Fallout from the House speaker’s race, Biden busted for mishandling classified files, more blue state teachers raping their students, Cadillac’s EV breaks into double digit sales, and the Imelda Marcos disco musical! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Kevin McCarthy finally wins Speaker of the House race on 15th vote after offering concessions to the House Freedom Caucus.
How is McCarthy doing? Early signs are encouraging. “The House of Representatives passed a new rules package Monday that overhauls the way it functions by putting up more barriers to congressional spending and creating a more deliberate process for passing legislation, which were key demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Party.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) used Thursday morning’s press briefing to criticize the Department of Justice’s handling of the issue.
“They knew this happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it secret from the American public,” McCarthy told a scrum of reporters on Capitol Hill.
Chicago Board of Education Inspector General Will Fletcher reported 470 sexual complaints against Chicago Public School employees from students in 2022.
“The report details students being abused, groped, groomed, assaulted and threatened by school officials.
“One investigation found a former Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a 16-year-old high school student for a year. When he learned there was an investigation, the staff member threatened to kill the girl and her family if she cooperated with investigators.”
The teachers’ union in Chicago, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, so praised by Joe Biden, has done nothing and said nothing about it so far as I can tell, and I did look, focusing instead on promoting critical race theory into the school system. Left unsaid is that the union ensures that firing any of these teachers involved in this activity is virtually impossible. Chicago’s public schools’s firing rate of bad teachers owing to their union membership, as of a few years ago, is 0.1%.
What’s vivid here amid all this widespread predatory behavior from the teaching classes, which like Harvey Weinstein, are prolific campaign donors to Democrats, is that the low outrage factor stands in sharp contrast to the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church, which was ordered by courts to pay billions in reparations to the victims, has seen its leaders publicly apologize for the abuses, and has many programs now to prevent child abuse by perverts in authority. This activity was evil and inexcusable and rightly punished.
As for the more widescale abuse now seen in Chicago’s public schools, along with comparable scandals in the Los Angeles public school system, and other bad cases in New York and other blue cities, well, crickets. The perversion has gotten out of control in Chicago and the story barely makes the national news.
How Biden’s inflation is destroying family budgets:
The reality of the inflation report for American families – year-over-year real wages have been negative for 21 straight months. pic.twitter.com/1Bh4DNqZBF
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a firearm accessory that enables a semi-automatic gun to shoot at an increased rate of fire.
In a 13-3 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans held that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), acting under “tremendous” public pressure, short-circuited the legislative process by approving a rule to define bump stocks as “machineguns,” which are illegal to possess. The court said ATF did not have the authority from Congress to do so.
This is what a real pro-natalist policy looks like: “Hungary addresses falling birthrates by exempting moms under 30 from income tax for life.” More:
Hungary has taken several measures in recent years to encourage its citizens to have more children, including three years of paid parental leave and state-funded daycare.
The country previously suspended income tax for moms with four or more children, but this new policy specifically encourages women to have children sooner, which in the long run means a higher likelihood of having more children overall.
Israel hit Syria again, and I heard just about nothing about it. Ukraine has really pushed Syria out of the headlines.
Speaking of Ukraine, Russia has largely captured the salt mining town of Soledar, though at a high cost in man. And good luck checking those hundreds of miles of salt tunnels for partisans…
“Tesla plans Houston-area expansion with large new industrial site in Brookshire…Little is known about Tesla’s plans, but the Fortune 500 company signed a lease late last year for about 1.03 million square feet at 111 Empire West, part of the 300-acre Empire West Business Park in Brookshire.” A bold move, considering how radically car sales have dived this year.
Other EVs update: “GM delivers record Cadillac Lyriq deliveries in Q4 – 12 per month.”
“David Byrne, Fatboy Slim Disco Musical ‘Here Lies Love’ Sets Broadway Debut. The musical, which has had a long journey to Broadway, centers on the life of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.” They say the mirror ball shine bright on Broadway… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Lindybeige (a military YouTuber whose tank videos I’ve used before) interviews a British volunteer fighting in Ukraine as to what is and isn’t useful field kit.
“Joe Rogan interviews Peter Zeihan” is obviously irresistible catnip for me, as any regular readers recognize. It’s like Rogan is reading my blog! (Joe, you should totally interview me! I’m a great speaker, I’m local, I can bring my dogs over to play with Marshall, and I can tell you what doing standup comedy was like in Houston in the 80s…)
I don’t have the entire interview, because Spotify, but there are some big, interesting chunks I found on YouTube. Many cover ground familiar to BattleSwarm readers.
First up: Zeihan explains his theory on why the Russo-Ukrainian War was inevitable because they had to get across Ukraine to plug defensive gaps, and that Russia had to do it in advance of a demographic death spiral.
Caveat: I’m not sure the “plugging the gaps” theory explains the invasion any better than old fashioned Russian chauvinism; how dare those lowly Ukrainians resist being incorporated into glorious Russia?
Next up: Will Russia use nukes? Zeihan thinks it unlikely.
“We’re not just providing the Ukrainians with the weaponry and the ammo, we’re providing them with the intelligence and most of the steps of the kill chain. Without that, the weapons are of limited usefulness, especially at long range, and the Ukrainians have no desire to rupture that relationship.”
“The Russians are relatively casualty immune. They fight in an area where they fight with numbers. They’ve never been technologically advanced versus their peers, they’ve always just thrown bodies at it. So there has never been a conflict in Russian history where they have backed out without first losing a half a million men. We’re at about a hundred thousand now. We have a long way to go before the Russian military breaks.” (I think he’s forgetting the Russo-Japanese War, where they got their asses kicked but lost a whole lot less than half a million men. Maybe he implied European war, and ignored a lot of minor ones following the Russian revolution, and ignored anything before the Russian Empire…)
We don’t how many Ukrainian civilians the Russians have slaughtered; maybe 250,000. “If you think of things like Bucha and Izyum, German radio intercepts told us as far back as May that there were at least 70 places behind Russian lines that had suffered massacres [like] Bucha, and when we’ve had additional liberations since then, it corroborates that general assessment.”
“The Russians are fighting so badly, they’re doing much worse than the Iraqis did in 1992.”
“Russia has always been poorly managed and authoritarian, but under Putin it’s taken a much darker turn because of the nature of the end of the Cold War.” Yeah, no. Putin is not a “darker” authoritarian than Stalin.
On Putin’s paranoia, isolation, and possible illness. Plus a bit about gay demons.
“We’re now in an environment that between the terminal demographic structureof the Soviet/Russian system, and Putin’s personal paranoia. So he’s gone through and purged what was left of the KGB, FSB, of anyone who has personal ambitions to succeed him. We’re left with an entire political elite of only about 130 people, and Putin has removed anyone who has leadership ambitions.”
“Any sort of leadership talent has left, or been killed.”
“When it came to the Kherson offensive, and it became clear that there was more going on than just NATO weapons, the Ukrainians actually knew what they were doing, they changed the the line from that these are all Nazis to these are actually gay demons.” (Rogan: “What???”)
“This is the official line right now that ‘We have homosexual demons fighting us in Ukraine.'” (I’m going to guess that it’s not the line, but just the latest in a firehose stream of ever-more-risible excuses for failure that no one pays any serious attention to, just like whatever Baghdad Bob spit out in 2003.
“The guy who’s in charge of the Orthodox Church is a Putin crony.”
“We’ve got a Jewish Nazi gay demon.”
On Putin having cancer and/or Parkinson’s: “He’s clearly on steroids, but that could mean a whole lot of things…He looks very, not just flushed, but puffy, and that’s that’s kind of a classic too many steroids in your system issue.”
“There was this great piece that came out that I saw last week, where it was all the propaganda shots that he’s taken with, like, the soldiers mothers, and on the front, and with the tech people, and in the, intelligence and it was like the same twelve people were in every single shot, just in different outfits and even with those people he’s wearing his ballistic vest.”
“He’s clearly unhealthy.”
“He’s got the shakes, that’s one of the reasons [for the] Parkinson’s analysis.”
“The Ukrainian propaganda guy has been saying that there’s a coup underway since March…I wouldn’t put too much into that.”
Rogan: “What a fucked-up situation.” Zeihan: “For the Europeans who have been dealing with the Russians for three centuries, this is kind of par for the course.”
I’ve got at least four more videos to go, so let’s break this post into two parts.
Another criminal finds out the hard way that it is unwise to try and rob people in Texas.
A customer at Ranchito Taqueria shot and killed a man who robbed the restaurant in southwest Houston late Thursday night, according to the Houston Police Department.
It happened just before 11:30 p.m. Thursday at the restaurant on S. Gessner near Bellaire Boulevard.
Bellaire at Gessner is right where working classic Hispanic Houston meets Asian Houston, with a Hispanic Fiesta supermarket, Strake Jesuit (one of Houston’s premiere private Catholic high schools), and a Chinatown all within a few blocks.
Houston police said the armed man in a mask came inside the restaurant, demanding money and wallets from customers. However, as he was leaving, one of those customers shot the suspect.
The incident was caught on surveillance video.
Houston police also released surveillance photos of the customer who shot the robber in the video. Investigators said he is wanted for questioning for his role in the shooting. He has not been identified and is not charged at this time.
Seeing as how Houston’s legal system as started getting infected with social justice, I don’t see how turning himself in for questioning would be in the shooter’s best interest.
The shooter collected the stolen money from the robber and returned it to the other patrons, police said. Then the rest of the people in the restaurant left the scene before the police arrived.
Colion Noir has a reaction video, and why he thinks it’s a righteous shoot:
“When you look up the definition of Texas in a dictionary, it literally says everyone and their mama has a gun.”
“There are over 300 million guns in this country, and 90% of them are in Texas The rest are in Florida. Why would you possibly think you can walk into a taqueria in southwest Houston, Texas and think no one in there has a gun?”
This is an interesting video on the conflict between some poor boatniks known as “Anchor-Outs” for anchoring in Richardson Bay, just off Sausalito, California, and a government entity known as the “Richardson Bay Regional Agency.”
What’s the conflict? RBRA wants them gone, because they pay neither rent nor taxes, and their ramshackle boat view spoil the views of limousine liberals.
So they just seize and destroy people’s boats.
Some quotes:
“The RBRA. It’s the Richardson Bay Regional Agency. I call it the ‘Rich Boy Reach Around’.”
“They want to get rid of us all and gentrify the whole waterfront, eliminate the historical waterfront atmosphere, and put mooring balls for yachts.
They just want millionaire yachts.”
“Richardson Bay is in one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. and is a scenic vista for million dollar homes. Basically, this is the most desirable place to live in all California. And ironically, it’s run by limousine liberals, you know? Rich people don’t want to look at poor people. A lot of them are people that were born here that have been out here a long time, and they just kind of got priced out.”
“There aren’t many housing options for someone on a fixed income of $1,200 a month.” Funny how Democratic Party-run locales always seem to price the poor out of the market.
“For the past few years the RBRA has taken the extreme step of confiscating and crushing boats in their effort to clear out the anchorage. Leaving many boat owners homeless. ‘It’s to push out the poor. They want to get rid of the junkier boats. They literally would like to get rid of all the boats.'”
A detailed discussion of various local ordinances follows, some of which appear to be at odds with national maritime law.
“This is a federal anchorage so they don’t have authority to actually come out here and police us. People telling you laws, regulations, 72 hour anchoring, harbormaster. All that is just lies. It’s smoke and mirrors.”
Are there parallels between the Anchor-Outs and the homeless plaguing Austin? A few. But there doesn’t appear to be a large crime problem, the people in the boats don’t appear to be dealing drugs, and if they’re on boats, they’re not panhandling or breaking into people’s houses, so the parallels to Adlers seem minimal. Also, if they haul their own garbage (as the video states), they’re not leaving the needles on public streets (or floating in the bay), so there also seems to be little parallel with Seattle’s dystopian RV drug culture.
Sausalito’s limousine liberals do truly seem to have become The Man, using their power to oppress the little guy.
“Every few months to couple of years, a new conventional wisdom takes hold that the United States is in its final years, if not final months, and some big political thing is going to happen that is going to dethrone the US dollar as the global currency, and all American power will unwind with that. There is no part of that logic chain that has ever been correct.”
Some takeaways:
U.S power is not a result of its position as the global currency, it’s the other way around. The global currency has to be able to impose, by force if necessary, some sort of taxpax on the trading system to allow trade to happen in the first place. And right now the U.S Navy is more powerful than that of all other navies combined by about a factor of seven. And if you consider that the world’s second and third most powerful expeditionary navies are the Japanese fleet and the British fleet, and you throw them in as American for this Force projection factor, you’re now talking in excess of 12 to 1.
“Honestly, there’s there’s never been any math there and there’s no danger to the U.S. position from a strategic point of view.”
“BRICs is a group of four large developing economies: Brazil, Russia, India and China. It’s a grouping that was put together by some finance guy back in the 2000s, and all he meant by it was ‘Hey, look, these are four big countries with big bond markets we might want to consider trading these as a group.’ That’s all he ever thought about it.”
“The leaders of the BRICs countries do get together from time to time. [No]
meaningful policy has ever come out of it, because these countries don’t really trade. I mean they all trade with China, of course, but they don’t trade with one another, so there’s a reason to caucus with Beijing, but the rest of it is just kind of fluff. Always has been.”
“When I see stories about other countries such as South Africa, or Argentina, or now Saudi Arabia starting to join, I’m like ‘Oh, this is really boring.’ Because these countries really have nothing in common.”
“The conspiratorial logic goes: If they stop using the U.S. dollar, then the US is doomed. Well they’d have to start using something else, and none of them, none of them, want to use each other’s currencies, because that would give that country a leg up.”
“The Russians have always said that the ruble should be the global currency, which makes everyone, everyone laugh, because nobody wants rubles, especially Russians.”
Same for the Yuan and the Rand.
“If you want to have a Global Currency it has to be huge. It has to be able enough to lubricate the global exchange mechanisms, which at last check was in the tens of trillions. And that doesn’t mean that your currency has to be in the tens of trillions, that means you have to be able to lubricate the exchange of tens of trillions, your currency needs to be even bigger.”
Which gets us to probably the single biggest constraint on being a global currency: you have to not care what happens to the value of your currency in any given day, because if there’s a trade surge and demand of your currency goes up, then all of a sudden supply of your currency is plummeted, and you’re dealing with very real economic distortions at home. So your currency has to be so huge that you don’t care that global exchange in it is moving around every day. And that means you also need to be able to run a persistent trade deficit, because you have to be able to provide currency for everyone who wants to trade everywhere at any time, and you cannot sign off on each individual transaction.
“That makes the list down to one already.”
“Europeans couldn’t do it, because they have to run a trade surplus because their demographics are so aged they will never be net importers again.”
“It can’t be the Chinese. The Chinese are the most manipulated currency in human history. They print two to five times as much currency every month as the U.S Fed did at the height of our monetization programs in 2007 to 2008, and then again during Covid. It’s everything that everyone says is wrong with the US dollar is actually wrong with the Yuan by a factor of 10.”
“Every time the Chinese start to loosen up their capital controls in an attempt to have a bigger role for their currency internationally, a half a trillion to a trillion dollars of private savings floods out of the country in a matter of months, and they have to slam that window shut again.”
Even in times of war, countries tend to use the dominate global currency for international trade, even if issued by their current enemy.
“The Russians are under financial constraints right now, sanctions put on them by the Americans the Europeans and others, and so they tried to pull a lot of their petroleum earnings, which comes in in euros and dollars, and they tried to push it into Chinese yuan as kind of like a stick it to the West. Well, a few months later they tried to then pull it out, and the Chinese went like ‘Well, no, we really don’t want these Yuan back.’ And so the Russians just lost tens of billions of dollars.”
In a post-globalist economy, American dollars provide a handy hedge against regional hegemons.
“There’s no shortage of people who don’t like Americans, who have no sense of math or history, who are always going to trot this up every few months, and it means as little today as it did then.”
Ian McCollum tackles an important and long-debated question among AR-15 owners: Can you run .223 Remington and 5.56 NATO ammo interchangeably without any problems?
Short answer: Yes!
Plus he clears up a little bit of misunderstanding about “military grade” ammo.
Looting and rioting are both signs of societal breakdown. Recent election cycles have seen the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party encourage (and the rest of party at least tolerate) such behavior, seemingly on the working assumption that doing so helped keep black voters pulling the “D” lever, no matter how destructive it might be for economic opportunity and community cohesion in the long term.
Putting aside morality, it’s easy to see the “nature red in tooth and claw” cost-benefit analysis of looting when no one is getting prosecuted. If everyone is looting and you’re pretty sure you’re not going to be popped for carrying away the big screen TV, hey, free TV!
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown had sharp words for looters Monday who have broken into and stolen items from several stores around the city during the Blizzard of 2022.
Videos of ransacked stores and businesses with people running out with various items have been shared broadly on TikTok, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
The mayor called these people the “lowest of the low.”
“People who are out looting when people are losing their lives in this harsh winter storm it’s just absolutely reprehensible I don’t know how they can live with themselves,” said Mayor Brown during a joint press conference with Erie County and State Officials including Governor Kathy Hochul.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia who also spoke at the press conference said that police are aware of these incidents and working to get a full count of how many there have been.
“We have made a few arrests we have intervened in some of those, we’ve assisted with at least one location that I am aware of in getting a store boarded up so our officers are out there,” said Commissioner Gramaglia.
That store is believed to be Rick’s Sports Apparel near Allen Street and Elmwood Avenue according to a tip shared with 2 On Your Side. The store had its windows broken, got looted, and was boarded up Monday night.
The Commissioner added that officers are starting to get back to their patrol duties which would include monitoring looting and theft. Since Friday the focus has been on the snow emergency and saving lives.
“It’s heartbreaking. When this is all over the community will have nowhere to go to get the things they need,” said Robert Smallwood, an employee at Camellia Meats.
Smallwood had flagged down 2 On Your Side’s Dave McKinley Monday morning and said that the Family Dollar at Genesee Street and Zenner Street was in the middle of being looted. Several videos show people with bags of items who had just exited the store.
Not only do looters seem in no danger of imminent starvation, they also show no fear at the police siren and show no inclination of dropping the looted goods.
Looting generally qualifies as third degree burglary under New York law, which is still a felony that can earn you seven years in jail. So what sort of person would risk that to loot a Family Dollar? You know, where almost everything is a buck? How far down the scale of civilization do you have to slide before grabbing armfuls of cheap goods and running off seems like a viable life strategy?
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has the right attitude toward such criminality, but I note that his party, the Democratic Party, has ruled Buffalo since January 1, 1966, and Democrats have occupied the New York Governor’s mansion since January 1, 2007. And it’s not like Buffalo hasn’t suffered through previous blizzards.
Why is looting a Family Dollar now considered acceptable behavior?
Since August, Russian forces (including a large contingent of Wagner Group mercenaries) has been assaulting the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the Dunba with almost monomaniacal focus, despite very little to show for their efforts. Despite small successes for Russia (a few streets here, an industrial area there, even capturing a garbage dump on the edge of town was listed as a major Russian achievement a few weeks ago) almost all of Bakhmut has remained stubbornly in Ukrainian hands.
However, over the last day or two, tentative reports having come in that not only have Russian attacks slacked off, but that Ukrainian forces have recaptured not only just about all the hard-won territory Russia had gained in the city itself, but that some outlying areas were liberated after months of control. At the same time, there are numerous, persistent reports that Russia is running low on artillery shells in the region. (To be fair, repeated predictions that Russia must be running low on dumb ammunition of various types have failed to pan out heretofore.)
Here Suchomimus reports that Russia has been pushed out of the industrial areas of Bakhmut in the east, and that Ukraine has recaptured most of the town of Opytne to the immediate southeast.
Russian forces’ rate of advance in the Bakhmut area has likely slowed in recent days, although it is too early to assess whether the Russian offensive to capture Bakhmut has culminated. Russian milbloggers acknowledged that Ukrainian forces in the Bakhmut area have managed to slightly slow down the pace of the Russian advance around Bakhmut and its surrounding settlements, with one claiming that Ukrainian forces pushed back elements of the Wagner Group to positions they held days ago. Ukrainian social media sources previously claimed that Ukrainian forces completely pushed Russian forces out of the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut around December 21. ISW has also assessed that Russian forces made slightly fewer overall advances in the Bakhmut area in November and December combined as compared to the month of October.
Russian forces will likely struggle to maintain the pace of their offensive operations in the Bakhmut area and may seek to initiate a tactical or operational pause. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on December 24 that Russian forces currently lack the necessary stockpile of artillery munitions to support large-scale offensive operations and that sustaining defensive operations along the lengthy frontline in Ukraine requires the Russian military to expend a significant number of shells and rockets daily. The Ukrainian Joint Forces Task Force released an interview on December 24 with a Ukrainian servicemember in the Bakhmut area detailing that Russian forces have been conducting an extremely high pace of assaults on Ukrainian positions in the area with little corresponding progress. The Wagner Group’s reported heavy losses in the Bakhmut area in recent weeks have also likely strained Russian forces’ current operational capabilities in the area.
The Russian military’s personnel and munitions constraints will likely prevent it from maintaining the current high pace of offensive operations in the Bakhmut area in the near-term. Russian forces previously allocated significant resources in a meat-grinder effort to seize Severodonesk and Lysychansk in spring–summer 2022. Russian forces culminated after capturing Lysychansk in early July and failed to capture neighboring Siversk to the east or Slovyansk to the northeast. The Russian military’s fixation with conducting a highly attritional campaign to achieve the tactical objectives of capturing Severdonetsk and Lysychansk ultimately undermined the Russian military’s ability to achieve its larger operational objective to envelop Ukrainian forces in a cauldron along the E40 highway and eventually drive to Donetsk Oblast’s western administrative borders. Russia’s relentless and costly push on Bakhmut may also degrade Russia’s ability to pursue long-term objectives in the Donbas theater.
Another sign Russia may be running out of shells in Bakhmut: A tweet from Wagner Group saying just that, while also calling the Chief of Russian General Staff a “faggot.”
Russian mercenaries from Wagner insult the Chief of Russian General Staff with obscene words and complain that they have no ammunition pic.twitter.com/7LYvN2MzHr
As usual with Ukraine news, all this is very tentative, and could be reversed to tomorrow. But right now it looks like Ukraine has the upper hand in Bakhmut.
