Archive for the ‘Democrats’ Category

Semiconductor Update for July 18, 2022

Monday, July 18th, 2022

Enough links have filtered into the semiconductor bucket to be worth doing a roundup. This one touches on China and the corruption of our political elites.

  • The congressional Democrats’ attempt to throw money at the problem is going nowhere fast.

    The Biden administration is laser-focused on sending Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons, including the latest round of anti-ship systems, artillery rockets, and rounds of 105 mm ammo for howitzer cannons that it has entirely lost focus on reshoring efforts to boost semiconductor production Stateside.

    Multiple manufacturers of semiconductor wafers have announced plans for new multi-billion dollar factories across the U.S. but are contingent on Congress allocating funds to aid in building facilities under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.

    Congress passed the CHIPS Act in January 2021 as part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which proposed $52 billion in funding for increasing the domestic capacity of chip production, though the House and Senate have come to a standstill over disagreements on certain parts of the bill that have sparked so much uncertainty among companies set to build new factories.

    In a letter on June 15, dozens of technology executives from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices, Micron, Amazon, and Alphabet called on Congress to move quickly on the CHIPS Act. They wrote, “the rest of the world is not waiting for the U.S. to act,” and funding for new chip factories must be achieved immediately.

    Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced a new $5 billion factory in the U.S. on Monday, but contingent on subsidies from the federal government.

    “This investment that they’re making is contingent upon Congress passing the CHIPS Act. The [GlobalWafers] CEO told me that herself, and they reiterated that today,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC, the same day GlobalWafers announced its development plan.

    Notes:

    • IBM doesn’t own any fabs any more, having sold them all to GlobalFoundries.
    • Intel runs a huge number of very profitable fabs (troubles with their sub-10nm process yields notwithstanding) and doesn’t need federal subsidies.
    • Microsoft doesn’t own any fabs and is deeply unlikely to build any; their flagship Xbox Series X uses a custom AMD Zen 2 fabbed by TSMC as its CPU.
    • Analog Devices is an Integrated Device Manufacturer that owns several fabs with pretty old technology; they don’t have any 300mm fabs. They closed a small fab in Milpitas they got from their acquisition of Linear Technology last year. Designing analog chips is its own black art, and not everything that applies to shrinking digital circuits applies to the analog realm.
    • Amazon has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, but they do have a chip design division to support Amazon Web Services, and recently designed a cloud computing chip. They work closely with AMD (fabbed at TSMC), Intel (own their own fabs) and Nvidia (another fabless design house that also gets their chips fabbed at TSMC).
    • Alphabet AKA Google has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, though they do have a lot of AI chip design work going on.
    • GlobalWafers isn’t a semiconductor manufacturer, it’s a silicon wafer manufacturer. Making such wafers (the substrates upon which semiconductor fabrication depends) has its own challenges, but they are several orders less difficult than cutting edge chip fabrication. Maybe I’m quite far out of the loop, but I’m deeply suspicious that GlobalWafers planned wafer plant in Sherman, Texas will cost $5 billion. That’s a relatively piddling sum for a new semiconductor fab, but extremely expensive for a wafer factory. This makes me suspect a subsidy grab is afoot.

    So of the companies mentioned, Intel could suck up government funding to build a fab they were going to build anyway, I’m sure Analog Devices would build a fab with government money, but chances of them running an under 10nm process in said theoretical fab is extremely slim, none of the other mentioned copies are going to build a fab, and none of that government money is going to alleviate the main problem that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.

    As I’ve mentioned previously, semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

    $250 billion in taxpayer subsidies wouldn’t get you a single additional wafer start this year, and probably would accomplish little more than channeling money to politically connected firms and sticky pockets in a state (New York) that no one wants to build fabs in any more because of high costs, high taxes and union rule requirements.

  • So who expects to earn immediate gains from the taxpayers subsidizing semiconductors? Would you believe Nancy Pelosi?

    I bet you would.

    This past week it hit the terminal that House Speaker Pelosi was doing a little portfolio re-jiggering, including exercising $8 million of call options in Nvidia and selling Apple and Visa calls. The data was per CongressTrading.com and was reported on by Bloomberg.

    The Nvidia LEAPS were bought June 3, 2021 with $100 strikes, set to expire June 17, 2022 and the position appeared to be disclosed on Thursday morning for the first time. $8 million trades seem a little odd for members of Congress to begin with, but who are we to judge?

    But then, what did Speaker Pelosi do just hours after disclosing the trade, on Friday?

    She threw her weight behind a stalled $50 billion CHIPS PLUS bill that “would provide $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing grants and investment tax credits for the chip industry.”

  • Speaking of TSMC, they’re tired of their customers using their old tech.

    We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there’s a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built – and they won’t be building any more.

    Not strictly true. Remember, Bosch just finished building a 65nm fab.

    As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies.

    Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC’s revenue come from outdated processes.

    That’s because UMC has fallen woefully far behind TSMC, and no one trusts them because they let Chinese spies walk out the door with other company’s IP. SMIC is on Mainland China, sucks even more, and is trusted even less.

    Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn’t the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.

    This is why TSMC’s plan to expand production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by 50% is focused on 28nm-capable fabs. As the final (viable) generation of TSMC’s classic, pre-FinFET manufacturing processes, 28nm is being positioned as the new sweet spot for producing simple, low-cost chips. And, in an effort to consolidate production of these chips around fewer and more widely available/expandable production lines, TSMC would like to get customers using old nodes on to the 28nm generation.

    “We are not currently [expanding capacity for] the 40 nm node” said Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development at TSMC. “You build a fab, fab will not come online [until] two year or three years from now. So, you really need to think about where the future product is going, not where the product is today.”

  • This video asks whether China can produce their own chips:

    Obviously, they already produce some of their own chips, but the video covers most of the issues China has with fabbing more complex chips that I’ve already discussed here and here. They’re still dependent on the same three leading fab companies (TSMC, Intel and Samsung) everyone else is for sub 10nm feature chips, and are overwhelmingly dependent on both foreign talent and foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers like ASML and Applied Materials.

  • Speaking of TSMC and Intel, India would really like them to build fabs there. The problem is, despite a whole lot of technical talent there, it doesn’t have a terribly large domestic electronics manufacturing base.
  • LinkSwarm for July 15, 2022

    Friday, July 15th, 2022

    The Biden Recession continues to wreck the pocketbooks of Americans, EU economies are sucking even worse than ours, more Bidens Behaving Badly, and unlimited abortion is not nearly as popular among the American public as it is among New York Times staffers.

  • Another month, another 40 year inflation high.
  • More Biden economic magic: “New Job Openings Drop In 47 States, Nationally Down 17%.”
  • The Euro has now reached parity with the dollar for the first time in 20 years.
  • Cold comfort from Peter Zeihan: The economy and food security is going to get much worse, but Europe is going to suffer much worse than America.
  • Support for unlimited abortion is deeply unpopular:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Widespread criticism of Jill Biden’s failed hispander proves that Democrats are no longer interested in excusing Joe Biden’s many manifest failures.

    Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. Since Biden was elected, the only thing that has gone right is that the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation is out of control, gas prices are at record highs, grocery bills are skyrocketing, the stock market is getting battered and people’s 401(k)s are shrinking, crime remains high, mass shootings keep bedeviling America’s public spaces, Russia’s invading Ukraine, there’s a global food and commodity crisis, and the Taliban is running Afghanistan and oppressing women again. Democrats are apoplectic that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a New York State gun law, and the EPA’s right to regulate carbon emissions without explicit approval from Congress. Parents are up in arms, the teachers’ unions look like callous fools who kept schools closed and harmed a generation of schoolchildren, and “abolish the police” looks like a suicidal public policy. Republicans notice that waves of illegal immigrants headed north shortly after Biden’s inauguration and haven’t stopped coming since.

    You didn’t even mention the Social Justice insanity and all the transexual madness.

    That New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Democrats want a different presidential nominee in 2024. Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.

    There are some of us who would argue that Joe Biden has always been an insecure, abrasive, presumptuous, disingenuous, demagogic, insufferable blowhard who was largely protected by a cozy, all-too-friendly relationship with a press inclined to airbrush his glaring character faults, presenting him as a wacky neighbor or a kindly, ice-cream loving grandpa.

    What we see now is what happens when much of the national media, the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal interest groups stop playing along with the narrative that Biden is a wiser, sharper, kinder, more energetic and sensitive man than he is. And the truth isn’t pretty.

  • Speaking of unwanted Bidens: “Hunter Biden could face prostitution charges for transporting hookers across state lines and disguising checks to them as payments for ‘medical services.'” I’ll believe Hunter Biden prosecution when I see it. Also, I’ve been treating the 4Chan “Hunter Biden iPhone leak” with a certain amount of skepticism. Certainly the Hunter laptop revelations were real, and Hunter is a big enough scumbag to do the the things alleged iPhone leak materials depict. But I try to be cautious about anything that fits too neatly into my preconceptions. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Left-Wing Nonprofit Scores $171.7 Million-$1 Billion Government Contract To Help Illegal Immigrants Avoid Authorities.”

    A liberal non-profit group has been given a taxpayer-funded government contract worth at least $171.7 million — which could potentially reach just under $1 billion — for assisting illegal immigrant minors in avoiding capture or incarceration by U.S. Border Patrol and state officials.

    The Department of the Interior was the awarding agency and “The Vera Institute of Justice,” based out of New York — which supports the “defund the police” movement and has lax views on immigration enforcement — was the beneficiary.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is paper gold being manipulated?
  • China bubble update: Alibaba just just laid off one-third of its strategic investment team.
  • A look at the sniping war in Ukraine. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Houston demonstrates the case against zoning.

    Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.

    Houston is by no means a model for planning. Like every other Sun Belt city, it struggles with segregation and sprawl. Yet its continued success as one of America’s most affordable and prosperous cities reveals the workability—indeed, the desirability—of non-zoning. Houston is a profoundly weird place, resistant to seductive oversimplifications. But it provides insight into what comes after the arbitrary lines that have misshapen our cities—and how we might get there.

    So why didn’t Houston adopt zoning like every other U.S. city? The answer comes down partly to process. Unique among major cities, Houston subjected zoning to a citywide vote. While most city councils had, historically, quietly adopted zoning after a few perfunctory public hearings, the Bayou City invited voters to decide on zoning in 1946, 1962, and 1993. Voters rejected it each time—a reality that calls into question the often-postulated popularity of zoning.

    Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.

    But the answer to why Houston remains unzoned also comes down to politics. Zoning proponents didn’t merely lose the referendums—they were also tactfully bought off by being allowed to have something resembling zoning in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, the dark little secret of non-zoning in Houston is that it depends on a system of land-use regulations known as deed restrictions, which empower certain communities—principally middle- and upper-class homeowners—to effectively “opt out” of non-zoning, writing their own land-use rules for their own neighborhoods. In exchange, Houston is able to protect the vast majority of the city from the types of arbitrary-use distinctions, density limits, and raucous public hearings that cause so much harm in every other U.S. city. That is to say, in exchange for respecting pockets of private land-use regulation, Houston is able to grow, adapt, and evolve like no other city.

    Deed restrictions are private, voluntary agreements among property owners—typically the homeowners of a particular subdivision or neighborhood—regulating how they can and cannot use their land. These rules are literally tied to the deed, meaning that a property owner must agree to them as a condition of the sale. Since the failed 1962 zoning referendum, the city has enforced these agreements on behalf of the relevant parties, refusing to issue permits that run afoul of their provisions and bringing legal action against violators.

    Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.

    Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back.

    Another key difference is that deed restrictions must be voluntarily opted in to. This serves to discipline deed restrictions in a way that is rarely true of zoning: If the rules are stricter than what prospective homebuyers might prefer, or not strict enough, or simply focus on the wrong concerns, this may translate into lower home values. This in turn nudges homeowners to think through the optimal form of land-use regulation to a degree that rarely happens with zoning.

  • Speaking of Houston, a new poll shows Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo in a dead heat with Republican challenger Alexandra del Moral Mealer. November will be a good time to determine if the Hispanic realignment in Texas extends to America’s fourth largest city.
  • After deciding to let drug-abusing transients use their restrooms, Starbucks is now closing 16 stores because of rising violence, and the fact that transients are shooting up in their restrooms. Golly, who could have possibly seen that coming?
  • “White progressives do not have the moral authority to excommunicate a black man from his race because they disagree with him.”
  • Best gun oil? Project Farm does some testing, and Clenzoil and BreakFreeCLP come out on top.
  • Beto O’Rourke Lags in the Polls.” Try to contain your shock. And I bet the polls overstate his popularity…
  • Score another one for the good guys.

    Another Texas school superintendent has stepped down amid criticism from parents concerned about liberal indoctrination in their children’s classrooms.

    At a special meeting Monday afternoon, Clear Creek Independent School District’s board of trustees accepted the retirement of Superintendent Eric Williams, effective in January 2023.

    Conservative parents in the Houston-area district had complained that Williams, who started in early 2021, was subjecting their students to liberal ideologies he brought from his former job as superintendent of

  • Justice for Jim Thorpe.
  • Somebody didn’t listen to Jack Handy. (Hat Tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “San Francisco DA Announces Innovative New Plan To Arrest People For Breaking The Law.”
  • Been super hot in Austin this week, but there are ways to keep cool:

  • Two Doses of Neil Oliver

    Wednesday, July 13th, 2022

    First up: Scottish commentator Neil Oliver wonders about all the questions we’re not allowed to ask about Flu Manchu.

    Daily Mail online carried a headline on the 8th of June: Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register.

    This is SADS – an acronym that stands for Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – and according to the Royal Australian College of GPs, it occurs most commonly in people under 40. This is properly scary; I don’t mind telling you. Healthy young people are going to their beds of an evening and not waking up ever again, or otherwise going about their everyday business and dropping dead, for no identifiable medical reason.

    The best anyone in the health professions can apparently do is describe it as mysterious, baffling even, that there are people under 40 dropping in their traces for no known cause. At the same time, around the world, there have been reports of many hundreds of sports men and women dying suddenly and unexpectedly in the past year – super fit individuals uniquely focused on their own health – keeling over dead, often on the field of play.

    Here at home we have had updated information campaigns about how important it is to be aware of the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. It has been deemed appropriate to remind us as well that heart attacks are not unknown in children. It’s almost as if we’re not to be unduly alarmed by the sight of passers-by dropping to their knees and clutching at their chests. Elsewhere there is a poster campaign about a rise in the number of cases of shingles. The small print on the posters mentions shingles may strike people with lowered immune systems. Fancy that.

    Deaths have been attributed by coroners to the Covid vaccines. The numbers are disputed, but people have died on account of the jabs. That much at least is undeniable. Around the world there are millions of cases of alleged adverse reactions to the jabs – lives severely compromised in some cases. I won’t get into the numbers, because those are always disputed too – but the facts remain. People are dying.

    The elephant in the room here is the Covid-19 vaccines – and again I make no apology at all about banging on about this topic week after week. The push to move on, to leave all talk of Covid and pandemic behind us, is palpable and, I would say, downright sinister. I am nowhere near ready to move on – not while there is still so much we do not know, so much we are not allowed to say, think and ask.

    We are told all about Covid 19 – and all manner of ways in which it might affect health long after a person has recovered from the initial infection. But as well as the pandemic, the other momentous arrival among us – indeed in just the past year and a half – is the biggest mass vaccination campaign in the history of the world – vaccination with products that had emergency approval, but in my opinion are experimental and for which no long-term data is available – on account of their being brand new and just out of the box.

    Billions of people around the world have submitted to the procedure. In a coercive and bullying atmosphere created by politicians and the media, that was mandatory in feel, if not in fact, unknown and unknowable numbers of people did so simply to keep their jobs, to get on a plane and go on holiday or to a gig – and yet in the midst of one report after another of otherwise unexplained sudden deaths in the past 18 months or so, the only emergent variable, the only new thing in the world that we are not allowed to discuss, absolutely not allowed to discuss far less point accusatory fingers at, is the mass vaccination programme.

    Again, I ask the question I posed at the top of this piece – are we stupid? Or are we just being treated as if we’re stupid? Which is it?

    Next: Oliver notes how mass protests and even open revolt against the green globalist/Build Back Better agenda are being downplayed or ignored by the media:

    Sri Lanka was a product of that government following, you know, the the madness of [World Economic Forum] inspired policies: Net Zero, the stripping of fertilizers, and all the rest of it…wholesale strife, collapsing crops and all the rest of it. You would think in a sane world the politicians in each of the countries would respond to the people, but I suspect they won’t. We saw something similar in Canada with the trucker’s freedom convoys, but look what happened there. Obviously Justin Trudeau was was told to get a grip of that situation. He clamped down on it violently, arrested bank accounts and took away the funding for that movement.

    Bit on Sri Lanka skipped.

    I think what you’re looking at in The Netherlands, for example, is the deliberate dismantling of the land owning class. 85% percent of the of the land in The Netherlands is held by farmers, and has been for generations, and that’s an inconvenient situation for globalist leftist politicians who’ve got other ideas for the land, which is specifically to build houses to cope with the with the levels of immigration that are going on. They’ve empowered themselves the politicians to help themselves to 30 percent of the Dutch farmer’s land, and surprise, surprise! Just as I suspect you would or I would, if the government came into our homes and said they were taking 30% everything we had we owned and had worked for, the farmers have said no…It’s a blatant land grab.

    It gets harder and harder to ignore the intent by by leftist globalist governments to return us to some form of feudalism. All these people like us owning property, owning homes, living lives independent of the state. You know what the intention is there, to take people’s independence away. Take away their property, take away the land, and if you control the farmland, you control the food. And if you control the food, you control the people. So you can plainly see what the agenda is.

    One need not agree with every one of Oliver’s conclusions to agree that the pattern he deduces, of elites acting against the best interests of the countries they govern and the people they ostensibly serve, seems very real.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Threaten To Kill Ted Cruz? Enjoy Your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

    Tuesday, July 12th, 2022

    Harris County, which has given us no end of corrupt and sketchy practices over the last few years, continues the trend of Democratic Party downplaying and trivializing threats against prominent Republicans, this time a man who threatened to kill senator Ted Cruz.

    A Harris County criminal district court magistrate released a suspect who threatened to kill Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other legislators on a personal bond that required no payment whatsoever.

    According to charging documents on June 26, Isaac Ambe Nformangum, aged 22, allegedly called the senator’s Houston office regarding Republican opposition to legislation regarding elections. Nformangum accused Cruz and other Republicans of working to have voting rights repealed and then threatened violence.

    A transcript of the phone call provided by investigators quotes Nformangum as saying, “Every last one of your Republican colleagues to have signed off on that platform is to be found and, is to be found and killed, be it by a bullet to the face or by the smashing of a brick in your skull. It is a civic duty of every American citizen or resident to see to it that every last one of your colleagues is to be killed. Killed. Be it by finding you in a public space or by trailing you to your very, by your very public homes.”

    “You and every one of your colleagues is to be shot dead. Found and killed.”

    Following an investigation conducted by Harris County sheriff’s deputies, the district attorney’s office filed charges against Nformangum of making a felony-level Terroristic Threat, and he was taken into custody on July 2.

    Although the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) motioned for his bond to be set at $250,000, on July 3, magistrate Cheryl Harris Diggs for the 177th Criminal District Court ordered Nformangum released on a pre-trial personal bond of $2,500.

    Under the conditions of pre-trial personal bonds, however, defendants may be released without posting bail or paying fees. The court coordinator for the 177th Court confirmed to The Texan that Nformangum did not have to pay anything for his release from the jail system.

    As with rage against sitting Supreme Court justices, Democrats seem to have so little problem with threats against their political enemies that judges are willing to let those issuing felony threats to be let off with no more than a promise to behave themselves.

    And liberals wonder why law-abiding citizens refuse to give up their guns.

    Update: Reader LKB noticed a new addendum to the story: “On Tuesday, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office told the state Senate Committee on Finance that the U.S. Marshals have taken Nformangum into federal custody.”

    Messing with Harris County judges is one thing, but messing with Raylan Givens is another…

    Democrats Behaving Badly

    Sunday, July 10th, 2022

    This is a catch-all post of various instances of Democrats acting badly I meant to include in the last few LinkSwarms and just didn’t manage to squeeze in.

  • You know that oil Joe Biden foolishly released from the strategic oil reserve to ease pain at the pump? Instead of helping Americans, some of that crude went to the Chinese company Hunter Biden invested in.

    On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March.

    Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.

    On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon published new details about the Chinese oil shipments from the U.S. emergency reserves that Biden promised were tapped to “ease the pain that families are feeling” in the United States from high energy prices.

    “The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”

    Sinopec is also tied to Hunter Biden, whose private equity firm, BHR Partners, bought a $1.7 billion stake in the company seven years ago.

    Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the New York Times in November that the president’s son, “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles.”

    According to the Washington Examiner, however, Hunter Biden remained listed as a part-owner of the firm as late as March.

    “Business records from China’s National Credit Information Publicity System accessed Tuesday continue to identify Skaneateles as a 10% owner in BHR, and Washington, D.C., business records continue to list Biden as the only beneficial owner of Skaneateles,” the paper reported. “The White House has routinely deflected questions about Biden’s business dealings to his attorneys, who have remained largely mum.”

    “It’s possible that China’s business registry hasn’t yet been updated to reflect a potential transfer or sale of Skaneateles’s 10% stake in BHR to another party,” the Examiner added.

    Meanwhile, Biden’s Energy Department has refused compliance with requests under the Freedom of Information Act probing the administration’s improper use of the nation’s strategic oil reserves maintained for emergencies. Last week, the Functional Government Initiative, a nonprofit government watchdog, filed a lawsuit to compel records concerning administration officials’ decision to tap the oil reserves in the absence of a sudden disruption in supply such as a hurricane or cyberattack.

  • I would say it’s quite revealing how quickly Democrats resorted to racist slurs against Justice Clarence Thomas following the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, but not really. They’ve long shown they are racist against any minority that refuses to toe the leftist line.

    Twitter has been a cesspool of liberals calling Justice Thomas endless racist slurs … and of course, Twitter does nothing. Samuel Jackson called him ‘Uncle Clarence,’ and several people reported him and said they were told by Twitter it was not against the rules to call him that slur.

  • More on the same topic:

    Why has Clarence Thomas become the target of so much flak following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade? It’s because he’s black. It’s because, as someone with black skin, he is not meant to hold conservative views on issues like abortion. In the eyes of the furious woke agitators who are haranguing Thomas even more than they are the other Roe-sceptical justices, he has not only made a bad legal decision – he has also betrayed his race. His sin is twofold: he has undermined the right to abortion and he has failed in his racial duty to nod unquestioningly along to every ‘progressive’ idea. He’s a racial transgressor, a bad black man, and therefore he must be reprimanded even more severely than the white folk on the Supreme Court. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the scourge of woke racism.

    We have just witnessed one of the clearest examples yet of identity politics crossing the line into flagrant, undeniable racism. No sooner had it been announced that the Supreme Court was ditching Roe v Wade than so-called progressives were gunning for Thomas. They’ve never liked Thomas, who has been serving on the Supreme Court since 1991. Sure, he might be just the second African American to sit on the court, but for the identitarian elites he’s the wrong kind of African American, so his historic achievement doesn’t count. He’s Catholic – ‘decidedly and unapologetically Catholic’, as he says – and he’s not down with abortion or same-sex marriage. ‘Wait, I thought all blacks were BLM-supporting, pro-trans, sassy progressives like the ones I know from Twitter?’, you can almost hear the upper-middle-class left say. Thomas doesn’t compute for them. To paraphrase Biden, ‘He ain’t black!’.

    And so it was inevitable he would get it in the neck following the fall of Roe. Vile racial hatred has been hurled his way since the ruling. Angry woke Twitter has even used the N-word. Thomas is ‘just another dumb field nigger’, said one tweeter. Another called him a ‘nigger slave’ to his white ‘nutcase’ wife. He’s a ‘coon-ass motherfucker’, apparently. And of course he’s an Uncle Tom. Or ‘Uncle Clarence’, as Samuel L Jackson called him. As a result, ‘Uncle Clarence’ trended online for hours. Welcome to the twisted moral universe of Silicon Valley, where you can be banned for life for saying ‘he’ about someone with a penis but you can happily surf a wave of retweets for using racial slurs about high-ranking black men.

  • Speaking of the Supreme Court, Democrats continues to harass Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

    For some reason that I really can’t fathom, the progressive left is escalating its hounding of conservative Supreme Court Justices. If they’re trying to turn off normal Americans, they’re doing a great job. If they’re trying to intimidate or coerce SCOTUS, they are failing miserably. But radicals gotta radical.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh already was the target of an attempted assassination. But the hounding and targeting of him continue.

    Politico reports that Justice Kavanaugh was escorted by his security team out the back door of a DC restaurant because leftists were “protesting” outside.

    On Wednesday night, D.C. protesters targeting the conservative Supreme Court justices who signed onto the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion got a tip that Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH was dining at Morton’s downtown D.C. location. Protesters soon showed up out front, called the manager to tell him to kick Kavanaugh out and later tweeted that the justice was forced to exit through the rear of the restaurant.

  • Indeed, Democratic harassment of Supreme Court justices has gotten so bad that Supreme Court Marshal asked officials to do something about it.

    In a rare move, Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley has sent letters to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin demanding that authorities put an end to picketing and “threatening activity” outside the homes of SCOTUS justices.

    The letter seeks to use state laws to achieve what the Justice Department has clearly rejected under federal law. If the letter prompts arrests, we could see a major free speech challenge in the courts. The timing of the letter, however, is particularly interesting and may reflect a recognition of the limits of the federal law.

    Snip.

    Under a federal law, 18 U.S.C. 1507, any individual who “pickets or parades” with the “intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer” near a U.S. court or “near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” will be fined or “imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

  • The Hunter Biden shenanigans, though illegal, immoral and infuriating, is just more of the foreign graft rakeoff that Joe Biden and other high ranking Democrats have been pulling off for years. But the radical unhinged attacks on the Supreme Court after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the Democratic Party’s most Holy of Holies shows that the new pitch of derangement Democrats showed after Donald Trump’s unexpected election was not a temporary aberration.

    These days, the Democratic Party seems less a political party than a criminal graft conspiracy married to a crazed social justice cult enraged by any setbacks to its grandiose plans or any questioning of their delusional status as anointed saviors of designated victims.

    As reality crashes through their swaddling cocooned delusions and limitless self-regard, expect the derangement to get worse.

    Jose Alba The Latest Victim In The Democratic Party’s War On Self Defense

    Saturday, July 9th, 2022

    Friday’s LinkSwarm mentioned the plight of New York City bodega clerk, who was viciously attacked by the convicted-felon boyfriend of a patron whose credit card had been refused. Defending himself from the attack, Alba stabbed his attacker to death, and was charged with murder.

    Blog reader Clinton alerted me to the fact that GoFundMe just deleted Alba’s account.

    GoFundMe has deleted the legal defense fund page for the hard-working Manhattan bodega worker holed up at Rikers Island on a whopping $250,000 bond after he fatally stabbed a violent ex-con he was trying to fend off.

    Jose Alba, 51, is currently languishing behind bars at the notorious jail despite surveillance video capturing the alleged victim, Austin Simon, 35, storming behind the counter of the bodega to attack him Friday night.

    Alba’s family insist he was acting in self-defense when he grabbed a knife to fight off Simon inside the Hamilton Heights Grocery.

    Relatives immediately launched a GoFundMe page to help raise funds to cover Alba’s sky-high bail and legal fees after he was hit with a second-degree murder charge — but the page was mysteriously removed Wednesday night.

    “Our terms of service prohibit fundraising for the legal defense of a violent crime. At this time, the fundraiser has been removed and all donors have been refunded,” GoFundMe said in a statement Thursday.

    The page had already raised $20,000 for Alba when it was suddenly removed, the Daily Mail reported.

    Under GoFundMe’s terms of services, the platform can’t be used for the legal defense of “alleged crime associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism.”

    Of course, there are many documented cases where GoFundMe allowed fundraisers for those accused of violent crimes, as long as they had the right politics and/or skin color.

    Controversial Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced backlash over Alba’s case after his office brought the charges — and then pushed for $500,000 bail for the father-of-three at his arraignment Saturday.

    This is just the latest example of a Soros-backed Democrat DA filing charges against law-abiding citizens daring to defend themselves from violent attacks by felons. (See also: Kyle Rittenhouse.)

    Former New York City resident Louis Rossmann has a nice video rant on the subject.

    “If you are a criminal, Alvin Bragg has your back!”

    You have felonies that have been, in many cases, decreased to petty misdemeanors. So if you commit a felony, it’ll get decreased to a petty misdemeanor. However if you are one of the people that allow society to function, one of the people that puts in work every day, a law-abiding citizen that simply wants to go home without getting killed by somebody half his age, who has a criminal record, who is beating you up, we throw the book at you this is sickening and tiring and it has to stop!

    “They will always simp for the criminal.”

    He’s right about everything, but the name “George Soros” never appears anywhere in his rant. Pretty much every-time you see this sort of coddling of criminals and throwing the book at the law-abiding, a George Soros-backed DA is the one making the prosecution decisions.

    Soros-backed DAs seem intent on destroying the social fabric of America, and of prosecuting the law-abiding Americans as though the right to self-defense didn’t exist. It goes hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party’s obsession with disarming law-abiding Americans.

    LinkSwarm for July 8, 2022

    Friday, July 8th, 2022

    More pain at the pump, an assassination in Japan, and a whole new crop of Democrat child sex offenders. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Why you can indeed blame Joe Biden for high gas prices.

    On May 12, Biden’s Interior Department blocked a proposal to open up more than one million acres of land in Alaska for oil and gas drilling. Two days later, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency blocked plans to expand an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands.

    Biden and his defenders said he had to block the expansion of the Virgin Islands refinery, given how polluting it was.

    But had Biden’s EPA allowed the Virgin Island refinery to expand, the owners would have poured nearly $3 billion into retrofitting the plant so it produced gasoline and other products more cleanly, while significantly increasing production at the same time.

    In truth, there are many things Biden could have done, and still should do, to lower energy prices. He could invoke the National Defense Act to accelerate the rate of oil and gas permits. He could set a floor of $80/barrel for re-filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which would be a powerful incentive for the industry, because it would prevent prices from falling to unprofitable levels. Biden could announce trade agreements with American allies to supply them with liquified natural gas, which would incentivize more natural gas production and lower prices.

    If Biden got America on a wartime footing, as he should be given Russia’s aggression in Europe, we would see the lowering of oil, gas and petroleum prices in less than one year.

    Why won’t Biden do it? Because he has declared war on fossil fuels. “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel,” Biden promised a student climate activist in 2019. “I am not going to cooperate with them,” he said, referring to the oil and gas industry.

  • Related: “Despite Record Gas Prices, Biden Rejects New Drilling in Atlantic and Pacific.”

    Joe Biden has proven once again that he has no interest in reducing the record-high costs of gasoline, which have gone up throughout his time in office.

    Biden not only wants to block all new oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but he’s also taking steps to shut down exploration of oil and gas on federal lands.

    “A plan released Friday shows the White House proposed no more than 10 potential lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, an option for one potential lease sale in the northern portion of the Cook Inlet of Alaska, and no lease sales for the Atlantic or Pacific planning areas over the 2023-2028 period,” reports Breitbart. This plan is not finalized, however, but any potential areas of exploration or sale not mentioned in the proposal will reportedly be off-limits from 2023-2028.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assassinated by a man with a homemade shotgun while giving a speech.
  • Abe’s Japan was a reliable ally to the United States. But we should not let the shocking assassination blind us to the fact that Abe’s much-praised (by western MSM outlets, anyway) runaway deficit spending “Abenomics” efforts to lift Japan out of its long-running recession were a colossal failure, jacking up Japan’s national debt to the highest debt-per-GDP ratio in the world while failing to measurably increase actual economic activity.

  • How our feckless woke elites are ruining the military.

    Here’s a little leadership secret that’s actually not a secret at all to competent commissioned and non-commissioned officers. There are no bad cohorts of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and whatever the hell Space Force people are called. There are only bad leaders, and we have the worst military leadership in American history, starting right at the top with a commander-in-chief who is less like Ike than Beavis.

    In fact – and this rips me up to say because I would not trade my about 27 years in the Army for anything – the reluctance to enlist of the traditional, normal Americans who are most likely to serve and who are the most desirable for service, is entirely rational. You do have an obligation to serve your country in some way, the military being the highest and best way for those who are able. But you do not have an obligation to do so if your life is going to be squandered by a leadership whose strategies are a disaster, whose priorities are not the defense of this country but some sort of bizarre pan-global progressive ideology, and who will use you as a guinea pig in freakish and morally bankrupt social experiments, all while failing to fulfill even the most basic obligations of the leaders to the led. Our military today is failing to meet its recruiting goals because it has failed to earn the trust of normal Americans who would otherwise be inclined to raise their hands.

    Snip.

    That social justice nonsense is another reason we can’t recruit. Would you want to waive your civil rights and sleep in the dirt to be part of an institution that hates you? Would you feel like joining an organization whose leadership is very, very focused on mythical “white privilege” and those scary “insurrectionists?” Remember, if you are conservative, you are an official extremist threat. If you are a believer, you run afoul of the official morality of CRT. If you think men can’t become women because they feel like it, you are a horrible bigot and you will be ordered to lie and use the pronoun du jour or else.

  • This is your city on Woke: “Over 400,000 High-Priority Incidents In Chicago In 2021 Had ‘No Police Available To Send.'”
  • Problem: GPS tracker for bonded suspect in Detroit shows him participating in a drive-by and other gun crimes. Solution: Judge orders the GPS tracker removed. (Hat tip: Mike the Musicologist.)
  • Speaking of Democratic Party-ruled city approaches to crime, look at the New York City case against Jose Alba, who “was sitting in his store working and was no harm to anyone. Then the perpetrator came behind the counter and attacked him.” Alba defended himself by killing his attacker with a knife. Naturally, Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg charged Alba with murder.
  • The Social Justice Warrior love affair with pedophiles continues: “Top New Biden Staffer Defended Underage, Gay Prostitution Website Raided By Feds.”
  • Speaking of Biden-related pedophiles: “Another Democrat Sent to Prison for Child Sex Crimes. Biden campaign surrogate Jerry Harris gets 12 years for solicitation, sexual assault.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “The owner of a Washington sex shop, who also serves as the director of the local school board, is hosting a pair of sex education workshops for children as young as 9 years old. Jenn Mason, the owner of the Wink Wink Boutique in Bellingham, Washington, and the director of the Bellingham School Board, is hosting a sex-ed workshop titled ‘Uncringe Academy: Sex Education Without (most) of the Awkward’ for children ages 9-18.” If the story seems familiar, it’s because she tried to do the same thing in May. According to their website, she’s still a Bellingham School Board Director.
  • More companies migrating from blue to red states, including Texas. We’ve covered this a whole bunch of times before…
  • The Biden Administration sues Arizona for demanding proof of citizenship to vote.
  • Speaking of preventing voting fraud, the Wisconsin Supreme Court outlawed drop boxes and ballot harvesting.
  • More on four gun control cases the Supreme Court sent down to be reexamined.
  • Breaking: Elon Musk giving up on buying Twitter?
  • “The ailing #WokeSuperheroes and teenagers-talking-in-hallways network The CW has been sold for zero dollars.” Plus $100 million in debt assumption. Bonus: Critical Drinker reviews Batwoman.
  • Truly insane charter bus build.
  • Important safety tip: Don’t do this:

  • Or This:

  • Chocolate dragon:

  • “Democrats Proudly Introduce The ‘Raise Gas Prices Even Higher And Make More Kids Trans’ Bill.
  • LinkSwarm for July 1, 2022

    Friday, July 1st, 2022

    Welcome to the second half of 2022! The Biden Economy suckage becomes more obvious, the world’s most taboo lawsuit wants justice for real women being raped by fake women that the state of California forced on them, the Supreme Court slaps the EPA with a ruler over regulating carbon dioxide without congressional authority, and Eric Adams finally realizes he’s running a hellhole. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • U.S. first-quarter GDP shrank 1.6%.” And the second quarter will probably suck as well.
  • $10 a gallon gasoline coming? If anyone can make it happen, it’s the Biden Administration.
  • Russia has taken Severodonetsk and is pounding Lysychansk. They have also successfully crossed the Donets River.
  • However, Russia has withdrawn from Snake Island.
  • Welcome to the world’s most taboo legal case, a lawsuit over imprisoned woman having the right not to be raped by men who “identify” as women.

    On November 17, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, filed a civil rights lawsuit in California that drew almost no coverage. A press corps gearing up to be outraged en masse by the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation case had zero interest in a lawsuit filed by far poorer female abuse victims.

    Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons. There was nothing TV-friendly about the scenes depicted in the complaint:

    Plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez (“Krystal”) is a female offender currently incarcerated in Central California Women’s Facility. Krystal was sexually assaulted by a man transferred to her unit under S.B. 132. Krystal filed a grievance and requested single-sex housing away from men; the prison’s response to Krystal’s grievance referred to her assault by a “transgender woman with a penis.” Krystal does not believe that women have penises…

    After a week spent denounced for reviewing the Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman?, and for saying things I think will be boring conventional wisdom within a year, I was ready to never go near trans issues again and move to the impending financial disaster. But accident sucked me back. I’d made a point of pride of not reading a line of commentary about Heard-Depp, but listened to an episode of Blocked and Reported that touched on it after it was over, and learned three things that made me furious and think immediately of Chandler.

    One, the ACLU, in apparent exchange for a pledge of $3.5 million, ghost-wrote Heard’s offending editorial, and in particular a line about her having “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” Two: Guardian writer Moira Donegan declared, “We are in a moment of virulent antifeminist backlash.” Three: Vice proclaimed without irony, “We’ve all failed Amber Heard.” Almost as one, the establishment press declared itself concerned with the suffering of a rich actress. However, there’s a gaping loophole in their concern for women, and Chandler sits in the middle of it.

    Let’s talk about “the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out” in the context of this case:

    Chandler is the headline legal action in a nationwide battle over whether or not prisoners who self-identify as women, including those with histories of rape or sexual abuse, should be allowed to transfer to women’s correctional facilities. There have been both official and unofficial policy changes on this front in a growing collection of states across the country. These often happen with little to no public debate, because this issue may be the most impenetrable media taboo in America now.

    The group bringing the suit, WoLF, has been targeted from every conceivable angle by pressure and censorship campaigns. While we at least heard about protesting Canadian truckers having their GoFundMe campaigns frozen, WoLF didn’t even bother trying to raise money on that platform, “because they just ban you really easily,” as legal director Lauren Adams put it.

    They moved to a purportedly speechier platform, GiveButter, hoping they would have “less of a censorious kind of view.” But even GiveButter soon gave WoLF the boot (I reached out to the company, which hasn’t provided public comment yet). “It was just a general fundraiser,” Adams explains. “And they said we violated their community standards. So now we’re on GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site.”

    If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company.

    Snip.

    Most of the cross-dressing men claiming a “transgender identity” and granted transfer… are sex offenders, most are heterosexual men who want to be housed with women to get penis-in-vagina sex, most stop taking any feminizing hormone medications right after getting into women’s prison, they all refer to themselves as men when speaking to the women inmates, many have threatened to “fight you like a man” to women inmates, many have threatened to rape us, and they all have working penises that they are using to have sex with female inmates.

    Transexism is now so central to the social justice victimhood politics ideology that controls the Democratic Party that it leads to letting men rape women rather than question the holy tenant that a man can magically become a women by declaring it so.

  • Notice how that “giant backlash” against the overturning of Roe vs. Wade seems to be limited to leftwingers freaking out on social media? Here’s a good explanation why:

  • Another salutary Supreme Court decision: The EPA cannot regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant absent explicit congressional authorization to do so.
  • “U.S. and Canada Tell G7 That Climate Change Policy is More Important Than Feeding People.”
  • I’ll take “Headlines That Surprise No One” for $400: Top Three Worst-Run US Cities Are Controlled By Democrats. D.C., San Francisco, and New York City.
  • Speaking of which, New York City mayor Eric Adams is shocked, shocked to discover that the city he runs sucks.

    During an exclusive interview conducted as Adams rode the subways overnight for more than three hours last week, the former NYPD transit cop said he was astounded by the botched “deployment of resources” that has New Yorkers on edge amid a nearly 40 percent surge in major crimes this year.

    “Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,” he said of the city.

    Adams — who campaigned on a promise to restore order to an increasingly lawless Gotham — said the scales fell from his eyes when he began reviewing internal city operations following his swearing in moments after midnight on New Year’s Day.

    Yet somehow I could tell that despite living some 1,700 miles away, thanks to the magic power of “paying attention” and “not depending on the MSM for news.”

  • California’s Attorney general wants to revoke Second Amendment rights for citizens based on their political beliefs.
  • More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year.”

    Nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.

  • Who has the highest debt in the EU? Exactly who you would think: The PIGS (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, in that order), then France, Belgium and Cyprus.
  • Supreme Court to Louisiana Democrats: No, you can’t have another Democratic congressional seat. Not yours.
  • Methinks thou hast punched thy ticket in a shade most pink. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Following other western tech giants, Cisco plans to exit Russia permanently. Unless you’re in the sector, you might underestimate just how many pies Cisco has fingers in. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The $37 billion road project that’s changing Indonesia.
  • Project Farm rates blue jeans.
  • Dear Bed Bath and Beyond: Turning off the air conditioning is not a way to win customers in Texas during the summer. (They deny the charge.) (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Authorities Warn Tonight’s Protests May Escalate From ‘Mostly Peaceful’ To ‘Somewhat Peaceful.'”
  • Harris County Democratic Judge Indicted For “Official Oppression”

    Tuesday, June 28th, 2022

    More illegal shenanigans from a Democratic judge in Harris County:

    Harris County misdemeanor court Judge Darrell Jordan has been indicted on charges of Official Oppression related to a 2020 incident in which he jailed investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino for contempt of court.

    Jordan was briefly taken into custody and released Monday on a $500 bond from the 339th District Criminal Court under Judge Teiva Bell. Although Official Oppression charges under Texas Penal Code are a Class A Misdemeanor, such cases are referred to felony courts for prosecution.

    On June 30, 2020, Dolcefino entered Jordan’s courtroom to question the judge about his lack of action on a series of complaints of public corruption. Dolcefino was wearing a hidden camera to document the interaction.

    According to the video evidence, Jordan at first greeted Dolcefino, but then told the reporter he would not answer his questions and threatened to hold him in contempt if he persisted. Moments later, Jordan had Dolcefino shackled and taken to jail.

    The following day, television cameras recorded guards ushering Dolcefino back into the courtroom in handcuffs and a jail-issued orange jumpsuit. Jordan then sentenced him to three days in jail and 180 days of probation. After Dolcefino appealed, Jordan added an alcohol monitor and random drug tests to his probation conditions.

    Seems like an abuse of power, possibly with First Amendment abridgement implications.

    Although Jordan maintained he had been holding virtual hearings when Dolcefino entered, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later overturned Dolcefino’s conviction, writing, “after a review of evidence and arguments, the contempt of court allegation is not supported by the habeas corpus record.”

    Dolcefino told The Texan he is calling for Jordan to resign.

    “This guy does not deserve to be on the bench, period,” said Dolcefino. “The Fort Bend County prosecutors spent months investigating this.”

    Darrell Jordan has been in office longer than some of his compatriots, having been elected to his current judgeship in 2016. But it does seem like Democratic Judges are up to an awful lot of shady activity in Harris County.

    [Edited to add: Headline fixed. Damn autocorrect…]

    LinkSwarm for June 24, 2022

    Friday, June 24th, 2022

    Two landmark Supreme Court cases drop, another woke social justice child-rapist exposed, Keith Olbermann channels John C. Calhoun, and the secret plans to nuke Yorkshire. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Just like the old gypsy woman said leakers indicated, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade.

    The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, allowing a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks to take effect.

    “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority.

    Justice Alito was joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority. Justice Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion with the majority that he would have taken a “more measured course” stopping short of overturning Roe altogether, but agreed that the Mississippi abortion ban should stand.

    The Court’s liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented….

    The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization means each state will now be able to determine its own regulations on abortion, including whether and when to prohibit abortion.

  • The Supreme Court also handed down a landmark pro-Second Amendment case.

    In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court affirmed that gun rights are due the same protection as all other constitutional rights.

    To which I can only reply “Duh. What took them so long?”

    Today’s Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen is not only the most important Second Amendment ruling since D.C. v. Heller, it is potentially the most important Second Amendment ruling in American history.

    Not sure about that, as Heller firmly established the gun ownership was an individual right unconnected to militia service. That laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s ruling.

    For all the brouhaha, the question at hand in Bruen was rather straightforward: Can the state of New York require that applicants for gun-carry permits “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community,” or is New York obliged by the Constitution to offer a “shall issue” regime of the sort that 43 of the other 49 states have adopted? By a 6–3 vote, the justices decided that the latter approach is required. In the United States, Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion concluded, “authorities must issue concealed-carry licenses whenever applicants satisfy certain threshold requirements, without granting licensing officials discretion to deny licenses based on a perceived lack of need or suitability.” Moreover, while there is nothing illegal about America’s existing state-level permitting systems, those systems may not be mere smokescreens for outright prohibition, unequal protection, or unacceptable delay. “We do not rule out,” Thomas added in a footnote, any “constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”

    As Justice Alito was keen to note, this “holding decides nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm or the requirements that must be met to buy a gun. Nor does it decide anything about the kinds of weapons that people may possess.” It concludes solely that:

    The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.

    Bottom line: New York is allowed to exclude carry-permit applications on a categorical basis (e.g., the applicant has a felony conviction), but not on a subjective one (e.g., the applicant doesn’t “need” a gun in the view of the determining officer).

    To get there, the majority first determined that “nothing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.” Indeed, “to confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home,” the majority observed, “would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.” This, Thomas explained, would not do, because “the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’”

  • In light of the ruling, Borepatch offers up a rare word of praise for Mitch McConnell for black holing the Merick Garland nomination in 2015.
  • Liberals are taking the gun and abortion rulings well. Ha, just kidding! Keith Olbermann came out for nullification. Because nothing says “progressive liberalism” like adopting the policies of South Carolina from 1832.
    

  • Woke “socialist high school teacher” is “fighting for a better society” by filming himself having sex with a 13-year old student during lunch breaks.
  • Long, interesting twitter thread on how crime has soared under various George Soros-backed DAs.
  • Ukraine has banned the main opposition party. Not a great look. Though you know FDR would have tried that with Republicans if he thought they posed more of a threat to his agenda and the Supreme Court would let him get away with it…
  • Biden Administration to oil companies: “Hey, we need you to refine more oil! Also, we want to put you all out of business in five to ten years.”
  • “Court Rules Virtue-Signaling Minneapolis Mayor Failed to Protect Citizens With Enough Cops…The Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered kneeling Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and his band of defundanistas to hire more cops as required under the city’s charter or show why they can’t.”
  • Remember Andrew “failed Florida Democratic Gubernatorial candidate/gay meth orgy participant” Gillum? Well, he was just indicted on 21 counts of “conspiracy, wire fraud and making false statements” for raking off campaign contributions into his own pocket.
  • This week’s example of a reporter making up sources comes to you from Gabriela Miranda of USA Today.
  • Reason to worry: China has a new aircraft carrier the size of our own Nimitz-class carriers. But not too much: It probably won’t be ready for active service until 2025, and it’s oil-boiler powered rather than nuclear.
  • Israel is headed for yet another election. “After almost one year of taking power, Israel’s ruling coalition has agreed to dissolve the parliament and hold new elections. ‘Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office announced Monday that his weakened coalition will be disbanded and the country will head to new elections.'” (“How many elections is that now, five?” “Shut up! Don’t tell Mere!”)
  • International Swimming Federation bans men from competing. It’s astonishing that headline even needs to be written…
  • Twitter board recommends that they accept Elon Musk’s offer. Maybe he can get them to unlock my account.
  • The Denver Airport is expanding, and they’ve actually leaning into the conspiracy theories.
  • Powers that be in Tennessee are threatening YouTuber Whistlin Diesel with a year in prison for…splashing with a jet ski. Sounds like a clear abuse of power to me…
  • A review of one of the last production Trebants, the crappy, under-powered, plastic communist car East Germans had to wait years to buy. Let this be another reminder that commies aren’t cool and the consumer goods produced by commie companies that don’t have to deal with market competition are crap.
  • I’ve posted a lot of Peter Zeihan video this year, so you might be interested to know that his book The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization is now out.
  • “In my day, we had to work twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, and they set off a nuclear explosion underneath us! You tell that to kids these days and they don’t believe you!”
  • “After ‘Lightyear’ Bombs, Disney Quietly Cancels Their Upcoming Movie ‘Brokeback Woody.”