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LinkSwarm for August 28, 2020

Friday, August 28th, 2020

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Republican National Convention finishes up and more news of those “fiery but peaceful” riots.

  • Here’s President Donald Trump’s full nomination acceptance speech from the RNC:

  • The PJ Media crew live-blogged night four of the RNC. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Victor Davis Hanson on what the riots are really about:

    As with most cultural revolutions that wish to start things over at “year zero,” the violence is aimed at America’s past in order to change its present and future.

    The targets are not just the old majority culture but also classical statues and buildings, hallowed institutions, religious icons, the renowned names of streets and plazas, and almost every representation of tradition and authority.

    For the majority of Americans who do not buy into the revolution, it all seems so surreal — and hypocritical.

    Only a despised, dynamic American economy allows millions to divorce from it for a summer of protest.

    A ridiculed U.S. Constitution ensures that looters and arsonists have due process.

    The Bill of Rights guarantees peaceful assembly and electrically amplified profanity rarely protected elsewhere.

    Affirmative action; federally ensured and subsidized college grants and loans; and cheap smartphones, headphones and laptops all give youth choices unimagined in the past.

    No matter — cultural revolutions are incoherent and nihilist.

    Those who signed up for the Jacobin Reign of Terror wanted violence, not a constitutional republic to replace the French monarchy.

    The Bolsheviks were less interested in substituting an elected prime minister for the Russian czar than in grabbling power and murdering millions of their enemies.

    Mao Zedong did not just hate the warlords, landlords, Mandarins and Nationalists. He wished to reinvent 1 billion Chinese in his own narcissistic image by first killing millions.

    There is, of course, reason to oversee the police more effectively.

    Universities are partly culpable for a collective $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.

    Globalization eroded the middle class. Inner-city America is far too violent — and far too neglected.

    But these are not the apparent concerns of those who carry off shoes and phones in U-Hauls, kick the unconscious on the pavement, destroy art and sculpture, or seek to torch public buildings with public servants inside.

    The point of the mob is to wipe out what it cannot create.

    It topples what it can neither match nor even comprehend.

    It would erode the very system that ensures it singular freedom, leisure and historic affluence.

    The brand of the anarchist is not logic but envy-driven power: to take it, to keep it, and to use it against purported enemies — which would otherwise be impossible in times of calm or through the ballot box.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “There’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.”

    More fundamentally: where do you think the country would be without him? Even if you’re disappointed with less than 200 miles of wall, remember that leading Democrats not only insist that every single new inch is a moral atrocity, they want to tear down sections that already exist.

    Think the trade agenda is progressing too slowly? Well, President Trump already renegotiated two of our worst trade deals. How many new, bad ones do you think a Hillary administration would have signed by now? Trump not tough enough on China for you? A little too much talk about his “good friend” Xi Jinping? I sympathize. But he’s still done more than all the last four presidents combined. More than that, he’s reversed the China policy of the last four presidents combined. Have you heard how Joe Biden kowtows to China?

    And I know that some will insist that, so long as a single American soldier, sailor, airman, or marine is deployed anywhere in the Middle East, then Trump has failed—or worse, betrayed them. But in fact, the president has mostly succeeded at the tasks he promised for that region: defeating ISIS, revitalizing our alliances while requiring more from our allies, and prudently disengaging from existing conflicts while not starting any new ones.

    All of these trends, changes, policies, and initiatives, and many others—however incomplete—would be reversed in the event of a Trump loss. The ruling class would hail the president’s defeat as a historic repudiation of his (allegedly) “racist and xenophobic” vision, etc., as a vindication of every charge and complaint they’ve made against him and his supporters since Day 1. Their goal would be to erase the last four years and the 2016 election as if they never happened. If think-tank conservatives want above all to get into a DeLorean and go back to 1985, the ruling class wants to cram America into a Prius and force us back to 2015. And then resume the trajectory the country had been on back then, i.e., the road to woke managerial tyranny.

  • Password is: “Enthusiasm Gap,” with six times as many CSPAN viewers for the RNC than the DNC. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • President Trump’s poll numbers rise in swing states. Adjust by the usual 3% polls historically favor Democrats over election results, and Trump is tied or ahead in all of them. And that was before the RNC. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Another look at the rioting in Kenosha.
  • Video of Kyle Rittenhouse exercising his right of self-defense:

  • Reporter robbed at gunpoint during riot.
  • Newspeak from CNN: “Fiery but peaceful protests.” At this point, all of us should just start pelting CNN reporters with garbage.
  • CNN’s inadvertent open mic:

  • “CNN Hires This Is Fine Dog To Report On Riots.”
  • Sadly true:

  • This is how cities die: “Shaken by summer looting in affluent neighborhoods, some Chicagoans are moving away.”
  • Jerry Seinfeld tries to refute that New York City is dead piece, but it just amounts to “New York is awesome and we’re tough” yadda yadda, and doesn’t address the insanely high taxes or actually changes in economic justification that used to make living in the city a requirement that isn’t there anymore. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Powerline has additional thoughts on that New York Times article mentioned yesterday that shows that, amazingly, riots, looting and arson aren’t popular with average Americans.
  • Baltimore Sun slams Maryland Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik for blaming Baltimore’s dysfunction on Democrats. They said that was “ludicrous and overly simple,” which I guess is a synonym for “true.”
  • “The Post Office Conspiracy Is First Class Stupidity“:

    If you believe the mainstream media, Donald Trump is involved in a nefarious scheme to somehow make the USPS into something inefficient and incompetent, which comes close on the heels of his plot to make the sun start setting in the West. If that’s his plan, he already pulled it off decades before he first hit the cover of the New York Post. We conservatives think the president has done a lot of great stuff since humiliating Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit in 2016, but not even the most hardcore Trump Train engineer would go as far as Trump’s frothy pie-holed critics and credit the president with the mastery of time and space.

    The correspondence conspiracy is pretty much liberal Q, except the eccentric Q folks at least like America.

    And here’s a special shout-out to the Democrats pushing this intellectual fentanyl for deciding it is a good idea to choose the competence of the post office as their hill for the crusty crustacean’s campaign to die on. Please, continue pointing to the USPS as an example of what you’ll make the entire government into if we’re dumb enough to elect Gropey J. Good thinking, because if there’s anything that real people outside the MSNBCNN bubble love, it’s the post office. It’s the federal DMV, except with stamps.

    Snip.

    What is clear is that the real goal of this conspiracy theory is to launch a preemptive attempt to find another excuse for a Democrat defeat. Last time it was PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN and this time it’ll be POSTAGE POSTAGE POSTAGE.

    Apparently, his plan is to somehow make it so the post office will be unable to deliver vote by mail ballots in order to prevent Democrats from winning the election that their senile old weirdo nominee is in the process of blowing. It might be interesting to examine the details of this conspiracy theory if there was even a coherent conspiracy theory to examine, but there’s not. It’s mostly “Trump bad!,” then low and undecipherable mumbling, then “And that’s how he will steal the election!”

    The specifics of the alleged plot, to the extent you can identify them, are puzzling and elusive. What exactly is Trump going to do again? Is he going to order the mailmen to toss ballots in the shredder? Seems like it would be hard to pull off that flex with all those crack journalists out there. We are also told that he is rounding-up blue mailboxes from America’s street corners, and that this has been going on for a couple of decades is only further proof of his evil plan, somehow. What is not clear is how this might work in practice – so, the idea is that the Democrat voter comes home, ballot in hand, weeping because there are no blue mailboxes anymore to place his ballot into, and then he walks back inside his house past … his own mailbox? And then he just gives up? He sits at his dinner table, head in hands, sobbing at his inability to figure out how to drop a piece of correspondence into the postal system?

  • “New Jersey Election Invalidated Because of Mail-In Voter Fraud.”
  • Related: “Man Arrested in L.A. for Voting 3 Times as His Dead Mother.
  • Good news! Yaser Abdel Said, the man accused of murdering his own two daughters in an Islamic honor killing, has finally been apprehended after a 12 year manhunt.
  • Texas Democrats sue to keep the Green Party off the ballot in November. Remember: When Democrats say they support equal ballot access, they don’t really mean it.
  • University of Arizona stops a Wuhan coronavirus outbreak before it starts.
  • Interesting data on how UK Labour Party has become markedly unpopular in ever-younger age groups:

  • President Trump to the press:

  • Reporter: Why are the NBA’s ratings down? Expert: Woke politics and China. Reporter: Do you have any idea? Expert: Woke politics and China. Any idea at all? Expert: WOKE POLITICS AND CHINA! Reporter: 😑.
  • Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp has has had enough of Social Justice Warriors in Silicon Valley.
  • Dwight has a four part video series on The Falkland Islands War up.
  • Speaking of Dwight, he might appreciate these annotated lyrics to the C.W. McCall song “Convoy,” since we recently watched the movie of the same name. (Brief review of the movie: Deeply flawed but weirdly compelling.)
  • Captain Kirk brings the fire:

  • “Arkham Board of Health Feedback On Miskatonic University’s Draft Plan for a Safe Campus Reopening.”
  • “Did Democrats Sacrifice Several Goats To Satan At The DNC? Fact Check: FALSE. They Actually Sacrificed Just One Goat.”
  • “Facebook Now Allows Users To Flag Anything They Disagree With As ‘Literally Hitler.”‘
  • Speaking of Facebook, everyone hates their new interface. Me included.

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for August 14, 2020

    Friday, August 14th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, the science behind Beirut’s big boom, and more Democrats destroying their own cities.

    It’s supposed to hit 105°F in Austin today. Stay frosty…

  • President Donald Trump helped broker a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that includes fully normalized diplomatic relations.

    If Obama had done this, it would be front page news on every paper in America proclaiming what a “historic” peacemaker Obama was. Since no Democrat can take the credit, newspapers that hate Trump and Israel have been downplaying the news as much as possible.

  • Since people are always talking about “October Surprises,” here’s a possibility: Saudi Arabia and Israel signing their own peace treaty and full diplomatic recognition. Israel and the Saudis have been secretly cooperating against the Iran-Syria axis for quite some time. And now there are public signs of a thaw, including positive depictions of Jews in a new TV drama shown on Saudi TV.
  • “Obama Horrified As Trump Undoes His Years Of Hard Work Bombing The Middle East.” “My drone strikes — all for nothing!”
  • Hydroxychloroquine cuts the death rate in countries that administer it early to Wuhan coronavirus victims. Why won’t the media report that?
  • Democrats cave on reopening schools:

    New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.

    And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.

    “I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

    Reopening means swimming against their anti-Trump base and teachers union donors’ full-court press to amp school funding and slash teacher duties. That means the below-surface financial and political pressure Cuomo, Pelosi, and Schumer are under to make this kind of a reversal must be huge. It’s likely coming from not only internal polling but also early information about just how many people have left New York and New York City, as well as interpersonal intelligence from their influential social circles.

    This means three things. First, the pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. Second, Democrats’ hard opposition to school reopenings has been politically devastating. Third, all the push polls and media scaremongering promoting the idea that most parents shouldn’t and wouldn’t send their kids back to school have failed.

  • More on New Yorkers fleeing the DeBlasio-made hellhole:

    Start spreadin’ the news, they’re leavin’ today!

    However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.

    Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.

    One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.

    “In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”

    She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.

    “We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”

    Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.

    The Lucerne, at 79th Street and Amsterdam, and the Hotel Belleclaire, at 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.

    Now, with the thinnest of justifications:

  • As always, riots hurt the poor the worst. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Residents push “protestors” away from Chicago police station. “We refuse to let people come to Englewood and tear Englewood apart.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Minneapolis Forcing Riot-Wrecked Businesses To Pay Property Taxes Before Getting Permits To Rebuild.” Pay property taxes for what, since they voted to disband the police. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) (Update: Fortunately, somebody handed the City of Minneapolis a clue-by-four.)
  • “Florida Democrats aimed to register 1 million voters by now. They didn’t come close.”

    Florida Democrats have a problem: there were supposed to be more of them by now.

    Following narrow losses in 2018 races for Florida governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats emerged from the midterms with a new resolve to register more voters in the nation’s largest swing state as a path to victory in 2020. Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, fresh off a stinging 34,000-vote loss, vowed to “flip Florida blue” by registering or “re-engaging” 1 million voters, including 200,000 new Democrats added by the Florida Democratic Party.

    But those initiatives fell well short of their goals. And with seven weeks until mail ballots go out in the Nov. 3 election between presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, Florida Republicans are closer to parity in voter registration than they’ve been in decades — a dynamic that may portend yet another hard-fought, narrowly decided presidential election.

    “We won the voter registration war,” Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters said last week.

    Voter registration — the grunt work of politics — sets the foundation for campaign season. For Florida Democrats, who historically have had a harder time turning out their voters than Republicans, it’s even more crucial.

    When former President Barack Obama first won Florida in 2008, he entered the final months of the campaign with an advantage of more than 500,000 registered Democratic voters. That lead has steadily dwindled, dropping to about 259,000 in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by 112,000 votes.

    New data posted online Wednesday by the Florida Division of Elections showed that, as of July 20, when books closed on eligible voters for the upcoming Aug. 18 primary, Democrats led Republicans in the state by 240,423 people — about 5,000 fewer than at the same point in 2018.

  • South Korea plans to build F-35 aircraft carrier. Due late this decade. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hezbollah linked to “spike in drug trafficking across the Middle East and Europe.”
  • Interesting piece on the physics of the Beirut explosion:

    The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.

    No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.

    Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.

    The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.

    By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.

    Snip.

    Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.

  • Bank of Japan gives up on negative interest rates.
  • “Despite The Diplomatic Bluster, China’s State-Run Banks Are Quietly Complying With Trump’s Hong Kong Sanctions.”
  • DC comics decided it wanted to get woke, so it’s no surprise that Warner Media decided they needed massive layoffs.

    It’s a “bloodbath” at the WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics, with the Editor in Chief, the Publisher, and one third of the editorial staff sacked.

    Included in the sackings is — this is a rumor as of yet, not confirmed — leftwing SJW ideologue Andy Khouri, one of the absolute cancers killing the industry, who brought in GamerGate skel Zoe Quinn to “write” “comics” for DC, despite her having no comic book experience and no writing experience (outside Depression Quest and a failed kickstarter). Khouri filled DC’s Vertigo imprint with angry yet untalented SJW freaks; Vertigo was cancelled within a year.

    DC had already laid off people last year, and now has to cut even more. Co-publisher Dan DiDio was fired last year, leaving the other co-publisher, Jim Lee, supposedly in charge; now Jim Lee has been pushed out of that position, though he’ll probably be kept in some other role. (He’s a major comic book artist.)

    Why did this happen to DC Comics?

    Let’s ask Wonder Woman and see if she can tell us.

    Oh yeah, everyone involved in this deserved to lose their job:

  • America:

  • Driving back from a barbecue road trip Saturday, I saw a Trump 2020 billboard, which was simplicity itself:

    TRUMP: JOBS
    BIDEN: MOBS
    

  • This is pretty interesting:

  • Google puts its thumb on the scale yet again:

  • “I know just the thing to make him complete: Some bacon! I don’t know if it’s cooked, I don’t want to know if it’s cooked. All I need to know is that I get to give him some creepy bacon fingers!
  • Wants no part of the goat rodeo:

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, video, Welfare State | No Comments »

    “Let’s Have A War!”

    Tuesday, August 11th, 2020

    Because 2020 just didn’t have enough tricks up its sleeve, the specters of multiple wars seem to be popping up all over the place.

    1. The most worrying, from our perspective, is the possibility of a U.S./China military confrontation over a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

      After Beijing officials have repeatedly charged Washington with violating the decades-long status quo “One China policy”, and amid ratcheting tensions over Taiwan given the highest-level meeting between Washington and the self-ruled island in decades is currently taking place with Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar meeting government officials in Taipei Monday, the region is on edge after satellite images showing a significant Chinese military build-up near the island have reportedly emerged.

      The New Zealand Herald reports the alarming development that “satellite images reportedly show amphibious armored vehicles and mobile missile launchers massing at military bases near the island nation.”

      Specifically, according to the report, the images show “the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moving the military vehicles into the Eastern Theatre Command on China’s coastal cities across the strait from Taiwan, with missile launchers well within range to hit any targets in Taiwan.”

      It comes after threats and counter-threats of military build-up between the two, with regional analysts cited in the report saying there’s currently high risk for military clash or incident.

      While it’s unclear where the newly published image featured in the New Zealand Herald is ultimately sourced from (the satellite images first appeared in Kanwa Defence Review – a Canadian military magazine focused on East Asian affairs and diplomacy), many are convinced that Beijing is sending a clear signal to Washington and Taipei. However, the satellite image could also simply reveal a military base vehicle storage depot, common at most any nation’s military bases.

    2. I’ve covered the slow motion Chinese-Indian War before, but that’s not going away any time soon. Both side continue their military build-up along the Line of Actual Control.
    3. Tensions are also high between Greece and Turkey, with Turkey sending a military escort along with an oil exploration ship into (disputed) Greek waters.

      Tension remained high Tuesday between Greece and Turkey, both of which have warships in the eastern Mediterranean after Turkey sent a research vessel to carry out seismic research for energy resources in an area Greece says is on its continental shelf.

      Greece will be requesting an emergency meeting of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council, the prime minister’s office announced following a meeting between Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias.

      Ankara announced on Monday that its research vessel Oruc Reis and two support vessels would be operating in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and Greece until Aug. 23. The vessel arrived in the area Monday morning, escorted by Turkish warships.

      Greece slammed the decision as an illegal act that infringed on its sovereign rights, saying the Turkish research vessel was inside an area covered by the Greek continental shelf. Greek warships were in the area and were monitoring the Oruc Reis, and the military was on alert, officials said.

      NATO allies and neighbors Greece and Turkey have traditionally had testy relations and have been at odds for decades over a wide variety of issues. The two have come to the brink of war three times since the mid-1970s, including once over drilling exploration rights. Recent discoveries of natural gas and drilling plans across the east Mediterranean have led to renewed tension.

      Yeah, but Greek-Turkish enmity goes back much farther than that, almost a millennium back, to when the Turkic Islamic Seljuk Empire started their conquest of the Hellenized Byzantine Empire’s Anatolia, up through the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the Ottoman conquest of almost all of Greece over the next hundred years. There then followed many unsuccessful Greek revolts, until Greece threw off the Ottoman yoke with the Greek War of independence (1821-1830). The two have fought each other several times since then, until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of the modern state of Turkey and the Grecco-Turkish War (1919-1922), where a Greek attempt to seize back Anatolian land led to a disasterous defeat culminating in the Great Fire of Smyrna. And don’t forget the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, resulting in the effective division of the island.

    Are any of these actually going to blossom into full-blown war? I suspect China is just sabre-rattling over Taiwan. Their best play would seem to be to wait for the possibility of a Biden Presidency to escape the vice that President Trump’s sanctions have put them into. And China thinks it can continue to eat away at Indian territory if it just bides its time.

    As far as a new Greek-Turkish War, that’s a more likely possibility, because the two really do hate each other. But one wonders whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ploy of another military adventure to distract Turkish voters from the quagmire of his current military adventures in Syria (yes, two, if you count the Afrin-Idlib incursion separate from the Kurdish buffer zone) will play well with Turkish voters.

    The post title is not an invocation, but a reference to pioneering punk band Fear’s song of the same name from their album The Record

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 2 Comments »

    Beirut Blast: How Many Kilotons?

    Wednesday, August 5th, 2020

    Yesterday a massive explosion ripped through Beirut, Lebanon from the city’s port:

    Here’s a video of the aftermath:

    Sometimes you do calculations and get a result that you know must be wrong, and you report them anyway so others can spot your errors. Reports had the explosion shattering windows 10 kilometers away, and doing damage to the Beirut airport, so I set out to calculate the explosive yield using the Nukemap, based on shattering windows at the airport (the 1 psi overpressure ring) and ignoring radiation effects. (The nukemap interface is far more user friendly than the “Nuclear bomb Effects Computer” at the back of Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.)

    Here’s the map with the resulting 1 psi ring just reaching the airport:

    That’s a blast effect map for a 300 kiloton blast.

    That has to be wrong, since the devastation is nowhere near that immense, and I can’t fathom even having enough space to store that much ANFO or PETN in one location. (And it was obviously a non-nuclear blast, due to lack of radiation and the color of the blast itself.)

    So let’s look at some comparable explosions:

  • The 2015 Tianjin blast, consisting of about 800 tons of ammonium nitrate:

  • The Murdock BLEVE:

  • Minor Scale, the 4 kiloton 1985 non-nuclear test blast of 4744 tons of ANFO, for which I can find no footage online.
  • The Operation Sailor Hat test blast of roughly 500 tons of explosive.

    • It’s reported that the port is under unofficial Hazbollah control, and wide-spread rumor is that it was a Hezbollah munitions or rocket factory that went up, but I haven’t seen any confirmation of this.

    In the fire before the big explosion, fireworks or munitions are clearly seen going off.

    The speed of the blast makes me think it was not TNT or a BLEVE. That explosion went up fast, and all at once. Here’s a Tweeter that suggests it was ammonia nitrate:

    And indeed that’s what the government has come out to say it is:

    Current death toll is over 100.

    But how do you abandon 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate? I know Lebanon is not exactly run on western efficiency, but that much exploding stuff just lying around for six years does rather strain credibility.

    But to return to the title question: ammonium nitrate is roughly 42% as effective as TNT. Which means the explosion would have been about 1.155 kilotons, or less than 1/15th the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Assuming that’s correct, here’s the revised nukemap blast:

    Somehow that blast radius seems too small, as the damage and overpressure wave seemed to travel much farther than shown here. But you wouldn’t want to stand next to it.

    I wrote Lebanon expert Michael Totten to ask about the blast, and he said he heard that the Lebanese Army has been storing confiscated high explosives there since 2014. If we assume that it’s ANFO rather than straight ammonium nitrate, that’s about 72% as effective as TNT, and with just under twice the detonation velocity of ammonium nitrate. That yields a blast of 1.98 kilotons. The nukemap for that:

    That seems to accord a bit better with blast observations.

    (Hat tip: Dwight and RoadRich.)

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, video | 3 Comments »

    BidenWatch for April 27, 2020

    Monday, April 27th, 2020

    The Tara Reade rape-accusation scandal isn’t going away, nor is the Bejing Biden tag, no matter how hard Team Joe might try to jujitsu it away. Plus Q1 fundraising numbers drop. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Well well well well well: “New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges“:

    A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.

    In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me.

    Reade couldn’t remember the date or the year of the phone call, and King didn’t include the names of callers on his show. I was unable to find the call, but mentioned it in an interview with Katie Halper, the podcast host who first aired Reade’s allegation. After the podcast aired, a listener managed to find the call and sent it to The Intercept.

    On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

    KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.

    CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

    KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?

    CALLER: That’s true.

    .

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The video in question:

  • By an amazing coincidence, that episode has been removed from the Google Play catalog. What are the odds?
  • Want to guess which Democrat is calling on Biden to bow out over the Tara Reade accusations? Would you believe notorious Hillary shill Peter Daou?

    Given that Daou’s Clinton sycophancy meter was pegged at 11 in 2016 (even Renfield told him “dial it back”), that gives some credence to the “replace Biden with Hillary at the convention” conspiracy theory. But Daou went all Bernie Bro in 2019, so maybe he’s just disgruntled. Or maybe he was only a Clinton mole the entire time pretending to be a Bernie Bro. Or maybe…(leads pack mule back to the Sierra Madre)

  • Also asking for Biden to drop out: Rose McGowan.
  • “The More Anger at China, the Worse for Biden.”

    For months now, it has been clear that Biden family corruption will be a campaign issue. The impeachment focused attention on ties between the vice president’s son, Hunter, and the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas giant Burisma. But Hunter had equally close, equally profitable ties to Chinese state-owned banks. Those connections were formed when Joe Biden was leading the Obama administration’s policies toward both China and Ukraine.

    Cozy, profitable, and possibly corrupt connections with the Chinese government are the last thing Americans want to hear about their politicians right now. Those voters are closeted at home, worried about their future, thanks to a virus that originated in Wuhan. They are mad as hell at Beijing for hiding what it knew, early on, about the pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party knew something terrible was happening, and it refused to share honest information about it. It denied the virus could be spread by human contact, weeks after it knew patients were infecting health care workers, and it hid vital information about the origins and genetic structure of the virus. The World Health Organization spread that misinformation. Beijing’s deception cost lives and livelihoods. Americans are reminded of it every day they are home from work or school under quarantine.

    This anger at China’s rulers is bad news for Joe Biden. Voters see China as a rising threat and its economic gains as coming out of American pockets. The Trump campaign was already pushing these issues. It won’t have any trouble tying them to Joe Biden and making his family the face of American elites who profit from their insider positions.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Rudy Guillani’s Commen Sense podcast did a show on the same theme. “Joe Biden’s relationship with China, ‘they make the Clintons look like cheapos.'”
  • Team Biden raised $46,741,037 in Q1. It’s much better than Biden had been fundraising, and a tiny bit ahead of what Hillary Clinton raised in 2016.
  • The challenges of fundraising from your basement.
  • What did they spend it on?

  • Another Slow Joe verbal fumble video:

  • And another:
    

  • And still another, with Special Guest Al Gore:

    Gore looks like he needs to invest in some sunblock.

  • “Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure.” It’s sort of a Greatest Hits of Biden incompetence. “You might think that after five decades of experience with public policy both foreign and domestic that you’d be able to discern Biden’s governing philosophy, even given his inability to express a coherent thought. But you’d be wrong. The lessons and experiences that inform a person’s decisionmaking seem to pass completely through Biden’s brain without leaving a trace of residue.”
  • “Joe Biden Advisor Tries to Blame Republicans for Small Business Loan Money Running out. It Doesn’t Go Well.”
  • New York Times does a Biden in quarantine piece. Anything remotely interesting or unexpected? (scans) “At times, callers deduce from rowdy background noise that Mr. Biden is working beside his German shepherds, Major and Champ.” Good for him. Also:

    The former vice president also places calls to mayors and governors; congressional leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; elder statesmen like Al Gore; potential running mates; donors; and former rivals like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. A few governors have become favorite points of contact, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

    Oh yeah, pick Gretchen Whitmer as your running mate. That move is gonna make you super popular…

  • There is simply no way Biden can out-hawk Trump on China. Some of the premises of this piece are ill advised, but the conclusion is not.

    The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on China’s leaders. The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.

    This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call, no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.

    This Dem-leaning piece is way too kind on China (as you would expect), but is correct that trying to spin Biden as “tough on China” is absurd.

  • “Candidate Who Killed #MeToo Movement Returns Donation From Notorious Masturbator.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Documents seized in the raid that killed him showed that Osama bin Laden wanted to assasinate President Obama because he thought Biden was woefully unprepared to take over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Virtual rope line?
  • Reporter tries to nail President Trump for having a rally in early March. Know who had rallies later in March? Biden. To be fair, they were much, much smaller rallies than Trump’s…
  • Is Biden going to release a potential SCOTUS list? David Harsanyi says “Go ahead, make our day.”
  • Why Biden might pick Alabama Congresswoman Rep. Terri Sewell. Basically because she’s black and endorsed Biden.
  • “Why Joe Biden’s America loves a lockdown. The divide between the professional and servant classes has never been more stark.”

    The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand—the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200. Let them eat cake, you know?

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Bernie Bro who created meme Twitter banned: “They took the bait!”

  • Heh:

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





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    LinkSwarm for March 13, 2020

    Friday, March 13th, 2020

    Happy Friday the 13th! This is the world we’re living in now:

  • President Donald Trump imposes 30 day ban on travel from Europe, based on Coronavrus fears. Doesn’t include the UK.
  • Prescient Trump:

    From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:

    1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
    2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
    3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

    Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.

    Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?

  • The NCAA Basketball tournament has been cancelled.
  • They say the neon lights are out on Broadway.
  • MLB opening delayed two weeks.
  • The idea driving this is not to stop all transmission of coronavirus (nice though that would be), but to flatten the curve so that American health care resources are not overwhelmed.
  • Coronavirus and the joys of National Health Service.
  • In Italy, you can say goodbye to Grandma. “Doctors are being told that they’ll likely need to deny care to senior citizens and those with other health conditions as the virus explodes across the nation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Norway shuts down.
  • Ireland locks down.
  • School’s! Out! For! Well, early Spring at least, in Houston ISD.
  • “Report: Hassan Nasrallah Infected with Coronavirus.” Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy…
  • Remember: It’s the “Wuhan Coronavirus”:

  • Coronavirus: A timeline.
  • Ex Jon: Don’t panic.
  • “Nation’s Nerds Wake Up In Utopia Where Everyone Stays Inside, Sports Are Canceled, Social Interaction Forbidden.”
  • “Parents Worried They’ll Have To Raise Their Own Children As Government Schools Shut Down.”
  • Nice try, China.

  • “U.S. Companies in China Were Struggling Before Coronavirus.”

    Before the coronavirus epidemic, U.S. companies were heading for record-low profitability in China as business conditions deteriorated and China’s economy slowed to its lowest rate in decades, according to a new survey of U.S. companies with operations in China…

    American companies surveyed by AmCham reported their lowest levels of profitability since the Chamber first began asking the question 18 years ago: 61% of members described their 2019 financial performance as profitable or very profitable, an eight-percentage point drop from the year before.

  • “In Warning Sign for Democrats, New Florida Poll Shows Trump Making Inroads Among Key Dem Voting Blocs.” 45%+ among Hispanics and 18%+ among blacks.
  • “Former UAW President Gary Jones Charged in Union Embezzlement Scandal.”

    He is charged with embezzling more than $1 million in union funds and properties to buy “luxury condos” in California, “lavish” dinners with “premium liquor,” five sets of custom-made golf clubs, horseback riding on a beach, and other non-union expenses that prosecutors allege the UAW covered up by mislabeling them as payments to vendors or meals for UAW officials, according to Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

  • Florida man convicted of scamming more than $2 million from a Fort Worth school district in a spearphising attack.
  • DOJ/DEA announce arrest of over 600 alleged cartel members as part of Project Python.

    No, not that Python

  • Uncle Sam brings the hammer down again against Iranian backed militias in Iraq.
  • “Saudi Arabia arrests 3 members of royal family in alleged coup plot.” If they’re anything like the other royal family members arrested on behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, this is probably good news.
  • Twitter verifies congressional candidate that doesn’t exist.
  • I don’t follow any of the singing competition TV shows, but, well:

  • Interesting essay on Chuck Leavell, the road keyboardist and musical director for the Rolling Stones.
  • Max von Sydow loses his chess game. He was in lots of fine films, perhaps none better than The Exorcist.
  • Alex Jones framed by reptoids arrested for DWI. But another report has him blowing under 0.8 BAC, which would suggest he can get the charges dismissed.
  • Social Justice Warriors slam University of Wisconsin for honoring basketball player who happens to be white. Because black people are so underrepresented in basketball…
  • Heh:

  • “Ignorant Boomer Shares CNN Article Thinking It’s Real.”
  • Attack of the hungry monkeys:

    Sadly, Troy Hurtubise is no longer around to design a monkey-proof suit…

  • Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof:

    • Let’s be careful out there…

    Update: “Austin Public Health has received two presumptive positive cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Austin-Travis County. These are the first cases to be confirmed in the area.” Not community spread.

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military | 2 Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 9, 2020

    Monday, March 9th, 2020

    EVERYBODY DROPPED OUT, except Grandpa Simpson, Grandpa Commie, and…Hot Surfer Girl? It’s Clinton-Sanders II, except Biden isn’t as widely loathed and Hillary was only physically decrepit. It’s no longer a clown car, but I’m going to keep the name because, you know, tradition. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 664
    2. Bernie Sanders 573
    3. Elizabeth Warren 64
    4. Michael Bloomberg 61
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    Polls

    Only one from Sunday:

  • Data for Progress (Washington): Biden 47, Sanders 44, Warren 5, Gabbard 3.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Biden’s at a bracing 85.8%.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • 538 covers the obvious: “After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden Is A Clear Favorite To Win The Nomination.”

    After a huge night on Super Tuesday — and with all his major opponents except Sen. Bernie Sanders having dropped out — former Vice President Joe Biden is a strong favorite to win the Democratic nomination, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.

    Snip.

    Things don’t look good for Sanders. He has several compounding problems:

  • First, he’s already behind by around 70 delegates, according to our estimates, based on returns in each state as currently reported. That deficit could get worse because there are some signs that late-returned mail ballots in California will help Biden — a reflection of the fact that Biden surged in the race in the final few days before Super Tuesday.
  • As mentioned, Biden will probably get a bounce in the polls as a result of his Super Tuesday wins. The model’s guess (accounting for its projected Super Tuesday bounce for Biden and the effects of Bloomberg and Warren dropping out) is that he’s currently ahead by the equivalent of 6 or 7 points in national polls. So although momentum could shift back toward Sanders later on, it may get worse for him in the short run.
  • Some of Sanders’s best states (California, Nevada) have already voted, and the upcoming states generally either aren’t good for him or have relatively few delegates. In fact, given how broadly Sanders lost on Super Tuesday — including in northern states such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and Maine — it’s hard to know where his strengths lie, other than among young progressives and Hispanics, who are not large enough groups to constitute a winning coalition in most states. Conversely, it’s easy to identify places where Sanders will likely lose badly to Biden. Our model has Biden winning a net of about 85 delegates over Sanders in Florida on March 17, where Sanders’s polling has been terrible, and a net of about 35 delegates in Georgia, which votes on March 24.
  • There aren’t that many delegates left after March. Some 38 percent of delegates have already been selected. And by the time Georgia votes in two-and-a-half weeks, 61 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. So even if Sanders did get a big, massive momentum swing late in the race, it might not be enough to allow him to come back, with only about a third of delegates still to be chosen.
  • Finally, even if Sanders does come back, it might merely be enough to win a plurality rather than a majority of delegates. We project that roughly 150 delegates — or about 4 percent of the total of 3,979 pledged delegates available — belong to candidates who have since dropped out or to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, even after accounting for the fact that statewide delegates are reallocated to other candidates once a candidate drops out.2 That creates an additional buffer that will make it harder for Sanders to win a majority.

    • So basically, Sanders has to come back quickly when the momentum is currently against him in a bunch of states that are not very good for him — or it will be too late. It’s not impossible. But the chances are low. The model gives Biden an 88 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates, with most of the remaining outcomes being “no majority” rather than a Sanders majority. It also gives Biden a 94 percent chance of winning a plurality of pledged delegates, and Sanders a 6 percent chance.

  • Is the great liberal freakout over?

    After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.

    Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.”

    Democrats were experiencing a political Murphy’s law, in which everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. The Senate voted to acquit Trump of impeachment charges, Democrats botched the vote count in Iowa, and the only “mainstream” candidate who seemed capable of challenging Sanders’ momentum was Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old homosexual mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Because African American voters are such a crucial demographic for Democrats, and because pundits believed black voters would never support a gay candidate, the chance that Buttigieg could win the nomination was dismissed out of hand. If Biden could not regain the lead, the “Anybody but Bernie” crowd seemed to calculate, the best hope of stopping Sanders was Bloomberg.

    An ex-Republican and former three-term mayor of New York City, Bloomberg had entered the campaign too late to be on the ballot in any of the first four states but was spending lavishly on Super Tuesday states. While the Bloomberg alternative was being explored, establishment Democrats experienced another shock in New Hampshire, where Biden placed fifth — zero delegates — behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. With Sanders leading the polls ahead of the February 22 Nevada caucus, the Democratic apocalypse was clearly at hand, and if the cable-news pundits had been worried after Iowa, they became utterly unhinged after New Hampshire.

    But the Great Liberal Freakout had not yet reached rock bottom. That nadir of panic came on February 19, when Bloomberg completely bombed his first debate appearance. Having become the default Plan B for “mainstream” Democrats, Bloomberg blew it so badly in his Las Vegas debate debut that the pundits suddenly found themselves searching for Plan C. Was it possible Klobuchar could contend for the nomination? Did Buttigieg deserve a second look? Or maybe Warren, whose debate attacks had inflicted the most damage on Bloomberg, might be capable of a resurgence? After Sanders scored another victory in Nevada, however, establishment Democrats evidently decided to go back to Plan A.

    Key to this desperate last-ditch strategy was the fact that black voters are a majority of Democrats in South Carolina. Four days after the Nevada primary, Rep. James Clyburn — known as the “godfather” of the South Carolina Democratic Party — delivered his endorsement of Biden, making an emotional appeal to unite behind the former vice president. Coming on the heels of a February 25 debate in Charleston, which many observers called Biden’s best performance of the campaign, Clyburn’s endorsement proved to be the turning point. Biden racked up nearly half the vote Saturday in South Carolina, more than doubling Sanders’ total, which immediately brought the capitulation of billionaire Tom Steyer. This was followed Sunday by Buttigieg’s announcement that he would suspend his campaign, and on Monday, both Buttigieg and Klobuchar endorsed Biden.

  • Kurt Schlichter says that the race just got even more hilarious:

    The battle is really for the shriveled heart of the Democrat Party, and no one better represents the yin and the yang of that dying collection of power-hungry elitists and grasping greedos than the doddering socialist Sanders and that Biden guy who should by all rights be chasing that damn know-it-all squirrel around the park.

    Biden reps the establishment, with his last fifty years of failure in Washington tracking exactly his party’s last fifty years of failure in Washington. And Sanders represents the fresh face of a 150-year-old murder cult that only people as dumb as Hollywood stars, college kids, and kale-gobbling hipsters would be stupid enough to let near power. If you’re not seeing anything for you between them, there’s a reason why – whichever loser they choose, you can be sure that you’ll be the enemy. With Sanders, you’ll be a Kulak, and with Biden, you’ll be a Kulak Lite. So, basically, you’ll be Ted Lieu-ed either way, but under Joe, your end might come a little slower, as is his won’t.

    The establishment is probably right about Sanders when they heed the injunction to “Never go full Red Guard.” A lot of people try to draw an analogy between Sanders’ anti-establishment populist insurgency and Donald Trump’s anti-establishment populist insurgency and warn that we’re likely to feel a third-degree Bern in November. And while the nominee of a major party always has a theoretical chance to win, the fact that Trump beat the odds does not mean the weirdo from Burlington is destined for victory. If you are normal, he wants to take your money, your guns, your doctor, your border, and even job if you are one of the American heroes who helped make us energy independent. Trump wanted to do the opposite. A better analogy is Sanders’s fellow garbage commie jerk, Jeremy Corbyn, who all the best people on Twitter told me was going to win and instead ended up taking the Labor Party down into the figurative Pulp Fiction pawn shop basement to channel Ving Rhames.

    Snip.

    Now, Biden is an inanimate object and everyone can see that he’s the Trojan donkey the establishment hopes to use to sneak back into power. That means he can’t very well capture the change zeitgeist. Sanders is a danger to the establishment because he actually believes the nonsense he’s spewing. He’d provide genuine change, but the problem is that with him, it would be changing us into his beloved Cuba.

  • “Lifelong Democrat Says Biden, Sanders Can’t Convince Him to Not Vote for Trump.”
  • The master at work:

  • “Nation Optimistic About Future Now That All Presidential Candidates Projected To Die Of Old Age Before Election.”

    • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden just had the best week for a politician running for President possibly ever. First he wins South Carolina, then two of his biggest rivals drop out and endorse him, then he wins most of the Super Tuesday states, takes the lead in delegates, and has still another deep-pocketed rival drop out and endorse him. (Long-vanquished rivals Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke also endorsed him.) Edward-Isaac Dovere has the long-winded, flattering, fed-to-my-by-Biden-insiders “comeback kid” version:

    Ducklo sidled up to the reporters, one by one, with the same mischievous smile. “Have you seen the video?” he’d say. “You gotta watch the video.” And then he’d stand and wait for each reporter to pull it up on his or her phone: a one-minute-and-40-second-long ad that snarkily compared Biden’s record with Pete Buttigieg’s. “Both Vice President Biden and former Mayor Buttigieg have taken on tough fights: Under threat of a nuclear Iran, Joe Biden helped to negotiate the Iran deal,” the narrator says. “Under threat of disappearing pets, Buttigieg negotiated lighter licensing regulations on pet-chip scanners.”

    The ad was harsh and petty, and the Biden campaign didn’t have money to put it anywhere except on Twitter—and thus on reporters’ phones. But that was enough. By the time Buttigieg did his rounds on the Sunday shows the next morning, he was getting asked about his experience at every turn.

    To survive long enough to become the unity candidate, Biden first had to be persuaded to rip into his rivals. Between his disappointing finishes in the first three states and his blockbuster victories that followed, the campaign made tweaks like this one. It didn’t overhaul its strategy or upend its structure. What his team did was try to redirect, in specific, targeted ways, a 77-year-old candidate who doesn’t take direction particularly well—and hope the electorate would notice.

    Note the classic “Oh, my oh-so-high-minded candidate needed to be convinced to go negative” spin.

    Biden at first resisted going negative, aides say—he doesn’t like attacking fellow Democrats. But after a fourth-place finish in Iowa, he went after Bernie Sanders, whom he genuinely likes and had resisted taking on in the debates, by smacking down socialism every chance he got. And although he’d been touched by Buttigieg’s defense of his family during the impeachment fight—and had come to see shades of his late son in the young mayor—he started attacking his moderate rival. He had no choice, his closest aides told him. This was a Do you actually want to be president? moment.

    “He did not love taking a sharp swing at another Democrat,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told me on Wednesday, recalling the conversation she’d had with him after the campaign decided to release the Buttigieg video. “He did not love taking it at Pete, whom he likes and respects. But he also understood and knew it was necessary to interrupt the narrative and shift some of the dynamic in the race, which he knew desperately needed to happen.”

    The Biden campaign wasn’t just broken. It was broke. Biden had no money for ads or internal polling, leaving his team to rely on publicly available numbers in order to get a feel for his performance. But it didn’t take a grand master to see that they were about to get checkmated. So, after denying rumors that the campaign planned to leave New Hampshire early, the morning of the primary it did just that. Aides rushed Biden to South Carolina and shoved talking points in front of him about how minority voters—including the black voters who form the backbone of his support—hadn’t been heard from yet. The move helped the speech get prominent TV coverage, which aides thought wouldn’t have been possible if he’d stayed in New Hampshire.

    What followed Biden’s early finishes—including a second-place spot in Nevada—was the fastest turnaround from flub to front-runner in modern Democratic politics.

    The basics of Biden’s campaign didn’t change. He kept a schedule with only a few events each day. He made new gaffes and generated new questions about whether he can consistently tell the truth.

    But he stepped up his rhetoric on health care and guns, and at every moment he could, his team urged him to repeat one word: Obama. “This guy’s not a Barack Obama!” he said of Buttigieg. Sanders, he said repeatedly, had wanted to primary the former president in 2012.

    Decisions about campaign spending and Biden’s schedule were handed over to Anita Dunn, an experienced Democratic operative (and former communications director in the Obama White House), who was pulled off the road to help run the show out of the Philadelphia headquarters. Greg Schultz, the campaign manager, was dispatched around the country to lean on donors not to jump to other campaigns—or start leaking to reporters about how much trouble Biden was in.

    They needed to get to the South Carolina electorate—the black and more moderate voters who weren’t well represented earlier in the primary. And in order to make the most of it, the campaign needed to change how the rest of the country was thinking of him too.

    At first, as Biden campaigned in South Carolina, he appeared to be feeling down, as though he thought the race was over. “There were times when you could feel his spirit a little diminished,” said Eric Garcetti, the former Los Angeles mayor. Garcetti had helped gin up Latino support ahead of an important second-place finish in Nevada, even as his allies teased him for throwing himself into a campaign that, at the time, looked like a lost cause. Biden, Garcetti said, “didn’t wallow in it. He kept on plugging.” Eric Ortner, a Biden friend and bundler, described Biden this way: The former vice president has “faced real darkness in his life,” and “it’s hard for anyone [who] hasn’t been on his journey to know the spectrum that he measures light on.”

    However, Biden, who is one of the most extroverted politicians around, was soon feeding off the largely African American crowds in Charleston and Orangeburg—crowds that hadn’t shown up in Cedar Rapids or Ottumwa during the long Iowa days. He started smiling more. Fletcher Smith Jr., a former state representative who introduced Biden at his final event in South Carolina last Friday, was optimistic about what the crowds meant for his candidate. “When you connect as a white guy with black people, it convinces white people too,” he told me after the rally at a college gym in Spartanburg.

    “All over America, this same kind of conversation is going to help him punch through,” he predicted, a comment that seemed, at the time, more wistful than realistic.

    By the time Biden showed up for a quick stop at a Greenville polling location the morning of the South Carolina primary, he and his staff knew that they’d win, aides told me, though they didn’t know by how much. Public polls showed a tight race, and they had no other data to go on. The endorsement of Representative Jim Clyburn had been key, earning Biden the kind of media attention he couldn’t afford to buy. (“If we had been before South Carolina, then Alabama would have delivered the big victory, and I would be the kingmaker,” Representative Terri Sewell, an enthusiastic Biden backer from Selma, told me Wednesday. Biden would go on to sweep her district on Super Tuesday.)

    Before the polls closed, his aides settled on the opening line for his victory speech: “To all those who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind: This is your campaign.”

    It wasn’t a coronation, but a rebound—the kind of story Biden himself tells on the stump, about a man who is beaten down but refuses to give up and scratches his way back. “Fighting as an underdog is comfortable for him, and it’s also comfortable for a lot of Americans,” Ducklo said. “The message resonates because of the message and also because of the messenger.”

    Biden won South Carolina by 30 points. He raised $400,000 in the 20 minutes after the polls closed, before the campaign had sent any texts or emails asking for support. This was almost as much as the team had raised online in the week leading up to the Iowa caucuses. It raised more money in the subsequent three days than it had in the entire third quarter of 2019.

    Left out of this praise is how clearly the DNC must have orchestrated significant portions of the narrative to boost Biden. Getting Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out and keep Warren in to siphon votes from Sanders and having Bloomberg drop out having dropped tons of money into running negative ads against Sanders reeks of at least some degree of orchestration by the “anyone but Bernie” DNC. Indeed, it would not shock me if this was Buttigieg’s assigned role from the very start. Biden is now the prohibitive favorite if he can avoid full onset senior dementia. “Stop. Pause. He can’t be President.”

    More:

    Never forget Biden’s long history as a proven liar:

    Not sure if tacking left is a good move if it alienates so many potential voters:

    Then again, California already cast its votes, so Biden can afford to alienate Uber users to curry favor with unions. Joe claims he loves ObamaCare but structures his taxes to avoid ObamaCare taxes. Weekend at Joe’s:

  • Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Dropped Out. Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden. Bloomberg got in late and spent over half a billion dollars to garner 64 delegates. At some $7.8 million per delegate, it isn’t as bad as Steyer ($200 million+ for no delegates) or John Connally ($11 million for one delegate), but it isn’t good. (It is, however, slightly more efficient than the $8.75 per delegate Jeb! spent in 2016.) His relentless ad bombardment seemed to drive away more people than it convinced:

    But he’ll always have American Samoa:

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? At this point it’s clear that she’s not going to jump into the race proper, so I’m going to move her back to the also rans, despite widespread speculation that she’ll replace Biden at the top of the ticket due to Slow Joe’s obvious mental deterioration.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yep, she’s still running:

    Tulsi Gabbard is still running for president.

    The congresswoman from Hawaii hasn’t garnered much support in primary elections and she’s falling short of winning enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. She has two so far.

    But Gabbard appears set on continuing.

    Gabbard won her first pledged delegates on Super Tuesday, when 14 states and the territory of American Samoa voted. Gabbard, who was born in Leloaloa, American Samoa, came in second in the U.S. territory to former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

    She campaigned in Super Tuesday states including Colorado, California and Utah. And she spoke at a town hall in Detroit on Tuesday, ahead of the March 10 primary in Michigan. But she had not been traveling nearly as much as other candidates. Her campaign has not responded to multiple requests for comment over several days.

    She has remained in the race as numerous candidates with far more support nationally — including most recently Bloomberg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — have dropped out. Now former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are contending for the nomination.

    Snip.

    Her home state of Hawaii will hold its primary April 4.

    Gabbard remains the only prominent person of color and woman left in the race.

    This would theoretically be inconvenient for Democrats mouthing social justice platitudes, were it not for the fact they’re hypocrites. But since Gabbard is widely loathed by Democratic Party activists, the “woman of color” bit is simply irrelevant to them.

    And in visual form:

    She asked for Biden and Sanders to help get her on the debate stage, since the DNC’s new thresholds (of course!) exclude her. Well, people in Hell want ice-water, too. Is Gabbard the John Kaisch of 2020? Maybe, except for the fact that she’s actually much more interesting than the candidates still running, and she has issues that seem orthogonal to DNC gospel. Does she have any chance whatsoever? Maybe…if both Biden and Sanders dropped dead in the next couple of weeks (a non-zero possibility). Plus she evidently still has $2 million cash on hand, which is enough to run an insurgent campaign all the way to the convention. Jerry Brown ran an effective (albeit losing) insurgent campaign in 1992. (Granted, even then he was a much more important political figure than Gabbard is now.)

  • Update: Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Dropped Out. She dropped out and endorsed Biden on March 2. Her primary achievement was pushing Biden down to fifth in Iowa and outlasting Gillibrand and Harris, and the biggest impression she made was mistreating staffers.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Tough week for the old commie. One minute everything’s coming up Bernie then BOOM!, the DNC yanks the chains hard enough to make the stars align just right for Biden to all but run the table on Super Tuesday. A look at Bernie’s problem:

    The campaign released an ad featuring an audio clip of former president Barack Obama praising Sanders, a clear attempt to undercut the benefit that has accrued to Biden, particularly among black voters, as the loyal lieutenant to the country’s first African American president.

    The flurry of activity amounted to the clearest acknowledgment yet that the coalition Sanders has built — which is composed largely of young people, liberals, working-class voters and Latino voters — has failed to expand since Sanders’s upstart 2016 bid, all as the rest of the party has coalesced behind Biden.

    The Tuesday results, in which Sanders led in California while winning Colorado, Utah and Vermont, offered a reminder that he retains a forceful position in the party — win or lose the nomination — with support from a quarter to a third of the base.

    But much of his team’s focus Wednesday was on the need for improvement.

    Exit polls showed that the struggles Sanders experienced among black voters four years ago against Clinton were largely unchanged. Black voters boosted Biden across Southern states on Super Tuesday, with exit polling showing that he won the votes of roughly 7 in 10 black voters in Virginia and Alabama, and did nearly as well in North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, getting roughly 60 percent of the black vote.

    Sanders’s push to broaden the electorate with scores of new voters rallying behind him hasn’t been realized. And he has struggled to persuade voters that a leftist political revolution is the best way to beat President Trump.

    Now, Sanders is confronting a radically different political landscape from 11 days ago, when he was flying high after a decisive win in Nevada seemed to put him in the driver’s seat in the Democratic race. Divisions in the moderate wing of the party that enabled him to succeed with a limited, if loyal, base have been resolved.

    He picked up an endorsement from Jesse Jackson, which might indeed help with old black people, but is it enough to overcome Biden? Probably not.

  • Update: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Dropped Out. She dropped out March 5, 2020, having failed to win a single state Super Tuesday. “Voters didn’t reject the Massachusetts senator because of her policy positions; they rejected her because of her penchant for lying about herself.”

    How did Warren, flush with cash from a wildly successful grassroots-fundraising operation and atop all the national polls in mid October, fail to translate that lead into actual votes? Why didn’t her string of successful debate performances make a difference? And most importantly, why is her very like-minded socialist colleague, Senator Bernie Sanders, still standing while she’s finished?

    Unlike others who’ve failed in their bid for the nomination this cycle — Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — Warren was not undone by a lack of funds, campaign infrastructure, social-media following, or work ethic. She had all of those things, plus a campaign team stocked with high-level talent from past Clinton and Obama campaigns, yet she lost anyway.

    And in the end, she has no one to blame but herself.

    Snip.

    Warren fell apart not because of her agenda but because her utter dishonesty about her personal life eroded her credibility as policy wonk. Her decision to double-down when called on lying about her Native American ancestry, her debunked allegation that she’d been fired from a school job for being pregnant, and her false claims that her kids had never attended private schools all shattered her persona as a thought leader and ideologue. Her personal opportunism, as well, made it easier to argue that her platform was opportunistic. So when voters got to pick between Sanders’s socialism and Warren’s, the choice became very easy.

    Warren’s embarrassing performance in her home-state primary — third place, behind Biden and Sanders — suggested that the public airing of her iniquities had even taken its toll with her own constituents. The relative popularity of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in select far-left enclaves of Massachusetts did not boost her, despite her convictions on those issues and her reasonably articulate (if economically and logically lackluster) advocacy for them. Warren was able to rise to the top of the field, even when it had more talented candidates still in it, with her entire policy portfolio on the table. But once she became the most visible candidate, her penchant for lying about herself became impossible to ignore.

    She was sincere only in wanting bigger government, higher taxes and herself in charge, but she backtracked and hemmed and hawed on the details, plus went full Social Justice Warrior. Warren: The final days:

    “Warren Returns To Tribe In Shame After Failing To Take Land Back From The Pale Faces.”

    • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020)

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    LinkSwarm for March 6, 2020

    Friday, March 6th, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Math is hard:

  • It’s indicative of a bigger problem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Come as you are:

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    LinkSwarm for February 21, 2020

    Friday, February 21st, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Chinese Intel Officers Indicted for Stealing Personal Data of 145 Million Americans in Equifax Hack.”

    The Justice Department charged four Chinese intelligence officers on Monday with a 2017 hack of credit-reporting giant Equifax, which compromised the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans.

    “This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Attorney General William Barr said in a press conference on the announcement.

    Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, members of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute, are charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as well as two counts of unauthorized access and intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of economic espionage, and three counts of wire fraud.

    The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Atlanta last week, alleges that the soldiers used a vulnerability in Equifax’s online dispute portal to access its secure servers over several weeks. The group ran approximately 9,000 queries while routing traffic through 34 servers to secretly obtain names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens, before compressing and exporting the data.

  • The Guardian reveals that the Sulemani strike was an even bigger blow to Iran’s terror network and regional ambitions than previously thought:

    “There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one official privy to the panicked conversations that swirled through the corridors of power that morning. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”

    Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed. “However, the [assassinations] may have significant repercussions for the relationship between the [Quds Force] and Iran-aligned groups in Iraq in the near term,” an official said.

    In the 40-day mourning period to mark the Iranian general’s death, which ended last Thursday, the fallout in Iraq has barely subsided. If anything, its impact has become more acute there, as well as in Suleimani’s homeland of Iran, and elsewhere in a region he had come to dominate like no other figure.

    From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region and exposed to rare vulnerability the opaque Quds Force it has used to project its influence over two decades.

    The assassination has also shone a light on the complicated relationship between the Iranian leadership and the Iraqi government, senior members of which have scrambled ever since to resurrect Suleimani’s core regional projects located as far away as the Lebanese capital and Damascus. The reckoning started as soon as the dead were buried.

    Plus attempts by Iran to get Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to help fill the void.

  • “It’s Looking More and More Like Nevada Will Be Another Democratic Clusterfark.”

    In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.

  • Margaret Thatcher warned about the perils of European integration:

    In a major speech about the future of Europe, delivered in Bruges on September 20th, 1988, she “began with a grand historical sweep, taking in the Romans, Magna Carta, the Glorious revolution and much more, all designed to show that Britain was part of European civilization.” Thatcher also made it clear that “Britain wanted no ‘cosy, isolated existence’ on the fringes: ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’”

    What Thatcher did oppose was the project of “ever-closer union,” and the resulting weakening of the influence of nation states. She believed that Europe should not be a centralizing power that incubated supranational institutions—particularly as this model of centralization was just then in the throes of spectacular failure within the Soviet Union. Instead, as she outlined in a speech at The Hague on May 15th, 1992, she favored a looser form of European co-operation, by which states retained their sovereign freedoms—including control of their borders. This, she believed, would accommodate the political and cultural diversity of Europe, including the eastern European countries that, she hoped, would be offered full EC membership. As Moore notes, in fact, she was one of the few prominent European politicians of the 1980s who had recognized that cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest were very much European cities that had been cut off from their historical and cultural roots.

    In her speech at The Hague, as Moore summarizes it, “she prophesied that large-scale immigration caused by free movement would cause ‘ethnic conflict,’ and bring about the rise of extremist parties, that there would be ‘national resentment’ because of one-size-fits-all financial and economic policies under a single currency, and that a more centralized EC would not be able to work with the influx of new member states from the former Eastern Bloc.”

  • Washington Post is really concerned that elites don’t have enough say in choosing presidential candidates.
  • ICE isn’t having any of California’s nullification:

    ICE said in a statement that California’s law doesn’t supersede federal law and “will not govern the conduct of federal officers acting pursuant to duly enacted laws passed by Congress that provide the authority to make administrative arrests of removable aliens inside the United States.”

    “Our officers will not have their hands tied by sanctuary rules when enforcing immigration laws to remove criminal aliens from our communities,” David Jennings, ICE’s field office director in San Francisco, said in the statement.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Mexico is now the wall.
  • Clayton Williams, RIP. He was that close to beating Ann Richards for Texas governor in 1990 before he shot his mouth off, not realizing that you can never trusts journalists to keep something that hurts a Republican quiet. Had he won, it’s extremely doubtful that George W. Bush gets elected governor in 1994, and the modern history of America turns out very differently…
  • “The 25-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing a library security officer to death had been released without bail after being accused of trying to rape a woman at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in November.” Thanks to Democratic “reforms,” attempting to rape a woman in a hospital in New York is now effectively a misdemeanor.
  • “Ilhan Omar DID marry her brother, reveals Somali community leader, who says both she and her husband told him Ahmed Elmi was her sibling and she would do what she had to do to get him ‘papers’ to keep him in US.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • See you in Hell. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • FATALITY!

  • One step closer to autonomous heroin-vending robots.
  • “Under financial stress, Oberlin College seeks to end unionized custodial and dining hall services.” Point and laugh, children…
  • Speaking of pointing and laughing: How #NeverTrumpers are the waterboys of the D.C. elite. “All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong.”
  • White Bernie bro attacks black man wearing pro-gun T-shirt.
  • Trump plays the race card.
  • NASCAR driver Ryan Newman complained about safety so much that they added the “Newman bar” to their cars, which may have just saved his life.
  • Faster, Klingon! Kill! Kill!
  • How two different programmers made the same error in their code a decade apart, with the result that you can’t run two different programs if the other is running.
  • The pro-wrestling “heel” who helped desegregate Memphis.
  • Noble but sad dog tweet:

  • Funny dog tweet:

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for February 7, 2020

    Friday, February 7th, 2020

    Another week chock-packed full of news:

  • Impeachment farce ends with President Donald Trump acquitted. Let’s hope Democrats are severely punished in November for wasting so much time on bogus garbage.
  • So Bernie Sanders won 6,000 more votes than Pete Buttigieg, but by the amazingly fair and in no way flawed or crooked process Mayor Pete won two more “state delegate equivalents” in Iowa than Bernie. How many actual national delegates get apportioned to who remains to be seen. Elizabeth Warren came in third, while Joe Biden came in fourth with just enough votes to put him over the 15% threshold to win delegates.
  • More than 100 official ballot discrepancies in Iowa?
  • Speaking of weird Iowa voting artifacts, enjoy a long, detailed, borderline tedious discussion of how “satellite” voting sites counting methods might or might not have screwed Sanders depending on which type of rounding is used.
  • This morning’s official Cornoavirus totals:
    Total Infected:31,522 (up from 9,776 last Friday)
    Total Deaths: 638
    Total Recovered: 1,741
    Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 29 (China (including Hong Kong), Singapore, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Germany, the United States of America, Malaysia, Vietnam, Macau, Canada, France, United Arab Emirates, India, Italy, Russia, Philippines, UK, Cambodia, Finland, Napal, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Sri Lanka; there’s also an “Others” which I assume is Chinese territory, but not mainland China or Hong Kong)

    In the U.S. Coronavirus cases have been spotted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Benito (CA), Seattle, Phoenix, Madison, Chicago and Boston, plus London, Ontario and Toronto. No deaths in U.S. locations.

  • Of course, all that assumes that China isn’t lying about the extent of infections there. Briefly leaked graphics from China tech conglomerate Tencent suggests that deaths may be two orders of magnitude higher than what China has admitted to.
  • Coronavirus vs SARS, in visual terms. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Eric S. Raymond thinks the cornoavirus outbreak might be a bioweapon backfiring, though he partially walks one of the reasons back.
  • More on the same theme from ZeroHedge, also inconclusive. I don’t have the deep biological background to remotely evaluate the technical claims. “Plausible but thus far unproven” seems to be the most logical stance based on what we currently know.
  • Speaking of ZeroHedge, they were suspended by Twitter for fingering the identity of Wuhan biolab researcher Dr. Peng Zhou. Awfully shady, Twitter…
  • The Winter of NeverTrump Discontent.

    The NeverTrumpers all follow and retweet each other, creating an echo chamber, amplifying and reinforcing their Trump Derangement Syndrome. As Bush establishment Republicans, they would be delighted with the open borders and the endless wars of past Republican presidents. When confronted with a truly conservative presidential administration, they run like scalded dogs.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • President Donald Trump is more popular at this point of his presidency than Obama was.
  • Former #NeverTrumper Erick Erickson says to dial it back, you hysterical ninnies. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Boom! Another al Qaeda leader dirtnapped, this time “Qasim al-Rimi, a founder and the leader of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and a deputy to al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,” taken out in Yemen.
  • “Cook Political Report Shifts Alabama Senate Race to Lean Republican After Doug Jones Votes to Convict.” Wait, how was it not already Leans Republican based on the facts that: A.) It’s Alabama, and B.) It’s Alabama?
  • Former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi has died. He was a corrupt and mildly brutal scumbag, but far from the worst on the continent, and he prevented Kenya from descending into the violence and instability that plagued Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe (among many others).
  • Colorado wants to drive restaurants out of business with a “climate” tax. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Is supporting diversity a criteria for getting hire at Berkley? No, it’s the only criteria.
  • Ammoland brings us John Knox’s picks on who to vote for on the NRA board. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
  • He’s back!

  • A link for Andrew: A bridge that didn’t quite collapse. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Massive “monster” galaxy has died (i.e., it stopped producing new stars). Or rather, it did this some 12 billion years ago, due to that pesky “speed-of-light” thing. I blame Thanos. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Inside a dog’s brain.
  • Florida Man: Grand Master Champion Edition: “Florida troopers find narcotics in bag labeled ‘Bag Full of Drugs.'”
  • Old and busted: Grumpy Cat (RIP). The New Hotness: Angry Cat.
  • “Journalists Caution Against Blaming Empire For blowing up Alderaan.”
  • I did not watch the Super Bowl, or the halftime show, but this is pretty funny:

  • An oldie, but a Golden oldie:

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

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