in the contiguous 48 states, at $3.619 per gallon of unleaded, some 26 percent higher than the national average of $2.865.

    California’s once-vaunted water storage and conveyance system has been essentially frozen in time for decades, as the state’s politicians spend billions on environmental programs and studies and precious little on expending and securing California’s water supply.

    California’s highway system, once the envy of the world, has similarly been put at the bottom of the priority list, regularly being ranked at the tail end of national surveys. Further, the state’s union labor agreements and environmental approval maze contribute to the state’s road maintenance costs being almost 40 percent higher than the national average.

    As for state and local taxes, Forbes ranked California as 45th-worst in 2016.

    The U.S. Chamber of Commerce meanwhile rated California as having the 47th-worst lawsuit climate in the nation last year.

    The regulatory burden on small business was studied in a report authorized by the California legislature 10 years ago which found that small businesses faced a complex puzzle of state and local rules that cost about $134,000 per year in compliance costs.

  • “From well-funded pensions to basket case, San Francisco’s voters are to blame.”

    Voters approved retroactive pension increases 10 times between 1996 and 2008, thus leaving the San Francisco Retirement System underfunded and a drain on the operating budget.

    The city and county of San Francisco owes the retirement system a massive $5.8 billion – more than half the city’s entire general-fund budget.

    (Hat Tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • “Californians fed up with housing costs and taxes are fleeing state in big numbers.” “Census Bureau data show California lost just over 138,000 people to domestic migration in the 12 months ended in July 2017.”
  • 2017: “Thanks to the declaration of being a Sanctuary City, San Fran L.A. and other criminal cities have done what is not possible. ICE has announced it is sending hundreds of agents to these cities—that means illegal aliens are now in greater danger of being deported, thanks to the policies of the Democrats. Yup, now the illegal aliens in these cities have a reason to fear deportation—De Leon, Mayors Lee and Garcetti have put a target on their backs.”
  • What life is like on the dirtiest block in San Francisco:

    The heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner.

    It is a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation’s technology industry, where a single span of Hyde Street hosts an open-air narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.

    There are many other streets like it, but by one measure it is the dirtiest block in the city.

    Just a 15-minute walk away are the offices of Twitter and Uber, two companies that along with other nameplate technology giants have helped push the median price of a home in San Francisco well beyond a million dollars.

    Snip.

    According to city statisticians, the 300 block of Hyde Street, a span about the length of a football field in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood, received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other. It is an imperfect measurement — some blocks might be dirtier but have fewer calls — but residents on the 300 block say that they are not surprised by their ranking. The San Francisco bureau photographer, Jim Wilson, and I set out to measure the depth of deprivation on a single block. We returned a number of times, including a 12-hour visit, from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. on a recent weekday. Walking around the neighborhood we saw the desperation of the mentally ill, the drug dependent and homeless, and heard from embittered residents who say it will take much more than a broom to clean up the city, long considered one of the United States’ beacons of urban beauty.

  • San Francisco is now so filthy that “a major medical association is pulling its annual convention out of the city — saying its members no longer feel safe.” From 2018, back when people still had conventions. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • More residents are leaving San Francisco than any other US city. For as expensive as it is to live in San Francisco, it’s just as expensive to leave. The migration’s so intense that U-Hauls are scarce and people are paying thousands in rental fees.” (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore’s twitter feed.)
  • The latest “benefit” of California’s “high speed rail” boondoggle: Longer traffic delays for “blended” traffic that isn’t high speed at all. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • 2019: Amazon adds 600 jobs in Austin.
  • In 2019, the Texas Permian Basin became the world’s largest oil-producing region, pumping out more oil than Saudi oil fields. Who knows if that will change under Biden…

    “If everyone in the middle class is leaving, that’s actually a good thing. We need these spots opened up for the new wave of immigrants to come up. It’s what we do. We export our middle class to the United States. You guys should be thanking us for that,” Singam said to a stunned Carlson.

    Of course, he also says that “Soon enough Texas will be a blue state,” so there’s an unusually high degree of “talking out your ass” going on here… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • It’s not just Tesla: Elon Musk has shifted his SpaceX work from California to Texas as well.

    The SpaceX South Texas launch site, which first broke ground in September 2014, is a rocket production facility, test site, and spaceport located at Boca Chica approximately 20 miles east of Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. The South Texas Launch Site is SpaceX’s fourth active suborbital launch facility, and first private facility.

    By March of last year, SpaceX had over 500 employees working at the Boca Chica site, Ars Technica reported. Four shifts work 24/7 — in 12-hour shifts with four days on and three days off followed by three days on and four off — enabling the continuous manufacturing of his Starship flight rocket with workers and equipment specialized to each task of serial Starship production.

    According to a 2014 Brownsville Economic Development Council report, the facility was projected to generate $85 million worth of economic activity in Brownsville and eventually generate roughly $51 million in annual salaries from new jobs created by 2024.

    Part of this money is coming directly from Musk. Musk tweeted that he is donating $20 million to schools in Cameron County and $10 million to the city of Brownsville for revitalization efforts, both of which are near SpaceX.

    “Please consider moving to Starbase or greater Brownsville/South Padre area in Texas & encourage friends to do so! SpaceX’s hiring needs for engineers, technicians, builders & essential support personnel of all kinds are growing rapidly,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday. “Starbase will grow by several thousand people over the next year or two.”

  • “Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.”

    Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown “complacent” and “entitled” about the state’s world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley’s high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there’s nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglomerations is exceedingly hard, as much art as science. Low taxes, modest regulation, sound infrastructure and good education systems all help, but aren’t always sufficient. Once squandered, moreover, such dynamism can’t easily be revived. With competition rising across the U.S., the area’s policy makers need to recognize the dangers ahead.

    In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance — widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime — it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias — a major tech-industry perk — on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an “Office of Emerging Technology” that will only grant permission to test new products if they’re deemed, in a city bureaucrat’s view, to provide a “net common good.” Whatever the merits of such meddling, it’s hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.

    These two traits — poor governance and animosity toward business — have collided calamitously with respect to the city’s housing market. Even as officials offered tax breaks for tech companies to headquarter themselves downtown, they mostly refused to lift residential height limits, modify zoning rules or allow significant new construction to accommodate the influx of new workers. They then expressed shock that rents and home prices were soaring — and blamed the tech companies. California’s legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state’s biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum. A new privacy law has imposed immense compliance burdens — amounting to as much as 1.8% of state output in 2018 — while conferring almost no consumer benefits. An 8.8% state corporate tax rate and 13.3% top income-tax rate (the nation’s highest) haven’t helped.

  • Haywood, California is very, very upset that ICE officials deported an accused illegal alien child molester.
  • Meet California’s working homeless. Thanks, Democrats!
  • This 2018 piece didn’t anticipate oiur winter storm problems: Texas vs. California on energy policy:

    The third and most ignored reason California doesn’t use much electricity is that their tax and regulatory policies and high costs of doing business have steadily driven out industries that use a lot of energy to manufacture things such as steel and cement.

    There’s irony in this, of course, and it’s this: California’s environmentally-minded leaders like to tout the virtue of their post-industrial policies, but in deindustrializing wide swaths of their economy, they have merely outsourced the energy use—and pollution—to other places and then, to add insult to injury, pay to have it shipped to California in carbon-emitting ships, planes, trains, and trucks.

    In terms of electric production, California is the nation’s biggest importer of electricity. In the past, this meant a lot of coal-fired power from places such as Arizona and Utah.

    But a law passed in 2006 alongside the state’s more famous AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, effectively banned the renewal of power contracts from traditional out-of-state coal-powered generators.

    As a result, “electron laundering” has arisen to fill the gap. This occurs when Californians, in the quest for green electrons to power their grid, pay British Columbians for hydropower, which the Canadians are happy sell, as they backfill their own power needs with coal power from Washington State and Alberta. It works out for everyone: California gets higher-priced power that they can claim is green, while the Canadians get American greenbacks to fund their national health care system.

    To cover their tracks and keep the green mirage intact, California authorities invented a new category of imported power called “Unspecified Sources of Power” that magically provided 9.25% of California’s electric needs last year. Prior to becoming politically incorrect, these power imports were simply labeled “coal.”

    In the meantime, Californians paid an average of 18.41 cents per kilowatt hour for their electricity in July 2018, 67% higher than the national average and more than double the cost of electricity in Texas. In August, California’s rates jumped to 19.08 per kWh, 110% higher than Texas’ rates. In fact, Californians’ July and August electric rates were the highest in the contiguous 48 states.

    Snip.

    In contrast, Texas pursued a market-based electric policy through deregulation. While liberal consumer advocates were quick to claim failure in the first couple of years after the 2002 electric competition law passed as higher prices signaled more producers to enter the market, in the years since, Texans have seen their retail inflation-adjusted electricity prices decline by 32 percent from 2008 to 2017.

  • It’s not just Texas: “California secretly struggles with renewables“:

    California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.

    The new battery array is rated at a storage capacity of 1,200 megawatt hours (MWh); easily eclipsing the record holding 129 MWh Australian system built by Tesla a few years ago. However, California peaks at a whopping 42,000 MW. If that happened on a hot, low wind night this supposedly big battery would keep the lights on for just 1.7 minutes (that’s 103 seconds). This is truly a trivial amount of storage.

    Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh, so they get a magnificent 206 seconds of peak juice. Barely time to find the flashlight, right?

    There is no word on what this trivial giant cost, since PG&E does not own it. That honor goes to an outfit called Vistra that does a lot of different things with electricity and gas. But these complex battery systems are not cheap.

    This one reportedly utilizes more than 4,500 stacked battery racks, each of which contains 22 individual battery modules. That is 99,000 separate modules that have to be made to work well together. Imagine hooking up 99,000 electric cars and you begin to get the picture.

    The US Energy Information Administration reports that grid scale battery systems have averaged around $1.5 million a MWh over100% renewable deception the last few years. At that price this trivial piece of storage cost just under TWO BILLION DOLLARS. At 103 seconds of peak storage that is about $18,000,000 a second. Money for nothing.

    Mind you the PG&E engineers are not that stupid. They know perfectly well that this billion dollar battery is not there to provide backup power when wind and solar do not produce. In fact the truth is just the opposite. The battery’s job is to prevent wind and solar power from crashing the grid when they do produce.

    It is called grid stabilization. Wind and solar are so erratic that it is very hard to maintain the constant 60 cycle AC frequency that all our wonderful electronic devices require. If the frequency gets more than just a tiny bit off the grid blacks out. Preventing these crashes requires active stabilization.

    Grid instability due to erratic wind and solar used to not be a problem, because the huge spinning metal rotors in the coal, gas and nuclear power plant generators simply absorbed the fluctuations. But most of those plants have been shut down, so we need billion dollar batteries to do what those plants did for free. Nor is this monster battery the only one being built in California to try to make wind and solar power work. Many more are in the pipeline and not just in California. Many states are struggling with instability as baseline generators are switched off.

    There is even an insane irony here, one that is perfect for Crazy California. This billion dollar battery occupies the old generator room of a shut down gas fired power plant. Those generators used to make the grid stable. Now we are struggling to do it.

  • “San Francisco: A string of drug stores close after shoplifters strip the shelves bare.”

    The drugstore, which serves many older people who live in the Opera Plaza area, is the seventh Walgreens to close in the city since 2019.

    “All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters, ” said longtime customer Sebastian Luke, who lives a block away and is a frequent customer who has been posting photos of the thefts for months. The other day, Luke photographed a man casually clearing a couple of shelves and placing the goods into a backpack…

    Snip.

    he Walgreens clerks can’t do anything about the theft because the company has a policy preventing them from interfering in shoplifting. Allegedly this is for their safety but I suspect it’s really because if they didn’t have this policy and anyone got hurt, they would be sued.

    And trying to stop this wave of thieves would be like throwing a pebble in a stream. It wouldn’t make any real difference anyway. A theft of less than $950 is a misdemeanor in California and even if the shoplifters get arrested they would likely be back on the streets almost immediately.

  • “Nearly 200 women have signed a letter denouncing a culture of rampant sexual misconduct in and around the state government here in Sacramento.” Remind me again which party controls California’s legislature…
  • Cal State system to drop remedial English classes, even though “nearly 40 percent of freshmen arrive each fall unprepared to do college work in English, math, or both.” Maybe they plan to move to entirely Emoji-based classes…
  • California bill proposes jail time for using the “wrong” pronoun. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Texas places six cities among the top 20 fastest growing in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016. But they’re probably not the ones you’d think: Odessa, Pearland, Brownville and Midland all make the top 10.
  • California employee suing GrubHub for wrongful termination and to be reclassified as an employee rather than an independent contractor, isn’t exactly the ideal plaintiff, admitting he didn’t read the entire employment contract and lied on his application.
  • California invents middle class homelessness, with people forced to live in their cars.
  • California teachers unions push a teacher shortage myth:

    The myth that America suffers a scarcity of teachers is promulgated by the teachers’ unions and their supporters in the education establishment. On the California Teachers Association website, we read that “California will need an additional 100,000 teachers over the next decade.” But this statistic simply means that CTA expects about a 2.8 percent yearly attrition rate, and will need to hire 10,000 teachers per annum over a ten-year period to maintain current staffing levels—more of an actuarial projection than an alarming call for action. (The union adds that California must hire even more teachers to “reduce class size so teachers can devote more time to each student.” The claim that small class size benefits all students—another union promulgated myth—means more teachers, which translates to more dues money for the union.) In reality, California is following the national trend in overstaffing. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, California had 332,640 teachers in 2010. By 2015, there were 352,000. But the student population has been virtually flat, moving from 6.22 million in 2010 to 6.23 million in 2016.

    True, legitimate general shortages exist in some school districts, while other districts may lack teachers in certain areas of expertise, like science and technology. Workers in these fields can earn higher salaries in the private sector; one solution would be to pay experts in these subjects more than other teachers as a way to lure them into teaching. Unfortunately, that’s not possible: throughout much of the country, and certainly in California, salaries are rigorously defined by a teacher union-orchestrated step-and-column pay regimen, which allows no room for flexibility in teacher salaries.

    What’s necessary is to break up the unaccountable Big Government-Big Union education duopoly. More school choice, from privatization to charter schools, could go a long way toward solving the teacher glut. The government-education complex will always try to squeeze more money from the taxpayers, irrespective of student enrollment. Its greed has nothing to do with teacher shortages, small class sizes, educational equity, or any other rationale it can come up with: paramount to the interest of the educational bureaucracy is more jobs for administrators, and more dues money for the unions, which they use to buy and hold sway over school boards and legislators. While there is a surfeit of teachers and administrative staff, clarity and transparency regarding the reality of union control of the schools are scarce indeed.

  • People are fleeing the bay area in droves:

    From Santa Rosa to San Jose, more and more residents are making the bittersweet decision to leave the Bay Area, abandoning its near-perfect weather, booming economy and thriving arts, culture and food scenes in favor of less-glamorous destinations like Austin, Boise and Knoxville.

    Some are fleeing the Bay Area’s sky-high housing and rent prices, both among the most expensive in the nation. Others are cashing out, selling their homes to get more for their money in a less expensive city. Nearly all of them are fed up with miserable, hours-long commutes on snarled freeways.

    More people are leaving the Bay Area than are moving in, according to a 2018 report by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. An average of 42 people left San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties each month in 2016, the most recent year for which data was available. That’s a sharp uptick from the year before, when the region gained an average of 1,962 residents per month.

    Snip.

    The couple will miss the church and community they’re leaving behind. But Pullen and Preuss, who describe themselves as politically moderate, won’t miss the Bay Area’s “super progressive politics.”

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and ‘general lawlessness’:

    Kieran Blubaugh dreamed of living in California when he was growing up in Indiana. He played the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game and envisioned himself skateboarding down San Francisco’s crazy hills.

    After paying off his student loans four years ago, he landed a job with a tech company and moved to San Francisco. At first, life was heavenly. He had a seven-minute commute on his motorcycle. He could pay $30 to see Incubus, one of his favorite bands, a short walk from his apartment.

    Soon, however, his California dream soured. Thieves broke into his locked garage and did $8,000 worth of damage to his motorcycle, doubling his insurance rates. His dog nearly died after eating human feces on the sidewalk. Seeing people either getting arrested or being treated for an overdose outside a nearby building was a regular occurrence.

    “And I live in a nice part of town,” said Blubaugh, 33.

    Not anymore. On Saturday, Blubaugh moved out of the $4,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment he shared on Russian Hill and moved to Dallas, where he will pay $1,300 a month for a place the same size.

    It’s not that he set out to ditch San Francisco for Dallas. “But it was the financially responsible thing to do,” he said.

    Also: “We need more police. There’s a general lawlessness that’s just scary.”

  • 2018: California’s Democratic Party goes hard left: “The rejection of Feinstein reveals the eclipse of the moderate, mainstream Democratic Party, and the rise of Green and identity-oriented politics, appealing to the coastal gentry . It offers little to traditional middle-class Democrats and even less to those further afield, in places like the industrial Midwest or the South.”
  • 2017: “San Diego is awash with ‘fecal matter’ due to lack of public toilets and surging rates of homeless people, health officials warn as they try to control the hepatitis A outbreak.”
  • 2017: Housing costs in San Francisco that “a law firm bought a $3 million plane to fly its people in from Texas” instead of having them live there.
  • 2017: Los Angeles would rather people camp under overpasses than let them live in tiny SRO apartments.
  • Everybody wants to leave California: “The taxes are higher here, the services are worse, educations worse, the roads are poor. You go to Texas – they have no personal income tax, they have great roads, they have a free government encouraging innovation.”
  • LA County spend billions on homelessness. Result? More homeless. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • It probably doesn’t help that they’ve made sleeping in your car illegal.
  • 2017: “Security robots are being used to ward off San Francisco’s homeless population.”
  • 2018: “Cost for California bullet train system rises to $77.3 billion.” Also this: “The rail authority also said the earliest trains could operate on a partial system between San Francisco and Bakersfield would be 2029 — four years later than the previous projection. The full system would not begin operating until 2033.”
  • At some point I stopped collecting links for the doomed high speed rail project, but guess what? It still clings to undead life:

    California’s bullet train has become a nearly forgotten source of trouble, eclipsed in the public eye by Covid-19, a gubernatorial recall, and out-migration from the Golden State. But it’s still out there, sucking up time and money, and as empty as it ever was.

    The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020. Instead, the project is moving at the speed of the museum piece it sometimes appears destined to be. Not a single train has run, with train testing still six to seven years away, amid seemingly never-ending delays.

    The news regarding the project is, as usual, dismal. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January, Ghassan Ariqat, vice president of operations at bullet-train contractor Tutor Perini, sent a “scorching” letter to California officials criticizing persistent construction delays, “contradicting state claims that the line’s construction pace is on target,” and warning that the project could miss “a key 2022 federal deadline.” “It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after [official approval to start construction], the authority has not obtained all of the right of way,” Ariqat wrote. Because of the sluggish construction pace, he added, his company “will have to lay off a significant number of its field workers in the very near future” after already letting 73 walk.

    Ariqat has good reason to be agitated. If there’s been a more poorly run public works project in California history, nobody can remember it. Two years ago, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan think tank, called California’s high-speed rail an outright “failure” that has “suffered from at least seven identifiable ‘worst practices,’” causing it “to be indefinitely delayed.”

  • San Francisco wants to ban corporate cafeterias to force people to eat at local restaurants. Because who doesn’t want to be forced to walk San Francisco’s scenic, feces-festooned streets to eat lunch?
  • “California Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-San Fernando). The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ Bold PAC since 2014, who took fundraising from $1 million to $6 million in just one year, is accused of drugging and molesting a 16-year-old girl in 2007.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Evidently the lawsuit was dropped in 2019.
  • The USC Medical School Dean who was also a drug addict.
  • “California DMV worker fell asleep at desk for nearly 4 years.” (Hat tip: Andy Wendt’s twitter feed.)
  • More California Flu Manchu craziness: “Los Angeles bans televisions in restaurants because that’s something they can do apparently.”
  • 2019: Mitsubishi moves North American headquarters from California to Tennessee.
  • “Maryland Firm Relocates Headquarters To Round Rock.”

    The Round Rock Chamber announced Friday that Ametrine, Inc. has selected Round Rock as the company’s new U.S. headquarters in a move that will create some 140 good-paying jobs.

    Founded in 2011, Ametrine is a manufacturer of unique, advanced multispectral camouflage systems with its current headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. Ametrine produces patented nano-technology materials and is consistently awarded research and development projects through the U.S. Department of Defense.

    “We started the search for our new U.S. headquarters almost a year ago,” Ametrine CEO Brandon Cates said in a prepared statement. “We compared thirteen cities in five states using twelve evaluation criteria and came to the conclusion that Round Rock would be the best fit for the future of our business. Round Rock has been very forward-thinking when it comes to supporting the defense industry, and we anticipate future collaboration with the city, the chamber, and the other innovative companies that Round Rock attracts.”

    (Hat tip: Rep. John Carter on Twitter.)

  • NBA 2K maker planning Austin studio after acquisition. Visual Concepts said it will bring hundreds of jobs after acquiring Austin-based software design and gaming applications studio, HookBang.”
  • Three tweets on Californians moving away from their mess of a state:

  • A tour of senic Oakland:

  • Can even California officials learn from experience? “Los Angeles County ups police funding by $36 million after rise in crime.” (Hat tip: StillGray.)
  • Hopefully the next update will be a little more timely…

    LinkSwarm for March 6, 2020

    Friday, March 6th, 2020

    Been a hell of a week. Monday’s Clown Car update will be yuuuuuuuugggggeeeeee! Also remember that the horror begins anew this weekend.

  • Trump Administration: Sanctuary city? No federal funds for you!
  • Democrats lie about coronavirus budget cuts.
  • How tranny pandering damaged the Labour Party:

    “Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy have backed a 12-point plan put forward by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights group that calls for sex-based rights campaigners to be expelled from Labour. Angela Rayner and Dawn Butler, who are in the running for deputy leader, also backed the group’s pledges. The trans rights group is calling for long debated changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow people to formally self identify as the opposite sex without paying for a certificate or demonstrating that they have accessed transitioning services. It also vows to ‘organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance, and other trans exclusionist hate groups.’”

    People were then asked whether they agreed with the pledge. Then they also answered the question about how likely they were to vote Labour.

    The results show that being exposed to even this small snippet of news about the pledge seems to reduce support for Labour. As figure one reveals, the share of survey respondents who said they would likely vote Labour was 42.6 percent among those who read nothing and just 32.7 percent among those who read the paragraph about the Labour trans pledge.

    One reason for the drop was the limited popularity of the trans pledge among many survey respondents. For instance, less than a third of this mainly left-leaning sample who read about the pledge agreed with it. Among Labour voters, agreement rose to 40 percent, with 18 percent opposed and the rest undecided. However, Green, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party (SNP) voters split fairly evenly between opposing and supporting the pledge, with many undecided.

    It seems that most opposed the pledge or were undecided. Among the 40 people who agreed with the pledge, 70 percent said they planned to vote Labour. Among the 99 who either disagreed or were unsure about the pledge, just 20 percent planned to do so.

  • Democrats behaving badly: “Hawaii councilman led meth-trafficking ring, conspired with Samoan gang ‘shot caller,’ investigators allege.”

    A Hawaii councilman pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges accusing him of leading a methamphetamine-trafficking ring, supplying weapons and conspiring with a gang leader while serving as an elected official, investigators said.

    Arthur Brun, 48, operated the major drug-trafficking conspiracy involving 11 other defendants since at least June 2019, while serving as an elected member of the Kauai County Council and vice chairman of its Public Safety and Human Services Committee, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged in a news release.

    Also, another case of “name that party,” since Brun is a Democrat.

  • There are two middle classes: the yeomanry and the clerisy:

    First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.

    Snip.

    The yeomanry’s distress can be seen in everything from falling rates of business formation as well as declining homeownership, particularly among the young, most notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Even in the United States, a country that never experienced feudalism, the proportion of land owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017.

    Land ownership in Europe is also increasingly concentrated in smaller hands; in Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is increasingly concentrated while urban real estate has fallen into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy.

    Growing corporate concentration, in both the US and Europe, has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy. In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture is being supplanted by a gargantua of giant firms that have achieved market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 – 90 percent of their key niches like search, social media, cellular, and computer operating systems. One online publisher uses a Star Trek analogy to describe his firm’s status with Google: “It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.”

    The decline of the yeomanry threatens the future of democracy as we have known it. Faced with growing assaults on their businesses, and in some cases, their communities, they have begun to fight back against many of the policies, notably climate policy, that are widely supported by the oligarchs and the clerisy. A policy to force the rapid replacement of fossil fuels with heavily subsidized renewables requires the development of the kind of largely unaccountable bureaucracies that both employ and empower the clerisy while providing the oligarchs both in the US and Europe with a unique opportunity to cash in on energy “transitions.”

    In contrast, for large parts of the yeomanry, a call for a rapid, radical shift towards renewables imposes much higher energy prices. It also threatens to diminish industries in which many of them work and undercut the sustenance to the Main Street merchants in smaller cities and the countryside. Already attempts to impose such policies have led to yeoman rebellions in a number of countries.

  • Math is hard:

  • It’s indicative of a bigger problem:

    This, right here, is why so many left-leaning Americans think that “the billionaires” can pay for everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren was enthusiastically boosted by the media despite her ridiculous pretense that she could pay for a series of gargantuan initiatives without raising taxes on anyone but the extremely rich. It’s why Democrat after Democrat promises not to raise “middle class taxes” while promising programs that require the raising of middle class taxes. How did this bad tweet make it onto TV to be endorsed? Why did Mara Gay agree with it? Why didn’t Brian Williams notice? Because the people involved in this clip thought it was true. This is how they see the world.

    But it’s not true. Not even close. Forget the million for a moment and make it Andrew Yang’s thousand instead. Would that be possible? Nope! If Michael Bloomberg were to try to achieve what Andrew Yang promised ($1,000 per American per month, forever), he would be able to give every American about $183 in the first month before he’d have $0 left. To make it through a single month, he would have to be five times richer than he is. And, after that single month, even at five times his current wealth, his fortune would be completely and permanently depleted. Elizabeth Warren’s unconstitutional wealth tax topped out at six percent. Filter Bloomberg’s money through that tax and you get $11 per American per year.

    There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If Americans want expanded services — or a monthly stipend — they are going to have to pay for them themselves. There is no billionaire out there who can do it for them.

  • Iran is cheating on its nuclear commitments again. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • America doesn’t need more foreign workers.

    Are we so “desperate” for more bodies to “fuel economic growth?” Let’s recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn’t include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign “students” now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.

    “We” ordinary Americans don’t need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They’ve been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation’s Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.

    I don’t agree 100%; I think it behooves us to get the very best in some fields, people with PhDs in science and technology, and masters of various arts. But that’s a far cry from “Hey, my cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint. Let’s write an H1B rec so we can get him over here.”

  • Billionaire Republican buys major Twitter stake, may oust CEO amid GOP concerns of bias.”

    A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a “sizable” stake in Twitter and “plans to push” to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.

    Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, Bloomberg News reported, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn’t have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter’s struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.

    Singer, who opposed President Trump’s campaign in 2016, has since changed his tune, raising the prospect that some of the changes to Twitter could make the platform a friendlier place for pro-Trump users. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Singer donated $24 million to Republican and right-leaning groups in the 2016 election.

  • Defense contractor accused of passing classified human intelligence information to a Hezbollah-connected lover. “Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, formerly of Rochester, Minn., was arrested by FBI agents on Feb. 27.” Other reports have noted she herself was born in Lebanon. Who gave a foreign born contractor Top Secret clearance?
  • Fourteen Coronavirus cases in Texas, but only three in the wild (all in the greater Houston area), the rest evacuees in quarantine.
  • Heh:

  • Kinda news: Joyriding in a stolen car. Kicking it up a notch: Adler joyriding in a stolen police car.
  • Heh 2.
  • Dwight wanted this in the clown car, but since John “Whale Farker” McAfee isn’t a Democrat, I’m including it here:

    Thew only problem is that once you install McAfee as your running mate, he slows your campaign down by 90%…

  • Come as you are:

  • LinkSwarm for November 8, 2019

    Friday, November 8th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Trump is derailing the elite’s gravy train:

    Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.

    What happens then?

    What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.

    The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.

  • So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:

    If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.

    Snip.

    For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”

    In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.

  • Full State Department review of Hillary Clinton’s emails show nearly 600 security violations.
  • Former Virginia democratic governor forgives current Virginia democratic governor for wearing blackface. “We’ve moved on,” says former Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe. As Stephen Green says, “it’s easy to move on when your side can’t be held accountable.”
  • President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
  • Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.

    As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.

    (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)

  • The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
  • “Maryland Officials Drop Sanctuary Policy After Illegal Alien Sex Crimes.”
  • Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
  • Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Comedians Taking Sides In The Woke Wars.”

    A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.

    “No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.

    “Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.

    “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’

  • Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
  • Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?

    The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.

    Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.

  • “Federal agents raided a Long Island tech firm early Thursday and arrested its top executives amid concerns the company was selling Chinese-made equipment to the U.S. military while claiming it had been manufactured in the United States. According to federal prosecutors, Aventura Technologies of Commack has been running the alleged scheme since 2006, selling equipment with “known cybersecurity vulnerability” to government and other customers.”
  • MSM amnesia:

  • Out-of-state Justice Democrats money props up Texas candidate:

    Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.

    Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.

  • “Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
  • Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman tried to illegally transmit voting information over the Internet. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • Disruptive Democrats crushed in The Woodlands.
  • Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
  • Samsung lays off it’s entire Austin design team. I used to work in the building where it was housed, a few jobs ago…
  • Rudy Boesch, decorated Navy SEAL. He was also evidently on some reality TV show.
  • America: Hey Berlin, you want a statue of Ronald Reagan? You know, “tear down this wall” and all of that? Berlin: Nein. America: Too bad.
  • Another day, another fake hate crim—wait, a real one? Oh, against a Catholic Church. In New York City. Now I get it.
  • “Fringe Conspiracy Theorist Believes Epstein Just Killed Himself.”