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LinkSwarm for December 10, 2021

Friday, December 10th, 2021

If it looks like I’ve been absent from Twitter, it’s because I received a seven day timeout merely for posting one of Twitter’s pre-loaded gifs, probably this one:

(If it’s not animated, it says “Die in a fire” at the end.)

Now on to the LinkSwarm!

  • Inflation hits 39 year high. Unexpectedly!
  • The Biden Administration is functionally pro-China.

    Josh Rogin delivers an unnerving scoop in the Washington Post:

    Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.

    “To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”

    In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.

    “It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”

    Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office.

    Snip.

    Month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.

    Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.

    Snip.

    Elsewhere, Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”

    As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.

    Why, it’s almost like his son is on China’s payroll…

  • Another day, another Washington Post hitpiece against Kamala Harris.

    The rumors started circulating in July: Vice President Harris’s staff was wilting in a dysfunctional and frustrated office, burned out just a few months after her historic swearing-in and pondering exit strategies. A few days later, Harris hosted an all-staff party at her official residence, where most of her office bit into hamburgers and posted pictures of smiling, congenial co-workers on Twitter, pixelated counterpoints to the narrative of an office in shambles.

    “Let me tell you about these burgers at the VP’s residence!!” chief Harris spokesperson Symone Sanders gushed in a tweet. “The food was good and the people were amazing.” Her official defense against reports of staff unrest was more searing. She called people who lobbed criticism behind nameless quotes “cowards” and stressed that working for a groundbreaking vice president was a difficult job, but not a dehumanizing one. “We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day,” she told one outlet. “What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club.’ ”

    Five months later, Sanders is leaving the vice president’s office, the highest-profile member of an end-of-year exodus that includes communications chief Ashley Etienne and two other staffers who help shape the vice president’s public image. Sanders told The Washington Post her departure is not due to any unhappiness or dysfunction, but rather because she is ready for a break after three years of the relentless pressure that came with speaking for and advising Biden and Harris while navigating a global pandemic.

    But the quartet of soon-to-be-empty desks reignited questions about why Harris churns through top-level Democratic staff, an issue that has colored her nearly 18 years in public service, including her historic but uneven first year as vice president. Now, those questions about her management extend to whether it will hamper her ability to seek and manage the presidency.

    “Historic” because she checks social justice warrior diversity boxes, “uneven” because the Post will never be allowed to call it “horrible” for the same reason.

    Critics scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions. People used to putting aside missteps, sacrificing sleep and enduring the occasional tirade from an irate boss say doing so under Harris can be particularly difficult, as she has struggled to make progress on her vice-presidential portfolio or measure up to the potential that has many pegging her as the future of the Democratic Party.

    “One of the things we’ve said in our little text groups among each other is what is the common denominator through all this and it’s her,” said Gil Duran, a former Democratic strategist and aide to Harris who quit after five months working for her in 2013. In a recent column, he said she’s repeating “the same old destructive patterns.”

    “Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have (them) pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons,” he told The Post.

    The Washington Post spoke with 18 people connected to Harris for this story, including former and current staffers, West Wing officials and other supporters and critics. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid about a sensitive topic. The vice president’s office declined to address questions about Harris’s leadership style.

    Her defenders say the criticism against her is often steeped in the same racism and sexism that have followed a woman who has been a first in every job she’s done over the past two decades.

    “Shut up, because social justice!”

    Her selection as President Biden’s vice president, they say, makes her a bigger target because many see her as the heir apparent to the oldest president in the nation’s history.

    “Shut up, because social justice!”

    They also say Harris faces the brunt of a double standard for women who are ambitious, powerful or simply unafraid to appear strong in public.

    “Shut up, because social justice!”

    Some pro-forma Harris defense snipped.

    Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.

    “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”

    For both critics and supporters, the question is not simply where Harris falls on the line between demanding and demeaning. Many worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.

    Why should we remotely worry about her future ambitions when she’s obviously not even up to her current job?

  • Biden’s plans to relieve port crowding at LA/Long Beach haven’t worked.

    Looking all the way back to Nov. 2, five weeks ago, the total number of excess dwell containers in Long Beach was down 22% as of Wednesday (the decrease is even higher, at 32%, when comparing to Oct. 28). Yet the numbers in Long Beach have plateaued more recently. Furthermore, the number of total import containers at Long Beach terminals has not decreased — it has actually slightly increased. There were 57,042 import containers at Long Beach terminals on Nov. 1 and 57,970 on Tuesday.

  • Another redpilled liberal abandons the Democratic Party.

    I embraced my people, and my people embraced me. They gave me everything I had always imagined I wanted: a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university; a professorship at NYU, complete with a roomy office overlooking Washington Square Park; book deals; columns in smart little publications; invitations to the sort of soirees where you could find yourself seated next to Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag or any number of the men and women you grew up reading and admiring. The list goes on. Life was good. I was grateful.

    And then came The Turn. If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that The Turn doesn’t happen overnight, that it isn’t easily distilled into one dramatic breakdown moment, that it happens hazily and over time—first a twitch, then a few more, stretching into a gnawing discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.

    You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about.

    You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

    Snip.

    You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.

    When “the left” becomes the party of wealthy elites and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens and for the U.S. Constitution, and telling people what to do and think at every turn, then that’s the side you are on, if you are “on the left”—those are the policies and beliefs you stand for and have to defend. It doesn’t matter what good people “on the left” believed and did 60 or 70 years ago. Those people are dead now, mostly. They don’t define “the left” anymore than Abraham Lincoln defines the modern-day Republican Party or Jimi Hendrix defines Nickelback.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Chinese real estate giant Evergrande has officially defaulted.

    “The defaults of Evergrande and Kaisa move us to the second step of this China Property downturn, with systemic risk being gradually replaced by idiosyncratic risk,” said Robin Usson, credit analyst at Federated Hermes. He is of course referring to the much bigger risk that is the downturn in China’s residential – and in general property – sector, which as Goldman recently showed is the world’s largest asset and arguably the most important pillar propping up China’s entire economy. Should China’s housing market crash, all bets are off.

    Smoke and mirrors all the way down…

  • Study: “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • Liberal elites can deride “replacement theory” all the want, but it sure seems to be a major concern in European nations.

    The rising star on the right is Eric Zemmour, who, writes The New York Times, “became one of France’s best-selling authors in the past decade by writing books on the nation’s decline — fueled, he said, by the loss of traditional French and Christian values, the immigration of Muslim Africans bent on a reverse colonization of France, the rise of feminism and the loss of virility, and a ‘great replacement’ of white people.”

    Zemmour is being called “the Donald Trump of France.” And he and Le Pen are now running third and second behind Macron in the polling to become the next president of France, which suggests the power of the issue on which they agree: uninvited and unwelcome Third-World migration.

    “You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” said Zemmour in his announcement speech Tuesday, declaiming, “We will not be replaced.”

    Neighboring Spain is gripped by the same concern. Refugees and migrants from the global south use Morocco as a base from which to breach the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.

    Spain has taken to pushing the intruders back into Morocco.

    Madrid has accused Rabat of using the migrants as a diplomatic weapon to extort changes in Spanish policy.

    Italy, whose native-born ethnic population has been in a steady decline, patrols the Mediterranean Sea to prevent migrants from Libya from reaching its shores.

    Drowning deaths are not uncommon. The Channel and the Mediterranean Sea are more formidable and unforgiving waters to cross than the Rio Grande.

    Greece is attempting to keep Turkey from moving refugees and migrants from Middle East wars onto the Greek islands off Turkey’s coast.

    Half a decade ago, Turkey was bought off with billions of euros to prevent the millions of Arab and Muslim refugees within its borders from crossing over into the EU.

    In the recent clash between Poland and Belarus, the weapon of choice for Alexander Lukashenko was — migrants.

    Brought into Belarus from the Mideast, they were moved to the Polish border, forcing Warsaw to deploy troops to keep thousands out of Poland. Lukashenko was exploiting the migrants to punish Poland and the EU for supporting sanctions on his regime.

    After Europe united against him, Lukashenko moved the migrants away from the border and sent many back to Syria and countries whence they came.

    In the hierarchy of European fears, the perceived threat to national identities that comes with mass migrations from the failed and failing states of the Third World appears to rank as a greater concern than the prospect of a Russian army driving toward the Rhine.

  • Speaking of refugees: Is “Kurdistan” in trouble? Lots of the refugees showing up on the Polish/Belarus border are Kurdish. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Don’t look now, but Twitter just suspended the account tracking the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
  • “Tesla Officially Moves Headquarters From California to Texas.”
  • LA crime has gotten so bad that even Hollywood liberals are getting strapped. “‘Even hardcore leftist Democrats who said to me in the past, ‘I’ll never own a gun’ are calling me asking about firearms,’ said Joel Glucksman, a private security executive. “I’d say there has been an increase of 80 percent in the number of requests I’m getting this year.'” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Actual Hispanics hate the social justice neologism “Latinx.”

    Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.

    More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.

  • Promoting FedStock, life imitates The Matrix.
  • Judge blocks de Blasio’s private employer mandate for New York City and Louis Rossmann goes on an epic rant, including how it would disproportionately fall on minorities. “You are coming up with a policy because de Blasio is such a stupid cuntrag that it actually turns the clock back 40 or 50 years.” Also: “I don’t know who the fuck would sign up to do this job. I’d expect to disappear if I were doing this job…I would expect to end up on the bottom of the East River.”
  • “Jussie Smollett Found Guilty of Staging Hoax Hate Crime.” Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end for the lucrative Hate Crime Hoax industry. (Previously.)
  • Heh:

  • Facebook admits that it’s “fact checks” are merely opinion.
  • If you parcel out your business It needs to multiple companies, but all of them rely on AWS (which had an outage Tuesday), you haven’t necessarily reduced your risk.
  • More on that AWS outage.

    The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.

    The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.

    Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit. Irate device users tweeted their frustrations to Ring’s official account, with many complaining that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out on Twitter that there was a general Amazon Web Services outage. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down.

    Others said they weren’t able to turn on their Christmas lights.

    This is why I don’t run “smart anything” or IoT devices in my house. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Let’s Go Brandon boat wins boat parade, until award is cancelled due to liberal tears.
  • Boom:

  • Boom 2:

  • “Unemployment Rate Among Cuomo Brothers Rises To 100%.”
  • Those are some epic zoomies.

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for December 3, 2021

    Friday, December 3rd, 2021

    Last week on Thanksgiving vacation, I had to put my Mac through a reboot cycle and lost the zillions of open Firefox Windows. So you may find this week’s LinkSwarm relatively (some might say “mercifully”) brief.

  • Hunter Biden was pulling down a hefty $10 million a year to spread Chinese influence:

    A damning new report claims that Hunter Biden helped expand Chinese influence in America in a $10 million a year agreement and an $80,000 diamond.

    In her new book, Laptop from Hell, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, describes Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese-linked energy consortium, called CEFC.

    Based on hundreds of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop which he left in a Delaware repair shop in April 2019, and transcripts of messages from WhatsApp, she claims that the Biden family offered their services to CEFC to help expand its business around the world.

    In exchange, Devine writes, Hunter Biden received $10 million a year for three years, and a diamond worth at least $80,000.

  • And, by an amazing coincidence, the Biden Administration is super soft on China.

    Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.

    “To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”

    In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.

    “It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”

    Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office. Through most of 2020, Biden insisted that he was the tough one on China and that the Trump administration only offered “a colossal gap between tough talk and weak action.”

    Biden, at a Democratic debate on February 25, 2020, said: “I had spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader by the time we left office. This is a guy who doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug who in fact, has a million Uyghurs in reconstruction camps, meaning concentration camps.”

    Biden, writing in Foreign Affairs last spring, said: “Companies must act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere. . . . The United States does need to get tough with China.”

    Biden, speaking at the U.S. State Department on February 4, said: “We’ll also take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”

    And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.

    Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.

    Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

    Snip.

    Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”

    As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.

    It’s not that the Biden administration is doing nothing — an upcoming “democracy summit” invited Taiwan but not China, there have been prohibitions on U.S. investment in particular Chinese companies, and a dozen Chinese companies have been blacklisted for helping the Chinese army with quantum computing.

    But these are small-ball gestures while the Chinese government sends 18 fighter jets plus five nuclear-capable H-6 bombers into Taiwanese air-defense zone at one time, Beijing wipes out the last of Hong Kong’s opposition, and the Genocide Games go on with full U.S. corporate sponsorship. We’re attempting minor and symbolic moves while Xi Jinping is attempting big and consequential ones to maximize his leverage over the rest of the world.

  • “Biden’s Approval Rating Below That of Least Popular Governor, GOP Has Nine Out of 10 Most Popular Governors.”
  • More on that subject. “Biden Approval Rating Remains an Abysmal 36 Percent.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Michael Shellenberger talks about how leftwing policies enable homeless camps:

    In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

    Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

    But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

    More:

    The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.

    But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

    The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

    How did progressives, who claim to be evidence-based, ever get so committed to Housing First? “Malcolm Gladwell’s [2006 New Yorker article] “Million Dollar Murray,” really helped popularize this idea,” the person said. “But it was based on an anecdote of one person. It works for who it works for but is not scalable. [Governor] Gavin [Newsom] made a mistake [as San Francisco’s Mayor 2004-2011] which was that we stopped investing in shelter. But that’s because all the best minds were saying, ‘This is what’s going to work.’”

    One of the claims made by defenders of the open drug scenes is that people who live in them are mostly locals who were priced out of their homes and apartments and decided to pitch a tent on the street. In San Fransicko, I cite a significant body of evidence to show that this is false, and that many people come to San Francisco from around the U.S. for the city’s unusually high cash welfare benefits, free housing, and tolerance of open drug scenes.

    The insider agreed. “People come here because they think they can. It’s bullshit that ‘Only 30 percent [of homeless] are from out of town.’ At least 20,000 homeless people come through town every year. Talk to the people on the street. There’s no way 70 percent of the homeless are from here. I would guess it’s fewer than 50 percent. Ask them the name of their high school and they guess, ‘Washington? The one around the corner?’ But you can’t even talk about that without being called a fascist.”

  • Change? “Biden Administration to Restart Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy.” Or else they’ll they’re restarting it and not do it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.”)
  • “Insiders Are Dumping Stocks At The Fastest Pace In History.”
  • More rats swarm off the D.N.C. Kamala.

    A top adviser and chief spokeswoman for Harris, Symone Sanders, is set to resign from her position by the end of the year, a White House official said Wednesday. It’s one of several high-level departures in the vice president’s office since she was sworn in earlier this year.

    Peter Velz, the vice president’s director of press operations, is leaving the office in the coming weeks, along with Vincent Evans, deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, according to reports. Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director, is also stepping down. Advance staffers departed over the summer, soon after a trip to Guatemala where Harris drew criticism for a biting response to a question over when she intended to visit the southern U.S. border.

    A source familiar with Harris’s office woes quipped that the defections must be “completely unrelated to reading stories where they are blamed for everything.”

    “This is the same story that gets played out again and again — it’s always the vague ‘staffing,’” this person said. “I don’t think there are a ton of staff, present and former, that would rush to defend the way the office is run.”

  • What percentage of requested water are California farms getting next year? Try 0%.
  • Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw brings the wood to Ron Klain:

  • Let’s follow up that kudo for Crenshaw with some serious criticism: He was one of 80 Republicans (along with Rep. John Carter, my own representative) to vote in favor of a federal vaccine database. He can swear up and down it’s not going to be used for vaccine passports, but we’ve seen worldwide governments use coercive tools with even less legal justification.
  • When it comes to arguments on the new Supreme Court abortion case, you can smell the panic.
  • Virginia’s Lt. Governor elect Winsome Sears tells the truth about Critical Race Theory in Virginia.
  • The FTC is suing to stop the Nvidia Arm acquisition. Between the China subsidiary going rogue and additional regulatory hurdles in the UK and EU, the deal may be in serious jeopardy.
  • Real life frequently has symbolism more heavy-handed than fiction. “Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary will close at the end of the 2022-2023.” (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • Disney censors episode dealing with China censorship for China.

  • Gutfeld is beating Kimmel and Fallon.
  • “Joe Rogan Had the No. 1 Podcast in 2021 on Spotify.”
  • “The Jussie Smollett Trial Isn’t About A ‘Hoax.’ It’s About The Entire Social Justice Movement Being A Scam.”

    Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called “social justice.” (Or, in the Biden administration’s parlance, “equity.”)

    It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it. According to a very solid case built by an exhaustive Chicago police investigation, Smollett pretended to be the victim of a violent racist and anti-gay assault because he wanted more fame and thus more money.

    What better way to achieve that goal than to feed into the enduring myth that minorities in America are suppressed at every turn, even targeted for violence by whites? White men in particular, and, as of 2016, even better if they’re Trump supporters.

    Police charged that Smollett offered to pay two brothers he was acquainted with about $2,000 each to act out an attack on the actor in the dead of a Chicago winter night. The siblings, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, told investigators that Smollett had given them $100 to buy masks, a red hat, and a rope that would be fashioned into a kind of noose for the staged attack. The Osundairos were instructed to confront Smollett on a sidewalk, slightly rough him up, and then disappear.

    The setup preceeded a previous stunt, wherein Smollett mailed himself a threatening letter that said, “You will d[ie] black fag,” accompanied by an illustration of a hangman. Police said Smollett’s failure to garner any significant national attention from the letter is what led him to fake the assault.

    “…This announcement today recognizes that ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” then-police superintendent Eddie Johnson said in late February, after his department probed the events from the night of the incident. He said Smollett was mostly motivated by seeking a salary increase for his role on “Empire.”

    That was the conclusion of law enforcement after spending more than $100,000 taxpayer dollars on an investigation to piece together surveillance video, eye-witness testimony, and data gathering that led them to believe Smollett had lied about everything.

    But in all fairness, who could blame him? This is what our entire culture is teaching now— that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.

    Lucrative opportunities present themselves quickly for those who sell themselves as oppressed and aggrieved. And for Smollett, it worked! Nobody knew who he was before he claimed to have been physically confronted and called the n-word and the f-word by white male Trump supporters. Thereafter, everyone knew who he was.

    He was written about in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. A-list celebrities, TV hosts and political leaders expressed their solidarity.

  • Boom!

  • “White Smoke Emanates From Wuhan Lab Chimney Signaling A New Variant Has Been Named.”
  • The Cute, it burns!

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Uncategorized, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for November 5, 2021

    Friday, November 5th, 2021

    Remember, remember, this Guy Fawkes Day LinkSwarm!

  • Nancy Pelosi: “See how we got slaughtered? Now march right uphill and take that machine gun nest for the glory of the party!”

    The Associated Press reports that, unchastised by Tuesday night’s rout, Nancy Pelosi plans to ready the House of Representatives for a “debate and vote on a revised draft of President Joe Biden’s now-$1.85 trillion domestic policy package.” The decision, the AP suggests, is intended to “show voters the party can deliver on its priorities.”

    That’s one way of putting it, certainly. Another might be: Nancy Pelosi hopes to appease the progressive wing of her caucus by sending her most vulnerable members unarmed into the Somme.

    Substantively, what Pelosi is proposing is bonkers. For a start, there is no “Build Back Better” bill. It remains what it has always been: a slogan, in search of a topline, in search of an agenda. There is only one thing on which the Democratic Party is agreed, and that is that the United States should spend at least two trillion more dollars over the next decade than it had planned to before Joe Biden won. On what? Well, that depends. Some want tax cuts for the rich. Some want to send checks to Americans who have kids. Some want a bunch of new permanent programs. Some want climate-change-mitigation measures. Some want to a second New Deal. At various points during the last few months, all of these things have been in the bill in one form or another, and, at various points, they’ve been taken out again. There is a reason that we have not had a “national debate” over the “Biden agenda,” and that reason is that, beyond its cost, there is nothing concrete to debate.

    The result has been the creation of a protean piece of vaporware that nobody in Congress seems much to like, and that the American people seem increasingly to loathe. Since Tuesday’s elections, the institutional Democratic Party has rallied stupidly around the idea that, in order to stave off further electoral losses, it must show voters that it can “get things done” — as if the average American citizen favors action for its own sake. But, of course, it must do no such thing. Reflecting upon this fallacy, Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, noted yesterday that “nobody elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” while Representative Kathleen Rice, her colleague from New York, seemed baffled by the whole thing. “I don’t understand some of my more progressive colleagues saying [that Tuesday] night now shows us that what we need to do is get both of these bills done and shove even more progressive stuff in,” Rice said.

    Rice is correct. And yet, inexplicably, “shove even more progressive stuff in” is precisely what Nancy Pelosi has chosen to do in response.

    “Do the will of the Party, comrade, and know that when we step on your corpse, we’re climbing to a glorious future!”

  • Examples of why the Democrats’ revised spending bill is still awful.

    Budget Gimmicks Pour Gasoline on Inflationary Fire

    The main number mentioned about the bill is the claimed cost of $1.75 trillion in spending and tax credits. For starters, this is only an educated guess on the part of Democrats, since official congressional scorekeepers have not had a chance to weigh in yet.

    More importantly, that stated cost (which is not zero) is only possible as a result of deliberate budgetary gimmicks. Many key programs expire after a few years rather than the usual 10 years, and in some cases expire after a single year.

    Amazingly, the bill’s cost would more than double without the gimmicking.

    This would still be a problem even if all of the programs are allowed to expire. That’s because the bill front-loads the spending while spreading tax hikes across the decade, meaning it would increase deficit spending significantly in the first few years, especially the first year.

    In turn, that deficit spending would mean artificially injecting billions of dollars into the economy. This would only serve to worsen the biggest wave of inflation in decades.

    Causing hardworking families to pay more for essentials is no way to “build back better.”

    Using Taxpayer Dollars as a Back Door to Mass Amnesty of Illegal Immigrants

    Providing amnesty to illegal immigrants has been a top priority of the left for decades. While the spending package is supposed to be just that—a spending package, not a new immigration law—Democrats are attempting to sneak amnesty through the back door.

    Because the bill is written to fit within strict budgetary rules, there are limits to what it can contain. The Senate parliamentarian has ruled against the inappropriate amnesty provision twice already, with the second decision relating to the language that’s in the revised bill.

    Democrats have said that the current immigration text is a “placeholder” while they make a third attempt to convince the parliamentarian to give them what they want. The fact that they’re including text that has already been ruled out of order demonstrates how little regard they have for the rules.

    Plus handouts for the wealthy, more social justice indoctrination, and $2.5 billion for “tree equity.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Manchin still isn’t having any:

    A point Manchin made about the use of “budget gimmicks” by fellow Democrats [could] doom the Biden agenda.

    Manchin reiterated his concerns about “exploding inflation,” the debt, the potential for rising interest rates, and the creation of new social spending programs. “How can I in good conscience vote for a bill that proposes massive expansions of social programs when vital programs like Social Security and Medicare face insolvency and benefits could start being reduced as soon as 2026 in Medicare and 2033 in Social Security?” he asked rhetorically. “How does that make sense? I don’t think it does.”

    Initially it seemed as though he was just demanding the need for a CBO score when he talked about the need for more transparency about the bill’s fiscal impact. That alone would be consistent with a strategy of wanting delay legislation that he would ultimately vote for. And there are a myriad of ways for Democrats to game the intricacies of the CBO process to get an acceptable enough score for Manchin to vote for.

    But then Manchin took things a step further.

    He said, “As more of the real details outlined in the basic framework are released, what I see are shell games — budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that amount if the full time is run out. If you extended it permanently. And that we haven’t even spoken about.”

  • Further, Manchin saiud that he won’t vote to overrule the Senate Parliamentarian on reconciliation rules.

    “I’m not going to vote to overrule the parliamentarian,” Manchin added. “I’m not going to do that; they all know that.”

    Because Democrats are trying to bypass Senate Republicans on President Biden’s spending plan, they have to comply with the rules governing reconciliation, an arcane budget process that lets them avoid the filibuster.

    The Senate parliamentarian provides guidance to senators about if policies meet the Byrd rule, named after the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), that restricts what can be included in a reconciliation bill.

    If it doesn’t comply with the rule, it will be stripped out of the bill — or Democrats could try to overrule the parliamentarian. But that would take total unity from the 50-member Senate Democratic caucus, meaning they would need Manchin’s support.

    In addition to Manchin’s opposition, members of Senate Democratic leadership have previously signaled that they don’t believe they have the votes for such a move.

    But the parliamentarian has frustrated activists this year, first by ruling against including a $15 per hour minimum wage in a coronavirus relief bill. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tried to put it back in the bill as an amendment, which required 60 votes because it didn’t meet the budget rules, but lost several Democratic senators in addition to Republicans.

  • The Biden Administration has finally unveiled their vaccine mandate.

    On September 9, President Biden announced a directive to the Labor Department to develop a temporary emergency rule for businesses with 100 or more employees that would require workers to be fully vaccinated or be tested at least once a week. Biden declared that, “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers. We’re going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.”

    This morning, the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration announced that starting on January 4 — sixty days from today’s publication — new vaccination-or-test requirements for businesses with more than 100 workers will go into effect, as well as a vaccine mandate for health care workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid.

    OSHA is issuing the vaccine mandate under an “emergency temporary standard,” which means the regular public comment period was skipped. Emergency temporary standards are applied when “workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards and that an emergency standard is needed to protect them.”

    Just past the Christmas season. Funny that.

  • “Mandate Meltdown: 26 NYC Firestations Shuttered, LA Sheriff Warns Of ‘Mass Exodus‘, Tucson Water District Faces ‘Staff Shortage.'”

    We’re f–ked. We are going to toast like marshmallows,” retired electrician Vinny Agro, 63, told the Post. “It’s another sad day for New York City.”

    Across the Rockies, Los Angeles Country Sheriff Alex Villanueva has warned of an “imminent threat to public safety” caused by a “mass exodus” of thousands of deputies and civilian personnel who refuse to take the jab.

    “I could potentially lose 44% of my workforce in one day,” he wrote in a Thursday open letter to the Board of Supervisors, adding that he can’t enforce “reckless mandates that put public safety at risk.”

    This seems to be the desired outcome. Ordinary people who voted for Democrats might start to ask why.

  • And here come the lawsuits!

    Within hours of the Biden administration unveiling a Jan. 4 deadline for 100 million workers to get vaccinated, a small business advocacy group announced it is filing a lawsuit seeking to block the measure.

    “The Biden administration’s vaccine mandate is clearly illegal and will have a devastating impact on our small business community and our entire economy,” said Alfredo Ortiz, the CEO of the Job Creators Network.

    CN is suing the administration on the grounds that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t have authority to impose the mandate and that, in any case, there is neither the grave danger nor necessity to issue it.

    It’s just one of many court battles set to ensue over the rules, many coming from Republican leaders accusing the federal government of overreach into personal medical decisions.

    At least 19 states have filed three separate lawsuits aimed at stopping the previously announced mandate for federal contractors, and the rules are being challenged by most of the Republican caucus in the Senate.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Teachers Union: ‘It’s OK’ That Kids Don’t Know Math, ‘They Know The Words Insurrection and Coup.'”

    The head of the Los Angeles teachers union said “there is no such thing as learning loss,” despite evidence of massive educational declines due to a year of remote learning.

    Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, told LA Magazine that “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”

    Anyone know what it takes to decertify a union?

  • Yes, they are teaching Critical Race Theory:

  • Legal Insurrection has been all over covering the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Here’s day 2. So far everything argues for legal self-defense, even the prosecution witnesses. “I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that seems capable of meeting their burden to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt. And I’m beginning to wonder if we ever will.”
  • How Republican truck driver Edward Durr defeated Democratic New Jersey State Senate President Steve Sweeney.

    “The main issue was rights,” Durr said, via phone. “People talk about how New Jersey has the highest taxes, and we’re the worst state for business, with high debt, and so on, but bottom line is rights. It’s family.

    “When somebody’s messing with your family, you’ll do anything,” he said. “The governor was messing with people’s families. When you mess with somebody’s job, their livelihood, their home, their children — people just won’t take that.”

    Durr said that New Jersey’s harsh coronavirus policies had helped create a “perfect storm” that made his victory possible.

    “It was the combination of a governor who acts like a king, and a senate president who acts like a court jester, and does nothing. That made it very easy to convince people they were not being paid attention to. And when they got ignored, they got angry.”

    But Durr, 58, did more than just get lucky. And he spent more than the $153 that has been highlighted in media reports.

    “That’s the amount I spent prior to the primary,” he explained, somewhat exasperated by the inaccurate reporting.

    He estimates that he spent about $8,000 to $9,000 in total, mostly on campaign literature, yard signs, and a now-viral video.

    He also worked hard, walking door-to-door to speak to voters. Having left long-haul trucking for a job working a local route close to home, he was able to use afternoons and evenings to campaign in the district, together with several volunteers.

    “I walked three to four hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Saturdays and Sundays, I walked six to eight hours. We usually had half a dozen volunteers. One time we went out and we had twelve to thirteen go out with us,” he recalled proudly.

    “Trust me, plenty days I did not feel like walking. It was too hot, my ankles and my feet hurt — I’m not a young man anymore, and I have gout, and plantar fasciitis — it was a hard thing.

    “But it was well worth it, because it allowed me the opportunity to talk to every person I could possibly talk to, and understand what they were feeling, and get the pulse.”

    (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • Joe Rogan 1, “Journalists” 0. “So far, there isn’t a lot of evidence that ivermectin is a good anti-covid therapy, and federal agencies have warned people who hear about the drug not to consume a paste intended for livestock. But that doesn’t mean Rogan ate horse dewormer. You don’t fight disinformation with disinformation. Not if you’re a good reporter.”
  • “Police arrest suspect who shot HEB employee in North Austin.” Since Prop A failed, expect more shootings.
  • “Main Steele Dossier Researcher Arrested in Durham Probe.”

    The primary researcher behind the Steele Dossier, a collection of unsubstantiated opposition research linking the 2016 Trump campaign to the Kremlin, was arrested by federal authorities Thursday.

    Russia analyst Igor Danchenko’s indictment stems from the federal probe led by John Durham, the special counsel tapped by the Trump administration to audit the Russia investigation for malfeasance, anonymous individuals with direct knowledge of the matter told the New York Times.

  • Is China planning to build 150 nuclear reactors?
  • “Nobel Prize Awarded for the Worst Climate Model.”

    Syukuro Manabe has been a pioneer in the development of so-called general circulation climate models (GCMs) and more comprehensive Earth System Models (ESMs). According to the Committee, Manabe was awarded the prize “For the physical modelling of the earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming.”

    Snip.

    Every six years or so, the U.S. Department of Energy collects all of these models, aggregating them into what they call Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIPs). These serve as the bases for the various “scientific assessments” of climate change produced by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the U.S. “National Assessments” of climate.

    In 2017, University of Alabama’s John Christy, along with Richard McNider, published a paper that, among other things, examined the 25 applicable families of CMIP-5 models, comparing their performance to what’s been observed in the three-dimensional global tropics. Take a close look at Figure 3 from the paper, in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, and you’ll see that the model GFDL-CM3 is so bad that it is literally off the scale of the graph.

    At its worst, the GFDL model is predicting approximately five times as much warming as has been observed since the upper-atmospheric data became comprehensive in 1979. This is the most evolved version of the model that won Manabe the Nobel.

    In the CMIP-5 model suite, there is one, and only one, that works. It is the model INM-CM4 from the Russian Institute for Numerical Modelling, and the lead author is Evgeny Volodin. It seems that Volodin would be much more deserving of the Nobel for, in the words of the committee “reliably predicting global warming.”

    Might this have something to do with the fact that INM-CM4 and its successor models have less predicted warming than all of the other models?

  • Lucifer Devil stabbed to death on Halloween. Looks like some Satanist dumbasses had the instructions upside down…
  • Play Taken games, win Taken prizes.

  • Zillow shuts down its home-flipping business. Louis Rossman says good riddance. Maybe you shouldn’t have kept tweaking your algorithm until you were paying way above market rates for housing…
  • “1959 Miller-Meteor Hearse powered by a 707 horsepower Hellcat engine.”
  • Happy feet!

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    “NYC’s Homeless Problem Is A Giant Scam!”

    Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

    Tying into my post on homelessness being a profit center for the Democratic Party, here’s a Louis Rossmann video that discusses a homeless shelter in New York City that:

    1. Bills the government $3,500 to $4,000 a month to
    2. House the homeless in a literal shithole (with visible feces in one picture of the place), and
    3. By an amazing coincidence, is run by a non-profit founded by Andrew Cuomo and now run by his sister Maria Cuomo Cole.

    (I think that this is the news story he reads from at some point.)

    “The top executives of Help USA earn $200,000 to $375,000 a year, and many of them have contributed heavily to NY Gov. Cuomo’s campaigns.”

    “Board members associated with various homeless shelters have gifted the governor $322,972.50, while donors associated with Help USA, a shelter service provider founded by the governor and chaired by his sister, Maria Cuomo Cole, have ponied up $451,285 in donations.”

    Thirty five hundred to four thousand dollars per month per individual for people to stay in shitholes like this. This is being done so that the people who run these charities can pay themselves insane amounts of money and get away with it. And the reason that it continues to happen is because of the incestuous relationship that exists between many of the people who run this not-for-profit, and the people that run the state and city government.

    “This is an incestuous and disgusting relationship.”

    He proposes a voucher system instead that, while it would be an improvement, A.) Is inferior to actually letting the free market build free housing, something New York (city and state) actively implements legislation to prevent, and B.) Would never be passed, because government homeless programs exist to transfer money from taxpayers to Democrats. That, not helping the homeless, is their primary purpose.

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    Posted in Democrats, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

    Homelessness is A Profit Center For The Democratic Party

    Monday, October 25th, 2021

    In the course of discussing the crises of tent cities with drug addicts infesting just about every blue city in America, Peachy Keenan (I suspect a pseudonym) talks about how homelessness is a major profit center for Democrats:

    The homeless crisis is fake. By fake I mean, it’s an engineered social dysfunction created on purpose to ensure a steady flow of suitcases stuffed with unmarked nonconsecutive bills to City Halls around the country. It is a racket. A money laundering operation, just like the Department of Defense budget, and almost at the same astronomical scale.

    Just like the open border, Covid, and inflation, fake crises are never allowed to go to waste.

    Los Angeles voted itself $1.2 billion to “address homelessness” in 2019. The number of homeless people, naturally, shot up from 40,000 to close to 70,000 now. Meanwhile, Governor Newsom pledged $4.8 billion to “address” and “confront” homelessness in the state, where over 150,000 homeless live.

    But wait, there’s more! As the recall pressed in on him, he announced an additional $12 billion to “confront” homelessness.

    He’s addressing it, you guys! He’s confronting it!

    Liberal politicians understand that homelessness works. Homelessness is good. The more tents the better. The more lunatics who threaten and harass you with their pants around their ankles, the more likely you are to vote for new taxes and more spending.

    You see a filth-encrusted hobo nodding out on a curb, urine running down the sidewalk—our leadership class sees cash.

    You see a machete-wielding degenerate with stained pants terrorizing tourists on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—a greasy LA city official sees a new tax, a new program, a big pay raise for himself.

    There is a reason that LA’s infamous Skid Row has been allowed to fester and grow for almost 40 years. It now spans dozens of blocks in the downtown shopping district of America’s second largest city. It is mile after mile, block after block, of wasted zomboids shuffling past heaps of putrid trash, drug dealers, and pop-up brothels in Porta-Potties.

    It’s a perfect grift, and they don’t care if you know it.

    Thanks to the tsunami of money, in 2020 there was a 12.7 percent rise in homelessness, “despite an increase in the number of people rehoused.”

    I have no clue what “rehoused” means, but I’m guessing it’s a portmanteau of “deloused” and “re-hosed.”

    Meanwhile, Los Angeles mayoral candidates like Kevin De Leon continue to double down on the clown world policy of Housing First.

    Placing meth and heroin addicts in shiny new apartments with kitchens to clean, dishwashers to load and unload, beds to make, and trash to take out—what could go wrong?

    San Francisco just announced it’s building micro-homes for some lucky addicts.

    They had to remove the Port-a-Potties from LA’s skid row a few years ago because they were being used as brothels. Prayers to the poor city employee who has to clean out each micro house when the resident ODs.

    Solving homelessness “requires us to center solutions in racial equity so that we can dismantle the legacy of racism that still shapes our region’s vast inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity,” says Jacqueline Waggoner, who chairs the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s “Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness.”

    If homelessness is caused by racism, what’s with all the sunburned white beggars at every freeway exit in California?

    I wasn’t able to find Waggoner’s salary, but Heidi Marston, Executive Director of LAHSA, earned $260,000 in 2019. The mob has to pay its accountants well to keep the schemes going, after all. Marston was also on the Biden-Harris transition team. She must be a good person because she has a sign hanging in her office that says, “You Are On Tongva Land.” (The Tongva are the closest Los Angeles has to indigenous people).

    I’m sure Marston reminded the veterans overdosing on fentanyl on Hollywood Boulevard that their tents are on stolen Tongva land.

    The cities and states in Blue America have been using homelessness as an excuse to drain America of its wealth for too long.

    There’s much more there, including background on the meth crisis and suggestion a solution that Democrats will never implement. But the above ties into my previous discussion of the homeless industrial complex and how the entire “reimagine policing” movement is a grift to take money from police and channel it directly into the pockets of radical leftwing activists.

    I believe that early on (say, around the New Deal), liberal Democrats pushed for welfare state programs in the sincere belief that they would improve the the lives of the poor and downtrodden. Today, however, as per the universal law, every new welfare state program is born as a racket, designed to siphon money off the taxpayer and into leftwing pockets.

    (Hat tip: Bayou Renaissance Man via Borepatch.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 9 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 15, 2021

    Friday, October 15th, 2021

    Biden is bumbling, borders are crumbling, bankers are plotting, and Art is out. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green finds out the real reason behind the supply chain SNAFUs: California Democrats changing the rules because they weren’t getting enough kickbacks and graft from an efficiently functioning transportation system.

    The immediate problem, the one in Los Angeles, has been caused by the state’s vindictively regulatory state government.

    We’ll get to the trucker shortage in just a moment, but California also faces a shortage of trucks for them to drive.

    Twitter user Jerry Oakley reminds us that “Carriers domiciled in California with trucks older than 2011 model, or using engines manufactured before 2010, will need to meet the Board’s new Truck and Bus Regulation beginning in 2020.” Otherwise, “Their vehicles will be blocked from registration with the state’s DMV,” according to California law.

    Snip.

    As a result, trucks aren’t being purchased to replace the ones being regulated out of business.

    But even if there were plenty of trucks in California, there wouldn’t be enough truckers to drive them — and it isn’t because the truckers are too old.

    “Traditionally the ports have been served by Owner Operators,” Oakley says, who are non-union. But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”

    Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

    In fact, those work rules helped create the crisis conditions.

    The exact language of AB-5 was copied and pasted into Presidentish Joe Biden’s $5 trillion (Or: Five Million Million Dollar) “Build Back Better” bill currently stalled in the Senate.

    It’s one thing for Californians to screw themselves over, but AB-5 is hurting the entire country’s economy — and Washington Democrats want to take AB-5 nationwide.

  • Social Justice doesn’t want to win, it wants to destroy you:

    If you’re unaware, [David] Shor was canceled for accurately summarizing the contents of an academic paper. Shor made a point that he felt was important for the messaging of the Democrats. At the time the country was exploding in riots aligned with BlackLivesMatter and driven by anger over the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. Shor linked to a paper that argued that riots have bad political consequences for Democrats. This would not seem to be particularly inflammatory; people indiscriminately burning and smashing shit has little obvious utility for the marginalized or anyone else. But Shor lost his job for tweeting that paper and agreeing with its thesis. Similarly, the Intercept’s Lee Fang was absolutely mobbed for the crime of recording an interview with a young Black man who was critical of the riots and the protest movement from which they sprang. He almost lost his job, as well.

    (Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other.)

    Not that they had rebutted a particularly coherent pro-riot argument. There was little in the way of defense of riots in 2020 at all, really. Many attempted to invoke Martin Luther King in that regard, which is hilarious and bizarre concerning a man who among many other critiques of riots said that they “are not revolutionary but reactionary because they invite defeat; they offer an emotional catharsis, but they must be followed by a sense of futility,” and that close to the end of his life. (In their defense, almost no one who invokes MLK has actually read him.) But what Shor and Fang were guilty of was not of breaking with some intellectual mandate within liberalism but with speaking out of turn, with criticizing the wrong people. The difference between Shor and Fang’s criticism of the pro-riot side and the behavior of those who rose against them is that Shor and Fang never tried to destroy anyone, didn’t tweet at anyone’s boss in an attempt to get them fired, didn’t have the inclination or the power to punish those who dared to disagree with them. But those who targeted them were operating in a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please.

    Snip.

    The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them. Are most of these institutions false friends? Of course. But that, too, is not much of a defense.

    This tendency to be promiscuous in enthralling elites and powerful institutions should be a clue to the fact that, despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.

    Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces. (The former two groups have some overlap, but it’s not a perfect circle.) There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared.

  • Do global elites have incentives for pushing “Green Energy”/”Climate Change” nonsense? $150 trillion of them.

    Now, in case someone is still confused, none of these institutions, and not a single of the erudite officials running them, give a rat’s ass about the climate, about climate change risks, or about the fate of future generations of Americans (and certainly not about the rising water level sweeping away their massive waterfront mansions): if they did, total US debt and underfunded liabilities wouldn’t be just shy of $160 trillion.

    So what is going on, and why is it that virtually every topic these days has to do with climate change, “net zero”, green energy and ESG?

    The reason – as one would correctly suspect – is money. Some $150 trillion of it.

    Snip.

    How much would this green utopia cost, because if the “net zero”, “ESG”, “green” narrative is pushed so hard 24/7, you know it will cost a lot.

    Turns out it does. A lot, lot.

    Responding rhetorically to the key question, “how much will it cost?”, BofA cuts to the case and writes $150 trillion over 30 years – some $5 trillion in annual investments – amounting to twice current global GDP!

    At this point the report gets good because since it has to be taken seriously, it has to also be at least superficially objective. And here, the details behind the numbers, do we finally learn why the net zero lobby is so intent on pushing this green utopia – simple answer: because it provides an endless stream of taxpayer and debt-funded “investments” which in turn need a just as constant degree of debt monetization by central banks.

    Consider this: the covid pandemic has so far led to roughly $30 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus across the developed world. And yet, not even two years later, the effect of this $30 trillion is wearing off, yet despite the Biden’s admin to keep the Covid Crisis at bay, threatening to lock down society at a moment’s notice with the help of the complicit press, the population has made it clear that it will no longer comply with what is clear tyranny of the minority.

    And so, the establishment needs a new perpetual source (and use) of funding, a crisis of sorts, but one wrapped in a virtuous, noble facade. This is where the crusade against climate change comes in.

    Imagine a central banker, destroying your bank account through hyperinflation…forever.
    

  • The Biden Administration has discarded $100 million worth of border wall segments and is paying workers $5 million a day not to build the wall.
  • They’ve also halted worksite immigration enforcement.
  • Controlling (barely) all three branches of government, you wouldn’t expect Democrats to show this much panic.

    he results in 2020 came as a shock to Democrats for several reasons. First, Joe Biden’s official margin of victory, while slightly larger than Obama’s in 2012 at 51.26% to 46.8%, was half the size that polls, such as Nate Silver’s 538, had showed, at 51.8% to 43.4%. But even more concerning for Democrats, the locations of the polling error tended to be not in places where Democrats were strong, but rather either in swing areas where they hoped for gains, or areas where Obama had done well in 2008 and 2012, but Trump had won in 2016. In effect, Democrats won areas they felt were moving in their direction such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin by far less than they expected, and lost states they thought were close such as Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins.

    The implications of this in the Presidential race were obscured by the fact that the numbers showed Biden won. But they were keenly felt in the Senate races, where Democrats lost races in Iowa and North Carolina where they believed they were favored, and their candidates did worse than Biden even where he won, such as in Michigan and Maine. The result at the time was to leave the Senate at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats, a situation transformed by the victory of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock against a dysfunctional Georgia GOP in January 2021. Nonetheless, it was ominous and it set the tone for Democratic behavior in 2021.

    In light of these results, we can understand that the reason Democrats are now obsessing the filibuster is not because they have a mere 50 seats in the Senate. When Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut calls out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for blocking legislation that 48 Democrats support, he is doing so not because he believes they are likely to be 50 or 52 Senators for it in the future but because he is pretty sure 50 is as good as it is going to get. In 2008, Democrats won 60 Senate seats, and while with hindsight we can see this was a high-water mark, at the time Democrats dreamed bigger. After all, Mitch McConnell had only won 53%-47% in 2008. There were also open seats in states Obama had won in 2008 such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida coming up in 2010, and there was a path to a Democratic supermajority.

    That is not the case after 2020. In 2020, only Susan Collins won reelection in a state won by the Presidential candidate of the opposing party. Democratic challengers, including strong ones such as Montana’s two-term governor, Steve Bullock lost, and lost badly (by 10% in Bullock’s case). This was also not just a 2020 phenomenon. Despite a good year for Democrats overall in 2018, Democratic incumbent Senators lost in Florida, Indiana, and Missouri that year.

    Biden’s underperformance scared Democrats because it indicated a ceiling, rather than a floor for their strength.

    In 2022, Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all states that went to Biden, but within margins whereby strong GOP challengers, which exist in all those states, could win. More problematically, the list of Democratic targets includes only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among states Biden won, and North Carolina and Florida among states Trump won by less than landslide margins. Matching Biden exactly would get the Democrats a gain of two seats; but even in 2020 most Democratic candidates ran behind Biden, and Biden is himself deeply unpopular today.

    The situation in the House is, if anything, worse for the Democrats. Democrats lost 12 House seats in 2020. The impact of redistricting is overblown – Republicans will gain a marginal advantage from the lines, but census results show the areas growing most quickly lean Democrat – yet nonetheless, the Democrat position is so weak that any deterioration in Biden’s position will be fatal to their 2022 hopes.

    In effect, the 2021 Democratic majorities are on a “death watch,” and Democrats’ confused attempts to deal with that realization is determining their current erratic behavior.

    The split in the party is not so much between the moderates and the progressives. It is between progressives and moderates who desire political futures and those who know they have none. Pelosi is able to generally pass left-wing legislation in the House despite her narrow majority because many of her moderates know they are doomed no matter what, and are willing to cast their votes for the progressive agenda. In turn, AOC and the Squad feel free to sabotage any compromises because their own seats are safe and they believe they have time to fight another day, even if it is ten years from now. By contrast, both Sinema and Manchin seem to resent the efforts of other Democrat officials to pressure them to commit political suicide or behave as if they personally are doomed, just because it is true of some of their colleagues. In particular, rhetoric out of the Democrat caucus that Manchin is “probably in his last term anyway” or that Sinema “won’t win reelection” seems predicated on the idea that both should act as if they are finished and behave accordingly.

    But think about the deeper implications of that statement: All moderate Democrats (with the possible exceptions of Manchin and Sinema) are aching to do The Will of the Party and push the most radical, leftmost agenda possible if only it weren’t for the pesky problems of winning elections. Even moderate Democrats are leftwing radicals.

  • Democrats really want to get their hands on all your banking information. Remember how Obama weaponized the IRS? That was just a foretaste. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden: The war against terror is over! Supreme Court: Then why are you still doing all these things that are only legal if a war’s still on? Biden Administration: Yeah, when we said the war against terror was over, we didn’t mean it was over over…
  • You know Merrick Garland’s social justice warrior problem? It gets worse:

    We learned, too, that Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, through his company, Panorama Education, sells CRT materials to public schools. And yesterday, it turned out that Panorama is also spreading material calling Trump and his supporters “white supremacists”

    Alexander “Xan” Tanner, a very White man, is married to Merrick Garland’s daughter. Tanner co-founded Panorama Education, which purports to provide a data platform that delves into students’ psychosocial issues in order to help schools intervene in problems and improve the school climate. In a word, it’s creepy…

    The educational workshop released by Panorama Education, co-founded by Alexander “Xan” Tanner, the group’s president, revolves around “systemic racism” and includes an article as a resource that states the Ku Klux Klan and attendees of Trump’s rallies are both “examples of white supremacy.”

    Garland should be forced to resign.

  • “More Hunter Biden Questions: Art Gallery Repping Him Gets Big Federal COVID Loan.” Try to contain your shock.
  • A husband and wife were arrested for trying to sell U.S. submarine secrets. “Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebe, 42, and wife, Diana, 49, were charged Saturday with selling secret information to an unidentified foreign country.” Bonus! “The woman arrested with her Navy nuclear engineer husband for allegedly selling secret information about nuclear submarines to an undercover FBI agent appears to be vocally in support of Black Lives Matter and ‘resistance’ movements on her social media.” There’s a lot of shocked face in this LinkSwarm…
  • Michigan charges three women with more of that 2020 election fraud that doesn’t exist.

    Investigators determined Trenae Myesha Rainey, 28, a facility employee, did not contact residents as set by procedure and instead filled out the applications and forged the resident’s signature to each application….

    Investigators determined Nancy Juanita Williams, 55, planned to control absentee ballots for legally incapacitated persons under her care by fraudulently submitting 26 absentee ballot applications to nine identified city and township clerks.

  • “Sydney Lockdown Finally Ends After 106 Days.” Now Sydney residents just need to track down the people who ordered it and throttle them…
  • “School district equity chief canned after racist, anti-white videos surface.” That’s a good start, but every “chief equity officer” should be canned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • It’s FBI informants all the way down.
  • Empty Shelves Joe.
  • Morgan Freeman still isn’t having any of your defund the police lunacy. “I am not in the least bit for defunding the police.”
  • Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate and Clinton toady Terry McAuliffe lies again.

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe incorrectly stated on Thursday night that there were 1,142 children in Virginia’s intensive care unit beds, a gross overestimation of the virus’s current impact in the state.

    “We in Virginia today, 1,142 children are in ICU beds,” McAuliffe stated during a roundtable discussion with local reporters. The statistic is a massive overestimation. Virginia Department of Health statistics show that there are a total of 443 people of all ages currently in ICU beds, a fraction of the figure McAuliffe put forth for children.

    The state database shows the number of Virginians in ICU beds infected with COVID-19 has never come close to 1,142 since the first hospitalizations in March 2020—the peak of individuals hospitalized in the ICU with COVID-19 was on Jan. 13, when there were 587 cases. State records show that just 1,094 individuals younger than 19 years old have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Children, who rarely get seriously ill from the virus, have never made up a significant chunk of hospitalized individuals.

    McAuliffe also said during the roundtable Virginia had “8,000 cases on Monday,” another exaggerated statistic. On Monday, Oct. 4, Virginia saw 1,220 “confirmed” cases and 864 “probable” cases, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

    The state has never seen 8,000 confirmed cases in a day. According to the department, Virginia’s 7-day moving case average peaked at 5,904 on Jan. 8, 2021—a number thousands short of McAuliffe’s case assessment.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Oregon county declares “illegal pot emergency.” On the other hand, the “emergency” is that they can’t seem to regulate illegal pot farms.
  • Eight Texas Constitutional questions are on the November 2nd ballot.
  • “Longtime politician Mark Ridley-Thomas and the former dean of the School of Social Work at a university in Southern California were indicted today on federal corruption charges that allege a bribery scheme in which a Ridley-Thomas relative received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.” This is the fed indictment notice, so it doesn’t mention that he’s a lifetime Democrat, in addition to being an LA City Councileman and former state rep.
  • Dwight has more details.
  • Art Acevedo out in Miami. Sounds like a mixture of BS and real Acevedo stupidity. And it’s generally not a good idea to compare Miami Cubans to commies…
  • This is why the left feels compelled to crush police unions: “Chicago Police Union to Defy Vaccine Mandate and Dare the City to Enforce It.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Buy an electric vehicle,” they said. “They’re just as good and you’ll be saving the earth,” they said. Well surprise! “UK Readying New Law Mandating Home EV Chargers Be Shut Down During Peak Hours.” Also: “Beginning May 30, 2022, all chargers that are installed must be ‘smart’ chargers connected to the internet, allowing their functions to be limited between 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm.” Big brother in his squad car’s coming near…
  • Communist China demands that Christian pastor denounce himself for daring to preach the gospel in violation of state doctrine. Oh wait, did I say Communist China? I meant “Canada.”
  • Texas House passes Save Girls Sports act to keep them from having to compete against men.
  • UK: “Sir David Amess: Conservative MP stabbed to death. Police said a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after the attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea.” Police seem awful tight-lipped on details about the murderer…
  • “Wyoming teenager hauled out of high school in handcuffs for refusing to wear a mask.” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
  • British baker busted for selling cookies with illegal sprinkles.
  • Amy Alkon posts negative review for company trying to game Amazon reviews. result: Amazon deletes the review.
  • Heh:

  • John Deere workers go on strike.
  • Freedom Flu protest outside Southwest Airlines Monday, October 18:

  • “Southwest Airlines Offering Free Flights To All Passengers Who Are Vaccinated And Can Fly A Plane.
  • When the federal government banned sliced bread, supposedly due to helping the war effort in World War II. But nobody would admit who ordered it, or what scarce wartime commodities it was supposed to save, and the ban was lifted after two months. Sound familiar? Well, except for that whole “admitting the mistake and quickly reversing course” part…
  • You may be metal, but are you reach your hand into a shark’s mouth to remove a hook metal?
  • Armadillocon is this weekend.
  • Get hyped!

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Global Warming, Jihad, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Is Austin Homeless Funding A Conduit For Democratic Party Graft?

    Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021

    My working theory for why Mayor Steve Adler and the other leftwing radicals on the Austin City Council inflicted the homeless crisis on Austin is that the Homeless Industrial Complex is a particularly good vehicles for passing graft onto leftwing cronies.

    So yesterday, when current councilwomen Mackenzie Kelly (an outsider whose tenure postdates the disastrous camping law repeal) was kind enough to post a report on Austin’s homeless spending, I dove right in.

    Literally the first name I plucked out of Appendix B was Barbara Poppe and Associates of Columbia, Ohio.

    And the first thing I checked about Poppe was what political candidates and organizations she donated money to. Well, what do you know?

    Category Contributor Occupation Date Amount Recipient Recipient Jurisdiction
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 11-26-2020 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 10-30-2020 $500.00 Ryan, Tim (D) Federal
    Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe and Associates 10-22-2020 $250.00 Ohioans for Justice & Integrity Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 10-01-2020 $250.00 Espy, Mike (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 10-01-2020 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-30-2020 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-30-2020 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 09-28-2020 $500.00 Biden, Joe (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-04-2020 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 08-30-2020 $250.00 Biden, Joe (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-28-2020 $500.00 Biden, Joe (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 05-31-2020 $250.00 Swearengin, Paula Jean (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 05-29-2020 $250.00 Swearengin, Paula Jean (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 04-24-2020 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 12-27-2019 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 12-22-2019 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 12-19-2019 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 06-29-2019 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 05-03-2019 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 04-21-2019 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 01-13-2019 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 10-30-2018 $500.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-29-2018 $1,500.00 ZACK SPACE FOR OHIO Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-29-2018 $1,000.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-20-2018 $500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-21-2018 $650.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-21-2018 $500.00 Pureval, Aftab (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-21-2018 $750.00 GILLUM, ANDREW D. (DEM)(GOV) Florida
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-21-2018 $250.00 BEJAMIN TODD (BEN) JEALOUS CAMPAIGN CMTE Maryland
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-21-2018 $400.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-21-2018 $1,500.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-14-2018 $500.00 DETTELBACH FOR OHIO Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-13-2018 $500.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-13-2018 $250.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-05-2018 $1,000.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-05-2018 $1,000.00 ZACK SPACE FOR OHIO Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-29-2018 $250.00 GILLUM, ANDREW D. (DEM)(GOV) Florida
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 08-26-2018 $250.00 Garrett, Janet (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 08-24-2018 $2,500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 08-10-2018 $250.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 07-16-2018 $250.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-16-2018 $100.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 07-08-2018 $500.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 05-23-2018 $250.00 ZACK SPACE FOR OHIO Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 05-15-2018 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 05-15-2018 $250.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 PRINCIPAL 04-21-2018 $100.00 HELEN PROBST MILLS CAMPAIGN CMTE North Carolina
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 04-07-2018 $1,500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 03-14-2018 $250.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 01-28-2018 $2,500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 11-23-2017 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 11-15-2017 $250.00 Jones, Doug (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 11-15-2017 $250.00 Jones, Doug (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 08-18-2017 $2,500.00 Brown, Sherrod (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-14-2017 $250.00 JUSTIN FAIRFAX CAMPAIGN CMTE Virginia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-14-2017 $125.00 DONTE TANNER CAMPAIGN CMTE Virginia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-09-2017 $250.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 06-29-2017 $100.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES LLC 06-20-2017 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES LLC 04-15-2017 $500.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 10-29-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 10-14-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-25-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 Harris, Kamala D (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 Rochester, Lisa Blunt (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 Demings, Val (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-02-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-23-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-28-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 12-03-2015 $250.00 DORRIAN, JULIA L Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 COMMUNITY SHELTER BOARD 02-24-2012 $500.00 Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-21-2008 $100.00 STEWART, DANIEL K Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 COMMUNITY SHELTER BOARD 05-12-2008 $500.00 Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Holland, MI 49423 04-08-2008 $25.00 CMTE TO ELECT MICHELLE MAKSIMOWICZ Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 COMMUNITY SHELTER BOARD 06-29-2007 $250.00 Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-04-2006 $100.00 CELESTE, TED Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-23-2006 $100.00 CELESTE, TED Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, HERBERT & BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 RETIRED 05-01-2006 $25.00 FITZ-GERALD, JOAN Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 11-03-2005 $50.00 GRANHOLM, JENNIFER M & CHERRY JR, JOHN D Michigan
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 03-30-2004 $100.00 STEWART, DANIEL K Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-15-2002 $100.00 MILLER, RAY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 10-02-2002 $30.00 PLANT, TOM Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-01-2002 $50.00 MILLER, RAY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-27-2002 $150.00 HAGAN,, TIMOTHY & TAVARES, CHARLETA Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 07-23-2002 $30.00 FITZ-GERALD, JOAN Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 07-17-2002 $30.00 STEELE, TERESA L Colorado
    Money to Parties POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 09-06-2000 $100.00 DEMOCRATIC SENATE CAMPAIGN FUND OF COLORADO Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 06-16-2000 $25.00 FITZ-GERALD, JOAN Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-14-1998 $250.00 FISHER, LEE Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 07-31-1998 $50.00 TAVARES, CHARLETA B Ohio

    A total of 91 donations, all to Democrats and left leaning organizations, including:

  • Hillary Clinton
  • Joe Biden
  • Kamala Harris
  • Stacey Abrams
  • Andrew Gillum
  • “Ohioans for Justice & Integrity”
  • “Colorofchange.org” (BLM-esque group)
  • Etc.

    • Hardly invalidates my thesis, does it?

    There are lots of other names on that list, and lots of other ways for money to to flow into the hands of Democrats and far-left organizations.

    More research is needed.

    Tags:, , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for September 17, 2021

    Friday, September 17th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Chaos at the border and buying American military tech to oppose China are two of the themes this week:

  • 8,000 illegal aliens await processing underneath the Del Rio bridge on the U.S./Mexican border.
  • Here’s a drone shot:

    Those illegal aliens are there because Democrats and the Biden Administration want them there, so they can turn those illegal aliens into Democratic Party voters via amnesty.

  • So damaging is that drone footage that the FAA has closed airspace over the bridge to prevent it:

    I guess Bret Weinstein spoke too early…

  • Australia signed an agreement with the U.S. and the UK to build nuclear submarines.

    This effort is just one part of a new partnership between the three countries, dubbed AUKUS, which is short for Australia-United Kingdom-United States, that also includes cooperation in other areas, including long-range strike capabilities, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. President Biden said AUKUS would help all three countries work more closely together to help ensure peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region in the long-term.

    On the whole, this is probably a good move to counter China, and I hear that Canberra was the driving force behind the agreement. All that said, the United States was already in formal alliances with the UK and Australia through other treaties, so it’s not anything like a tectonic shift.

  • Another sign of the new alliance: The UK is going to station new vessels in the Indo-Pacific. [Senior Royal Navy admiral Tony Radakin] “said that the Taiwan Strait is clearly ‘part of the free and open Indo-Pacific.'”
  • Naturally France pitched a snit fit over the deal because Australia cancelled a contract with French shipbuilder Naval Group. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do,” Le Drian told franceinfo radio. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.” Cry some more, Jean-Claude. But it isn’t like France was ever going to come to Australia’s aid in a dust-up with China, so the deal makes sense as drawing Australia closer to the regions remaining nuclear naval powers. (Russia can barely keep its own navy running these days.)
  • Speaking of possible China opponents buying American technology, Japan is buying more F-35s.
  • Gavin Newsom survives recall election. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • John Durham finally files an indictment over the Russian collusion hoax investigation. “Special counsel John Durham reportedly seeks a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at a Democratic-allied law firm closely linked to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.” That firm, of course, would be Perkins Coie, who you may remember from regular appearances in the Clinton corruption updates.
  • Also:

  • More military resignations:

  • “Despite his bellicose rhetoric and bluster, Trump had probably been more reluctant to use military force than any president in memory.”
  • Texas Monthly is shocked, shocked to find Hispanic Texans voting Republican:

    The Democrats of Texas have long, as in 30 years or more, believed that the Hispanic vote would eventually hand them total control of Texas forever. They believe they need not adjust their policies on faith, family, life, the Second Amendment, taxes — anything — because the party brand itself was enough. If it wasn’t, then they would resort to bullying. They could go all the way left to Wendy Davis and Karl Marx if they wanted to — and they have — and the Hispanic vote would save them.

    But a funny thing happened along the way. People like state Rep. Aaron Peña switched parties on principle and others followed them. And more are following them. His daughter, Adrienne Peña-Garza, is quoted in this Texas Monthly story regarding how the Democrats operate when it comes to independent-minded folks like her father and herself.

    Peña-Garza, the Hidalgo County Republican chair, said Hispanic South Texans, who have long been conservative, “have become liberated” to vote on their long-held beliefs. “People have been bullied into voting Democrat. If you got involved [in conservative politics], people said, ‘I’m not going to give you this contract; I’m not going to give you this job.’ But I think the bullying has backfired. People are more empowered and courageous.”

    When I was reporting on border issues in Hidalgo County during my first stint with PJ Media, I’d hear about the bullying she mentions but it wasn’t provable. Rampant and endemic, but hidden with no paper trails. Tejanos and Tejanas started standing up to it a decade ago, some by running for office, others by working courageously together underground and actually going after some of the political criminality. People noticed. Groups like Hispanic Republicans of Texas and the Conservative Hispanic Society rose up to answer the call outside any party structure. One of the most popular and successful talk radio hosts in the Lone Star State is my friend Chris Salcedo, the “liberty-loving Latino.” The conservative juggernaut is heard expounding on the joys of freedom and how Democrats would take it away on the air every day in Houston and Dallas and nationally on NewsmaxTV.

    People are noticing how embarrassingly paternalistic and out-of-touch the Democrats are when it comes to South Texas. They really don’t know Texas at all and haven’t bothered to understand.

    Snip.

    That’s because they’re not immigrants. Treating them as immigrants cancels their ancestors and their heritage. Tejanos have been in Texas for generations, from the time when it was part of the Spanish Empire. Badly misunderstood and under-reported is the fact that Tejanos are and have been part of the culture of Texas long before we Anglos showed up. By the time my ancestors arrived in Texas in the 1850s and 1860s, Tejanos had been building Texas for more than a century. They’re not immigrants in any sense of the word. They’re Texans and American citizens. They resisted elitist dictator Santa Anna, fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto, they’ve served in every major war defending the United States, they’ve won Medals of Honor and have state veterans homes named after them — and their communities are the most directly affected by the chaos that out-of-state Democrats tend to unleash on the border. They serve in the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, and they work in the oil fields and own thriving businesses. Coyotes, cartels, drugs, and trafficking all affect Tejano communities first, while the rich Democrats who party at the Met are unaffected personally and weaponize the border as a racial cudgel. RGV citizens are not happy about that and they know whom to blame.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • How to skew poll samples, CNN edition.
  • The country is in the best of hands: “White House Cuts Live Stream of Biden Mid-Sentence as He Asks a Question.”
  • “At Bail Reform Bill Signing, Abbott and Patrick Lay Blame with ‘Socialist’ Harris County Judges.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott visited Houston on Monday to sign new legislation he said would directly address lenient bail practices and rising crime in Harris County.

    “Lives are being lost because the criminal justice system in Harris County is not working the way it should,” said Abbott.

    Known as the Damon Allen Act, Senate Bill (SB) 6 is named after a state trooper who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop on Thanksgiving Day 2017. Despite having a history of assaulting a law enforcement officer, the shooter was out on a $15,000 felony bond at the time of the murder.

    Allen’s widow, Casey Allen, who has become an advocate for the reforms implemented by SB 6, joined Abbott at the Safer Houston Emergency Summit held by a coalition of ministry groups.

    Noting that her husband had been killed by a “violent, repeat offender,” Mrs. Allen added, “The murderer still went to jail, and my life and my kids’ lives were forever changed by actions that can’t be taken back.”

    The new law will create an online public safety report for judges and magistrates to access more complete information about a suspect’s criminal history before setting bail. In addition, SB 6 requires additional training for judges and magistrates, and prohibits the release of certain violent suspects or repeat suspects on personal recognizance (PR) bonds.

  • “Same FBI That Chased Russia Collusion Hoax for Years Covered Up Sexual Abuse of USA Gymnasts.” Why did James Comey’s FBI fail to investigate charges against Larry Nassar?
  • Masks are for cameras, and the little people:

  • Jackson, I’m goin to Jackson…to get murdered. (Hat tip: Reader Alan Stallings.)
  • A thread about Rick Rescorla, one of the biggest heroes of 9/11.
    

  • Evidently LA parents are not wild about a teacher that has a F*CK THE POLICE poster in his classroom.
  • Funny how no one talks about Sweden’s response to coronavirus.
    

  • Meanwhile, fully vaccinated Israel is seeing record cases. But the death rates appear to be low. (Hat tip: Michael Quinn Sullivan.)
  • “EPA Peer Review: The Best Rubberstamping Cronies Money Can Buy.”

    Now that the Biden EPA has rolled back the conflict-of-interest standards imposed by the Trump EPA on the agency’s outside scientific peer review panels, it has gone back to its old practice of stocking its peer review boards with agency research grant-recipient cronies who can be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever EPA wants to do. The Biden EPA most recently announced the particulate matter (PM) subpanel for the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). As per below, 17 of the 22 members are current and/or former EPA grantees. The amounts associated with them as principal investigators are shown. Note the largest grantee (Lianne Sheppard, recipient of $60,032,782 in EPA grants) is, naturally, the chairman. Sheppard is also the chairman of the main CASAC panel as well as a member of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), a separate outside review panel. The Biden EPA needs a reliable multi-purpose rubber-stamper and that is Sheppard, an activist who sued the Trump EPA because it instituted conflict of interest rules under which she was ineligible to rubber-stamp agency wishes.

  • Here’s a UK funeral director who claims all the Flu Manchu deaths he’s seeing now are from vaccinations:

    Take this with a grain of salt and in the interest of gathering data points.

  • What. The. Hell. “Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims.” What’s a little sexual slavery compared to all those likes?
  • Busted!

  • Coronavirus actors in Australia?

  • Part of the $3.5 trillion Democratic Party payoff porkulus is subsidies for newspapers, because of course. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Norm Macdonald, RIP.
  • Another tribute to him from Bill Burr.
  • Bad bad boys, what ya gonna do, what ya gonna do when they reboot you? (Hat tip Dwight.)
  • Speaking of Dwight, here’s that list of Mannix episodes where he’s menaced by an old army buddy you’ve been waiting for!
  • The Vinland Map is a fake.
  • First edition of Frankenstein sells for $1,170,000. I guess I won’t be adding that to my collection anytime soon…
  • “Nation Cheers As Democrats Will Remain In California.”
  • “Woman Attending Ultra-Exclusive Gala For The Elite In Expensive Designer Dress Lectures Nation On Inequality.”
  • “Powerful: AOC Writes ‘Tax The Rich’ In The Sky With Her Private Jet.”
  • Live footage of the 101st GoodBoys drop:

    • Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Military, Regulation, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

    Afghanistan News Roundup for September 14, 2021

    Tuesday, September 14th, 2021

    The Democratic Media Complex would love it if Americans would just “move on” from the Biden Administration’s disasterous withdrawal debacle in Afghanistan, but there are too many sad lessons Democrats have yet to learn from the debacle. So here’s a roundup of relevant links.

  • Not matter how much the Biden Administration spins it, it was not a success:

    Talk about a catastrophic success.

    The Biden administration wants credit for the Afghanistan evacuation as measured by the sheer number of people it flew out amid a security and humanitarian crisis of its own making.

    This is the arsonist bragging about how many fires he has put out.

    Those with memories that stretch past a couple of weeks ago will recall the halcyon days when a mass evacuation at a civilian airport exposed to suicide bombers and other attackers wasn’t, according to Joe Biden, even conceivable.

    Biden contributed to the collapse of the Afghan military by denying it air cover, gave away Bagram Air Base for no good reason, pulled out U.S. troops before our diplomats and civilians, drastically underestimated the gathering Taliban offensive, and then, caught unawares by the fall of Kabul, scrambled to jury-rig a desperate rescue that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

    That the U.S flew more than 115,000 people out of Kabul is a testament to the awesome capabilities of the United States military.

    It is not in any way a vindication of President Biden’s exit.

    The evacuation itself has been costly. Because we outsourced security outside the airport to the Taliban, our service members were forced to operate in dangerous conditions. A nearly inevitable attack last week killed 13 of them. That’s the loss of more Americans in one day than were killed in action most years in Afghanistan since 2015.

    Then, we failed by the most important metric. We left hundreds of Americans behind who wanted to leave, a squalid betrayal that was unfathomable before the Biden team began to try to prepare the public for it a week or so ago.

  • Just how many Americans are left in Afghanistan?

    President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and press secretary Jen Psaki now all suffer from a credibility gap born of obfuscation over the Afghan catastrophe. Though the State Department can count the minimum number of “Americans” — defined by me as all U.S. passport holders, whether citizens or Legal Permanent Residents with “green cards” known to its teams by text, email and phone calls — no one at State or the White House can seem to agree on what that number is.

    This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told CNN there were “around 100” Americans left in Afghanistan. On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said “hundreds” are still stranded. The Post’s Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief Susannah George told my radio audience Friday morning there is simply no way to know, as some passport holders are cut off and most of the country is out of contact with anyone.

    We have a right to know the scale of this crisis: the minimum number of U.S. passport holders known by our authorities to be in Afghanistan. And it is a crisis. It is America Held Hostage 2.0, and though a cohort of Americans escaped Thursday, many remain behind. Psaki, with astonishing indifference to the worries of families and friends across the country, said on Wednesday that there were a “handful” of Americans still in Afghanistan.

    A “handful.” It is shocking to hear that. Americans do not come in “handfuls.” They come in ones. Each one matters. One American abandoned is a crisis. We need to know the denominator against which the “ongoing efforts” can be measured. We celebrate every American who escapes, but we cannot forget and dare not accept the minimization of Americans left behind.

  • Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says that there are thousands of lawful U.S. residents left in Afghanistan. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Longtime high-ranking soldiers are retiring left and right:

  • The MSM moved away from front page stories on Afghanistan as quickly as they possibly could. Never again will they run “America Held Hostage” headlines while a Democrat is in the White House…
  • Biden: We’re going to stay until we get every last American out. Reality: Nope.
  • Just how many weapons did we leave to the Taliban? We had a pretty good count until the Biden Administration removed them from government websites.
  • They were even trying to claim that none of the equipment left in Afghanistan was a threat to anyone.
  • Fortunately, U.S. troops were able to disable some of it before leaving.
  • The Biden Administration was already rewriting the history on the withdrawal while it was going on:

    The real issue about this historic flight of humanity, however, is why such a gargantuan cramped effort was necessary in the first place? For months Team Biden will be trying to fog over that issue like the inside of your windshield in a rainstorm.

    Here’s the narrative: Donald Trump did a deal with the Taliban last year when they were only wannabe rulers in which all U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, before the annual Afghan fighting season got underway in that godforsaken land.

    In exchange, the Taliban agreed to reduce violent attacks, mainly on Americans, forbid terrorists to set up shop there again, and to negotiate in good faith with the elected central government in Kabul.

    The withdrawal commitment was political cover for the United States, so the exit wasn’t an ignominious admission of defeat, like the Soviets in 1989 and every other attempted occupier for the last 33 centuries.

    No one except perhaps some kindergarteners in Arkansas expected the Taliban to live up to much of that agreement. And only those toddlers were disappointed.

    For some inexplicable reason, Biden delayed the withdrawal first to the anniversary of 9/11 that started this whole mess and then to Aug. 31, which is the prime-time combat season in a land that has no NFL to follow. Taliban forces were well on the move by then.

    Taking the flag down at Bagram weeks early with no contingency plan for adversity was the signal for insurgents to step on the gas. So, they did.

    Now, the U.S. military is an amazing collection of proud outfits whose men and women, volunteers all, thankfully train for many things you could never even imagine. Hard to believe that one scenario would be to have a commander in chief with diminished mental capacity and a notorious lifelong distrust of the military.

    And that man would order woke Pentagon leaders to forget those dumbass civilians in Afghanistan, just get the last 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan. And do it now.

    Then once they were out, the Taliban took over everything, and the reality of thousands of potential hostages emerged, Biden abruptly changed his mind to — No, wait, better send 6,000 troops back to re-secure the airfield. Oh, and assemble enough huge planes to fly more than 75,000 frightened people all over the Middle East.

    And then send in the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to meet with the Taliban’s leader to politely request an extension of that Aug. 31 exit deadline that the American leader himself had set.

    And all the time that U.S. commander in chief was on vacation refusing or incapable of telling countrymen what the hell was going on.

  • At least one veteran says that Afghanistan was a giant money funneling scam:

    I would sit in on staff meetings, because part of my position there was with a Joint Command that was building the Afghan military and police force — the division that I worked with was about training and policy for the Afghan police. And that also included arming and funding them. I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment.

    I would sit in staff meetings where we would talk about, OK, this month we sent 14 armored Humvees down to Helmand Province for the Border Patrol. And 12 of those 14 Humvees along the way went missing — or, quote unquote, broke down — and were disabled. And that was a regular thing. Like the majority of shit we were adding to the inventory of these Border Patrol units, just wasn’t even making it there.

    Let me give you some context on how fucked up the flow of information was. For example, a big part of my job there was tracking the number of police recruits that would complete their training cycle — you know, every month or however many times a month, I was there when there were over a dozen different police training camps throughout the country, and they would have different training cycles for different groups of police. And then I would contact those training facilities and be like, OK, how many police were expected to have graduated this month? How many actually completed training and how many recruits showed up?

    And what was funny about that whole system was these training camps were not operated by the US military. They are operated by contractors like MPRI or DynCorp. And those contractors were being hired through the US State Department, even though the DoD was paying for them. But it was the State Department that was hiring them. And then what made it even more ridiculous was the nature of these contracts made it so that the number — the training figure, the number of police that made it through training this month — that number was proprietary to the contractor. So they owned that number — they didn’t actually even have to give that to us. I’m a Captain in the Air Force working for the Command, calling and asking, “How many police did you guys train this month?” And they didn’t have to actually tell me that.

    When they would give me these figures, I would total them up, because I’m compiling reports that are presumably going back to be presented before Congress to justify expenditures. And I had a Marine Corps major that was part of the Command section that would come in and he’d say, “Hey, we were supposed to cycle through 300 police recruits this month. This says only 150 got through. It’s supposed to be 300.” I’m like, OK, well, it wasn’t 300, it was 150. “Well, can you massage this report so that it says 300?” Basically, can you lie on this report so that it says 300. So just the whole flow of information was not in any way remotely transparent, and it was set up so that really the only people that knew anything for certain were the contractors — the Command staff couldn’t leverage from them accurate information.

    I was sitting in on Command staff meetings, where they’re going through weekly reports on distribution of materials. And there were massive discrepancies that nobody was really following up on. The response when I asked about it — because it blew my mind — was just, you know, this is what happens. A lot of this stuff goes missing, a lot of it gets broken.

    “The purpose of us being here is to justify pouring mountains of cash into the pockets of contractors — the manufacturers of this equipment. The incentive structure was, “Lose shit, because then it’ll have to be replaced. We’ll have to send more out there.”

    Funny how the same State Department that ran the Iran deal was running Afghan military training and equipment. Why, if I were of a more suspicious mind, I might suspect that it was all a giant scheme to kickback still more money to the Democratic Party and radical leftwing activists…

  • Tell us what you really think: “President Biden Called ‘Feckless, Dementia-Ridden Piece Of Crap’ By Mom Of Slain Marine.”

    United States Marine Rylee McCollum, 20, was killed in Thursday’s terror attack at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. The fallen Marine’s mother, Kathy, said on a radio show that Americans who voted for Joe Biden “just killed my son.”

    “That feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die,” the distraught mother said. “I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to… right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin Taliban terrorists who just freakin blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

    “I never thought in a million years [my son] would die for nothing, for nothing, because that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap who decided he wanted a photo-op on September 11,” she said. “That’s what kills me. I wanted my son to represent our country, to fight for my country. But I never thought that a feckless piece of crap would send him to his death and smirk on television while he’s talking about people dying with his nasty smirk. The dementia-ridden piece of crap needs to be removed from office. It never would have happened under Trump.”

  • Speaking of which, who did impress Gold Star families?

    “It was just very cordial, very understanding. He was awesome. He was just talking about the finest of the finest. He said he heard and saw everything that we had said, and he offered his condolences several times, and how sorry he was.”

    Said Darin Hoover, father of one of the Marines who died recently in Afghanistan, quoted in “Trump reaches out to families of U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan.”

  • Did Gender studies lose Afghanistan?

    America in Afghanistan sought a shortcut, and by ‘shortcut’ Cockburn means ‘something that takes 10 times as long but doesn’t look as nasty for TV cameras’. America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry ‘colonialism’, but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.

    So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

    A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.

    The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.

    Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army that ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.

    But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the ‘nation-building’ that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.

    Instead of rattling off anecdotes, perhaps a single video clip will do the job. Dadaism and conceptual art are of dubious value even in the West, but at some point some person who is not in prison for fraud decided that Afghan women would be uplifted by teaching them about Marcel Duchamp:

    Watch the video, and you can see the exact point (specifically, 31 seconds in) where the American mission in Afghanistan dies.

  • But at least we carried out that drone strike against ISIS terrorists! And by “ISIS terrorists” I mean “an Afghan aid worker delivering water and the children running to greet him.
  • “Psaki: ‘There Are No American Hostages, Just People Being Detained Against Their Will Until Their Captors’ Demands Are Met.'”
  • “Psaki: ‘A Record 331 Million Americans Have Not Been Abandoned In Afghanistan.'”

    • As before, this roundup could have been ten times as long…

    Tags:, , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for September 3, 2021

    Friday, September 3rd, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I’m going to coral all the Afghan Debacle news for separate post, probably next week. In the meantime: Texans are winning political battles, and Australians are losing their damn minds.

  • Texas finally passes the election integrity bill. Now on to the governor’s signature. Hopefully this will prevent the mass vote-harvesting and manufacturing shenanigans Democrats are so fond of…
  • Speaking of Democrats, they seem to be waking up to the fact that Biden and Harris suck and will drag them down:

    We hear an enormous amount these days about the problem of “Flight 93-ism” on the American right, but a great deal less about the concomitant panic that has led the Democratic Party to behave as if last year’s election represented its last gasp. Since Joe Biden took office in January, his party has been busy cramming everything it has ever wanted to do into a series of multi-trillion-dollar, must-pass bills; hawking a patently unconstitutional elections-supervision bill that would hand it full control of America’s democratic infrastructure; and engaging in a frenzied attempt to pack the Supreme Court, discredit the Senate, abolish the filibuster, and add new states to the union by simple majority vote. If you ask for an explanation of this preposterous behavior, you will be told that it is the product of the Republican Party’s dastardly scheme to implement Jim Eagle. If you look more closely, however, you’ll sense something else: fear — that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.

    This fear is well-founded. Joe Biden is an aging, incompetent mediocrity whose main claim to fame, like the Delta Tau Chi fraternity from Animal House, is his long tradition of existence. Kamala Harris, his vice president, is a widely disliked authoritarian whose last run for the White House was stymied by her inability to garner support from more than 3 percent of the Democratic-primary electorate. If, prior to the disaster that was the last fortnight, the Democrats hadn’t sensed that they’d tied their party to a pair of losers, they sure as hell must have now.

    Explanation of why the 25th Amendment won’t saved them snipped.

    And why should it, given that getting rid of President Biden would not actually fix the Democrats’ problems? Joe Biden’s approval rating is currently around 46 percent in national poll averages — not great for a president in his seventh month in office, but dramatically better than Kamala Harris’s rating, which stands at just 37 percent. Per NBC, Harris inspires “very positive” feelings in just 19 percent of the population while prompting “very negative feelings” among 36 percent — a feat that makes her the most strongly disliked VP since records began. If, today, the Democratic Party decided to cut its losses and replace Biden with Harris, it would be selecting a new president who was nearly ten points less popular than the old one. This would be absurd.

    Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have to come during the next set of presidential primaries.

  • Like many, I’ve wondered who’s actually pulling the strings in the Biden White House. (It’s clearly not Sundown Joe.) I’ve seen various people suggest it’s actually Ron Klain, Valerie Jarrett or Jill Biden. Former Trump intelligence director Richard Grenell says it’s Susan Rice:

    Rice, who served as national security adviser under President Obama, was tapped last December by President Biden to take charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council. It is in that role that Grenell believes she is exerting her influence.

    “Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over… [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] does not understand what’s going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention,” he said.

    Rice is one of the many officials from the Obama administration that landed jobs in the Biden White House. There was speculation that she would be his running mate and when that never materialized, secretary of state.

    She is among the wealthiest individuals in the Biden White House, with a net worth estimated to be at least $37.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. She resigned last December from her role as a member of the board of directors at Netflix.

  • For all the (justifiable) heat the 87h Legislature has taken over its failure to deliver on conservative priorities, it seems to have written the Texas Heartbeat Act in a way that makes it difficult to challenge in court:

    [Supreme Court Justices] denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the clarity, courage, and commitment to the rule of law that the five justices demonstrated in the midst of intense fury from the Left — and in the face of an exasperating cop-out by Chief Justice Roberts — are heartening indeed.

    Enacted in May, the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as S.B. No. 8, prohibits a physician from performing an abortion (other than in a medical emergency) “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” The fetal heartbeat is usually detectable at six weeks of gestation. The Act specifies an effective date of September 1.

    In an ingenious effort to prevent abortion providers from blocking the Act from taking effect, the Act prohibits state officials from enforcing the Act in any way. It instead authorizes any private person to bring a civil action in state court against anyone who performs a post-heartbeat abortion or who knowingly aids or abets a post-heartbeat abortion. (Federal restrictions on standing — on who can sue — in federal court do not apply in state court.) It entitles successful plaintiffs to at least $10,000 in damages for each violation as well as to injunctive relief and attorney’s fees.

    Because state officials are barred from enforcing the Act, the usual path that abortion providers would take to prevent the Act from becoming effective — suing those officials to prevent them from enforcing the Act — is a dead end. Instead, abortion providers would be able to challenge the constitutionality of the Act only if and when private individuals pursued civil actions against them. (And they’d have to confront the widely overlooked fact that the Act itself explicitly confers on abortion providers an “affirmative defense to liability” in the event they demonstrate that a lawsuit brought under the Act “impose[s] an undue burden.”)

    In mid July, nearly two months after enactment of the Act, various abortion providers sued eight defendants in federal court: the Texas attorney general and four other state officials, a state district-court judge and a district-court clerk from Smith County (one of 254 counties in Texas), and a pro-life activist. But their lawsuit faced overwhelming jurisdictional hurdles. Among other things, none of the defendants was threatening to enforce the Act against them (so how was there even a live controversy?), and all seven of the governmental defendants had strong claims to sovereign immunity.

    To make a long story short, when federal district judge Robert L. Pitman last week ruled against the governmental defendants’ sovereign-immunity claims, the governmental defendants exercised their right to immediately appeal the ruling against them to the Fifth Circuit. Pitman then realized that he had lost authority to proceed against the government defendants and had to cancel the preliminary-injunction hearing against them. (The Left viciously faults a Fifth Circuit panel of conservative judges for the cancellation that Obama appointee Pitman had ordered.) The abortion providers suddenly found that they had dug themselves into a deep ditch: The September 1 effective date was fast approaching, and they had indefinitely sidetracked their own effort to obtain a preliminary injunction.

    On August 30, the abortion providers made a desperate request to the Supreme Court to block the Act from taking effect. Set aside that they had waited two-and-a-half months to file their preliminary-injunction motion with Pitman. Set aside that they were asking the Court to rule on a set of issues that neither Pitman nor the Fifth Circuit panel had yet addressed. What’s even more remarkable is that because Pitman had never ruled on their request to certify statewide defendant classes of judges and clerks, injunctive relief against the only eight defendants in the case wouldn’t remotely prevent the injury the abortion providers allege they faced.

    The Supreme Court majority saw clearly through the huge holes in the emergency application. There was no reason to address the substantive question whether the Act is consistent with Roe and Casey because the abortion providers had failed to meet their burden on the “complex and antecedent procedural questions” that their request presented. The Court has the power to “enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” and the abortion providers hadn’t shown that any of the defendants should be enjoined from doing anything.

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Harris County $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract to One-Woman Firm Draws Scrutiny. Newly released documents show a $7 million bid was scored more highly, but Hidalgo’s office intervened to instead give nearly $11 million to a politically connected firm at a higher cost.”

    Last month tempers flared at Harris County Commissioners Court after County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” when he referred to a vendor as a “one-woman company.”

    Although the expenditure had been approved months earlier in a 4 to 1 vote, little information had been provided to commissioners about Elevate Strategies, LLC, the winner of a $10.9 million contract to conduct vaccine outreach.

    It was not until August that commissioners learned that the company was only founded in 2019, listed a Montrose apartment as its business address, and only consisted of one person: Felicity Pereyra, a former deputy campaign manager for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and former employee of both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

    It almost like the entire purpose of the welfare state is to channel money from the wallets of taxpayers to the pockets of leftwing cronies…

  • Meanwhile, Australia’s government has gone completely fucking insane:

    In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”

    Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

    Australia has been testing the limits.

    Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”

    Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

    Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”

    In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.

    Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?

  • Australia’s lockdown rules are destroying small businesses:

    The idea of owning a beauty clinic in an iconic downtown Melbourne retail centre once seemed like a promising business opportunity. So promising, in fact, that I opened a second store nearby, and expanded my total payroll to 20 employees.

    Capital costs across the two stores came to $1.6 million; while monthly expenses included $11,000 in loan interest, equipment leases totalling around $30,000, and rent at almost $40,000 (all figures in Australian dollars). It’s a substantial commitment, but this was a vibrant locale. And our market research indicated that demand would be high enough to sustain the necessary investment. Fortunately, the customers showed up—enough to meet wages, pay the bills, and allow me to put money away for a rainy day.

    That day arrived last year, in the form of COVID. And not just the disease itself, but also the draconian, one-dimensional response from government officials: throughout the state of Victoria, 600,000 small business owners like me—men and women who collectively employ millions of people and generate a substantial share of the region’s economic output—have been marginalized in the name of public health and safety.

    Small-business entrepreneurs are, by nature, both aspirational and pragmatic. We pay our taxes like everyone else, and understand the role government must play in managing national emergencies—including pandemics. But we also expect leaders to avoid imposing unnecessary and unreasonable regulatory burdens and operating prohibitions.

    One of the lessons learned over the last year and a half by small business owners is that Australia’s flawed, multi-layered government structure can easily enmesh an owner in overlapping forms of red tape. This has forced us to reflect on what type of society we are becoming, and whether, in Victoria at least, it is still worth setting up businesses here.

    Plus police specifically targeting vocal lockdown critics for fines.

  • “A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.”
  • “Fauci strongly endorses COVID treatment that the media tried to criticize Ron DeSantis for supporting…Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Dr. Anthony Fauci seem to agree when it comes to the use of monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.”
  • Joe Rogan contracts Flu Manchu, takes everything the MSM says you shouldn’t take…and throws off the disease in three days:

    “All kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, Z-pack, Prednisone, everything. I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip.”

    NAD evidently stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotid, and the drip combines some other common vitamins in a intravenous cocktail that seems really frigging expensive ($750-1,000), which is fine if you make Joe Rogan money, but ordinary people may want to stick to a multivitamin (which you should be taking daily anyway).

  • Earlier, Rogan had offered full refunds for his New York shows for anyone who can’t attend due to a vaccine mandate.
  • Welcome back my friends to the crisis that never ends:

  • Commie Antifa teacher boasting of indoctrinating his students is on the run:

    the heroes at Project Veritas released an undercover video showing a proud antifa communist teacher bragging about how he has 180 days to indoctrinate his students and make them Marxists. How does he do it? He “scares the f*** out of them.”

    Now the proud commie peacock is running scared. He refused to defend himself to another Project Veritas reporter. He claims he fears for his safety, and is worried about his brainwashing teaching gig, which means he KNOWS what he was doing is wrong.

    Even his fellow Antifa clowns aren’t happy with him.

    In the tweet below, fellow antifa stains bemoan [Gabriel] Gipe’s willingness to spill his commie guts to an undercover Project Veritas reporter. They also question his over-zealous approach to indoctrinating young high school kids and turning them into fellow Marxist comrades.

    Some highlights from the undercover video:

    • Gipe gives extra credit points to students who attend far-left extremist rallies
    • He has an antifa flag and a Mao poster hanging on his classroom wall
    • Gipe believes taking up arms against the “state” is a good thing, though it always fails
    • He shamed a student who claimed the antifa flag made him uncomfortable
    • Gipe isn’t the only pinko recruiter at the school

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The meeting over Dear Revolutionary Comrade Gipe was lit, and the upshot is that the school board is going to fire him. Good.
  • “After Years of Antifa Assaults, Portland ‘Journalists’ Finally Muster Outrage at Latest Attack:

    The local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just noticed that antifa is a violent bunch of thugs after black bloc-clad attackers beat yet another reporter and tossed her into a busy Portland street for daring to do her job.

    After years of similar attacks on reporters, SPJ was finally jostled from its slumber by an attack on reporter Maranie Staab, from a lefty news organization called “News2Share,” for disobeying her Leftist compatriots and doing some reporting.

    Antifa responded in the same way they accuse police of doing: They sprayed her with chemicals and threw her into the street.

    The MSM seemed happy to ignore the same tactics when used against Andy Ngo, because Reasons.

  • The NRA cancels it’s yearly show:

    However, with building news about the number of withdrawn vendors, it’s possible that the costs of the other events would surpass what they would expect to make from a crowd that was already predicted to be less than half of normal. I was seeing 35,000 as a predicted attendance batted around the interwebz, and that assumed full exhibit hall, no restrictions, and a full weekend of activities. If word of mouth about reduced exhibitors managed to knock another 10,000 off of that prediction, I don’t know enough about their financial obligations & forecasting to know if that would drive it into the territory of losing money or not.

    Snip.

    The Board & Wayne LaPierre are desperate to look like NRA members stand by them, so visibly empty halls with far fewer attendees in already wide aisles would make for press photos they may believe they can’t afford.

    Add to this that the ILA Leadership Forum, at least anytime I checked the pages, never had more than the big Texas politicians (Abbott, Cruz, Cornyn, and Crenshaw) along with Mark Robinson from North Carolina listed. It appeared that they couldn’t get commitments from big national names to attend which would have, again, signaled a loss of influence and interest that NRA can’t really afford to be a story.

    LaPierre and his cronies seem desperate desperate to cling to power, no matter how far down they drag the NRA with them.

  • Contention: Tesla drivers do more damage to the environment than pickup truck drivers.
  • We could be heroes just for one day…
  • How much is Bari Weiss making now that left the New York Times and moved to Substack? More than $800,000 a year.
  • The left is pretty. Pretty vacant:

  • “Why did the Dutch eat their Prime Minister?”
  • “Beyond expert.”
  • “Biden Drone Strikes White House After Vowing To Kill Those Responsible For American Military Deaths In Kabul.”
  • H.P. Lovecraft Writes Olive Garden’s Dinner Menu. “Madness controls my mouth as forkfuls of stodgy substance and sludge slide down my esophagus. Death seems certain.”
  • This is pretty impressive.
  • Happy dog video:

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