(Beijing, China) Today Google announced they were releasing a new application developed for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Dubbed “Room 101,” the new software not only tracks the “social credit rating” of all citizens, but also records all attempts to break government laws, as well as all relevant information for enhancing state security interrogations of subversives.
“While completing Project Dragonfly, we became aware that there were other Chinese state security needs we could be filing,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “That’s when we started work on Room 101.”
“Before, MSS officers had to rely on cumbersome file folders for surveillance of Chinese subjects scattered throughout regional offices. We’re bringing all that information to their fingertips!”
Among the information Room 101 tracks for every subject:
Their day-to-day commuting travels schedule, and where police might most easily pick them up
Attempts to evade the Great Firewall of China
Any subversive information found on their PCs or phones
Membership in Falun Gong or human rights organizations
Homosexual tendencies or activities
Forbidden religious affiliations (especially Christian, Muslim, or “unapproved” Buddhist sects)
Their greatest fears and phobias
Which subjects might be most susceptible to public shaming campaigns
Which of their relatives might be most effectively interrogated to elicit information from, or to force the subject’s compliance
Which body parts they are most in fear of losing.
There are also modules for leading modules for self-criticism sessions, pain tracking, and a variety of prefilled forms for subjects to confess their sins against the Communist Party.
Pichai indicated that an initial trial on Google’s own personnel showed great promise at tracking and eliminating wrongthink.
Pichai said he looked forward to rolling out modified versions of Room 101 to other countries.
“If you want to know the future, imagine Google tracking every thought of every person on earth, forever.”
Trumpism is now the unregretted tattoo that altered the Republican coalition, making it edgier, more rugged, and more relentless in pursuing its policy objectives.
Confronted with a liberal self-styled “resistance” movement—whose very name reeks of the virtue-signaling that galls the right—Trump responded in kind. Left-wingers march in the streets and chase prominent conservatives out of restaurants; he bows his back and marches Kavanaugh onto the bench for a lifetime. Liberals feel better for a weekend; pragmatic conservatives get to feel vindicated for decades. Good trade.
Trump not only refused to rescind Kavanaugh’s nomination when the confirmation process got rocky—as both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had done with flagging nominees—he barnstormed the country and held campaign rallies in jam-packed basketball arenas rallying his coalition behind Kavanaugh. After playing nice for a handful of surprisingly diplomatic days, enabling a judiciary committee hearing to fairly hear the allegations against Kavanaugh, Trump retrieved his megaphone from its holster and unleashed on the judge’s liberal Senate and media antagonists.
Conservatives who may have been privately uncertain on how to proceed in the face of the allegations found the light in the flames of Trump’s heat. The consensus on the right became clear: this was not a competition of memories between two middle-aged professionals who grew up privileged at boozy teen parties in suburban Maryland. By last Saturday’s confirmation vote, this episode was not even predominantly about Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford; it was a tectonic struggle between the voters’ chosen Republican government and the ruthless Democratic minority seeking to topple it by any means necessary.
Jay Cost, by way of Alexander Hamilton, explains why America won’t have a another civil war: “To put matters bluntly, we do not have to like one another, so long as we continue to make money off one another.” To which I would add: Only left-wing loudmouths on Twitter are really trying to provoke a civil war. Average people rarely mention the things that rage huge on the Internet in their day-to-day lives…
Rand Paul says media hid key detail about Democratic terrorist James Hodgkinson: "When he came on the field with a semi-automatic weapon firing probably close to 200 shots at us, shooting five people and almost killing Steve Scalise, he was yelling 'this is for healthcare!" pic.twitter.com/E9VQ8EDpHs
“Border agents in Texas arrested three sex offenders in two days, one of whom had been jailed in Dallas. All three men have been previously convicted of offenses involving a minor, according to officials with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.” (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abbott’s twitter feed.)
Least anyone think I’m reflexively pro-Trump, his idea to increase the amount of Ethanol in gasoline is an astonishingly bad idea for numerous reasons. And get ready for it to start destroying your lawnmower engines…
Around 150 gang members were arrested or validated with affiliations to the Simon City Royals, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, Vice Lords, and the Aryan Brotherhood.
Over 200 registered sex offenders living within the Northern District of Mississippi were checked for compliance in regards to sex offender registration requirements. Around 150 home visits were conducted on high- to moderate-risk offenders on probation with the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the United States Probation Service.
Overall, 255 violent offenders were picked up during Operation Triple Beam. They were wanted on charges including homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, illegal gun crimes, narcotics possession and distribution, robbery, arson, and sex offender registration violations.
Following a nine-day trial, a district court judge has voided the results of the City of Mission mayoral election after finding the winning campaign engaged in a conspiracy to bribe voters and harvest mail-in ballots.
Norberto “Beto” Salinas, the former mayor of Mission of 20 years, filed a lawsuit against current mayor Armando “Doc” O’Caña after several witnesses claimed bribery, mail-in ballot harvesting, and illegal voting during the June 9 runoff election. On Friday, 93rd District Court visiting Judge J. Bonner Dorsey agreed with Salinas and voided the results of the election. “I cannot ascertain the true outcome of the election,” Dorsey said.
Salinas’ camp had to prove 157 votes were illegally cast, the number the candidate lost by in the election. Dorsey ruled, “I hold or find, by clear and convincing evidence, that the number of illegal votes was in excess of 158.”
First, it conceded in August by removing U.S. oil imports from a list of possible duties. Two months earlier, China – perhaps trying to either intimate U.S. oil producers (who have been largely supportive of Trump’s policies thus far) who would in turn pressure President Trump, or either by pressuring Trump directly, indicated it would levy a 25 percent duty on U.S. oil imports.
Second, since China is the largest buyer of American crude, Beijing likely discarded one of its strongest bargaining chips in the trade war so far. Some reports claim that U.S. oil imports to China are worth $8 billion all by themselves, so erasing oil from the tariff list reduced the value of sanctioned goods by roughly one-third.
As far as Beijing’s LNG tariff threats are concerned, the reduction from an earlier 25 percent duty to 10 percent could also be considered another blink on China’s part. Beijing, though it does have a host of other gas and LNG suppliers, at the end of the day still needs American LNG as the country continues to pivot away from dirtier burning coal needed for power production in favor of cleaning burning natural gas. By 2020, per government mandate, gas is earmarked to make up at least 10 percent of China’s energy mix, with further earmarks by 2030.
NFL running back legend Jim Brown comes out against NFL players taking a knee:
Jim Brown speaks to media outside White House: "I don't think that we should take knees in protest instead of be standing up for our flag." pic.twitter.com/sZDTsfyinp
Cost for male student to defend himself from charges of sexual assault even though the girl admitted the sex was mutual: $12,000. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)
My son was born in 2002. I didn’t have an office job, so I was around a lot to get high and enjoy the cartoons. I opened a packet of Reefer’s peanut butter cups at his preschool fund-raiser and stunk up the place. But pot wasn’t just an occasional funny thing for me to do on weekends. I got stoned the day my son came home from the hospital and stayed that way, with few breaks, for a decade and a half. Of course I put him in danger because I couldn’t stop getting high. I was a drug addict.
Snip.
In March of 2017, my mother died. The hour before she passed, I was outside the hospital, getting a shipment of medical gummies from a friend. I was high when I watched her die, I was high at her funeral, and I was high every day for the next eight months. To say I was “self-medicating” to deal with grief would be too kind. My addicted self took grief as a no-limits license to get stoned.
Leftist befuddled by how black men can join “white nationalist” groups like Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Here’s a hint, dumbasses: They’re not white nationalist groups.
Social Justice Warriors attempt to slip their usual political bullshit into open source licensing terms and get smacked down hard. “Less than 24 hours after I posted this, the license change was revoked and its committer expelled from the project.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
#Gamergate Social Justice Warrior lunatic “Brianna Wu” lost her a bid for Massachusetts’ 8th U.S. congressional district by 49 points.
Theranos, the biotech company fraud built, is shutting down. Now all that remains is for Elizabeth Holmes to go to federal prison on pending wire fraud charges.
Principles of the Resistance: 1) When we get back in power there will be a purge and a blacklist and we will destroy the lives of anyone who in any way supported Trump! 2) We need to stop our nation's alarming drift into tribalism. https://t.co/3ktfRKP80S
The only thing surprising about this story is that it didn’t happen two years ago.
Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez said in a live broadcast Saturday that several dronelike devices armed with explosives detonated near Maduro during his appearance at a military event, according to AP.
It quoted Rodriguez as saying Maduro was safe and unharmed. According to Reuters, seven National Guard soldiers were hurt.
Just think how much better off Venezuela might be if someone had taken out Maduro before he admitted socialism was a failure, or even before people started eating their dogs and children started dying because his socialist paradise can’t afford antibiotics?
Here’s footage of the attack. You can’t see the drone attack itself, but you can see reactions to it and people running from it.
It’s actually surprising we haven’t seen more drone assassination attempts. The technology is mature and the strike can be carried out from several blocks away, even out of line-of-sight with an onboard video camera. Get a medium-sized quadcopter, pack it full of Semtex and roofing nails, and detonate a few feet from your target.
Not only have we been using Predator drones since 1994, the Predator has actually been retired in favor of the much larger and faster MQ-9A Reaper…
I’m hoping that this week is Peak Busy for me. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Rasmussen: “Today’s [President Donald Trump] approval ratings among black voters: 29% This time last year: 15%.” Overall Trump approval rating at 50%.
Related: “President Donald Trump was lauded by inner-city pastors, including one who said he may go down as the ‘most pro-black president’ in recent history, during a White House roundtable on Wednesday that was focused on efforts to reform the prison system.” (Hat tip: Da Tech Guy via The Other McCain.)
At long last, the Trump administration has created a “freedom option” for people suffering under Obamacare. A final rulemaking issued Wednesday reverses an Obama-era regulation that exposed the sick to medical underwriting. The new rule will expand consumer protections for the sick, cover up to two million uninsured people, reduce premiums for millions more, protect conscience rights, and make Obamacare’s costs more transparent. And unlike President Barack Obama’s implementation of his signature healthcare legislation, it works within the confines of the law.
Federal law exempts “short-term, limited duration” health insurance from having to carry the unwanted coverage and hidden taxes Obamacare requires. Many consumers have understandably taken refuge from soaring Obamacare premiums in short-term plans.
Hoping to force those consumers into Obamacare plans, the Obama administration sabotaged short-term plans by stripping them of crucial consumer protections. It cut the maximum plan term from 12 months to three months, and forbade issuers from offering “renewal guarantees” that allow the sick to continue purchasing short-term policies at healthy-person rates. State insurance regulators protested that these restrictions literally stripped sick patients of their coverage.
Wednesday’s rule reinstates and even expands the consumer protections Obama curtailed. It allows short-term plans to last 12 months, and allows insurers to offer them with renewal guarantees.
You read that right. Democrats curtailed consumer protections; Republicans are expanding them.
Is the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, a racist?
From one perspective — that commonly held by people outside the confines of the political left — she obviously is. A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color. If that sounds harsh, let’s review a few, shall we? “White men are bullshit,” is one. A succinct vent, at least. But notice she’s not in any way attacking specific white men for some particular failing, just all white men for, well, existing. Or this series of ruminations: “have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation. there’s literally nothing. like skiing, maybe, and also golf. white people aren’t even allowed to have polo. did you know that. like don’t you just feel bad? why can’t we give white people a break. lacrosse isn’t for white people either. it must be so boring to be white.” Or this: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” I can’t say I’m offended by this — it’s even mildly amusing, if a little bonkers. (Has she read, say, any Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson?) But it does reveal a worldview in which white people — all of them — are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.
A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” One simple rule I have about describing groups of human beings is that I try not to use a term that equates them with animals. Jeong apparently has no problem doing so. Speaking of animals, here’s another gem: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!
Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word “white” with any other racial group. #cancelblackpeople probably wouldn’t fly at the New York Times, would it? Or imagine someone tweeting that Jews were only “fit to live underground like groveling goblins” or that she enjoyed “being cruel to old Latina women,” and then being welcomed and celebrated by a liberal newsroom. Not exactly in the cards.
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro admits that socialism doesn’t work. Just think how much pain could be avoided if he had admitted this before people had to eat their dogs…
Mistaken police call for an active shooter at a McAllen mall turns out to be an illegal alien robbery gang. Result? Seven illegal alien criminal suspects arrested.
Sheldon Silver Sentenced: Seven in Sing Sing. (Actually, it’s not clear the former New York Assembly speaker will be serving his sentence in Sing Sing, but we can only hope, for the sake of the alliteration…)
China cracks down on illegal coffins. Which is to say, any coffins, since cremation is now mandated. Including seizing and destroying coffins old people have spent their entire lives saving for.
When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York in 2014, things changed drastically. I started to hear rumblings early on. My former colleagues who were dedicated public servants were concerned by a large-scale rollback of Bloomberg’s strategic initiatives. These seemed to be based on partisan politics and black-and-white thinking as opposed to critical analysis. It was very disappointing for me since I had also voted for de Blasio.
Although I was still working in the same social-services agency where I had remained at the end of Bloomberg’s term, my job changed radically. I had no contact with the new commissioner who appeared to be disengaged from substantive discussions about social-services programs for an extremely vulnerable population. In fact, she was much more preoccupied with renovating her office — I heard her new desk alone cost thousands of dollars. She even requested that a private bathroom be built for her. She had the attitude of an oligarch and was disturbed that she had to vet invitations to galas through legal and City Hall. She wanted carte blanche to attend expensive events.
She also refused to meet with the lawyers in her department and she kept the door to her office closed and didn’t know the names of the people who worked in her agency.
Under my commissioner, there were no benchmarks, no goals and she did not hold regular meetings with her general counsel. Under her tenure, the legal unit was gutted. And there were no consequences for failing to meet performance goals because there were no performance goals.
Comics video blogger Jeremy Hambly attacked at GenCon. “The Quartering also provided another update claiming five eyewitness have identified the attacker as Matt Loter, the owner of Elm City Games.” GenCon promptly expelled Loter. Ha! Just kidding!
GenCon is blocking and muting and banning people who talk about @TheQuartering’s assault on their official channels and social media accounts.
It’s almost as if they want to make people angry by censoring all conversation about the topic.
“Millennial Drops Support For Socialism After Learning How Hard It Is To Get Avocado Toast In Venezuela.” The Babylon Bee has just been tearing it up recently. I probably need to add them to the blog roll.
Job interviews and book-related work have taken up the majority of my waking hours this week. Also, The Burning Time has fully arrived here in central Texas. It’s supposed to hit 108° on Monday…
There are plenty of risks with President Donald Trump’s trade strategy in China, but China faces risks of its own:
The smartest short-term decision Beijing can make is simply to absorb the next round of blows and hold its punches. For instance, if Washington moves ahead to impose 25% tariffs on $16 billion of Chinese imports, Beijing would withhold fire, in the hope of enticing Washington into a ceasefire, which in turn could create an opportunity to negotiate a face-saving way to avoid further and much more costly escalations.
The most compelling rationale behind this strategy of quick capitulation is to protect China’s centrality in the global manufacturing supply chain. About 43% of Chinese merchandise trade in 2017 (totaling $4.3 trillion) is, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, “processing trade” (which involves importing intermediate goods and assembling the products in China). What China gains from processing trade is the utilization of its low-cost labor force, factories, and some technological spillover. Processing trade generates low value-added and profitability. For example, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones in China, had an operating margin of only 5.8% last year.
One of the greatest risks China faces in a prolonged trade war with the U.S. is the loss of its processing trade. Even a modest increase in American tariffs can make it uneconomical to base processing in China. Should the U.S.-China trade war escalate, many foreign companies manufacturing in China would be forced to relocate their supply chains. China could face the loss of millions of jobs, tens of thousands of shuttered factories, and a key driver of growth.
However, capitulating to a “trade bully,” as the Chinese media calls Trump, is hard for Xi, a strongman in his own right. Worse still, it is unclear what Trump wants or how China can appease him. The terms his negotiators presented to Beijing in early May were so harsh that it is inconceivable that Xi could accept them without being seen as selling out China.
Even if the trade war with the U.S. could be de-escalated with Chinese concessions, Beijing faces another painful decision. The trade war in general, and in particular the forced shutdown of the Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE after Washington banned the company from using American-made parts have highlighted China’s strategic vulnerability from its economic interdependence with the U.S. Before the two countries became geopolitical adversaries, economic interdependence was a valuable asset for China. It could take advantage of this relationship to build up its strength while the mutual economic benefits cushioned their geopolitical conflict.
But with the overall U.S.-China relationship turning adversarial, economic interdependence is not only hard to sustain (as shown by the trade war), but also is rapidly becoming a serious strategic liability. As the economically-weaker party, China is particularly affected. In the technological arena, China now finds itself at the mercy of Washington in terms of access to vital parts (such as semiconductors) and critical technologies (operating systems such as Android and Windows). Should the U.S. decide to cut off Chinese access for whatever reason, a wide swathe of Chinese economy could face disruption.
China’s somewhat vulnerable on semiconductors, but it’s severely vulnerable on semiconductor equipment.
Democratic U.S. House candidate and socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “We need to occupy every airport.” Yeah. I can’t possibly see that backfiring. Sayeth Powerline’s John Hindraker:
Yes, please! Please go straight to LaGuardia and shut it down. But don’t stop there! “Every airport” needs to be occupied and shut down by Democrats. Between now and the midterm elections, Democrats should do all they can to make air travel inconvenient, and preferably impossible.
This actually happened not too long ago, in the fall of 2001. Ocasio-Cortez may be too young to remember it clearly, but all of America’s airports were closed for a few days as a result of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Ocasio-Cortez is more ambitious, of course. She doesn’t just want to shut down “every airport” for a few days, she wants to make it long-term. Terrific, I say! Led by Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party could be as popular as al Qaeda by November.
Congress breaks record confirming trump picks. Also, check out this from Sen. Dianna Feinstein (D-CA): Oldham’s record “could not be more extreme and overtly political.” Really? Did he order kittens to be slaughtered in his chamber so he could bath in their blood while invoking Satan? No? In that case, I’d say he his a lot of headroom on the “more extreme” front… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The most difficult times I faced during my years with the LAPD were during the years Bernard Parks served as its chief. Parks, in an overreaction to the Rampart scandal (which, though a genuine scandal, was confined to a handful of officers at a single police station), had disbanded the LAPD’s gang units and instituted a disciplinary system that placed a penalty on proactive police work. It was under Chief Parks that I attended a supervisors’ meeting after a week in which my patrol division had seen four murders and a wave of lesser crimes. Despite these grim statistics, not a single word at this meeting touched on the subject of crime. What did we talk about? Citizen complaints. And even at that we didn’t discuss them in terms of the corrosive effect they were having on officer morale. Instead, we talked about the processing of the paperwork and the minutia of formatting the reports. Fighting crime, it seemed, had taken a back seat to dealing with citizen complaints, even the most frivolous of which required hours and hours of a supervisor’s time to investigate and complete the required reports.
As one might have expected, officers reacted to these disincentives by practicing “drive-and-wave” policing. Yes, they responded to radio calls as ever, but it became all but impossible to coax them out of their cars to investigate suspicious activity when they came upon it. As one might also have expected, the crime numbers reflected this change in police attitudes. Violent crime, which had been falling for seven years, began to increase and continued to increase until Bernard Parks was let go and replaced by William Bratton.
Which brings us back to Baltimore, where, USA Today informs us, 342 people were murdered in 2017, bringing its murder rate to an all-time high and making it the deadliest large city in America. (Baltimore’s population last year was about 611,000. In Los Angeles, by comparison, with a population of about 3.8 million, there were 293 murders last year.)
The Baltimore crime wave can be traced, almost to the very day in April 2015, that Freddie Gray, a small-time drug dealer and petty criminal, died in police custody. When Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made the ill-considered decision to charge six officers in Gray’s death, she sent a clear message to the rest of the city’s police officers: concerns about crime and disorder will be subordinated to the quest for social justice.
As was the case in Los Angeles years ago, the result was entirely predictable. Officers disengaged from proactive police work, minimizing their risk of being the next cop to be seated in the defendant’s chair in some Marilyn Mosby show trial. The prevailing thought among Baltimore’s cops was something like this: They can make me come to work, they can make me handle my calls and take my reports, but they can’t make me chase the next hoodlum with a gun I come across, because if I chase him I might catch him, and if I catch him I might have to hit him or, heaven forbid, shoot him. And if that happens and Marilyn Mosby comes to the opinion that I transgressed in any way . . . well, forget it. Let the bodies fall where they may, and I’ll be happy to put up the crime-scene tape and wait for the detectives and the coroner to show up.
Andrew Cuomo fundraising tidbits. Cuomo has $31.1 million cash on hand and spent more on TV advertising ($1.5 million) than Cynthia Nixon has raised in total. Bonuses: Low-level shenanigans (one guy gave 69 donations totally $77) and Winklevoss twins!
Defeated Republican state representative Jason Villalba calls for President Trump’s impeachment. Thanks for reminding Republican primary voters, yet again, why they dumped you for Lisa Luby Ryan.
“Kicking, screaming, biting Kansas councilwoman finally taken down with Taser, arrested.” Bonus 1: She later bite a deputy’s thumb so hard she broke a bone. Bonus 2: She was elected to the Huron (population: 73) city council with a grand total of 2 votes.
Saw this and thought it was well worth highlighting:
Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway. https://t.co/un9YfjmSGQ
When those Axe Body Spray commercials first appeared, I thought “Who would be dumb enough to fall for that?” And the answer, of course, was “Men too young and naive to realize the blatant con job.” Same thing with young people and socialism. They don’t know enough about the world to know any better.
Though women tell me that Axe Body Spray is one of the most effective contraceptives of all time…
Violence escalated in Nicaragua as a nationwide strike demanding that corrupt, brutal communist scumbag Daniel Ortega resign triggered a violent crackdown by pro-Sandinista paramilitary groups.
The clashes between forces that support President Daniel Ortega and demonstrators calling for his resignation mark the deadliest protests in Nicaragua since its civil war ended in 1990.
At the Divine Mercy Catholic Church in Managua, at least three people were injured, according to a post on Twitter by Paulo Abrao, an official with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
One of the injured has been shot through the leg, a Washington Post reporter at the church posted on Twitter, and along with others was allowed out by police and met by waiting ambulances.
It was unclear how many people remained trapped in the church where earlier in the evening gun shots prevented those inside from leaving.
At the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, also in the capital, some students barricaded themselves on the campus earlier in the day as paramilitary groups that support Ortega shot at the building from outside, according to media reports.
It was not clear how many people had been injured at the university.
Nicaragua has been convulsed by unrest since April when its leftist president proposed reducing pension benefits to cover a social security shortfall. The plan, later dropped, provoked deadly demonstrations and led to demands for Ortega’s resignation and early elections.
A nation-wide strike emptied streets on Friday as businesses shut their doors, heeding the call of civil society groups that have demanded Ortega’s resignation after more than three months of bloody civil unrest.
The general strike followed mass protests that fanned out across the Central American nation on Thursday.
Nicaragua has been trending this way for a while. The Trump Administration has called for Ortega and his family to step down:
U.S. Ambassador Michael Kozak, of the State Department’s bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Thursday that demonstrators have even been blocked from getting treatment for their injuries and government-run hospitals have reportedly required families to sign certificates that falsified the cause of deaths as a condition of retrieving relatives’ bodies.
Kozak and other administration officials told Congress that the only way to address the ongoing crisis in Nicaragua is with new elections that would allow the Nicaraguan people to pick new leadership.
“Nobody is going to be able to reconcile with the regime in power,” Kozak testified. “It’s really important for them to get out of the way and let the country make a future for itself. It’s how do you make that happen mechanically. How do you put enough pressure on the family basically to make that choice and get out of the way.”
More than 250 people have been killed since daily peaceful protests in April turned into a political uprising. Most deaths have been at the hands of the national police, state security forces and government-led gangs who target peaceful demonstrators, officials said.
While some have expressed surprise at the violence in what was once known as the most stable country in Central America, Rep. Paul Cook, R-Calif., chairman of the subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said this crisis did not occur overnight.
“In my view, it is a result of more than a decade of Ortega’s authoritarian rule and built-up resentment from the Nicaraguan people who have seen the Ortega family enrich themselves at the expense of the country,” Cook said, calling on the United States to take stronger actions.
Even the lefty Washington Post editorial board has gotten a clue-by-four on Nicaragua, comparing it to Venezuela, Latin America’s other socialist basket case:
THE DEATH TOLL in Nicaragua continues to rise. A bloody assault on protesters Sunday by police and pro-government paramilitary forces left 31 civilians, four police officers and three members of President Daniel Ortega’s black-hooded paramilitary groups dead. This was the highest one-day body count since pro-democracy demonstrations began April 18; it left the cumulative total at more than 300, according to human rights monitors. Monday, masked pro-Ortega thugs armed with clubs and handguns invaded a church where protesters had taken refuge and roughed up the Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio José Báez. There are reliable reports of sniper fire against peaceful civilian protests.
Such bloodshed, so reminiscent of the political carnage that plagued Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, is repugnant enough on its own. What was especially ominous about this latest spasm, however, is that it came just after Mr. Ortega declared at a rally on Saturday his unequivocal rejection of the leading compromise proposal for resolving Nicaragua’s crisis: holding early national elections, rather than waiting for 2021. And on Monday the Ortega government issued a proclamation declaring its opponents “terrorists” and canceling any further political talks until such time as “the serious problem of terrorism, insecurity and violence . . . has been addressed and resolved in a verifiable manner.”
In short, the Ortega regime has now opted for all-out repression similar to that practiced against the democracy movement in Venezuela. It is true that protesters in Nicaragua have blocked key roads with heavy brick barricades, a tactic opponents of the erstwhile Somoza dictatorship, including Mr. Ortega’s Sandinista front, employed when that regime forced them into it — just as Mr. Ortega’s regime is forcing its opponents into strikes and civil disobedience today. This is taking a toll on the Nicaraguan economy. Yet the government is responsible for the vast majority of the deaths and injuries. Contrary to regime propaganda, the opposition remains overwhelmingly peaceful and unarmed; the only terrorism in Nicaragua today is the official kind.
There’s even an Austin angle here, with two cousins describing how they were kidnapped and beaten by paramilitary forces. (Warning: Autoplay video.) Though the piece doesn’t mention that it was pro-government paramilitary forces until 90 seconds in.
Things will continue to deteriorate in Nicaragua until Ortega either steps down or is removed from power.
The whole “OMG, we lock up illegal alien kids!” panic the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have ginned up is a sign of just how good the economy is under President Donald Trump, and just how desperate Democrats are to find an issue to run on in November. Faced with the prospect of running on tranny bathrooms, gun control and calling ordinary Americans racists (yet again), they hit upon screeching about the fate of some 2,000 illegal alien minors as the only naked emotional appeal left in their arsenal.
Here it is, folks: the only tactic Democrats could agree to run on this fall.
So naturally, President Trump defused the issue he inherited from Obama with an executive order, causing Democrats to turn on a dime from “OMG, this is the most important moral crisis of our time!” to “That’s not good enough, you heartless monster, we want immediate full amnesty or we keep screaming our heads off!” Ditto for Sen. Ted Cruz’s legislative fix, which was instantly labeled a “cynical ploy.” You know, just like Democrats manufacturing the whole issue.
Expect Democrats to to start bloviating about something equally ludicrous but completely different with the same overheated emotional furor next week…
Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Manuel Padilla says the entire problem stems from Obama-era laxness:
“It’s a very complex situation,” he told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King. “When you have high levels of activity, and a lack of resources – personnel, technology, infrastructure – it creates this kind of chaotic environment.”
I know this is complicated for you and your team, but what people are talking about is cruel and inhuman behavior, is how it’s perceived,” said King. “Do you actually agree with this policy?”
“I do agree that we have to do something. We created this situation by not doing anything,” Padilla said. “So what happened with zero tolerance is, we were exempting a population from the law. And what happens when you do that, it creates a draw for a certain group of people that rises to trends that become a crisis.”
“I’m going to give you an example: Because we were releasing family units, May 2, just last month, we had a full-blown MS-13 (gang member) accompanied by his one-year-old child. He thought he was going get released into the community; that was not the case.”
Congressional Democratic candidates are more left-wing than ever. I’m sure a platform of repealing tax cuts will go over swell among ordinary voters… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Actor Peter Fonda (who you may remember as The Devil in Ghost Rider) went off on an “unhinged even by the standards of blue checkmark liberals on Twitter” rant in which he called for Barron Trump to be raped by pedophiles. To which reporter Juan Williams said Fonda’s rant was “poorly worded.” Oh really? Just how should someone word an appeal that the children of one’s political opponents be raped by pedophiles? Where does Miss Manners stand on this vital issue of 21st century American etiquette?
Related tweet:
Within the last two days, the anti-Trump Resistance has endorsed the brutal murder of ICE agents, the stalking of their children, the public mobbing of a DHS official, and the doxxing of White House officials. And also they're very worried about civility and norms you guys.
Eric S. Raymond on the mathematics of gun confiscation. “The critical fraction of American gun owners that would have to be hard-core enough to resist confiscation with lethal violence in order to stop the attempt is lower than 1 in 317. Probably much lower. Especially if we responded by killing not merely the doorknockers but the bureaucrats and politicians who gave them their orders. Which would be more efficient, more just, and certain to follow.”
The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.
That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.
Federal Bureau of Investigation background check records suggest that civilians bought more than 2 million guns in May alone, which means civilians purchase more than double the number of firearms owned by police departments. The number of gun-related civilian background checks in May and April, at over 4.7 million, is greater than the number of firearms currently owned by the American military.
The FBI reported processing more than 25.2 million gun-related civilian background checks in 2017, which is more than the 22.7 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are currently held by every law enforcement agency in the world combined. Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI reported conducting more than 135 million civilian gun checks—more than the 133 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are in all the world’s military stockpiles.
The Small Arms Survey estimated there are about 1 billion firearms currently in circulation throughout the world. By its estimate, about 85 percent are owned by civilians and American civilians own nearly 40 percent of all the guns in the world. Researchers said worldwide firearms ownership was up since the last time they studied the issue about a decade ago.
“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”
Roberts was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
This is the rare case where I side with the court’s liberal wing against its conservative wing. If there is a constitutional right to privacy, then surely metadata, which reveals your minute-by-minute physical location, among many other things, should be covered.
Federal court rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional for exercising executive authority but putting its director beyond the each of Presidential power.
Turkish jihadist scumbag president Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls a snap election, a tactic that could backfire.
Portland feminist bookstore closing. Naturally they blamed their poor business decisions on white male patriarchy. Insert your own Portlandia joke here.
Back in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still a going concern, communism held sway over a significant fraction of the globe. In addition to those countries forcibly incorporated into the USSR itself, and its vassal Warsaw Pact states in eastern Europe, communism also had many “franchises for totalitarianism” scattered throughout the world, with client states in Vietnam, Mozambique, etc. One of the closest to America was in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas went about rapidly communizing the country, killing thousands, censoring the press, suppressing the Catholic Church, ushering in hyperinflation (P.J. O’Rourke: “We exchanged $480 for 4,080,000 Cordobas, which filled an Adidas gym bag…You probably have to take economics at Moscow U. two or three times to make cash worth this little.”), and committing ethnic cleansing against the Miskito, Suma and Rama indians. Running the entire show was Comandante Daniel Ortega, until pressure from the Reagan-doctrine backed “Contras” and the Organization of American States, forced the Sandinistas into holding a fair election in which they were promptly kicked out of power.
Out of office for 17 years, Ortega’s Sandinistas managed to regain power in 2007, and since then they’re gotten up to their old tricks, albeit in a lower-key, “we’re no longer backed by Soviet money” way.
The protest on Wednesday capped six weeks of what has been described as a national rebellion against the government of President Daniel Ortega. The government has denied responsibility for any of the deaths and insists that it is the victim of a vast conspiracy….
“The demonstration was peaceful,” said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a negotiator on the national dialogue committee. “There were children there. It was a peaceful manifestation that ended up with people shot in the head and killed deliberately by snipers.”
Guillermina Zapata, 63, said protesters had told her that the bullet that hit her son, Francisco Javier Reyes Zapata, 34, came from a sharpshooter perched on the top of the national baseball stadium. Mr. Reyes was struck in the eye and died, she said.
“They have to go,” Ms. Zapata said of the president [Ortega] and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the vice president. “He is a murderer, and a murderer cannot continue to govern Nicaragua. They have to leave. I believe that dialogue is no longer an option. That’s sitting down to talk with the devil, who is killing the people.”
And, of course, the classic socialist mismanagement of the economy. “David Zywieck, the Bishop of Siuna, a mining town in northeast Nicaragua, said pharmacies are short on medicine, building materials like tools and cement are in short supply and people are running out of sugar, flour, milk and cooking oil. Gasoline has also become scarce and more expensive.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A half-million protestors showed up in the streets of Managua to protest the Sandinista regime, a staggering amount for a country of six million people.
Here’s a brief video recap of the situation:
All that time out of office evidently didn’t quench Ortega’s thirst for absolute power. Once a brutal communist scumbag, always a brutal communist scumbag…
