If I were tracking the 2024 Republican Presidential Primaries the way I tracked the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries (I’m not; the Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update was a huge pain in the ass and I don’t have the time to spend on it), Vivek Ramaswamy is exactly the sort of fringe candidate I’d give some time and attention to.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the millionaire entrepreneur and author of Woke, Inc., told National Review on Monday that he is “strongly considering” a run for president and expects to make a decision “very soon.”
Ramaswamy said he’s been drawn to the idea of running to address a “national identity crisis” that has left Americans hungry for purpose, meaning, and identity.
“We are at a point in our national history when the things that used to fill that void — faith, patriotism, hard work, even family — have disappeared,” he said, adding that in its absence, “wokeism, climate-ism as an ideology, radical gender ideology, Covidism” have become secular religions that fill that “black hole of identity.”
Conservatives have gotten too good at pointing out the problem and “trying to stamp out the poison without actually addressing the real problem,” said Ramaswamy, who has been dubbed the “CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.” The solution, he says, is to “fill that identity void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep, that it dilutes the secular agendas to irrelevance.”
Those such as President Biden who deliver a vision of national unity by beginning in the middle and calling for compromise are doing it wrong, Ramaswamy said. In order to build unity, the country must return to the “extremism of the ideas that set America into motion: free speech, unbridled meritocracy,” he said.
“I think most people believe these ideals and most people think their neighbors and their colleagues believe these ideals to be true as well, but they can’t be sure anymore, because they don’t feel free to talk about it,” he said. “And so that’s been one of the hallmarks for me, is to start talking openly, again, to lead the way by actually doing it.”
Ramaswamy founded biotech company Roivant Sciences in 2014 and served as its CEO until 2021. That year, he published Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, which says that despite “rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world,” stakeholder capitalism “robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity.”
In May 2022, Ramaswamy announced the launch of his new financial firm, Strive, which would focus on “excellence capitalism” rather than encouraging American corporations to get involved in social or environmental issues.
The Ohio-based firm was created to solve what it says is a fiduciary problem created by investment companies such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which have used clients’ funds to “exercise decisive influence over nearly every U.S. public company to advance political ideologies that many of their clients disagree with.”
“Over the last two years, I have traveled the country and listened to the concerns of everyday Americans who want to be heard in the places where they shop, work and invest,” Ramaswamy said in a statement at the time. “We want iconic American brands like Disney, Coca-Cola and Exxon, and U.S. tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google to deliver high-quality products that improve our lives, not controversial political ideologies that divide us. The Big 3 asset managers have fueled this polarizing new trend in corporate America, and that’s why we’re going to compete with them head-on to refocus American companies on the shared pursuit of excellence over politics.”
In September, Ramaswamy published his second book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.
He told National Review on Monday that he has been working to create a space for open conversations about a return to American ideals in recent years.
“I wasn’t free to speak as an elite CEO or the other environments I had been in, but I purposefully stepped aside from my job as a CEO to make this my mission over the last three years, to start talking openly,” he said.
He wants to “revive the American dream in the 21st-century context,” a vision that is of personal importance to Ramaswamy who has “lived the full arc of the American dream” as a first-generation Indian American. Ramaswamy, who attended Harvard for undergrad before attending Yale Law, is the son of a General Electric engineer and a geriatric psychiatrist.
Another box he checks is “Can self-fund,” as he is reportedly worth $500 million. That’s the sort of money that can easily get you to the finish line…in a senate or governor’s race. As Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved, spending $50 to $200 million
Is he a better speaker than Steyer or Bloomberg? That’s a pretty low bar, but yes:
That’s the latest video from his YouTube channel. Which, as of this writing, has 44 views.
So you can begin to see the scope of the problem.
Ramaswamy is a guy who might make a serious candidate for a lower-level job, but who wants to run for President as an outsider message candidate. In that sense, he’s a lot like Andrew Yang was for Democrats in 2020. But while Yang’s message was a bit eclectic for Democrats, Ramaswamy’s seems to be a lot closer to the default position for Republicans. It’s hard to see the necessary war against radical social justice being a wedge he can use to calve votes from higher profile and more experienced candidates.
It would be great if there were a Republican candidate in the 2024 Presidential race who was running to destroy wokeness…and who was also a proven elected leader of a large, successful state.
Like, say, Florida.
That’s the sort of candidate a majority of Republicans could get behind…
Via Texas Scorecard comes two different stories of how radical racist social justice warrior ideology in the form of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion continues to infect Texas universities.
First up: A University of Texas professor is suing UT officials for violating his First Amendment rights.
In attempts to silence the professor for speaking out on controversial issues, university administration threatened his job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, and academic freedom.
Richard Lowery, Ph.D., a tenured finance professor at University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, said in the complaint, “The officials at the state’s flagship university violated his constitutional right to criticize government officials.”
In the suit, Lowery claims the university administration “harmed his right to academic freedom.”
Lowery’s suit explains that the First Amendment “protects the right of public university professors to engage their colleagues and administrators in debate and discussion concerning academic matters, including what should be taught and the school’s ideological direction and balance.”
According to the Institute for Free Speech, Professor Lowery is “well known” for his “vigorous commentary on university affairs.” Lowery’s articles have been featured in The Hill, The Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and The College Fix.
Lowery has also been known to use social media and online opinion articles to “publicly criticize university officials’ actions, and ask elected state-government officials to intervene. He has also used such tools to participate in the sort of academic campus discourse that faculty traditionally pursue.”
In his articles criticizing UT officials, Lowery specifically calls them out for their approaches on issues such as “critical race theory indoctrination, affirmative action, academic freedom, competence-based performance measures, and the future of capitalism.”
On multiple occasions, Lowery reported that university administrators are using diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements to filter out “competent” teachers and professors who disagree with the DEI ideology prevailing on campus.
In response, Lowery claims university administrators “responded with a campaign to silence” him, where they threatened his job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, academic freedom, and labeled his behavior as inviting violence or lacking in civility.
The suit continues, saying school officials “also allowed, or at least did not retract, a UT employee’s request that police surveil Lowery’s speech, because he might contact politicians or other influential people.”
“Lowery got the message,” the suit says.
In response, the professor is seeking to “vindicate” his right of free speech, asking the court to declare the administration’s actions as unconstitutional and restore his First Amendment rights to speak on matters he was previously prevented from speaking on.
DEI has even infected the university previously considered a bulwark of conservative value, Texas A&M:
Thought of by many Texans as a relatively conservative university, a new report explains how Texas A&M has “gone woke” in recent years.
Scott Yenor, a Boise State professor and fellow at the Claremont Institute, explained during a recent interview on The Luke Macias Show how leftist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have seeped into the campus.
DEI programs have come under fire recently for prioritizing factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation over merit in hiring, admission, and curriculum.
“Texas A&M has this reputation as being one of the more conservative public universities. I know a generation ago when someone asked me where I would send my kids to school, I said the best public university in the country is Texas A&M,” said Yenor.
But when Yenor began researching DEI programs in college campuses across the country, he found something troubling in Texas.
The interesting thing about these universities is that they advertise what they’re doing. They have a plan and they’re proud of the plan. And then they go about trying to execute the plan. And Texas A&M announced a very radical diversity plan in 2010 and has been executing it like on steroids the last two years.
Yenor mentioned recent efforts to take down a statue of former Confederate General and Texas Governor Sul Ross from campus. Though that movement was unsuccessful, Yenoer argued bigger factors are at play.
“There were attempts to take down statues and, and, you know, other other ways of affecting the campus climate symbolically. But the more important thing is that there’s been a real, real ratcheting up of their understanding of what they have to do. The 2020 diversity plan really concerns breaking down the systems of oppression in words like ‘merit,’ hiring the best person, and things like that,” said Yenor.
To that end, Yenor pointed out a shocking statistic: Texas A&M University currently has more DEI personnel than the University of Texas at Austin.
“It’s true at A&M that diversity is the new merit,” said Yenor.
Governor Greg Abbott issuing a directive banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory doesn’t seem to discouraged social justice warriors from continuing to radicalize Texas higher education. There needs to be sterner measures, including defunding the DEI bureaucracy, followed by pink slips.
“Biden’s job growth is mostly immigrants working for low wages.” Also this: “The Department of Homeland Security has been issuing an unknown number of two-year work permits to illegal immigrants, which will keep them in the workforce suppressing wages and fanning the flames of discontent amongst Americans unable to find jobs until the next presidential election.” What the hell?
“Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media.”
The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported . This same “disinformation” group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress.
“Any outfit like that engaged in censorship shouldn’t have any contact with the government because they’re tainted by association with a group that is doing something fundamentally against American values,” Jeffrey Clark, ex-acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the Washington Examiner. “The government or any private entity shouldn’t be involved with this entity that’s engaged in conduct that is either legally questionable or at least morally questionable.”
GDI compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” that it feeds to corporate entities, such as the Microsoft -owned advertising company Xandr, emails show. Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.
The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on this exclusion list. The list includes at least 2,000 websites and has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” said GDI’s CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast.
GDI has identified that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
Another huge story that the news media has done it’s best to ignore: a toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The blew it up to prevent a BLEVE and ended up releasing Phosgene gas. That’s carrying your World War I reenactment too far.
90-year California Democratic Senator old Dianne Feinstein to retire after 2024. But…
A few hour later she was evidently unaware she had retired. Increasingly, “crazy” or “senile” seem to be the two most common flavors of the Democratic Party…
Now that it’s less than two years before the 2024 Presidential election, a small crop of Republicans whose last names are not “DeSantis” or “Trump” seem to have convinced themselves that they’re viable Republican presidential candidates. These people are either wrong or running for Vice President. The lack of enthusiasm for all four of the would-be candidates is palpable.
Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. For some reason (photogenic?), NRSC has been using her as one of their email begathon pitch-critters for a while, which probably explains why I’ve been receiving countdown emails (“I’m making a special announcement in 6 days.”) for her-not-even-remotely anticipated run. One struggles in vain to find the significant party faction Haley appeals to. Soft feminist Republican businesswomen? Indian-Americans? Plus: She appointed Tim Scott to the senate. Minuses: Backed Rubio in 2016, and was soft on culture war/social justice issues until about late 2020, and refused to fight transgender bathrooms, very low-hanging fruit for actual conservatives, back when she had a chance as SC Governor. No thank you. Effectively running for Vice President.
Former Vice President Mike Pence. Former Vice Presidents (Nixon, Bush41) used to have the inside tract to a White House nod in the Republican Party, but those days are gone. A solid, unexciting Vice President in the Walter Mondale mode for the first 46 months of his term who royally pissed off Trump supporters with his words and deeds in the last two months. Rational or not, Trump supporters now seem actively hostile to a Pence run, and since they were his only potential base of significant support (and only if Trump didn’t run), that’s a real obstacle, despite him checking almost all of the right policy boxes. If he runs (I have my doubts, as he doesn’t seem to have even his own website), he’s effectively running in the John Kasich lane (right down to the “unexciting Midwestern governor” background), which is a one-way ticket to Palookaville. No thank you. The only candidate here that we know isn’t running for Vice President.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. There was a time when being Secretary of State was a solid stepping stone to The White House. And that time was “the early 1800s,” as Martin van Buren was the last to do it, and only after a stint as Vice President. Which is bad news for Pompeo, arguably the most successful Secretary of State since James Baker. Between the Abraham Accords and keeping the War on Terror coalition together long enough to destroy the nascent caliphate of the Islamic State, Pompeo was a vast improvement over the largely ineffective Rex Tillerson, and worked well with foreign nations and international organizations that were, to put it mildly, not wild about his boss. And he has some other impressive credentials as well. “He graduated first in his class from West Point, and from Harvard Law and was on Harvard Law Review. After six years in the House of Representatives, he became CIA director for Trump, and then secretary of state – the only person ever to hold both jobs.” His short congressional tenure earned him a 97% score from the ACU. For me one of the biggest problems with Pompeo is that, like Haley, I primarily know his post-office career as a guy constantly in my inbox begging for money, and also talking like a career politician that’s already cranking up the baloney factory before properly introducing himself for a run. As Beto O’Rourke found out, three terms in the house is exceptionally thin electoral experience for a Presidential run. Plus his attempt to use “pipehitter” as a catchphrase for some sort of imaginary blue collar credibility was just laughable, as the term conjures drug addicts rather than plumbers. There’s just a bit too much standard issue political phoniness here, and Pompeo strikes me as someone who’s time has already passed. No thank you, but the softest no thank you of these four.
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. I was only vaguely aware of Sununu The Younger, but his attack on DeSantis for having the balls to fight the poison of social justice instantly rocketed him to the bottom of my list. You would think Romney’s failure would have soured the party on moderate business-oriented governors, but evidently Sununu didn’t get the memo. Likewise, I doubt modern voters are interested in voting for Bush Lite The Next Generation. No thank you. An unwillingness to actual fight for conservative values is automatically disqualifying, and I don’t him bringing anything to the table as a Veep pick.
So there you have it. Four people who are not going to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2024.
Following the huge power outages from untrimmed trees in the most recent ice storm, Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk has evidently been fired.
Austin City Council members unanimously agreed to part ways with City Manager Spencer Cronk, two city council members told KXAN under the condition they not be named.
The decision was made behind closed doors in executive session Thursday but has not been announced publicly yet. The city manager had no comment, a spokesperson said.
Mayor Kirk Watson ultimately placed an item on Thursday’s agenda to “evaluate” the city manager’s performance, with the backing of a handful of city council members, after overwhelming swaths of Austin Energy customers lost power during last week’s ice storm.
“The members of the City Council had a productive executive session on Thursday night. I’m going to honor that process and won’t comment on the matters that were discussed,” Watson said Friday.
Council members said they were also frustrated with Cronk’s Wednesday night announcement that the Austin Police Association and the city have reached an agreement in principal without looping in city council members.
Clearly Austin Energy’s ice storm prevention and response was woefully inadequate, but Cronk is largely the scapegoat for the Austin City Council’s own “green” priorities over actual tree maintenance. Austin’s radical leftwing government is filled with people who love preserving trees almost as much as they love raking off graft for leftwing causes.
Scapegoat or not, crazy leftwing causes are why I won’t be mourning Cronk’s departure, as he picked the radical leftwing activist participating in the “Reimaging Austin Police” lunacy. There’s no guarantee, but with Watson as mayor and Mackenzie Kelly on the council, maybe there’s a small chance Austin can hire a city manager more interested in actually managing city government in a competent manner that earning social justice warrior brownie points.
Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.
The leftwing corruption of all government institutions continues apace. “US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”
“Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”
There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”
But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.
“This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”
Boom. “Texas has punted Citigroup from the syndicate that’s set to manage the Lone Star state’s largest-ever municipal bond offering, saying the bank’s policies for gun retailers discriminate against the firearms industry.”
Grand Theft Pollo. The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings. Vera Liddell, 66, allegedly began stealing from the Harvey School District during the height of COVID-19.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Bill Maher continues to take regular red pills. “The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it.”
We could be heroes, just for one day. Or once a month, as the case may be…
This week in rapper murders: “Tampa rapper arrested for young mother’s murder days after being acquitted of recording studio double-murder.”
A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.
Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.
A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”
Velma, if you haven’t heard, is HBO Max’s “re-imagining” of the animated Scooby-Doo TV show. And by “reimagined” I mean “mangled and mutilated to fit the angry, narrow confines of social justice warrior ideology.”
Since I don’t have cable, I can’t go out of my way to watch it for the sake of reviewing it, so let’s let The Critical Drinker take a whack at it:
If that weren’t enough, let’s let Ryan George of Pitch Meeting also take his turn at bat:
The original Scooby-Doo is hardly going to go down in the annals of television as a classic on the order of Hill Street Blues or I Love Lucy, but it was a solid, wholesome kid-vid TV show that made good use of its limited animation budgets to produce solid, fondly remembered shows that the franchise was strong enough to survive decades of tweaks (“with special guest Don Knotts”), soft reboots, a series of unlikely direct to video movies…
…two “meh at best” live action movies, and even inflicting The Vile Abomination on American viewers.
Even apart from the social justice idiocy, throwing away that legacy for derisive belittlement is just wrong. Moreover, these projects never seem to be profitable or even well-received (remember the disasterous Land of the Lost remake with Will Ferrell?). If you don’t treat the source material with a due amount of respect, all you’re doing pissing off generations of people that grew up watching the originals.
This sort of thing is natural meat for The Critical Drinker, who delights in tearing into Social Justice crap. But the pointed Pitch Meeting takedown seems far more significant, as George has never been one to wade in culture war commentary.
Jordan Peterson always makes a great Joe Rogan guest, and the new interview they did last week is no exception.
Discussing the Twitter files, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, victimhood identity politics, postmodern theory, and falseness of reducing everything to power dynamics.
On the World Economic Forum:
“Globalist Utopian Tyranny” is a great phrase.
They follow in the wake of “Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it.”
There then follows a devastating take-down of the immortality of pushing 350 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of death through higher energy prices in the hope that maybe 100 years from now life for the poor will be better. I encourage you to watch the entirety of this segment for that.
“It’s a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It’s like there’s a bit of a moral hazard in, that don’t you think?”
“Do you want to save the planet, or do you want the power? And let’s let’s put the second one first, because the probability that you’re a saint or the messiah is pretty damn low. So that’s the danger of the Davos crowd.”
I suspect I’ll be putting up more snippets from this interview sometime this week…
Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”
The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.
The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.
“Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.
According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.
“Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”
Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.
The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”
“Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.
“Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.
The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.
“In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.
Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.
The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
I would link to Clarkson’s blistering attack on Wokeness…but it appears that the Sunday Times has cravenly removed it from their website. The Daily Skeptic appears to have reprinted it.
How did a movement theoretically dedicated to “checking privilege” take as its sacred totem a woman who’s only accomplishment is marrying into the royal family?
