Posts Tagged ‘Cuba’

LinkSwarm for June 28, 2019

Friday, June 28th, 2019

Man, it’s been a week. The clown car and NRA pieces have been blowing up my stats, and I’ve got a bunch of other things happening. I tried to watch the Group of Death debate last night, but the stream kept cutting out, so I’ll probably save the reactions for Monday’s Clown Car Update. This LinkSwarm features Dan Crenshaw, Google, and Dan Crenshaw grilling Google.

  • Pelosi caves, gets the House to pass the Republican Senate bill to address the crisis on the Southern border 305-102. The Senate bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a vast improvement on the House’s laughable effort. But the fact that 90% of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders are demonstrably to the left of Nancy Pelosi on the issue might give a more reflective party pause…
  • Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw says Democrats live in another world when it comes to the crisis on the border.
  • “In Emergency Bill, House Dems Vote To Send More Fake Tears To Address Border Crisis.”
  • Cuba runs out of other people’s money.
  • Trump’s latest accuser is loony toons.
  • But “David French Believes Her Implicitly, Because of Course He Does.”
  • It’s not all bad news on the gun rights front front: Gov. Abbott signed 10 pro-Second Amendment bills.
  • Kevin Williamson dissects Facebook’s attempts to float their own cryptocurrency.

    Professor Posner is correct in pointing to the rivalrous nature of political power and market power. What is less well understood is that markets won that fight in a knockout a decade or more ago. The new reality is that markets — not corporations, but markets — are more powerful than states, and much of the angry, angsty, mob-inciting politics of the Left and the Right in the past decade is simply the emotional noise and churn generated as societies and governments readjust their affairs to accommodate themselves to that new reality. Bill Clinton spent much of his presidency bitching about the bond market, which was his shorthand for the ways in which global markets (especially financial markets) limited politicians’ effective scope of action. He was, uncharacteristically for a man of such modest imagination, ahead of his time.

    The power of capital flows is a reality that has made itself known bit by bit to states both liberal and autocratic, from the members of the European Union to the caudillos in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no regard for life or property, brutal and vicious — and constantly getting slapped around by volatility in the energy market. Mohammed bin Salman can command almost anything — except the commodity markets that rule his world.

    Much of the hysteria on display in the Democratic presidential primary is American progressivism’s shrieking protest of the new facts of life. Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren are intelligent enough to understand what’s happened: That just at the moment they were primed to take power, power was taken away from them.

  • Project Veritas reported on Google executives working behind the scenes to censor conservatives and prevent President Trump from being reelected. “People need to know what’s going on with Google, and that they are not an objective piece – they’re not an objective source of information. They are a highly biased political machine that is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.” Result: Project Veritas was banned from Google-owned YouTube, then from ostensible YouTube competitor Vimeo. But you can watch it on BitChute.
  • Speaking of Google: “Rep. Dan Crenshaw grilled Google executives after an employee reportedly labeled Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Dennis Prager as ‘Nazis.’ ‘Two of three of these people are Jewish, very religious Jews. And yet you think they are Nazis,’ the Texas congressman said in reference to Shapiro and Prager. ‘It begs the question, “What kind of education do people at Google have?”‘” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Speaking of Big Tech censorship of conservatives, Reddit has “quarantined” The_Donald subreddit for Trump fans, one of the largest and most heavily trafficked groups on Reddit. You can still reach The_Donald by following that link, but you get a warning and you can’t search for the content anymore.
  • People continue to flee high tax states and move to low-tax states, something that has only been accelerated by the limitation of state and local taxes in the 2017 tax reform. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • What people actually die of versus what types of deaths the media cover. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • “Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Used To Hate Donald Trump. Now, He’s Kind of a Fan.” Also worries (if you listen to the podcast) about China’s rise as a techno-authoritarian hegemon.
  • Democratic congressmen Donald Norcross of New Jersey and Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut hit with ethics violation charges for all-expense-paid trips to Qatar. You know, the same country that loves bribing people and bankrolling terrorists.
  • “Leaders Of Brooklyn And Manhattan Chapters Of The United Brotherhood Of Carpenters Charged In Rampant Admissions-Bribery Scheme.”
  • Colorado sees 4 to 10 inches of snow on Summer Solstice.
  • Huawei loses lawsuit against semiconductor designer CNEX (a fabless solid state storage firm), though it’s something of a pyrhic victory, as the judge awarded CNEX no damages. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Herbert Meyer, RIP. You may not have heard of him, but he penned a famous memo in late 1983 that outlined how the U.S. was winning the cold war.
  • Rosanne Barr and Andrew “Dice” Clay to do a comedy tour together.
  • Speaking of comedy: “Louis CK’s audience must be punished.”

    Stop laughing. This isn’t funny. Louis CK is now an unperson. You can no longer applaud him or enjoy his comedy hate speech. If you insist on supporting an enemy of the people, there will be consequences. You will be punished. Your life will be upended. If you care about your future, you will keep your excitement and happiness to yourself when presented with the verboten.

    “Well, if you don’t like Louis CK, don’t listen to him. You can’t tell other people what they should and shouldn’t laugh at.” We hear that a lot from fascists, don’t we? They think hate speech is free speech, and they don’t think they need to do what they’re told. But they’ll learn. They will be corrected.

    Today you’re cheering for an unapproved comedian. Tomorrow you’re marching with tiki torches and tweeting dank memes. The day after that, you’re annexing the Sudetenland. These people must be controlled before the fascism spreads.

  • Famed designer Jony Ive has has left Apple to form his own design group (but Apple will be a client). CNet looks at some of his most iconic designs, including the original iMac and the iPhone.
  • How many flatmates were there in the classic BBC sitcom The Young Ones? Five. If you count the creepy ghost.
  • “Major Cave-In As Democratic Candidates Rush To Far Left Side Of Debate Stage.”
  • A nice little compilation of train stunts in silent movies:

  • LinkSwarm for April 19, 2019

    Friday, April 19th, 2019

    Happy Good Friday! Yesterday was a very good Thursday for President Donald Trump, and a very bad one for the media outlets that lied about the Russian Collusion fantasy for two years.

  • After the Mueller Report release, Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says that impeaching President Donald Trump is not worth pursuing. Take that, hard left base and Democratic House freshmen! (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
  • Orange Man Bad!

    For approximately 3 million people, nothing in the Mueller report could exonerate President Trump of “Russian collusion,” obstruction of justice, and various other high crimes and misdemeanors of which they are certain he is guilty. For those 3 million people (a number reflecting the combined average weekday primetime audience of CNN and MSNBC) Trump’s guilt is an indisputable fact, his presidency an ongoing crime against humanity, his 2016 election a fraud. In a nation of 325 million people, of course, 3 million is less than a single percentage point. However, that hard-core audience of obsessive Trump-haters includes every Democrat in Washington and the vast majority of our nation’s journalists, university faculty, and other such members of the intelligentsia. Therefore, their deranged idée fixehas enormous influence, calling into existence a sort of anti-Trump industry that manufactures a constant output of rage-inducing propaganda. The CNN/MSNBC bubble is the cable-TV equivalent of a cult compound, where dissent from their political religion is forbidden. For the past two years, the fanatics have been told every night by Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, et al. that the final destruction of Trump was at hand — “the walls are closing in!” — and the left-wing faithful awaited their deliverance from the evil man in the White House.

    “Orange Man Bad” — that’s a shorthand label for the anti-Trump mentality, coined by an anonymous contributor on a Reddit forum in 2017, mocking the robotic mindlessness of the president’s enemies. No fact that might contradict their Trump-hating beliefs has any validity to them, because Orange Man Bad. By obverse principle, anything done to harm Trump or his supporters, including libel and violent assault, is considered legitimate, because Orange Man Bad. Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel.

    What else can explain what happened Thursday, after Mueller finally delivered his 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The delivery of the special counsel’s report was preceded by a press conference at which Attorney General William Barr summarized the result of the investigation. Barr “made clear that, after two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and endless media speculation, the ‘Russian collusion’ story was, as some of us had noted all along, a story about nothing,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. “No member of Trump’s campaign — and in fact, no American anywhere — colluded with the Russians to influence the campaign.” Contrary to what MSNBC and CNN viewers had been told night after night for month after month, Trump is not a Kremlin stooge and yet: “Orange Man Bad!”

    Proven wrong on the matter of “Russian collusion,” the anti-Trump media sifted through the Mueller report in search of evidence of other wrongdoing by the president, who of course must be guilty of something. The Twitter feeds of media types filled up with excerpts of the report proving… what? Well, Trump was very angry about being falsely accused of “collusion,” and he didn’t enjoy watching his former associates being investigated and prosecuted as part of what he considered a partisan witch hunt, inspired in large measure by the phony Steele dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. But we already knew that. Trump’s animus toward the Mueller investigation was certainly no secret, but being angry is not a crime and, however angry he was, nothing Trump did amounted to obstruction of justice. Because there was no “collusion,” and thus no crime to conceal, it would be hard to figure out how or why justice could be obstructed in such a case. The innocent don’t fear justice, and if Trump was innocent of “collusion” (as Mueller concluded) why should he engage in obstruction? Never mind basic logic, cried the Trump-haters, because Orange Man Bad!

    “Their minds are made up, and mere facts cannot penetrate their ironclad certainty about Trump’s maliciousness.”

  • Watch Democrats move the Mueller goalposts.
  • Editorial in the New York Times: “Barr Is Right About Everything. Admit You Were Wrong.”

    The American political and media elites that spent the first two years of the Trump administration promoting the Russian collusion hoax have some explaining to do. And not merely explaining: They owe the president an apology.

    As Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday before releasing the Mueller report, “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”

    And yet nearly the entire complex of elite media was actively complicit in promoting the biggest political conspiracy theory in American history: that Hillary Clinton lost the election because Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to — well, that was always a moving target — but to somehow deprive Mrs. Clinton of victory. What we now know definitively is that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and a team of very accomplished, mostly Clinton-supporting, prosecutors were unable to find evidence of a conspiracy that had been taken as an article of faith by Trump haters.

    Journalists don’t like being called “fake news,” but too many of them uncritically accepted the Trump-Russia narrative, probably because of their strong distaste for Mr. Trump himself. But that lack of objectivity represents a major professional failure, and it’s Exhibit A in why Mr. Trump’s taunt resonates with so many Americans. Gallup polling shows that for 69 percent of Americans, trust in the media has fallen over the last decade. Among Republicans, it’s 94 percent; for independents, it’s 75 percent and for moderates it’s 66. Only among self-identified liberals and progressives does a majority continue to trust the media. They like what they hear.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “CNN Ratings Continue To Plummet To All-Year Low.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • CNN: God Allowed The Mueller Report To Test Our Unshakable Faith In Collusion.
  • Related:

  • “Prosecutors Ask To Present Evidence That NXIVM Sex Cult Leaders Illegally Bundled Money For Hillary Clinton Campaign.” Good points: Juicy! Bad points: The use of “sex cult” and “Hillary Clinton” in the same sentence. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Details on a Democratic dark money network under Arabella Advisors founded by Clinton Democrat Eric Kessler.
  • Leftists express respectful disagreement with Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw over his criticism of Ilhan Omar. Ha, just kidding! They mocked him as “captain shithead, “Nazi,” and “eyeless fuck.”
  • What happens when the government turns your apartment building into public housing. “The SWAT team, the overdose, the complaints of pot smoke in the air and feces in the stairwell — it would be hard to pinpoint a moment when things took a turn for the worse at Sedgwick Gardens, a stately apartment building in Northwest Washington.” Bonus: they’re handing out vouchers for up to $2,648 a month, which is more than my mortgage payment. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed new sanctions and other punitive measures on Cuba and Venezuela, seeking to ratchet up U.S. pressure on Havana to end its support for Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.” Good.
  • Journalist shot to death in Northern Ireland, in an incident police are blaming on the New IRA.
  • Six MS-13 members charged in two murders.
  • Four truths that will get you banned from a college campus in 2019. Including: “To pretend that a man is a woman if he believes he is a woman…[is] objectively untrue.”
  • Shocker: University head doesn’t cave in to Social justice Warrior pressure, refuses to fire Camille Paglia.
  • Change your gut flora, change your thoughts. (Hat tip: Jordan Petersen’s Twitter feed.)
  • Black immigrant MAGA hat wearer beaten by thugs. Washington Post: “Meh. Somebody did something to somebody.”
  • Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot says he will no longer prosecute theft cases under $750. Governor Greg Abbott is mighty pissed.
  • Related:

  • CDC: “Hey, our guidelines didn’t mean ‘Screw you, pain sufferers.'”
  • Apple, Qualcomm settle their patent dispute. Immediately after that was announced, Intel announced they were exiting the 5G modem business. Apple continues to be something of a monopsony in the space.
  • “Federal Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit by Teachers’ Union Leader Against Project Verita.”
  • Don’t California my Texas:

  • The Postal Service took away the doughboy’s gun.
  • Only in New York: Hermit gets $17 million to move out of his tiny dilapidated hotel room. (Hat tip: Baseballcrank.)
  • Gene Wolfe, RIP.
  • Ouch! (Consider yourself warned.)
  • LinkSwarm for February 22, 2019

    Friday, February 22nd, 2019

    Enjoy a 2/22 LinkSwarm!

  • Trump Is On Solid Legal Ground In Declaring A Border Emergency To Build A Wall.”

    A review of existing federal laws makes clear that President Donald Trump has clear statutory authority to build a border wall pursuant to a declaration of a national emergency. Arguments to the contrary either mischaracterize or completely ignore existing federal emergency declarations and appropriations laws that delegate to the president temporary and limited authority to reprogram already appropriated funding toward the creation of a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

  • When lawmakers want to talk to President Donald Trump, they just pick up the phone. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Andy Ngo helpfully provides an extensive list of fake hate crimes in the Trump era.
  • “Covington teen Nick Sandmann sues The Washington Post for $250M.”
  • Shocker: Washington Post tells the truth about guns:

    Gun homicides have dropped substantially over the past 25 years — but most Americans believe the opposite to be true. Why? Perhaps in part because of the media focus on multiple-victim shooting incidents in recent years. Perhaps, too, because of the number and deadliness of those incidents. We’ve noted before that the number of fatalities in major mass-shooting incidents has increased dramatically in recent years; it’s possible that people are conflating increases in frequency and deadliness of mass shootings with the United States getting more dangerous generally.

  • New York Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez adapts quickly to the ways of Washington, puts her boyfriend on her congressional payroll. But that’s not all! She also featherbedded him on her campaign payroll by laundering the funds through a third party.
  • The fight between Second Amendment activists and Michael Bloomberg’s money:

    The time for division is not now. We need a strong NRA. If you quit NRA over bump stocks or red flag laws, you aren’t helping. I’m not saying we can’t have disagreement, but we all need to be rowing in the same direction and understanding what’s important. Miguel notes that activists in Florida are concentrating on Open Carry. I would advise concentrating on stopping the ballot measure Bloomberg is going to foist on you in 2020. NRA has to have money to fight that. We cannot write off the third most populous state. We will never be able to outspend Bloomberg, but we sure as hell can out-organize him. We have a blueprint, and last I heard the dude who pulled off defeating the Massachusetts handgun ban is still alive. The odds were stacked against him too.

    Forget about the fucking bump stocks. It’s not where the fight is. That’s over. The fight is preserving the right to own semi-automatic firearms. That’s ultimately what they want, because they are well aware no state’s gun culture has ever come back from an assault weapons ban. Gun bans are a death blow to the culture. If you want to get the hard-core activists worked up over saving an impractical range toy, or in some misguided effort to (badly) get around the machine gun restrictions, you’re not paying attention to where the actual fight is.

  • “Government report reveals CBO was scandalously off in Obamacare estimates.”
  • The Supreme Court unanimously rules that there are limits to civil asset forfeiture under the Eighth Amendment. Good. Now congress should tackle such abuse legislatively.
  • Note the obvious truth that the media is overwhelmingly liberal? Expect to be attacked.
  • Nicolas Maduro would rather let his own people continue to starve rather than let foreign food aid reach them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • His army evidently relies on Cuban military personnel. Too bad for him that Cuba’s military intervention in Angola showed the world that Cuban troops sucked. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Even the UN IPCC says we’re not headed for climate disaster.”
  • The boy who inflated the concept of wolf:

    Suppose that instead of one shepherd boy, there are a few dozen. They are tired of the villagers dismissing their complaints about less threatening creatures like stray dogs and coyotes. One of them proposes a plan: they will start using the word “wolf” to refer to all menacing animals. They agree and the new usage catches on. For a while, the villagers are indeed more responsive to their complaints. The plan backfires, however, when a real wolf arrives and cries of “Wolf!” fail to trigger the alarm they once did.

    What the boys in the story do with the word “wolf,” modern intellectuals do with words like “violence.” When ordinary people think of violence, they think of things like bombs exploding, gunfire, and brawls. Most dictionary definitions of “violence” mention physical harm or force. Academics, ignoring common usage, speak of “administrative violence,” “data violence,” “epistemic violence” and other heretofore unknown forms of violence.

    Ditto “Gas-lighting.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Pro-top: Try not to steal guns from the SHOT show.
  • The English-language narrator of Islamic State execution videos has been captured.
  • Gay magazine takes the Mullah’s side to own Trump:

  • Former women’s tennis champion and out lesbian Martina Navratilova vilified for daring to point out that men shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports.
  • “Medical examiner barred from Travis County courtrooms amid Rangers investigation.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Stafford: the Texas city without property taxes.
  • B-1s to be retired before B-52s.
  • Followup: But they’re buying more F-15s. (Hat tip: The Political Hat.)
  • Philadelphia’s stupid soda tax has not reduced consumption, brought in less revenue than expected, and has cost Philadelphia over 200 jobs. Also, corrupt union officials helped push it through as a “screw you” to the Teamsters. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lt. Governor Dan Patrick bitchslaps some shoddy journalism from the Houston Chronicle so hard they had to retract the story. (Hat tip: Cahnman’s Musings, though the Scribed link is broken.)
  • Giant “nightmare bee” previously thought to be extinct found alive. Pleasant dreams:

  • A new football league, the Alliance of American Football, just debuted. Their main bread and butter isn’t ticket sales or broadcast rights, its refining technology to help boost sports gambling.
  • Trump-supporting comedian Terrance K. Williams recovering from a car accident:

  • Speaking of Williams:

  • Instant classic:

  • “Atheist Requiring Evidence To Believe Anything Knows For Certain Trump Colluded With Russia.”
  • La zzzzOOOOOMMMMMMMzzzz Le schzzzzzzcchh-Mmmmmmmmmwaaaaaaahh!
  • LinkSwarm for February 2, 2018

    Friday, February 2nd, 2018

    Happy Groundhog Day! To celebrate, just imagine that I’ve already posted this same LinkSwarm nine times already.

    Supposedly the Nunes FISA abuse memo drops today. After that happens, I’ll no doubt have some thoughts…

  • Democratic Party freakouts over the memo seem to be reaching epic proportions.
  • “The Democratic party’s strategy for 2018 seems to revolve around reminding people how happy they are that Democrats aren’t in charge.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Recent rulings from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals are a major contributing factor in the sharp rise in the number of family units and unaccompanied minors that have made the trek from Central America to the United States’ southwest border in the last few months, according to Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina is retiring.
  • As is Pennsylvania Democrat Robert Brady. Few people outside the state realize that Brady is the Democratic Party’s iron-fisted Philadelphia machine boss. I asked a Philly friend how corrupt Brady is: “Not as corrupt as Frank Rizzo, but pretty corrupt.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.
  • And even though that PhillyMag piece is from last year, it’s worth calling out this tidbit about Pennsylvania Democrats on its own:

    Since 2000, law enforcement officials have investigated no fewer than 32 Philadelphia Democrats. The allegations seem to get more debasing — more Robin Hood-in-reverse — every year. Seth Williams, the sitting district attorney, was indicted in March for allegedly stealing from his own mother and seeking thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes in exchange for making people’s legal problems go away. Chaka Fattah, the former 11-term Congressman, was sentenced in December to a decade in prison for using cash from taxpayers and a charity to pay back an illegal campaign loan. Leslie Acosta, the ex-state rep, pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiring to commit money laundering.

    Those are only the biggest and baddest examples of graft in the past year. The city’s traffic court was abolished altogether after nine judges were charged with ticket fixing in 2013. (Seven were later convicted on various charges.) In 2014, five state lawmakers — nearly a quarter of Philadelphia’s Harrisburg delegation — were accused of taking petty bribes; four have been convicted, some of lesser charges. The avalanche of indictments has left Philadelphians wondering whether their elected officials run for office to help anyone other than themselves.

  • Ace nails the SJW problem:

    It is the common practice of Social Justice Warriors to infiltrate organizations and hobbies in which they have little to no interest — videogames, comic books, sports, science-fiction awards organizations, all academic fields, etc. — for the sole purpose of seizing “key nodes and critical infrastructure,” as Diversity and Comics notes (echoing US military doctrine), in order to turn non-political pastimes into never-ending propaganda echo chambers — or destroy them outright, if they cannot be made to serve the regressive left’s propaganda mission.

    They’re deadly parasites for any organization that allows them to crawl inside their bodies.

    But these organizations let them in — hell, they actively seek them out — just so that social justice blogs and websites like The Mary Sue or Buzzfeed will give them the Social Justice Warrior Stamp of Approval.

    Trouble is, as Marvel Comics is finding out, Social Justice Warriors are not consumers of any of these products, and will not buy them even if they have been converted into full Social Justice Warrior propaganda outfits.

    These organizations are being infiltrated by Social Justice Warriors not because Social Justice Warriors like them or the cultural products they produce, but because Social Justice Warriors know that non- Social Justice Warriors enjoy these products, and thus these cultural artifacts must be seized and repurposed to serve leftist indoctrination ends or simply destroyed.

    If they cannot be remade to be useful indoctrination centers, then they must be destroyed, so that, at least, non-Social Justice Warriors will have one less enjoyable thing in their lives, and may be forced to seek Social Justice Warrior-controlled entertainments as an alternative.

  • What did the 2018 Women’s March produce? Trash. Lots and lots of trash.
  • “Chelsea” Manning is ineligible to run for office.
  • The MSM grapples with the truth about Sweden. (Hat tip: DirectorBlue.)
  • Republicans get more ObamaCare taxes delayed.
  • Sun Tzu predicted how President Trump would kick Democrats’ asses 2,500 years ago.
  • Obama paled around with Louis Farrakhan in 2005 and the media covered it up, because Democrat. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Fidel Castro’s eldest son commits suicide.
  • “Reclusive Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss — one of the Democrats’ biggest and most secretive donors — is currently under investigation for a 2011 sexual assault, as originally reported in a handwritten complaint by his former employee Jacqueline Long.”
  • Seattle lesbian awakes from woke:

    Herzog has awakened from “woke,” as it were, because she found herself attacked by her progressive comrades for Thoughtcrime. She has disagreed with transgender activists and defended Aziz Ansari, among other examples of her political incorrectness. Independent thinking by members of official victim groups — women, racial minorities, homosexuals — is dangerous to the Left because dissent undermines the identity-politics illusion of solidarity against the white heterosexual males who allegedly oppress everyone else. In the 21st century, belief in the pervasive evil of heterosexual white men has become the organizing principle of the Democrat Party, its raison d’être. To suggest to a Democrat in 2018 that perhaps this fathomless contempt for white males is misguided, or that not every member of an official victim group is suffering from oppression, is to commit a sort of political heresy, like denying the existence of witchcraft in 17th-century Salem.

    Democrats have become vendors of ethnic outrage, gender resentment and economic envy, with no other commodity to provide voters in the political marketplace. Because everyone inside the cult of social justice is fanatically devoted to this zero-sum-game mentality, there is a constant competition among Democrats to strike a “more progressive than thou” posture and, as Professor Reynolds says, “when sanctimony is your only coin, people will try to accumulate it.” Sooner or later, however, intelligent people wise up to the hustle. After the defeat of Hillary Clinton, many who had cast their lot with the party of victimhood may realize how badly they have been hoodwinked and bamboozled.

    Is it bad that I read the word “Seattle lesbian” and, even before I saw the picture, instantly thought “flannel”?

  • David Brooks wants new Americans because Original Recipe Americans, with our disgusting epidemic of improperly creased trousers, disappoint him so.
  • “Federal judge grants Texas request to block Obama-era restrictions on criminal background checks in hiring.”
  • Hitting your target at 1000 yards.
  • A SOTU tweet:

  • Another:

  • Bad hiring decisions:

  • Happy Groundhog Day! To celebrate, just imagine that I’ve already posted this same LinkSwarm nine times already.

    LinkSwarm for January 6, 2017

    Friday, January 6th, 2017

    The James Quintero interview on Texas municipal pensions generated a lot of interest, including a piece on Zero Hedge. I mention it here because, being Zero Hedge, the firehose nudged it to page 2 before I could even take a look at it.

  • It turns out that the FBI never examined the “hacked” DNC servers”. Indeed, the DNC denied the FBI permission to examine the server. “The bureau tells Buzzfeed News that the Democrats’ organization reportedly ‘rebuffed’ multiple requests for physical access to the hacked servers, forcing investigators to depend on the findings of the third-party security firm CrowdStrike (which the DNC contacted after the hack).” (“Your honor, instead of the FBI crime lab testing the alleged cocaine sample, we had Morty’s Fly-By-Night Chemical Analysis and Pet Grooming Company do the analysis. I’m sure you’ll find that’s good enough…”) So how can FBI actually tell the Russians hacked them? Did they even try to get a warrant for the DNC servers? Since that’s one of the first things you would do if you really thought the Russians were behind the hack, and the hack had (by Obama Administration testimony) national security implications. This suggests that the DNC is: A.) Lying about Russian involvement, or B.) Is telling the truth about it, but has material far more illegal and/or damaging than what has already been released. Why should we give more credence to allegations that the FBI hasn’t even taken the most basic steps of criminal investigation to prove?
  • President-elect Donald Trump has told the Department of Homeland Security to start getting ready to build the border wall. Remember, the construction of 700 miles of border wall is already authorized by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. All it takes is Presidential will to have work started on it. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “For Me, Obamacare Means Paying All Your Own Bills And Never Getting The Doctor You Need.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • A look back at all those Obama Administration scandals that Valerie Jarrett can’t remember. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Liberal strategy for 2016 election: “1) Make sure the GOP nominates Trump 2) ??? 3) Victory!”
  • John Podesta’s password was ‘password.'” What a tragedy it is that we kept the Democratic Party’s best and brightest out of the White House… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Reporters who colluded with the Clinton campaign? Not only did they not get fired, some got better jobs. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “If you thought 2016 was packed full of liberal foolishness, just wait until you get a load of 2017. As 2016 ends, progressives enter the new year terrified that Donald Trump will continue to run circles around them, and their epic meltdown is only going to get more epically meltdownier. They’ve been shrill, stupid, and annoying for the last two months, but brace yourself for the next 12. Fear is going to make them go nuts – not the fear that Trump will be a failure, but the gut-wrenching, mind-numbing fear that Donald Trump will be a success.”
  • Which is why Democrats are still in denial. “Republicans control the House, the Senate, 34 governor’s mansions, and 4,100 seats in state legislatures. But Democrats act like they run Washington.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Global warming critic at Georgia Tech resigns tenured position because “growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.”

    The reward system that is in place for university faculty members is becoming increasingly counterproductive to actually educating students to be able to think and cope in the real world, and in expanding the frontiers of knowledge in a meaningful way (at least in certain fields that are publicly relevant such as climate change).

    Snip.

    A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.

    How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Philadelphia’s new soda tax means that sometimes the price of the tax is more than the soda itself.
  • How the Washington Post pushed a fake “Russians hacked the power grid” story, then silently walked the whole thing back via silent edits. And the media wonder why the public no longer trusts them…
  • And speaking of the Washington Post being staffed with untrustworthy idiots, check out this cover plumping a “women’s rights” march:

  • And speaking of Fake News, the four different types of fake news.
  • Nothing says “delusions of grandeur” quite like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo booking 200 hotel rooms for a Hillary Clinton inauguration for theoretical supporters of his own future presidential run.
  • Speaking of Cuomo, he just commuted the sentence of left-wing cop killer Judith Clark. Clark participated in a Weather Underground robbery where three people, including police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady, were murdered. Maybe we should start calling him “Cop Killer Cuomo.” Evidently black lives, like that of Brown, don’t matter when they’re cops murdered by white leftwing radicals… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • This just in: Reporting on firearms still sucks.
  • Feminists have very little in common with the women they claim to represent: “Few feminists seem to be married with children, and comparatively few are heterosexual.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Evidently Cuba is just as much a tourist paradise as it is a worker’s paradise. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Smugglers work across the Texas border to sell their addictive products. Only this time, it’s selling black market Krispy Kreme donuts from El Paso in Juarez… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The time when James “Mad Dog” Mattis skipped dinner so a hungry soldier could eat. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Armed Texas grandma runs off would-be attacker. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Sears to sell Craftsman, close 150 stores. In other news, Sears still had stores to close.
  • Skynet conquers Go.
  • World’s largest dog. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Fidel Castro Crimes Roundup

    Monday, November 28th, 2016

    Now that the world has time to digest Fidel Castro’s death, here’s a roundup of more proof that, yes, he was a tyrannical torturing commie scumbag.

  • First up, here’s the Miami Herald‘s detailed account of Castro’s life and his brutal regime. It’s the one to read if you’re only reading one.
  • No really, he was a brutal scumbag:
    • He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
    • He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
    • He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
    • He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
    • He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
    • He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
    • He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
    • He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
    • He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
    • He censored all means of expression and communication.
    • He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
    • He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
    • He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.
  • Here is a series documenting Castro’s greatest crimes and atrocities. Only about half of these have been completed so far.
  • The myth of Cuba’s wonderful health care:

    What all of these pols and pundits lazily presume is that if the state of Cuban health care and education have markedly improved on Castro’s watch, surely the situation was dire during the final years of the Batista dictatorship.

    Well, not exactly. In 1959 Cuba had 128.6 doctors and dentists per 100,000 inhabitants, placing it 22nd globally—that is, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. In infant mortality tables, Cuba ranked one of the best in the world, with 5.8 deaths per 100,000 babies, compared to 9.5 per 100,000 in the United States. In 1958 Cuba’s adult literacy rate was 80 percent, higher than that of its colonial grandfather in Spain, and the country possessed one of the most highly-regarded university systems in the Western hemisphere.

    Cuba improved, as have most countries, on some of these indices in the years since the revolution. As Reason Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin points out, “countries like Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil have posted equal gains in literacy during the same time period without resorting to totalitarian governments.”

  • Indeed, Cuba’s hospitals are filfthy hellholes.
  • Old review of Armando Valladares’s Against All Hope.
  • How a New York Times reporter helped create the Castro myth.
  • Death toll estimate of the Castro regime was 87,073 people in 2005.
  • Brutal Dictator Fidel Castro Dead

    Saturday, November 26th, 2016

    Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro has died.

    Says Texas Senator Ted Cruz: “Fidel Castro’s death cannot bring back his thousands of victims, nor can it bring comfort to their families. Today we remember them and honor the brave souls who fought the lonely fight against the brutal Communist dictatorship he imposed on Cuba.”

    Castro was known both for opressing and torturing his people (and more recently putting gay people in concentration camps) and for getting left-wing useful idiots to sing his praises. The sort of clueless leftists who sing the praises of Cuba’s “modern” healthcare without ever having experienced the filthy hellholes that are its hospitals firsthand. There are political prisoners who have rotted in jail for more than two decades merely for speaking out against Castro’s brutal regime.

    Those interested in the real Cuba beyond the tourist Potemkin villages for the useful idiot fellow travelers should read Michael Totten’s many dispatches from the island.

    The world is a better place for Fidel Castro’s too-long-delayed passing.

    LinkSwarm for July 1, 2016

    Friday, July 1st, 2016

    Happy Independence Day weekend! (That’s America’s Independence Day, not the newfangled UK version.) Enjoy a LinkSwarm to tide you over for the weekend:

  • Kevin Williamson explains why firearms ownership is a civil right. “It is a measure of the corruption of the Democratic party and its ability to inspire corruption in others that John Lewis, once a civil-rights leader, is today leading a movement to strip Americans of their civil rights based on secret lists of subversives compiled by police agencies and the military…The Democrats have lynching in their political DNA, and they seem to be unable to evolve past it.”
  • Hillary’s State Department just ignored FOIA requests.
  • The Clinton Foundation is Hillary’s personal piggy bank. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The left cares about ‘the people’ as much as the Soviet Communist Party cared about the workers.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Obama’s unconstitutional illegal alien amnesty remains blocked on a 4-4 Supreme Court vote.
  • Ted Cruz endorsed candidate Darryl Glenn wins the Colorado Republican Senate primary and will face incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet in November.
  • 154 million voter records exposed, revealing gun ownership, Facebook profiles, and more. Caveat: A “MacKeeper” research discovered this and MacKeeper is foul malware
  • This lengthy article in the New York Times talks about how a new Panama Canal expansion designed to handle bigger ships (and which is on the edge of opening) has numerous possible debacles due to radical underbidding by the primary contractor. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Bill de Blasio cronies are being arrested right and left. Or, keeping in mind this is de Blasio we’re talking about, left and left…
  • An Arizona Democratic lawmaker was indicted on felony charges for allegedly falsifying her application when applying for food stamps.”
  • Results of Austrian Presidential election overturned due to voting irregularities. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Brexit is just what the doctor ordered.
  • ASK KUNTZMAN!
  • Drunken wife-beater Neil Steinberg not allowed to buy a gun. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Al-Jazeera: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood? Flynn: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.” On the flip side, if Obama’s secret Middle East goal is to halt Iranian expansion, why the nuke deal?
  • Lessons from Orlando.
  • “The MSM eagerly chomps down on its ball-gag.” (Hat tip Instapundit.)
  • Cuba’s hospitals are filthy, undersupplied hellholes.
  • Behold the nightmarish portal to hell that is Arlesford! (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Texas closes in on adding 250 DPS border control troopers.
  • Ft. Worth’s superintendent’s tranny bathroom law is in violation of both Chapter 11 and 26 of the Texas Education Code.
  • LinkSwarm for June 5, 2015

    Friday, June 5th, 2015

    Another Friday, another LinkSwarm!

  • Democrats believe illegal aliens should be allowed to vote. “The Obama Administration has lost faith in the electorate and has decided to appoint a new one.” (Hat Tip: Instapundit.)
  • The ObamaCare death spiral is still coming.
  • Doctors leaving practice due to federal mandates. “EHR is health care’s Solyndra.”
  • Vermont: A funny thing happened on the way to Socialized Medicine.
  • “If there’s a more renewable resource than Clinton lies, I’m hard pressed to think what it might be.”
  • Hillary’s event ticket sales: Not setting the world on fire. (Hat tip: Moe Lane)
  • Democrats panicking over Hillary’s sleaze contemplate breaking the glass case around Michael Bloomberg.
  • And speaking of old rich white male Democrats, Lincoln Chafee joins the Presidential race, comes out against drone strikes, for the metric system and belt onions.
  • Minneapolis teacher takes middle school students on field trip to sex shop. Bonus: “Gaia Democratic School”
  • America: There’s an App for that. Cuba: There’s a line for that.
  • Another day, another Islamist suicide bombing killing 10 in Nigeria. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Professional pro-Putin Internet troll now suing her former masters.
  • France insists those damn elected representatives can’t be let anywhere near their precious global warming treaty.
  • Planned Parenthood goes ballistic over OTC birth control. It’s all about the Benjamins…
  • Consultants advise college applicants how to appear less Asian.
  • Did you know there’s a national egg shortage on?
  • Venezuela Takes The Express Lane To The Dustheap Of History

    Thursday, December 11th, 2014

    There’s been a lot of talk of how low oil prices are screwing Russia, but Venezuela is, if anything, more screwed thanks to the Magic Power of Socialism™:

    U.S. currency is vital to Venezuela, which imports as much as 80% of what it consumes; 96% of its exports are petroleum products…In effect, the one-third decline in the price of oil means that the state oil company must either raise or divert enough production because Venezuela effectively owes China 67 million barrels of oil, roughly 27 million more than it did before, for this loan alone. And there are billions of dollars in other loans to consider.

    And the outlook for the immediate future is equally grim:

    Venezuela’s economy is expected to contract in 2014 and 2015, and even though it’s already recognized as the 14th least competitive economy in the world (according to the World Economic Forum) and the eighth-worst economy for doing business (according to The World Bank), [President Nicolas] Maduro’s laws seem to discourage private investments even more. The new laws reinforce bureaucracy and the difficulty of doing business in the country, particularly in the area of taxes.

    “Increasing numbers of low-income Venezuelans are souring on Maduro as they suffer a declining economy, the highest inflation in the Americas, chronic shortages of basic goods and one of the world’s highest murder rates.”

    If Venezuela’s economy collapses, they might take Cuba down with them, since the Castro brothers are so heavily dependent on Venezuelan oil subsidies to prop up their own moribund economy.

    Compounding Venezuela’s crises is the fact that it’s probably going to default on its bonds. So they’re finally reaching the point in socialism where the run out of other people’s money. Next to that singular problem, U.S. sanctions on government Venezuelan officials for killing protestors are a trivial irritation…