Guns are flying off the shelf, India isn’t rolling over for China’s aggression, and things just keep mysteriously blowing up in Iran. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
The media have claimed over the past three months: 1. Cuomo was great; 2. Seattle's CHOP and Portland were paradisical; 3. Mass riots were no biggie; 4. Enormous BLM protests provided no health risk in the midst of a pandemic. I can't imagine why they have a credibility gap.
Gun sales are up big. “A record 10.3 million firearms were purchased in the first half of 2020, according to NSSF’s adjusted NICS data. They report, ‘The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.'” Makes sense, since they disproportionately live in Democrat-controlled cities where they’ve let rioters, arsonists and looters run rampant…
“Trump Task Force to Dismantle MS-13 Takes Down Gang’s Key Leaders.”
Thanks to Barack Obama’s open border policies, MS-13 was energized with new recruits provided by a steady flow of illegal immigrant minors. When the Obama administration started welcoming a barrage of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) in 2014, Homeland Security sources told Judicial Watch that the nation’s most violent street gangs—including MS-13 and the 18th Street gang—were actively recruiting new members at U.S. shelters housing the minors. The Texas Department of Public Safety subsequently confirmed that the MS-13 is a top tier gang thanks to the influx of illegal alien gang members that crossed into the state under Obama’s disastrous program, which saw over 60,000 illegal immigrants—many with criminal histories—storm into the U.S. in a matter of months. Tens of thousands more have entered since then.
Snip.
The cases announced this week include an indictment against a high-ranking MS-13 operative, Melgar Diaz, in Virginia. Diaz is charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, conspiring to kill or maim persons overseas, conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, conspiring to finance terrorism, and; conspiring to engage in narco-terrorism, in addition to racketeering conspiracy and drug trafficking. In another case eight MS-13 members were indicted in New York for committing six murders, two attempted murders, kidnapping, narcotics felonies and related firearms offenses. In Nevada 13 MS-13 gang bangers, including leaders of the “Hollywood Locos” clique and “Los Angeles Program” were charged with multiple counts of narcotics distribution and weapons crimes. The task force is also responsible for the indictment in New York of Alexi Saenz, an MS-13 leader accused of committing seven murders, including two high school students with a machete and baseball bat. “MS-13 is a violent transnational criminal organization, whose criminal activities respect no boundaries,” said [Joint Task Force Vulcan (JTFV) director John Durham]. “The only way to defeat MS-13 is by targeting the organization as a whole, focusing on the leadership structure, and deploying a whole-of-government approach against a common enemy.”
China may be a powerful adversary to India, but its bluffs can be called. And that is what India has done in the last two weeks, making a host of decisions that, seen in the perspective of the stand-off with China, represent its resolve and constitute a sustained effort on several fronts — military, diplomatic, economic, social — to make China pay.
Previously, India had never taken sides with or against China on the Hong Kong protests. But this time around, it took a strong stand on the passage of the new security law, which is an attempt to stifle the city’s pro-democracy movement.
It has also blocked Chinese firms from investing in India under the free FDA route, taken several initiatives to force a global probe into the source and origin of COVID-19, and, as mentioned above, banned a host of Chinese apps.
That’s not all. India’s railways ministry has canceled a signals and telecom contract with a Chinese company for a mammoth freight corridor project in Uttar Pradesh. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) have decided to exclude Chinese firms from providing telecom equipment and cancelled their plans for upgrading 4G services. The roads department has announced that no highway projects will be awarded to China. The power ministry is looking to curtail imports from adversarial nations, including China. The move is aimed also at reducing the ability of adversarial nations to cripple India’s power infrastructure through cyber attacks.
Several Indian states have followed up on the national government’s moves. A push to deny a Chinese firm, Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Co Ltd, a contract for the construction of a critical section of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS corridor, is ongoing. The state of Maharashtra is on the verge of cancelling three agreements with Chinese firms. It includes an agreement with China’s Great Wall Motors (GWM) to set up an automobile plant near Pune and produce electric vehicles there. However, the state is going ahead with nine other agreements signed with the U.S., Singapore, and South Korea, indicating to China what’s to come.
Next was a heavily fortified, highly restricted, underground nuclear enrichment facility. Then power stations, a port, a health clinic and a petrochemical plant.
For weeks, things have been blowing up or catching fire in Iran.
The two most significant incidents were a June 26 explosion at Khojir, near Tehran — a liquid fuel production site for the country’s missile program — and more recently, a blast deep underground at the Natanz nuclear facility on July 2.
Red Bull decides that they don’t want to go broke, refuses to get woke. “Red Bull has fired two ‘diversity directors’ who tried to force the company into virtue signaling about Black Lives Matter while also dissolving several ‘culture teams’ who were pressuring Red Bull to take a more aggressive ‘woke’ political stance.” Good for them.
Gerald Walpin had been investigating Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA basketball star and Obama supporter, for misusing federal grant money from AmeriCorps. The program was created by the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 and grew to over 80,000 members. Program participants received benefits such as student loan deferment, living allowances, health benefits, career opportunities and training, and so forth. The program has done some good but has also been plagued by waste and corruption.
He found that Johnson gave $850,000 of AmeriCorps grant money to a nonprofit organization he founded called St. HOPE Academy. In addition to being improperly used to pay AmeriCorps volunteers for political activity, to wash his car, and to run his personal errands, Walpin also discovered that Johnson had used AmeriCorps grant money to pay hush money to underage girls, who were students at St. HOPE Academy, that he had sexually assaulted and then staged a cover-up.
Walpin called for Johnson to be criminally prosecuted. Instead, Johnson was able to get a sweetheart deal avoiding prosecution if he paid back the money. This deal was approved by Alan Solomont, a major Democratic fundraiser who was also the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS).
Walpin was furious about the deal and made it known, prompting his illegal firing. Following the firing, the Obama White House waged a smear campaign against Walpin, making bogus allegations that he appeared “confused, disoriented and unable to answer questions,” and exhibited “behavior that led the [CNCS] board to question his capacity to serve.”
If there were no police, if the police were defunded, wealthy people would hire private security guards, but the people who cannot afford private guards need to have a well‑funded police force. I am in favor of extra funding for the police. Give them better training. Teach them how to subdue people without using lethal force.
The problem with the UN is not that it passes too many resolutions, but too few. It never attacks its favorite countries. It applies a double standard of injustice. It has devoted more time to condemning Israel than all the other countries of the world combined. Let us see what it says about recent reports concerning murders in Iran of gay people, for instance the recent murder of a 14‑year‑old by her father as an honor killing. Let us see what it says about so many of the violations of human rights around the world. Well, do not hold your breath. It will say nothing. It will focus only on Israel and the United States. There is a case to be made for the United States withdrawing and defunding…
Plus some observations on recent Social Justice Warrior/Cancel Culture issues. Not in agreement with everything (he opposed elected judges), but worth reading. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
During the height of the coronavirus lockdown, with a substantial portion of the world’s population in quarantine and the global economy sliding toward a deep economic recession, most of us still ate our fill every evening. We should rejoice in this miracle. Hunger, which has accompanied humanity from our beginnings, has practically disappeared. Isolated cases of malnutrition—but not of famine—remain, due to local conflict and extreme forms of poverty, themselves on their way to remission.
Since 1970, world population has doubled—but food production has tripled. In 1970, India was known as “the famine continent,” and the economic literature was uniformly pessimist, an echo of the writings of Thomas Malthus, who proclaimed 170 years earlier an inevitable contradiction between demographic growth and agricultural growth. Humanity escapes this proclaimed fate, thanks to science and commerce—the two foundations of progress, including agricultural progress.
Snip.
What saved us from famine was the 1970s Green Revolution: a combination of species selection, hybridization, and the application of farming techniques such as irrigation and fertilization. When these techniques were applied to wheat and rice, average yields tripled, especially in India, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The leaders of this revolution, which we do not celebrate enough, were two agronomists: Norman Borlaug, a Texan who transformed wheat cultivation in his laboratory near Mexico City; and M. S. Swaminathan, an Indian from Chennai who applied Borlaug’s method to rice in a laboratory near Manila. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (Swaminathan was overlooked). Never was the Nobel Peace Prize more deserved—or so soon forgotten.
Progress is seldom, if ever, unanimously welcomed. Activist groups in India and the United States have blamed Borlaug and the Green Revolution for creating new inequalities. It’s true that all Indian peasants were equally poor and hungry before the Green Revolution. Those who applied Borlaug’s recommendations became more prosperous than those who stuck to the old methods. It’s easy to achieve equality when there is nothing to distribute; leftists seem to prefer scarcity to plenty if plenty implies unequal portions. The same people who condemned the Green Revolution now oppose GMOs. Their ancestors, in the early nineteenth century, justified destroying new textile machines using the same arguments. Science progresses; ideologies spin their wheels.
Kanye West explains why he’s against abortion. Man says a lot of wacky things, but he sounds truly sincere about this and his faith.
Small engine maker Briggs & Stratton declares bankruptcy. The very last paragraph mentions seeking a new deal from United Steelworkers of America. (Hat tip: ASM826 at Borepatch.)
James Lileks goes to town on that stupid “Classical music is white supremacy” essay.
Dawn breaks in the crowded prison cell. Not everyone is asleep — conditions are so cramped in the 70-square-yard space that 15 of the 60 inmates have to stand to give others their turn to lie down.
The lack of privacy is absolute. Toilet breaks are rationed — two minutes at a time — and in full gaze of the others.
Glass walls, cameras and microphones mean that every word and deed is recorded.
Informants placed in each cell even note down what people say in their sleep and pass it on to guards.
As with every other day, the morning begins with compulsory singing of Communist Party songs, praising the glorious motherland and its wise leader, Xi Jinping.
Then their only meal of the day arrives. Watery cabbage soup, served with a small lump of steamed dough. If they’re lucky, they may get a few grains of rice as well.
Snip.
Morning is indoctrination. Inmates — hundreds of them, all shaven-headed — sit in a vast echoing room, listening to hours of lectures on the evils of religion
The monotony of the lessons is mental torture. At the end of the class, inmates are asked ‘is there a God?’ The only permitted answer is ‘no’.
Every waking moment is an onslaught on their cherished beliefs and traditions. The half-starved inmates are even forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, in defiance of their Muslim faith.
Afternoon brings interrogations. To break their mental resistance, inmates are forced to watch others being tortured before their own sessions of questioning.
They are made to denounce friends and family, to confess to fictitious crimes such as bomb-making and espionage, and to express abject contrition — even for such harmless acts as having a copy of the Koran. Any resistance brings beatings, electric shocks and sleep deprivation.
Nakedness is another dehumanising tactic. Nudity is taboo in Islam, but prisoners of all ages are made to parade before each other and in view of the guards.
For women, humiliating gynaecological inspections are mandatory. Rape is routine.
(Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.) Previous posts on China’s concentration camp system for Uighers can be found here and here.
This is pretty horrifying: “China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization.”
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.
While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
Last week, drone footage, verified by Western intelligence agencies, emerged from Northern China. It showed Uighur Muslims bound and blindfolded, with shaven heads, being loaded onto trains that were likely headed for detention camps. In a BBC interview, British journalist Andrew Marr demanded answers from Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom. Xiaoming accused “so-called Western intelligence agencies” of making “false accusations against China.” The population of Xinjiang had doubled in 40 years, he said, which clearly proved that “ethnic cleansing” and “so-called forced abortions” had not occurred. Marr, unconvinced, retorted, “According to your own local government statistics, the population growth in Uighur jurisdictions in that area has fallen by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018. 84 percent.”
How can that be so? A recent report by the Associated Press, compiling “government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor” gives an idea.
Over the past four years, the Chinese government has spent tens of millions of dollars to violently hijack the functioning reproductive systems of minority women. In 2017, according to official directives uncovered by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, government officials backed by armed law-enforcement officers were instructed to “leave no blind spots,” “contain illegal births and lower fertility rates,” “test all who need to be tested,” and “detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”
The AP report found that “having too many children” is a “major reason people are sent to detention camps,” that “parents of three or more [children] are ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines,” and that “police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.” The report also contains shocking witness testimony:
“Tursunay Ziyawudun said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb.”
“Gulbahar Jelilova confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their children. She also saw a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant. And she met doctors and medical students who were detained for helping Uighurs dodge the system and give birth at home.”
Gulzia Mogdia was also forced to have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. “Medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body,” after which she was “taken home and told to rest, as [officials] planned to take her to a camp.”
What does the “reproductive freedom” crowd have to say about this outrage? We all know what: Exactly nothing.
The United States champions a free and open Indo-Pacific. Today we are strengthening U.S. policy in a vital, contentious part of that region – the South China Sea. We are making clear: Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.
In the South China Sea, we seek to preserve peace and stability, uphold freedom of the seas in a manner consistent with international law, maintain the unimpeded flow of commerce, and oppose any attempt to use coercion or force to settle disputes. We share these deep and abiding interests with our many allies and partners who have long endorsed a rules-based international order.
These shared interests have come under unprecedented threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing uses intimidation to undermine the sovereign rights of Southeast Asian coastal states in the South China Sea, bully them out of offshore resources, assert unilateral dominion, and replace international law with “might makes right.”
Beijing’s approach has been clear for years. In 2010, then-PRC Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told his ASEAN counterparts that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” The PRC’s predatory world view has no place in the 21st century.
The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region. Beijing has offered no coherent legal basis for its “Nine-Dashed Line” claim in the South China Sea since formally announcing it in 2009. In a unanimous decision on July 12, 2016, an Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention – to which the PRC is a state party – rejected the PRC’s maritime claims as having no basis in international law. The Tribunal sided squarely with the Philippines, which brought the arbitration case, on almost all claims.
As the United States has previously stated, and as specifically provided in the Convention, the Arbitral Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both parties. Today we are aligning the U.S. position on the PRC’s maritime claims in the SCS with the Tribunal’s decision. Specifically:
The PRC cannot lawfully assert a maritime claim – including any Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claims derived from Scarborough Reef and the Spratly Islands – vis-a-vis the Philippines in areas that the Tribunal found to be in the Philippines’ EEZ or on its continental shelf.
Beijing’s harassment of Philippine fisheries and offshore energy development within those areas is unlawful, as are any unilateral PRC actions to exploit those resources. In line with the Tribunal’s legally binding decision, the PRC has no lawful territorial or maritime claim to Mischief Reef or Second Thomas Shoal, both of which fall fully under the Philippines’ sovereign rights and jurisdiction, nor does Beijing have any territorial or maritime claims generated from these features.
The Chinese long ago borrowed the concept of the political officer (“Zampolit”) from the Soviet Union. The political officer represents the Communist Party and has the authority to overrule any order a military commander gives. In reality, the political officer usually acts as a combined morale and special events officer. The political officers are primarily responsible for preventing anything happening in their unit that would embarrass the party. For naval zampolits that meant watching out for signs of mutiny or sailors planning to seek asylum in a foreign port.
Unlike the Russian naval zampolit, the Chinese counterpart, called a political commissar is considered the equal of the regular naval commander and his superior when it comes to a “special mission”, like deliberately harassing foreign warships or opening fire on anyone. The political commissar is the same rank as the ship captain and can overrule the ship commander at any time and in any situation. It was not always that way.
An important change took place in 2018 when naval political commissars were given equal authority with the captain as “mission commander” and is expected to replace the captain if the captain is disabled by injury or sickness. The normal second-in-command (the XO or executive officer) becomes the XO for the political commissar and the captain and third, not second, in command. The practical problem with this is that the captain and XO have spent their entire careers (fifteen or more years) learning how to run a ship and supervise the crew. In contrast, the political commissar learned enough tech stuff to be more annoying. The political commissar was a professional busybody, scold and snitch. The political commissar can end the career of the captain, XO or any other officer by simply making a series of uncomplimentary reports.
The 2018 change was part of a program that began in 2016 throughout the military as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) sought to improve its control over the military. In the navy that meant the political commissar had the ultimate responsibility for achieving goals assigned to a ship. The captain is not the true commander of the ship in the Western sense. He is there to see that technical details are well taken care of and that would include taking change during very bad weather or some kind of technical (fire, explosion) problem aboard ship. The political commissar is expected to personally undertake particularly dangerous leadership missions, although only those he is qualified to deal with. That means political commissars have led boarding parties in dangerous situations but not entrusted with command during damage control situations.
The full impact of the 2016-18 “reforms” to improve CCP control of the military are still working themselves out in the navy. Western, especially American, captains are being warned that their Chinese counterparts will probably not react as quickly to an emergency or unexpected situation that that should be taken into account, or taken advantage of.
Another reason for the 2016-18 reforms was to reduce corruption in the military. In theory, political officers are supposed to prevent their commanders from getting involved in fiscal corruption, but often it’s the other way around, with the political commissars getting involved in illegal money-making schemes first. The CCP is trying to purge the political officer ranks of dishonest and unreliable elements. It is slow going. This has caused more friction between commanders and their political officers. That tends to reduce the effectiveness of the unit these two officers are in charge of. There is no easy solution to this problem.
Snip.
There’s another leadership problem China has to deal with, a problem similar to the one that seriously hurt Japan’s effort against the United States during World War II. This is the fact that the Japanese Army then, like the Chinese Army now, is the senior service to the extent that generals can overrule admirals and generally interfere in navy matters that the army generals really know little about. This is already causing China problems and there is no solution in sight. This is particularly true when it comes to joint training. In wartime, this “army runs the show” sort of thing is a serious problem, just read any history that covers the Japanese army and navy relationships during World War II.
An offshoot of the army domination problem is that there is little real joint (all services working together) planning. Currently, the Chinese army tells the navy and air force what it wants done and that is the end of that. The Chinese understand that their next war will likely be in the Pacific, not mainland China. The navy should be in the lead here but it isn’t. Worse, naval officers who spend their entire careers learning how to run a ship, eventually as captain, have to accept being second-guessed or overruled by a less experienced (in running a ship) political officer.
“US House of Representatives passes NDAA amendment slamming Chinese aggression against India.” (From Hindustan Times. Judging from Google News, there’s precious little coverage of this resolution in American sources.)
“LA Times Publishes Beijing-Funded Propaganda.” “The eight-page advertorial, called “China Watch,” was tucked towards the back of the paper’s 61-page Sunday edition. With articles designed to look like legitimate newspaper columns, the insert presents a rosy view of the Chinese economy and its businesses.”
Sobering:
If you combine Chinese Fentanyl overdose deaths with coronavirus deaths, China has already killed more Americans than World War 2.
Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.
Well, unpleasant for you.
Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.
You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so.
After all, President Hillary Clinton did.
Didn’t there arise in your mind, that agonizing Wednesday morning after Mrs. Clinton’s ruination, just the faintest notion that you had been lied to? You tracked the polls, and you reviewed the percentages – most hovering above 90% – that assured you that the glass ceiling was in for an epic shattering. And yet, no shattering was forthcoming. Whether expressly or by omission, you were lied to.
And it is happening again.
“Trump Admin Tells Minnesota Governor To Get Bent Over $16 Million Aid Request Following Riots.” If Democratic officials refuse to defund their own cities from hard-left rioters and thugs, how is that the rest of the nation’s problem?
President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was great.
First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”
Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.
Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”
Democrat M. J. Hegar won her runoff with Royce West to face incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn in November. Cahnmann thinks Hegar is a much better candidate than West, but she’s not going to get the mountains of money and fawning media Beto O’Rourke got in 2018, nor are the demographic voting dynamics of a presidential election year going to be nearly as friendly to her.
Speaking of which: “Ilhan Omar’s Payments To Husband’s Firm Top $1 Million.” She’s certainly adapted quickly to the Washington Way…
Former Auburn football coach and Donald trump-endorsement recipient Tommy Tuberville wins Alabama senate primary over Jeff Sessions. I fully expect Tuberville to crush fluke democratic incumbent Dough Jones in the fall.
Perhaps no phenomenon is more studied, marveled, and desired in the world of high tech and science than the mystery of serendipity. In seemingly every industry, CEOs pay millions in consulting, design, and architectural costs to multiply and optimize the number of chance encounters between their most creative employees — and hopefully profit from the blockbuster new products that might result. If only they could engineer the cubicles just so, or the indoor waterfall at the right angle, they might orchestrate providential encounters, or at least load the dice in their favor.
No place on the planet generates more such interest than Silicon Valley. For decades, cities everywhere have tried to replicate the Valley’s record of producing one trend-setting tech giant after another, but none has quite measured up. Like history’s other hubs of outsized accomplishment — Athens in 450 B.C., Hangzhou in the 12th century, and Florence in the 16th century — Silicon Valley has entrenched itself as the world’s centrifugal force for the biggest thing of its age, tech.
But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge — the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley’s leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work. In May, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees they were no longer required to turn up in the office. Slack said more or less the same to its workers, and the trend was made official by industry colossus Zuckerberg, who announced that he expected up to half his employees would become permanently remote.
In the years before the pandemic, talent in San Francisco and the Valley were already conflicted about whether to stay, increasingly exasperated by the cost of living. The concentration of highly motivated creators has produced enticing jobs, but also driven up prices. In Palo Alto, the median home now costs $3.2 million. In nearby Mountain View, it’s $1.7 million, and in San Francisco $1.8 million. In other words, the Valley has priced out almost anyone not making high six-figures, and even many of them. The temptation has been to flee elsewhere, and some tech talent had already been doing so.
But now, if engineers, designers, and venture capitalists are geographically disbanding, working via the cloud instead of walking Google’s halls, surfacing at Buck’s Restaurant, or the cafes on University Avenue, how will future serendipity happen?
Lincoln Project co-founder is literally a registered agent for Russia. “The media can keep calling you ‘Republicans,’ but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat.”
Body Cam Released of a Eaton County deputy fatally shooting a suspect who stabbed a 77yo man, and attacked her with 2 knives and a screwdriver pic.twitter.com/KdJKv4RllQ
— Breaking News, USA (@currentnewsUSoA) July 15, 2020
The City would cut the number of cops despite increasing response times for emergency calls and increased violent crime in the city. I suspect other cities will be facing similar budget decisions under similar circumstances.
I don’t know anyone who thinks we shouldn’t improve officer training and use of force guidelines to minimize harm to citizens. I know a number of cops who have been saying such things for years. I fail to see how decreasing the number of cops will enhance public safety.
The Republican senator asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver last week if he would allow players to wear jerseys with the message: “Free Hong Kong.” Hawley was criticizing the league after officials announced “pre-approved phrases” would be allowed on the back of jerseys while “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of China, according to Fox News.
Wojnarowski responded to Hawley with the two-word email, which Hawley shared on social media. The columnist soon issued an apology for the message.
Wojnarowski (or “Woj” as NBA followers call him) still hasn’t clarified which was offensive to him: Supporting American law enforcement officers or supporting freedom for Hong Kong.
China buys Pakistan, the Supreme Court gives Oklahoma back to the Indians, another cartel shootout in Nuevo Laredo, and cancel culture comes for everyone! Enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm!
“In a major Supreme Court decision Thursday, justices decided that a large swath of [Oklahoma], including part of Tulsa, is still an American Indian reservation. Tribal members can no longer be prosecuted by the state for crimes that happen in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.” I have not had time to read the decision, but my impression is that it’s somewhat less sweeping than the MSM is making it out to be.
China has become the ultimate fiscal lifeline for Pakistan. Decades of deficits, growing corruption, excessive defense spending and military domination have left Pakistan broke and few willing to give or lend enough cash to keep Pakistan solvent. A recent example of how this works was seen when despite economic recession and a public debt crisis (no one will lend to Pakistan anymore), the Pakistani defense budget was increased twelve percent for 2020, with annual spending now $7.85 billion. Spending on dealing with covid19 has averaged about $100 million a month and by the end of the year military spending will be at least five times what was spent on covid19. The India defense budget is also up (13.6 percent more) in 2020 to $66 billion.
The only economic relief available to Pakistan is China and CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic corridor). CPEC is a vast Chinese investment and construction effort that depends on vigorous support of the Pakistani military to succeed. China needs the Pakistani military to keep Islamic terrorists and tribal separatists from attacking the Chinese construction projects. Pakistan also helps China by keeping Indian forces occupied in Kashmir and the northwest Indian portion of the Pakistani border.
Northwest India (Ladakh State) is the current a hot spot because India has been building roads to the border and threatening to take back the portion of Kashmir Pakistan illegally, according to the agreement that established the India-Pakistan border after the British left in 1947, seized from India. Pakistan signed that agreement but had second thoughts as it was being implemented. Pakistan urged Pakistani Pushtun tribes in the area to “liberate” Kashmir from the Hindus and managed to grab about half of the disputed area. This dispute has remained unresolved ever since and led to several wars with India. Pakistan always lost but India never sent troops into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The current Indian leader is openly questioning the wisdom of that policy.
India controlling all of Kashmir is a major economic threat to China, which has invested over $10 billion to build a highway and rail line from China to the Pakistani coast and it goes through Pakistani occupied Kashmir. This link is part of the Chinese OBOR/BRI (belt and road project) which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road that for thousands of years was the main economic link between East Asia and the rest of Eurasia. The Pakistani portion is called CPEC and is costing China at least $62 billion (so far). The Indian threats to the Kashmir road-rail link are minor compared to the problems China is having with Islamic terrorist and tribal violence against CPEC projects as well as the high levels of corruption in Pakistan which are also damaging CPEC projects. This is driving up costs while lowering quality and slowing progress. But China also claims ownership of much Indian territory so helping Pakistani keep what they have grabbed is considered something of a professional courtesy. At the same time the Pakistani military have gained an ally they cannot abandon or say no to.
In June China revived the border war over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and patrolled by a small Chinese naval force. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134-kilometer long lake extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual “sneak, grab and stay” tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lake shore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.
Given this newly declared foreign threat China has, since 2019, sent new Type928D Patrol Boats to guard the lake. This fast (70 kilometers an hour) boat is armed with an RWS (Remote Weapons System) using a 12.7mm machine-gun plus two or more smaller (7.62mm) machine-guns that can be outed elsewhere on the boat and operated by one of the ten sailors on board. There is also seating below deck for up to twenty troops. India has smaller boats patrolling it portion of the 4,200-meter high lake, except for the few months when the entire lake is frozen over.
In the last decade China has been building roads into remote and formerly inaccessible (via vehicle) portions of the lake coastline. China has built some of these roads into areas claimed by India but not regularly patrolled because special mountain troops must be employed to get into these areas without coming in by boat or on foot over the ice.
India admits that the Chinese aggression along its northern border is active again and the Chinese are now actually taking control of Indian territory and apparently plan to continue doing so. Despite Indian nuclear weapons China believes it can get away with gradually gaining control over more than 100,000 square kilometers of Indian territory it claims. This will be done by grabbing a few square kilometers at a time without triggering a nuclear exchange. Fortune favors the bold, even in slow motion.
The dead were allegedly members of the Tropa del Infierno, or Hell’s Army, the armed wing of the Northeast Cartel, who attacked soldiers while they were patrolling the highway to the airport. No military personnel were reported injured in the shoot-out.
Investigators at the scene recovered two of the squad’s vehicles that were reported stolen in the United States, as well as 12 guns including two Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles and eight AR-15s.
The Northeast Cartel, a faction of Los Zetas, is headed by Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias El Huevo. A reward of 2 million pesos (US $89,000) has been offered for information leading to his arrest. Treviño is the nephew of the former leader of Los Zetas who was arrested in Houston in 2016.
Nuevo Laredo, which is right across the Mexican border from Texas, was also the scene of two previous massive cartel shootouts, in 2012 and 2018.
Her business, first and foremost, was keeping Jeffrey Epstein happy. He shared much with her father: a humble origin, a vast fortune derived by mysterious means, even rumors of ties to the Mossad and other intelligence agencies. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein also attached himself to a woman of higher status. In those days, Manhattan was party central, a place where connections were made at night, person to person. “Ghislaine was at the epicenter of all that,” says Euan Rellie, a British investment banker who knew Maxwell in both London and New York. “She befriended everybody and had a massive Rolodex of influential people.”
Those connections proved pivotal to Epstein. “I always say that Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became,” says one of Epstein’s victims. “He had the money, but he didn’t know what to do with it. She showed him.” Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, which he boasted made his New York town house “look like a shack,” and named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, which is said to have featured a specially built massage room. Maxwell is said to have shared Epstein’s bed in each of the residences, as his girlfriend, before moving on to become his “best friend,” as he called her in Vanity Fair. (“When a relationship is over, the girlfriend ‘moves up, not down’ to friendship status.”)
Maxwell soon had a bed of her own in a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, tended by a live-in couple who served as her housekeeper and driver, two secretaries (one for her and a second for Jeffrey), and an immense budget for the six properties she was managing for Epstein. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.”
She wore a large diamond ring Epstein had given her, which she called her engagement ring, according to one of Epstein’s victims. “She would say things like she was the only one who Jeffrey slept with,” the woman says. “I know that she would have died to marry him. She would have done anything for him. He trumped everybody and everything.”
There is, of course, a big difference in saying you believe black lives matter versus saying you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a very important, key distinction to make in this debate. Unfortunately, “woke” reporters here in the U.S. often deliberately blur the lines by conflating the two as if they mean the same thing, so they can play the exact type of word games they did with [White House press secretary Kayleigh] McEnany over Trump’s tweets.
Across the pond in the UK, however, there’s been an unexpected development on this front. Unlike the mainstream media here that routinely fails to make the distinction between saying “black lives matter” (blm) versus saying you support Black Lives Matter (BLM), a growing number of media outlets there have started distancing themselves from the political group because of their calls to defund the police and after a series of anti-Israel, anti-Semitical tweets posted by BLM-UK were recently posted.
Is it too much to ask for our own MSM to start waking up as well?
Cancel cultures comes for Steven Pinker. “This transparently idiotic diatribe, previously dissected by folks such as Jerry Coyne and Barbara Partee — the latter of whom notes Pinker’s role in recruiting female and minority linguists to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — can’t possibly succeed. Can it?” I wouldn’t want to bet money on that proposition. Reason and logic play no role in cancel culture.
On the other hand, Kurt Schlichter sees an opportunity to kill off academia as we know it. “Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
I think I have successfully blocked enough #MAGAts for this to work now. Take this seriously, it's going to be used as part of my champaign advertisement. Thank you.
I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Snip.
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either.
Snip.
Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.
Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round.
Couple plot to ambush the wife’s ex-husband and new wife, drive from North Carolina to Ohio to murder them. Big mistake:
According to the transcript of his Feb. 12 interview with sheriff’s deputies, Lindsey said he owns a gun, but had left it in the house earlier, and so he asked Molly if her gun was in the car. Both Duncans have Ohio conceal carry permits, which they told investigators they had obtained out of fear that Cheryl Sanders wanted to do them harm. They obtained the permits when they moved about four years ago to the area, where Molly has family nearby.
With Molly’s gun in hand, Lindsey said he exchanged fire with the man later identified as Reed Sanders. Lindsey said his ex-wife then pulled up in a vehicle, got out and also threatened them with a gun before being shot by Duncan.
The Greene County coroner said in February that the apparent cause of death for the Sanderses was multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators reported finding three weapons at the scene and multiple shell casings. The Duncans were not physically hurt in the altercation.
The ambush took place in February, but due to coronavirus-related court closures, the grand jury didn’t no-bill them until recently.
Stefan Molyneux makes the case for the Chinese Communist Party’s culpability for the Wuhan Coronavirus:
Toward the end, he talks about the $20 trillion lawsuit Larry Klayman filed in Texas. Eh, I wouldn’t put much credence in him winning that lawsuit, as Klayman is a bit of a gadfly.
But Molyneux makes a compelling case for China’s culpability.
She seems nice: “Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that ‘the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.'” (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
Theoretical phsyicist Dr. Stephen Hsu forced to resign VP position after bogus accusations of sexism and racism:
“The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation,” Hsu posted on June 12. “The accusations are entirely false — I am neither racist or sexist.”
“The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.”
Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the first black billionaire, mocked Cancel Culture and the “borderline anarchists” who topple statues and monuments, claiming that black people “laugh” at the white people engaging in such violence. Even when white liberals topple a Confederate statue, Johnson insisted, “black people don’t give a damn.”
“Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it,” Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday. “They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue.”
The first black billionaire, who has called for $14 trillion in reparations payments to descendants of slavery, argued that vandalism and attacks on statues do not help the black community.
“It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps,” Johnson insisted.
He insisted that the rioters tearing down statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them saying, ‘Oh, my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South.’”
“You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows,” Johnson added. He said these attempts to purge American culture of supposedly offensive monuments and media are “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic.”
“It absolutely means nothing,” the BET founder insisted.
“White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn,” he quipped.
Know who else isn’t impressed with Social Justice Warriors? Muhammad Ali’s son.
“Don’t bust up s**t, don’t trash the place,” Ali Jr. told the Post. “You can peacefully protest. My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘all lives matter.'”
With regard to the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, Ali Jr. said he believes BLM is “racist” — and his father would have, too.
“I think it’s racist,” he said. “It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is.”
“It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that,” he added of the BLM movement.
Communist China has decided it must crush Hong Kong because it knows the city presents an information-streaming ethnic, geographic, political and ideological alternative to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian police state.
The CCP police state promises China’s citizens prosperity’s material goodies — cellphones, electric cars — in exchange for silently accepting communist dictates no matter how harsh and malign. Hong Kong, however, is not a promise. It is an existing democratic example of 21st-century Chinese prosperity.
Why add “information streaming”? Despite the best efforts of the CCP’s censors, cyberbullies, digital surveillance brigades and police threats, what happens in Hong Kong doesn’t stay in Hong Kong. Information about Hong Kong’s political, economic, social and cultural vitality manages to spread throughout mainland China.
The Chinese people also know Beijing lied about the COVID-19/Wuhan virus. The virus originated in China. Only former Obama administration media flacks argue otherwise. The CCP may have tried, but it failed to control human-to-human stories of mourning families. In February and March, the Chinese people knew why demand for funeral urns had spiked in the Hubei province.
The preceding four paragraphs sketch the domestic political threat the CCP confronts. Tiananmen Square proves the CCP sees this threat as a war.
The CCP cannot answer this question: How long can the prosperous tyranny continue to survive trading smartphones and quality American pork for political subservience by the roughly 400 million people in China’s quasi-middle class?
Snip.
Recent economic news suggests China is teetering. A China-EU investment and trade deal has snagged. Bloomberg reported defaults “in all sectors” of China’s offshore bond market have exceeded $4 billion, double that during the same period of 2019. First-quarter 2020 percentage profits, capital expenditures and retail sales may be the lowest since the 1990s.
Big Picture: The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s domestic economy can’t sustain it.
CCP international aggression magnifies the vulnerabilities. Recent vile aggression abounds.
States with the least restrictions on their citizens’ movements and businesses due to the CCP Virus pandemic have the lowest death rates on average from the disease that prompted a national lockdown beginning in mid-March, according to a new study.
Conversely, the most restrictive states show higher death rates on average from the disease known as COVID-19 caused by the CCP virus and originating in late 2019 in China.
You know all that “Wuhan Coronavirus is overwhelming Houston hospitals!” panic? Yeah, not so much. (Hat tip: Aaron Glenn.)
More on the subject:
Here's what's going on with plenty of availability of general beds, too.#Texas has 2nd most recoveries in nation & 2nd lowest case fatality rate. @DavidBalatHC#Texas is responsibly phasing out shutdown, but some are spreading fear & wanting people locked down. #txlegepic.twitter.com/VeuSm3fM3W
Tesla is said to be in negotiation with Travis County, Texas, home to the state capital, Austin, for property tax abatements on what is said to be up to a $25 billion investment bringing up to 30,000 jobs to the region. Since Texas collects most of its taxes through property taxes, abatements are often offered as an incentive for industry to locate in the state and can be worth millions.
The proposed Tesla gigafactory in Austin would build the company’s new Cybertruck electric pickup and serve as a second site to build the Model Y SUV.
I’d never heard of Wirecard before last week, but evidently CEO Markus Braun resigned over some massive financial shenanigans that involved missing billions.
A few writers you’ve never heard of: “How dare J. K. Rowling question the sacred trans movement by saying there are two sexes! You must drop her immediately and send your staff for ‘reeducation!'” Literary agency: “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s funny! There’s the door!”
So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
“Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
Biden comes out of his basement and sees his shadow, more questions about China and Ukraine, more veepstakes, and questioning just how much of that #BlackLivesMatter money ActBlue is raking in goes to Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”
Joe Biden is the top beneficiary of the ActBlue’s fundraising efforts.
Is there any evidence that BLM funds donated through ActBlue aren’t going to Biden? If so, who are the recipients?
Reminder: Biden once had a very different view of street disorder and black lives:
I’m not sure that highlighting the 1994 crime bill will actually cost Biden votes, but showing videos like this does provide a stark contrast of the Joe Biden of today and the Joe Biden of the past who obviously had a far more functional brain…
Creepy Joe Biden is beginning to emerge from the basement again, and the results have not been auspicious thus far.
Cut to Philadelphia, Wednesday. He was sporting the de rigueur mask, but it was dangling loosely from his left ear, as if he’d forgotten it. That made his statement attacking President Trump (I think) all the more bizarre.
All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:
“You know, the rapidly rising uh, um, uh, in with the — with the — I don’t know, uh uh,” he said, finally looking up in utter confusion from his notes.
“His, his just inability to focus on any federal responsibility,” Biden mumbled, and I don’t believe he’s been seen outside the basement since.
That latest stumble got a good leaving alone from approximately 99% of the media’s Democrat stenographers. So the next day the Trump campaign manager put out an email demanding that the press’s Democrat rump swabs “stop protecting Biden.”
“The failure to expose the American people to these rambling displays of incoherence, ineptitude and forgetfulness is depriving voters of a clear picture of Biden’s inability to execute the duties of the office he seeks.”
Which is exactly why Biden’s comrades in the media are doing their damnedest to keep him under wraps.
Staying out of the limelight is good for Biden because the election is not about him. It’s about Trump and his missteps, and Biden is the generic Democratic alternative to another four years of the current administration.
Biden’s campaign is explicitly trying to define the election based on whether or not to give Trump four more years in office. A slide in a Biden campaign strategy briefing last month said, “This election is a referendum on Trump.”
“If the country is asked to have an up or down vote on whether or not Donald Trump should receive four more years, the country would say no, and [the Trump campaign] themselves admit it,” Biden campaign strategist Mike Donilon said during the presentation.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe plainly explained why Biden does not need to be out in the open during a video call with a local Democratic group over the weekend.
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement,’ He’s fine in the basement,” McAuliffe said. “Two people see him a day: his two body people. That’s it.”
Will a Joe Biden presidency derail housing reform and the “recap and release” of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
The answer is a resounding “yes,” according to housing analysts who have ties to Biden’s economic advisers and their thinking on what might happen to the housing giants, if as current polls suggest, the former vice president unseats Donald Trump and becomes president in November….affordable housing is a significant issue to Biden and he would like to expand Fannie and Freddie’s mandate and likely keep them under government control.
Of course they do. How else are Democrats supposed to rake off the graft?
We all agreed that Trump has been too tepid lately and not using the instincts that blew up the political world in 2016.
We are all aware that Joe Biden has benefited greatly from his pandemic-induced basement quarantine. He’s such a train wreck that his handlers are no doubt working overtime to come up with excuses to keep him away from the campaign trail and — more importantly — from sharing a debate stage with President Trump.
The three of us agreed that President Trump needs to seize the initiative now and start goading Biden to get back in the public eye and into a debate. One of Trump’s greatest gifts is the thing that drives old guard Republicans crazy — his ability to drive a narrative on social media. Now is the time for him to use that bully pulpit and relentlessly bait Biden and force his hand.
Biden can’t win a Twitter throwdown with Trump. His handlers are tweeting for him and they are not the most inventive lot. His Twitter feed reads like something that came from a book titled “Democrat-y Stuff Candidates Should Say.” It would be very easy for the president to make Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep look awful all day, every day. The end game is to get Biden back in public, of course, but there is an immediate return on investment in a Twitter flame war.
In my five years of watching Donald Trump in the political arena, the only thing I’ve learned is that Trump probably isn’t going to do what I expect him to do, or think he should, and that what he ends up doing will probably be more effective than what I suggested. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Biden spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring China’s abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by our greatest rival for global leadership. The “made in China” era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America’s ability to produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
This disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was more gung ho than Joe Biden, the poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a platform diametrically opposed to the “open markets and open borders” philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against China’s malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for American workers.
While Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of China’s rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through deals with Chinese state-owned companies.
Biden leading in swing states, yadda yadda yadda. Consider this your periodic reminder that polls are pretty much meaningless this election season. The one poll I dug into, for Texas, undersampled Republicans by about seven points, so expect widespread media falsification of just about every media to help drag Biden over the line.
Another reason not to believe those polls: When you ask people who they think will win, a majority agree that President Trump will beat Biden, 51%-37%. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
As data show recent riots and the months-long COVID-19 economic shutdown hurt black-owned businesses more than any other racial group, the Trump campaign slammed rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for a “weak” response to these challenges.
Democratic governors generally have been more hesitant to reopen their states’ economies than Republicans, leading to criticism from President Trump and his campaign, which argues that delays hurt black-owned enterprises.
The Trump campaign pointed to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing there has been a a 41% decline in the number of black business owners from February to April of this year, driven by the COVID-19 shutdown.
“President Trump’s background as an entrepreneur and builder shapes his passion for protecting, supporting and empowering American black-owned business owners, especially right now,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member told Just the News. “Every day Joe Biden fails to strongly call an end to the looting, and rioting in urban cities, more black-owned businesses are destroyed. Every day Joe Biden fails to support efforts to safely and expeditiously re-open the economy, more black businesses are destroyed. The data shows a prolonged economic shutdown hurts black American entrepreneurs, so Joe Biden’s opposition is standing in the way of black generational wealth, growth and opportunities.”
More veepstakes pandering. “Among the candidates who have progressed to the point of more comprehensive vetting or have the potential to do so are Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), former national security adviser Susan E. Rice and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, all of whom are black. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is white, is also in that group, as is New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is Latina.”
The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.
Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.
Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.
Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren have been interviewed at length by Mr. Biden’s team, as has Ms. Baldwin, who was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Senate.
Two women with distinctive national-defense credentials have also been interviewed and asked for documents: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war combat veteran who is Asian-American, and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.
As the vetting process advances to a newly intense phase, the political currents of the last few weeks are also leaving a mark on the Biden team’s deliberations. The wave of demonstrations touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer there, has elevated a pair of black women long regarded as intriguing long-shot candidates: Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms.
Though Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms are far less known to the national electorate than other figures on Mr. Biden’s list, they have played crucial roles in a cascading civil rights crisis: Ms. Demings, a former police chief in Orlando, Fla., has become a major figure in the law-enforcement debate, while Ms. Bottoms’s handling of chaotic demonstrations in her city earned her national acclaim.
For “national acclaim” read “less incompetent than other Democratic mayors.
This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
100 million dollar question that leftists are refusing to answer:
To what organization do the funds raised on the Black Lives Matter website go?
BLM raised 40 million dollars in 48 hours because of George Floyd’s death. But WHO did Act Blue direct that funding to?
Rioters in Philly deface a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery 30 years before it ended. pic.twitter.com/1HKrDusPBh
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:
The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.
Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.
With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.
Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.
When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.
And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.
This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.
Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.
This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.
Snip.
The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.
It cannot.
It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.
The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.
Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”
That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.
Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.
Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.
“I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.
That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.
This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.
George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.
“Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.
McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.
He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”
Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.
This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.
I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Local pharmacy broken into Sat night. Smashed side door. Proprietor says every pharmacy in Bev Hills was broken into between 8PM and 11PM. Sounds well-organized. "What were they after?" "Drugs and money."
Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
“As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
“The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
Nature wants to kill you:
Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
