Archive for the ‘Border Control’ Category
Friday, February 1st, 2019
I know many of you don’t want to hear it, but here in Texas we’re enjoying a comparatively mild winter…
Why President Donald Trump will win the wall fight:
Trump has, however, suggested that he may well go the emergency route if Pelosi and Schumer remain intransigent: “We can call a national emergency. I haven’t done it. I may do it.… It’s another way of doing it.” The standard line trotted out by the Democrats and the media when the President alludes to an emergency declaration is that a phalanx of pettifoggers will contrive to tie it up in the courts indefinitely. This has even been repeated by conservative pundits. According to Professor Turley, however, “Courts generally have deferred to the judgments of presidents on the basis for such national emergencies, and dozens of such declarations have been made without serious judicial review.”
All of which means that there is no practical way for the Democrats to stop Trump from getting his wall. He will make a sound, statesmanlike case for it to the nation during the State of the Union address — just 10 days before the deadline to avoid another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi will be scowling behind him, still smarting from the beating she received in the polls from the last shutdown and the hectoring to which she has no doubt been subjected from vulnerable members whose constituents are tired of, “NO.” Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the Dem SOTU response and characterize Trump’s wall using the usual tired clichés about racism.
In other words, Trump will have been presidential. He will have delivered all manner of good news about the economy, deregulation, health care, foreign policy, and will have laid out a plan for the wall. The Democrats will have offered identity politics, obstruction, investigations, and magical thinking on policy. Pelosi will at length decide it’s smarter to ignore the crazies in her caucus, give Trump something that he can call a “win” on the wall, and move on to something else… anything else. And all the TDS victims and Never Trumpers will demand to know what happened to their bête noire.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
What a fully-funded border protection system looks like.
Shot: “Trump has opportunity to flip the 9th Circuit, so why isn’t he?”
Chaser: “Trump heard the conservative media outcry, nominates three judges for 9th Circuit.” That’s some swift course-correction…
Charlie Martin looks at big media’s very bad week.
Newseum closing. “Look on my works, ye mighty…”
Old and Busted: “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The New Coldness: Mail delivery in Minnesota cancelled due to cold.
Related:
In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years. In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago – over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).
Stop and think about that – if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn’t there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently? What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.
Heh:
“A shocking report from the Texas Secretary of State last week revealed 95,000 individuals identified in the Texas Department of Public Safety database as non-U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Texas — and 58,000 of those have voted in one or more Texas election since 1996.”
Newly seated Texas congressman Chip Roy isn’t backing down.
Four Houston police officers shot serving a narcotics warrant in southeast Houston.
Houston Police union honcho says that hands up, don’t shoot is to blame. Sounds like there may be a lot of blame to go around, including the possibility of excessive force for a narcotics raid.
Cop killer executed after thirty years on death row.
Texans may enjoy real property tax reform soon. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you have a speaker working for conservative goals, rather than against them…
“Public documents obtained by a Portland attorney reveal that Portland Public School staff, planned, executed and paid for what the media and the school district branded as a ‘student’ anti-Second Amendment protest last March 14th.” Sounds like they should be charged with embezzlement. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Worth a chuckle:
The negative startup economics of Buzzfeed:
In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!
BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment.
Heh:
“The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There’s a reason they have shakedown cruises, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll work out the bugs and get the electromagnetic catapult systems working properly. But at $13 billion, the cost-benefit analysis of additional aircraft carriers starts to get very tricky vs. say, four cheaper ships capable of launching 1,000 semi-autonomous drones each. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Rand Paul’s attacker finds out that assaulting people over political differences is a money-losing proposition.
Did Israeli scientists develop a cure for cancer? Let’s hope so…
Was Michael Jackson a child diddler?
“Three Charged for Working With Serial Swatter.”
Robert Stacy McCain talks about Tom Wolfe, Junior Johnson, and the decline of journalism:
Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.
If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”
The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.
He also quotes part of my favorite passage from Wolfe’s celebrated essay, about courage being one of Appalachia’s exportable commodities:
In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.
The coming Google+pocalypse.
Feminists aren’t just angry, they ignore facts that disagree with their preexisting anger.
This guy should make you feel a lot better about your own obscure collecting hobby.
Tags:9th Circuit Court, Border Controls, border fence, Buzzfeed, Chip Roy, Crime, Democrats, Elections, feminists, Global Warming, LinkSwarm, Michael Jackson, Military, Minnesota, Navy, Portland, Rand Paul, Robert Stacy McCain, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Tom Wolfe, USS Gerald R. Ford, Voter Fraud, weather
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 25th, 2019
How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?
True tales from border enforcement. “I also had multiple cases where convicted child molesters were arrested illegally reentering the United States.” (Hat tip: Director Blue. )
Over at American Thinker, E.M. Cadwaladr is not a fan of recent immigration policy:
The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.
While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.
Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.
This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.
Snip.
They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.
Human smugglers: extortion and death threats. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abboyy’s Twitter feed.)
Are Democrats wavering on a border wall?
Luke Rosiak’s book on the Awan case, Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats, is out next week. I intend to pick up a copy.
How National Review stepped in it in the rush to denounce the Covington kids:
It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.
“They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.
On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.
That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.
Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.
But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”
Snip.
When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.
Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)
To be fair, French did address the issue in this piece. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady via The Other McCain.)
It turns out that openly wishing for the deaths of children who hold different political views than you do is a career-limiting decision. Who knew?
MSM lies about Trump supporters again. Clip and save this sentence for reuse…
Let the lawsuits begin! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Press That Sicced Mob On Teenagers Based On 10-Second Video Clip Unsure Why Some People Call Them ‘Fake News.'”
Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
Ace of Spades had some pungent observations on journalists and Twitter:
As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.
You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.
The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.
What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.
Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.
Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.
Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!
The six axioms of Social Justice Warrioring. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott on Instapundit.)
“Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration.” Naturally Nancy Pelosi has given her a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thanks to Intersectionality, Democrats are exploring bold new frontiers in graft! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“What if the FBI Had Probed Obama for Collusion with Iran?”
The Supreme Court has agreed to review New York City’s draconian gun laws.
David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
In China, it’s not enough for Communist Big Brother to know you’re in debt, he has to let everyone around you know you’re in debt as well.
Germany catches an Iranian spy.
This just in: Shelia Jackson Lee is still a scumbag. And no longer leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Cahnman is a big fan of Speaker Dennis Bonnen’s committee assignments.
Powerline has a nice meme roundup of last week’s news. I’ll swipe a couple:
Could Alzheimer’s be caused by…gum disease? (Hat tip: David Shirpley on Twitter.)
Facebook is building an orbital death ray. Because they just weren’t evil enough before…
The fraudster behind the Fyre Festival.
Feel good story: A Puppy Saved From A Fire Becomes A Firefighter. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Tags:87th Texas Legislature, Abid Awan, Alzheimer's, Border Controls, Buzzfeed, Catholics, China, Covington Catholic, Crime, David French, Democrats, Dennis Bonnen, dogs, E.M. Cadwaladr, Facebook, FBI, Foreign Policy, Guns, Huffington Post, Ilhan Omar, Iran, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Luke Rosiak, Media Watch, National Review, New York City, Nick Frankovich, Republicans, S. E. Cupp, Scott Adams, Shelia Jackson Lee, Social Justice Warriors, Somalia, Supreme Court, Texas, Twitter, War on Catholics
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, January 18th, 2019
This week was filled to the brim with stupid news. I don’t want to get into most of it…
“Obama’s Border Patrol Chief Agrees With Trump, Says Build the Wall.”
Related Tweet:
“Trump Gains 19 Points with Latino Voters During Border Wall Shutdown.” Via that well-known alt right cabal of NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist. Also: Trump popularity rating among Latinos at 50%. Gee, evidently Latinos like jobs and the rule of law too! Who knew? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Democrats cracking? “Moderate, freshman Democrats open to deal.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France.” We could be heroes, just for one day…
The Washington Post lies about Texas education reform proposals.
Another week, another Trump-Russian collusion “bombshell” bites the dust.
In Israel, walls work.
Increasingly, to be a Democrat means to hate Israel.
“The Democratic National Committee is the latest organization to silently drop its partnership with the Women’s March. The DNC offered no explanation or condemnation of several march leaders’ well-documented history of anti-Semitism, yet the committee’s name is no longer listed as a “sponsor” on the Women’s March partner list.”
President Donald Trump orders military to step up missile defense efforts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Sears not quite dead yet.
At least five Saudi citizens in Oregon facing serious charges (“two accused rapists, a pair of suspected hit-and-run drivers and one man with child porn on his computer”) disappeared after posting large bail and/or surrendering their passports.
Stupid news: “CNN analyst Areva Martin accused Sirius XM radio and Fox Nation host David Webb of benefiting from ‘white privilege‘ because of his views on race Tuesday morning.” There’s just one tiny problem…
Let’s not forget one of the stupidest pieces of stupid news this week: that Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad. Here’s everything wrong with it.
Not only should you stop buying Gillette razors, you should consider stop buying everything parent company Proctor & Gamble makes until they clean house:
Related tweet:
And another:
Looks like voters will have a chance to kick around former State Rep. Jason Villalba in their mayoral race. You may remember Villalba from such hits as I Hate Photographers and Lawful Gun Owners and Lisa Luby Ryan Retired My Ass.
Missed this in 2017, but it’s worth linking to: “Air Force captain lands A-10 with no canopy, no gear.
More Facebook thumb-on-the-scale shenanigans:
“In a change designed to make their mission more transparent to Colorado citizens, the state’s Civil Rights Commission updated its mission statement Thursday to read simply “DESTROY JACK PHILLIPS.”
Get ready for an NFL strike or lockout in 2021. How can we tell? Language in new coaching contracts.
Read SF/F/H books? Here’s my most recent book catalog. And the rest of my stock is here.
Tags:A-10 Warthog, Areva Martin, Border Controls, border fence, CNN, Colorado, Dallas, David Webb, DNC, Facebook, France, Gillette, Hispanics, Israel, Jason Villalba, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, missile defense, NFL, Proctor & Gamble, Sears, Texas
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, January 11th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! At least those of you not among the millions dead from the shutdown, assuming you already survived the tax cut and the end of Net Neutrality…
If you ignore the MSM-generated drama, 2018 was a great year for America:
In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer
Since Trump took office, the United States has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.
It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.
In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century—”energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo”—no longer exists.
Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the United States is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.
The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.
In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That’s the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.
The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.
Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.
North Korea and the United States did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.
Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.
The United States—and increasingly most of the world—is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions, and mercantilism of the Chinese government.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
President Donald Trump visits the Texas border.
“The longer Donald Trump wrangles with his two superannuated cartoon antagonists, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the stronger the president’s position becomes.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“If the Dems Want to Lose the Wall Fight, All They Have to Do Is Keep Talking.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Secretary of State Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notes that Obama’s Cairo speech was full of shit.
Nobel Peace Prize secretary admits that giving the award to Obama was a mistake. In other news, Peter Dinklage will not be the starting center for the New York Knicks. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There’s no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.”
Flashback: How a Boris Yeltsin trip to a Randall’s in Clear Lake helped end the cold war.
The very first bill pushed by House Democrats takes aim at the First Amendment:
House Democrats are up and running, and their first bill is instructive. Couched as an anti-corruption and good-government measure, it is really an attempt to silence or obstruct political opponents.
A central part of H.R. 1 is “campaign-finance reform,” no surprise given the progressive fixation with money in politics, which oddly turns to mist when Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending. The House bill requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues.
The goal is to identify donors who don’t genuflect to progressive views, then bully or harass them to stop giving. Recall how the Mozilla CEO was driven out after he donated to California’s referendum opposing same-sex marriage.
(Hat tip: MQ Sullivan on Twitter.)
“WaPo’s embarrassing indulgence in hyperbole describing the attendance at Democratic candidates rallies.” Remember: Trump filling arenas is nothing, but when 200 Democrats turn out, it’s “filled to the rafters.”
Second dead black man found in the home of prominent gay California Democratic donor Ed Buck. I guest the first was just a “gimme” under California law.
“Hey officer, I have a dead body in my apartment, along with a bunch of illegal drugs.” “It’s cool. No worries.”
Tam suggests that people do not need to clean their gun as frequently as the old military guys suggest.
Laws are for the little people: “He’s been a staunch supporter of gun control measures for decades, but in a surprising twist, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday that nearly two dozen firearms were discovered in Ald. Ed Burke’s offices during their raids in November.” (Hat tip: Snowflakes in Hell.)
Woe unto those who own a house inadvertently mapped as a default location for unmapped IP addresses.
Being anti-communist is now evidently a hate crime in Seattle. (Hat tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)
Twenty-one bodies found in north Mexico after gang clash near Texas border.
Media Matters head and Hillary Clinton crony David Brock says that Bernie supporters must be silenced in 2020.
Brazil:
Jair Bolsonaro is “far right” and the media means that as a pejorative.
Turns out he favors the private sector and wants to get rid of government owned industry.
He favors expansive gun rights as a way to combat crime and let people protect themselves. This has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
He favors conservative social policy including a rollback of the LGBT agenda in Brazil. Again, this has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
Most damning in the eyes of many in western media, he favors abandoning restrictions on private property that could threaten Amazonian forest growth, i.e. he’s bad for climate change.
The media has focused a lot on Bolsonaro talking favorably about Brazil’s American backed military dictatorship that ruthlessly exterminated communists and other dissident groups from the 1960’s into the early 1980’s. They suggest Bolsonaro might bring it back.
So far, the only thing Bolsonaro seems to be doing is keeping his campaign promises to fight corruption, roll back progressive social policies his socialist predecessor supported, and expand gun rights. But the American commentariat can do nothing but see everything through the lens of Trump and if you hate Trump, you must hate Bolsonaro apparently.
Cahnman says cut Will Hurd some slack on some meaningless political posturing. I tend to agree, especially since here he might actually be voting the way his constituents favor.
Dan Crenshaw seems to be settling into his new job nicely:
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke Instagrams his trip to the dentist. Because that’s what voters really want to see.
Related snark:
Open office plans suck. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“I’m attacking the Death Star…and I’m not wearing any pants!” (Link corrected.)
Tags:Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Border Controls, border fence, Boris Yeltsin, Brazil, Cairo, China, Chuck Schumer, Cold War, Communism, Crime, Dan Crenshaw, David Brock, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, Ed Burke, Eqypt, Guns, Instagram, Israel, Jair Bolsonaro, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Matters, Media Watch, Mexico, murder, Nancy Pelosi, Palestinians, Soviet Union, Star Wars, Tamaulipas, Texas, Washington Post, Will Hurd
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, December 28th, 2018
The week between Christmas and New Years is always odd. Work slows down with so many people on vacation, but there’s always a personal rush to get things done before the end of the year.
Kevin D, Williamson follows the idiots of antifa around the streets of Portland. That is, when they weren’t accidentally following him:
If you want to see what a bunch of half-baked idiots and kettle-corn psalmists in a political march are up to, the easiest thing to do is to march around with them, as I did for a while in Portland. I do not look much like Tucker Carlson, and I remain, for the moment, able to blend in with such groups.
Which I did — and a funny thing happened: As the march began to peter out, a group of Antifa loitered for a bit on a street corner, and I loitered with them for a while, observing. And then I got tired and decided to bring my labors to an end and go on my merry. As I walked off, a contingent, apparently believing that we were once again on the move against fascism, began to follow me, pumping their fists and chanting, until they figured out that I wasn’t leading them anywhere. And thus did a National Review correspondent end up briefly leading an Antifa march through Portland.
Of course they followed me. They’ll follow anything that moves.
The psychological warfare campaign we carried out against Islamic State troops in the field.
National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy on the Syrian pullout:
There has never been any vacuum in Syria (or Iraq). Sharia supremacism fills all voids. In focusing on ISIS, David discounts sharia supremacism as “an idea.” But it is much more than that. It is a cultural distinction — even, as Samuel Huntington argued, a civilizational one. It will always be a forcible enemy of the West. It doesn’t matter what the groups are called. You can kill ISIS, but it is already reforming as something else. In fact, it may no longer even be the strongest jihadist force in Syria: Its forebear-turned-rival al-Qaeda is ascendant — after a few name changes (the latest is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Levant Liberation Organization) and some infighting with other militant upstarts. There is a better chance that ISIS will reestablish ties with the mothership than fade away.
The fact that al-Qaeda, which triggered the “War on Terror,” does not factor into American clamoring about Syria is telling. The anti-ISIS mission David describes was not always the U.S. objective in Syria. First we were going to pull an Iraq/Libya redux and help the “moderates” overthrow Assad. But the “moderates,” in the main, are Muslim Brotherhood groups that are very content to align with al-Qaeda jihadists — and our fabulous allies in Syria, the Turks and the Saudis, were only too happy to abet al-Qaeda. Syria had thus become such a conundrum that we were effectively aligning with the very enemies who had provoked us into endless regional war.
When ISIS arose and gobbled up territory, beheading some inhabitants and enslaving the rest, Obama began sending in small increments of troops to help our “moderate” allies fend them off. But the moderates are mostly impotent; they need the jihadists, whether they are fighting rival jihadists or Assad. Syria remains a multi-front conflict in which one “axis” of America’s enemies, Assad-Iran-Russia, is pitted against another cabal of America’s enemies, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda factions; both sides flit between fighting against and attempting to co-opt ISIS, another U.S. enemy. The fighting may go on for years; the prize the winner gets is . . . Syria (if it’s the Russians, they’ll wish they were back in Afghanistan).
Degrading ISIS into irrelevance would not degrade anti-American jihadism in Syria into irrelevance. If sharia didn’t ban alcohol, I’d say the old wine would just appear in new bottles. It was, moreover, absurd for President Trump to declare victory just because ISIS has been stripped of 95 percent of the territory it once held. Caliphate aspirations notwithstanding, ISIS’s mistake was the attempt to be an open and notorious sovereign. It was always more effective as a terrorist underground, and it still has tens of thousands of operatives for that purpose.
If we stayed out of the way, America’s enemies would continue killing each other. That’s fine by me. I am not indifferent to collateral human suffering, but it is a staple of sharia-supremacist societies; we can no more prevent it in Syria than in Burkina Faso. And I am not indifferent to the challenge David rightly identifies: terrorists occupying safe havens from which they can plot against the West. But that is a global challenge, and we handle it elsewhere by vigilant intelligence-gathering and quick-strike capabilities. We should hit terrorist sanctuaries wherever we find them, but it is not necessary to have thousands of American troops on the ground everyplace such sanctuaries might take root.
Kurt Schlichter on the return of Trump the Disrupter:
Trump campaigned on his promise to build a wall. He told Frisco Nancy and Chuck Odd that he would shut down the government if he didn’t get his wall money. The Republican establishment, which does not really want a wall because the GOP corporate donor class doesn’t want to turn off the spigot of cheap foreign peasant labor even though those illegals are all future Democrat voters, led Trump on and on. They put continuing resolution after continuing resolution in front of him, each time promising to really, truly, cross-my-heart-and-hope-you-die fight next time. He gave them a chance. He gave them too many chances. And they expected he’d go along again this time. But conservatives drew the line and Trump realized that he needed to do what he did best to get back inside the ruling class’s decision cycle.
He needed to disrupt, so he kept his promise. He refused to play along with the wall scam anymore. And the gleeful Dem senators singing carols as they expected to get away with another grift ended their serenade with a sad trombone. Now the government is going to shut down, and Trump has zero to lose by holding out.
Then he cranked up the disruption when he announced he was getting out of Syria, and it’s clear that Afghanistan is probably next. The establishment reacted with surprise and horror. It’s hard to understand the “surprise” part, since he campaigned on getting us the hell out of foreign hellholes and has always wanted to. Again, he played along, giving the establishment a chance. And another. And nothing happened. So now he’s done. He’s doing what he promised.
Is this withdrawal a good idea? That depends – we definitely need to provide for the safety of our Kurdish allies, and how that will happen remains unclear at this writing. ISIS is a danger; departing necessarily accepts risk. While the conservative anti-nation building attitude is blind to our successes doing it (like in Kosovo), neither Syria nor Afghanistan seem particularly fertile soil for it. And who is eager to dump more money into them after all the trillions we’ve wasted since 2001?
But beyond the substantive considerations is the fact that the overwrought reaction of the establishment to the idea of actually ending a war supports Trump’s plan. What is our objective anyway? What’s the endstate? In the War College they taught us we should have those things. But the screamers never tell us – instead, it’s always invective about how we love Putin, or how we are stupid or whatever, when we ask, “Okay, how much more in time, money and American lives should we devote to these projects?” We never get a timeline, or a dollar figure, or the number of coffins that they consider whatever their unarticulated objective happens to be is worth.
We keep hearing ISIS might return and we have to stay to stamp out those creeps again, and fine, killing jihadists is cool, but if the goal is to keep Mideastern jerks from being themselves then we will never, ever leave. The elite always denies it wants us to be the world’s policemen, but then it always demands that we keep walking a beat that never ends.
President Trump hasn’t destroyed free trade, he’s split it into two: One set of trading partners for us and our allies, and another set for China:
The status quo with China is crumbling. Businesses have grown disillusioned with China’s restrictions on their activities, forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at building up domestic competitors at foreign expense. Meanwhile, legislators in both parties are alarmed at increased military assertiveness and domestic repression under President Xi Jinping.
Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska, personifies these broader forces reshaping the U.S. approach to the world. Mr. Sullivan has followed the rise of China for decades—as a Marine sent to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 in a response to Chinese provocations; as an official in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and State Department; and for a time as Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources.
When Mr. Xi visited the U.S. in 2015, Mr. Sullivan urged his colleagues to pay more attention to China’s rise. On the Senate floor, he quoted the political scientist Graham Allison: “War between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment.”
Last spring, Mr. Sullivan went to China and met officials including Vice President Wang Qishan. They seemed to think tensions with the U.S. will fade after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, Mr. Sullivan recalled.
“I just said, ‘You are completely misreading this.’” The mistrust, he told them, is bipartisan, and will outlast Mr. Trump.
While delivering one message to China, Mr. Sullivan gave a different one to the administration and its trade negotiators: Don’t alienate allies needed to take on China.
“Modernize the agreements but stay within the agreements,” he says he counseled them. “Then we have to turn to the really big geostrategic challenge facing our country and that’s China.”
His was one voice among many urging Mr. Trump to single out China for pressure. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush sought to change China’s behavior through dialogue and engagement. Obama officials had begun to question engagement by the end of the administration. Last year, in its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration declared engagement a failure.
The Trump administration regards economic policy and national security as inseparable when it comes to Beijing, because China’s acquisition of Western technology both strengthens China militarily and weakens the U.S. economically.
“We don’t like it when our allies steal our ideas either, but it’s a much less dangerous situation,” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute whose views align with the administration’s more hawkish officials. “We’re not worried about the war-fighting capability of Japan and Korea because they’re our friends.”
Snip.
Michael Pillsbury, a Hudson Institute scholar close to the Trump team who has long warned of China’s strategic threat, sees three plausible scenarios. At one extreme is a new cold war with drastically curtailed economic ties. At the other, the U.S. and China resolve their tensions, continue to integrate and run the world together.
Between those extremes, Mr. Pillsbury sees a more likely and desirable middle path—a transactional U.S.-China relationship of the sort that prevailed during the 1980s in which the two decide, case by case, when to do business and when to decouple.
Stray thought: With the U.S. disengagement with various Middle Eastern conflicts, there’s a possibility that the less-Trump Derangement Syndrome-besotted ranks of the neocons might pivot to back Trump against China. After all, there was no end to neocon Jeremiads against China prior to the 2016 election…
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Paradoxically, U.S.-China trade has exploded recently.
The Wall Street Journal takes down the Washington Post‘s shoddy reporting of President Donald Trump’s visit with the troops:
These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings.
The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.
(Hat tip: Brit Hume on Twitter.)
Related:
Sad news: Austin’s own Richard Overton, America’s oldest living vet, died yesterday at age 112.
A roundup of how many anti-#GamerGate “journalists” turned out to be scumbag sexual abusers themselves.
Speaking of scumbag sexual abusers, Kevin Spacey has finally been indicted for sexual assault. The one tiny bright spot is that it was an 18-year old man, so it’s slightly less reprehensible than the statutory rate charges made against him. [Insert innocent until proven guilty disclaimer here.]
“Previously Deported Honduran Child-Sex Offender Arrested in Texas.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Shocking news: Washington Post readers actually blame the illegal alien father who brought his son along as a pawn in his plan to enter the U.S., only to see him die. “Reading these comments, I believe the American culture has changed radically since the fall of 2016, when Trump was painted as a racist for saying the situation at the border had to change. I think, for all the press resistance to Trump’s fight against illegal immigration, minds have changed.”
Mexico Beach, Florida: a tough road to recovery.
Speaking of Brit Hume: Six days after hip replacement surgery and he’s already walking around:
“Man Bravely Abandons Unpopular Christian Belief To Affirm Extremely Popular Cultural Belief.”
Heh:
“Theyyy’rrrree Heeeere…”
Let’s hope Stark gets the nuke back through the portal before it closes…
Tags:Andrew McCarthy, antifa, Austin, Border Controls, China, Crime, Dan Sullivan, Florida, Foreign Policy, Hollywood, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Kevin Spacey, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Military, Obituary, Oregon, Portland, psychological warfare, rape, Richard Overton, Social Justice Warriors, Syria, Texas, trade, Washington Post
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 19th, 2018
A roundup on the ongoing French “yellow jackets” protests/riots/revolution:
At least eight people have died. That’s more than died in the short-lived Soviet coup attempt in 1991.
The role of immigration in the French riots:
Even as the gilets jaunes were ruining the holiday season for the French capital’s richest consumers and most deluxe emporia, a whole different set of protesters tried to disrupt the metropolis’s high-culture scene. On Sunday evening, a mob of two to three hundred migrants, asylum seekers, and illegal aliens, mostly of African origin, stormed the Comédie Française, where a performance of Victor Hugo’s play Lucrezia Borgia was underway. Their goal was reportedly to compel, or convince, the deputy manager of the legendary theater to arrange an appointment for them with Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner, and thereby help them to secure residency documents. An odd approach, to say the least, but maybe this sort of thing makes more sense in France, where high culture, after all, rules. In any event, the mob was successfully repelled, first by the theater guards, then by a large cohort of gendarmes who arrived on the scene with a celerity that one does not immediately associate with French cops. But of course the police in every country have their own priorities: while British bobbies, for example, are quicker to check out reports of online Islamophobia than of Muslim gang rape, it would only make sense for their Gallic counterparts to be more concerned about productions of Victor Hugo dramas in the first arrondisement than about honor killings outside the Périphérique.
Snip.
I began this article by suggesting that it’s getting hard to keep track of these demonstrations in France. In fact, when you come right down to it, the whole thing is really pretty simple. On one side you’ve got these mobs of immigrants, most of whom have no business being in France in the first place, but who, instead of keeping a low profile and showing some gratitude for what the French state has already given them, have a breathtaking sense of entitlement that makes them feel free to charge the very temples of French culture and issue arrogant demands. On the other side, you have humble French workers, most of them from the provinces, who have seen their wages stagnate, in large part because of the mass influx of competitive immigrant labor, and seen their taxes soar, in large part because of the government’s need to fund ballooning social-welfare benefits for immigrants who choose not to work.
During the last couple of years, more and more commentators have suggested that America is splitting into two countries — one composed of immigrants and favored identity groups and their politically correct cultural-elite allies and the other of disgruntled red-state patriots who feel used, neglected, betrayed, and fed up — and that the country is inevitably headed for civil war. That may or may not be an exaggeration. But one thing is clear: a very similar split has long been taking shape — and is even more pronounced — in Western Europe, where the immigrant tide is higher and its impact on the daily lives of ordinary natives even more severe. It’s scarcely a surprise that mass demos motivated by these concerns are making their debut in France, where public protest is the national pastime, but no one should be surprised if large-scale revolts by both the invaders and the invaded begin to be weekly fare in other Western European countries, too. After all, the pressure is mounting all around, and eventually something’s got to give.
(Hat tip: Stephen green at Instapundit.
Claire Berlinksi also saw two different groups: Orderly middle class protestors against the tax hike, and antifa-types who came to explicitly do violence:
People at the Charles de Gaulle Étoile saw something else entirely. There, the police were physically overwhelmed by about 5,000 Gilets Jaunes who had come explicitly prepared to do violence. About 200 demonstrators showed their ID and allowed police to search them before they entered a security zone on the Champs-Elysées, but the rest refused to play by the rules. From about 8 am, hostile crowds of Gilets Jaunes emerged, in large numbers, from all the avenues around the Arc de Triomphe, trying to push their way onto the Champs-Elysées. The police were physically overpowered because so many of them were protecting the Champs-Elysées and the perimeter around the area where government buildings are concentrated. They were overrun. There were no cops behind the rioters to stop them from burning cars on the other avenues around the Étoile.
The rioter demographics were surprising. They were mainly aged 30-40, the police reported—a bit old for rioting, you’d think. They were “socially well-inserted” into the movement, but unlike the majority of the protesters, they had come with the goal of breaking and smashing things, rejecting the authority of the state and its symbols as savagely as they could. Of the 378 people taken into custody on Saturday, only 33 were minors. Most were rural men. The security services had drastically underestimated the number of violent protesters who would arrive and where they would be. It was immediately clear that this represented a massive police intelligence failure. The Elysée called a crisis meeting. Reports leaked to the press that the failure to anticipate the size of the violent and radicalized contingent of Gilet Jaunes was of a magnitude that “could lead to a deep reform of the Paris police headquarters,” as one television channel put it.
But it isn’t hard to understand how this mistake was made. Most people’s contact with the movement, including the police’s, was like mine—again, most seem to be peaceful, sympathetic people, respectful of authority, and simply too old for that kind of mayhem. What kind of 40-year-old guy from a rural farm comes to Paris carrying a gas mask and a makeshift weapon to desecrate the Arc de Triomphe? I sure wouldn’t have guessed there were so many of them, either.
Emmanuel Macron’s run as a technocratic reformer may be coming to an end:
Macron, who suddenly became head of state at the age of 39, first needed to develop his authority. And he did so with a clear strategy, setting out doing so with single-minded determination, seeking to develop charisma through images and symbols, and to carry out his revolution through shrewd argumentation. He put himself at the epicenter of French politics. As a candidate, he was alone. And he remained so as president. But this over-personalization had its price. Macron’s system relied on the complete centralization of power in the hands of the president and of a few intellectually gifted advisors, who sometimes send out text messages at 3 a.m., as Macron does himself. Macron’s IQ-absolutism was successful in his first year. The furthest-reaching job-market reforms in recent French history, which he instituted in fall of 2017, didn’t even lead to a general strike, as had been feared. Macron loosened the rules for firing employees and broke up the rigid wage-negotiation system. He simultaneously lowered the budget deficit below the 3-percent mark for the first time since 2007. He even modernized the sacrosanct French secondary-school diploma, known as the baccalauréat. Emmanuel Macron has already reformed his country more profoundly than all the presidents before him — at least since Mitterrand, who implemented an important wave of modernization starting in 1983.
Macron is proud of his reforms. Rightly so. He believes these reforms will bring growth back to France. Rightly so. He also believes that new growth in France will repair the social imbalances in the country. Rightly so. But Macron is forgetting about the span of time required between reform, growth and social justice. Many French don’t want to wait. They want results. Immediately. The yellow vests don’t have a face, but they have charisma. And they are united in anger. They want a revolution and they want more net income. They don’t care what this might mean economically for their highly indebted country. They loathe the self-proclaimed revolutionary at the top, his aloof reliance on symbols, his know-it-all revolutionary rationality. Although the Élysée’s arguments are technocratically coherent, the gilets jaunes confront them with brutal simplicity: If you abolish the wealth tax but raise the price of diesel by six cents per liter, you are an enemy of the people.
About 40 highway toll booths have been occupied and burned. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Tags:Border Controls, Claire Berlinski, Emmanuel Macron, France, Paris, riot, Taxes
Posted in Border Control, Foreign Policy | No Comments »
Friday, December 14th, 2018
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Austin just had a wind storm, to top off a year of weird weather.
Apple to spend $1 billion on Austin campus. This is going to be a couple of miles from my house. Expect more detailed examination in a latter post.
This Andrew Sullivan piece is half-useful for it’s look at Social Justice Warrioring as a religious substitute:
For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.
And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
Unfortunately, the second half is just Christian-concern-trolling as a way to bash Trump. Pace-Sullivan, there’s nothing new in his critique that couldn’t also be applied, to say, the “prosperity gospel” movement of the 1980s on, and it all boils down to “Those stupid Christians voted for Trump rather than the positions we enlightened betters believe in.”
“Census confirms: 63 percent of ‘non-citizens’ on welfare, 4.6 million households.” The ideal number there should be “zero.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Incoming New York Democratic attorney general vows to get Trump and his little dog Toto, too.
“Mexican National Sentenced to 8 Years for Trafficking Girls into U.S., Forcing Them into Prostitution.”
ICE workplace arrests up 700% in President Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year.
Think the Paris riots are bad? Just think what would happen if the biggest climate alarmists got their way:
If Paris streets burned over a proposed 25 cents per gallon climate change tax, imagine the global conflagration over a $49 per gallon tax.
That’s what a United Nations special climate report calls for in 12 years, with a carbon tax of $5,500 per ton—equal to $49 per gallon of gasoline or diesel. That’s about 100 times today’s average state and federal motor fuels tax.
By 2100, the U.N. estimates that a carbon tax of $27,000 per ton is needed—$240 per gallon—to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Of course, that isn’t going to happen. The economic wreckage of such a punitive tax would plunge the global economy into a permanent depression—and that’s assuming politicians could enact such huge tax increases over the will of their voters.
Keep in mind that the unrest in France was triggered by a looming 25-cent hike, which is a little less than 10% more in taxes than French drivers already pay. To meet the $49 per gallon tax hike recommended by the U.N., fuel taxes in France would have to go up 17-fold.
“When you said, ‘Paris is going to be so hot,’ I did not realise it would actually be on fire…’Eye-watering opportunities’ did not, in my mind, involve tear gas.”
The weirdness of the Huawei story.
How corrupt is the Chicago Way? A college student running against Democratic Party boss Michael J. Madigan’s hand=picked alderman Marty Quinn found out:
To get on the ballot, Krupa was required to file 473 valid signatures of ward residents with the Chicago Board of Elections. Krupa filed 1,703 signatures.
But before he filed his signatures with the elections board, an amazing thing happened along the Chicago Way.
An organized crew of political workers — or maybe just civic-minded individuals who care about reform — went door to door with official legal papers. They asked residents to sign an affidavit revoking their signature on Krupa’s petition.
Revocations are serious legal documents, signed and notarized. Lying on a legal document is a felony and can lead to a charge of perjury. If you’re convicted of perjury, you may not work for a government agency. And I know that there are many in the 13th Ward on the government payroll.
More than 2,700 revocations were turned over to the elections board to cancel the signatures on Krupa’s petitions. Chicago Board of Elections officials had never seen such a massive pile of revocations.
Mark Steyn: “If you’re having trouble keeping track, the French protests, Trump, Brexit, the Austrian and Italian elections, and the sudden cancellation of the ‘Murphy Brown’ reboot are all the work of Russian bots. Whereas the Tijuana caravan, the UK grooming gangs and that rental car heading toward you on the sidewalk outside the Berlin Christmas market are the authentic vox populi.” Plus some Max Boot bashing, which is now a year-round pursuit. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
1. Google gets accused of anticompetative practices. 2. Google donates money to the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 3. Same think tanks write pieces defending Google. 4. Google boosts those studies in its search results. It’s like the human centipede of political policy studies…
Another drawing Mohammed death.
Boy Scouts file for bankruptcy. Get woke, go broke.
Texas constitutional carry bill introduced.
Nike: It’s fine to insult patriotic Americans by kneeling at NFL games, but criticize Islamist scumbag Recep Tayyip Erdogan? That’s not allowed.
Janitor in Greece is facing a decade in prison after 18 years on the job for lying about the years of primary school she completed.
Keith Richards gives up drinking. And I saw seven angels blowing seven trumpets… (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
Scott Adams nails it:
Tags:American Enterprise Institute, Andrew Sullivan, Apple Computer, Austin, Border Controls, Boy Scouts, Chicago, Chuck DeVore, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Crime, Democrats, Draw Mohammed Day, Foreign Policy, France, Global Warming, Google, Greece, Guns, Huawei, Keith Richards, LinkSwarm, Mark Steyn, Marty Quinn, Media, Michael J. Madigan, New York, Nike, Paris, Scott Adams, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Turkey, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Global Warming, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 30th, 2018
Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!
Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
MSBNC in action:
Hamas is still freaking out over that Israeli raid a few weeks ago. “Hamas officials suspect Israel has been operating a base inside Gaza, and Hamas is turning itself inside out trying to figure it out.”
ESPN has lost 14 million viewers over seven years. How’s that “all social justice warrioring, all the time” format working out for you? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Deutsche Bank offices raided:
In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.
Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:
GM’s destructive subsidies:
General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The Second Amendment was always an individual right.
Detecting a stealth aircraft is one thing, but shooting it down during the terminal tracking phase is another.
Don’t be Dick’s.
Things to be thankful for:
The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.
We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.
Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.
No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.
Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.
Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.
So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.
(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“The case against carbohydrates gets stronger.”
People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.
Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.
Snip.
We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.
For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.
Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.
This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight — lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.
“Half As Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project.”
Evidently Creepy Porn Lawyer is considered a crook even by his porn star client.
Actual headline, not from The Onion or The Babylon Bee: “PETA Defends Graphic Animal Mutilation In Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.”
“Aides Force Ocasio-Cortez To Watch Entire Run Of ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
Ricky Jay, RIP.
Tags:Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Atkins, Border Controls, China, Democrats, Dennis Bonnen, Deutsch Bank, Economics, ESPN, feminists, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Germany, GM, Google, Gordon Johnson, Guns, Hamas, Jews, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Michael Avenatti, MSNBC, PETA, Social Justice Warriors, technology, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Trump Derangement Syndrome
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 23rd, 2018
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
“Is this NYT article really about how people are exhausted or is it about how the Democratic Party needs to admit it has a problem? The end of the article sounds like a loud wake-up alarm for Democrats.”
I’m so old I remember when the American Civil Liberties Union actually cared about Civil Liberties:
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Reminder: The Rev. Jim Jones was a big wheel in San Francisco’s far-left Democratic party establishment:
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
Another day, another Antifa riot in Portland. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Iran threatens U.S. bases and aircraft carriers within missile range.” Boy, could Obama pick him some partners for peace or what? (Hat tip: Patrick Poole on Twitter.)
More than a quarter-million French take to blocking roads to protest high gas prices.
Reminder:
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Five more MS-13 members deported from Houston by ICE. (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
Old and busted: “Believe in science.” The New Hotness: “Social justice Astrology is so cool!”
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
1. Become head of ABC programming. 2. Cancel Roseanne. C. Become ex-head of ABC programming.
Divorced Texas woman blows up wedding dress with twenty pounds of Tannerite.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to disappear.”
The DB Cooper hijacking mystery: solved?
I had more links planned for this LinkSwarm, but they got eaten along with the turkey…
Tags:ABC, ACLU, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antifa, astrology, California, Democrats, Foreign Policy, France, gas prices, Houston, Iran, Jamal Khashoggi, Jihad, Jim Jones, John Roberts, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Military, New York Times, Oregon, Portland, Roseanne Barr, San Francisco, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Taxes, Texas, Thanksgiving
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »