Hospitals in Xinjiang aborted late-stage pregnancies and killed newborns as part of China’s mission to erase Uighur culture, a doctor who worked in the region told Radio Free Asia on Monday.
Since 2016, China has interned at least 1 million Uighurs in hundreds of prison camps, which it euphemistically calls “reeducation centers,” where Uighurs are forced to abandon their heritage and religion.
A large part of this crackdown involves limiting Uighurs’ reproductive rights and slashing the birth rate.
Snip.
Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uighur doctor who spent 15 years working in hospitals in Xinjiang and now lives in Turkey, told RFA that when a child was expected to be born into a family who already had two or three children or who’d had a child in the past three years, the pregnancy would be terminated, even at “eight and nine months.”
Sometimes medical staff members would “even kill the babies after they’d been born,” Abdulla said.
“They wouldn’t give the baby to the parents — they kill the babies when they’re born,” she said, adding: “It’s an order that’s been given from above, it’s an order that’s been printed and distributed in official documents. Hospitals get fined if they don’t comply, so of course they carry this out.”
This seems like it should be bigger news than it is.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Literally killing babies.
Literally committing genocide.
Can we all agree that this is evil?
Can someone ask Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to condemn China over this atrocity?
Biden flogs the Fine People Hoax yet again, wants to lock down the nation yet again, more DNC fallout, and a look at Biden’s foreign policy team in waiting (and how some got paid by China). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
There are a few safe bets in life – the sun will rise in the East, the mainstream media will tongue-bathe the Dems, the Never Trump sissies of the Ahoy crew will die alone, forgotten, and unloved – but there is no safer bet than on Joe Biden not taking the debate stage with Donald Trump.
If he does debate Trump, Grandpa Badfinger is toast. And if he doesn’t debate Trump, Grandpa Badfinger is also toast. Either way, that post-moderate muppet is a breakfast entrée. Dodging the debate is merely his least bad choice, sort of like going with chlamydia over syphilis.
The media and the Biden campaign are doing everything they can to avoid the moment where the public consensus coalesces around Biden’s obsolescence. You know how that goes. One day, a politician is defined by his positions. The next day, there’s a moment in time when a new perception gets locked in stone, where the mere mention of his name gets people nodding and a single word seems to define him forever. With Biden, the word will be “senile,” just like with Bill Clinton the word is “humidor.”
And Trump is going to define Slow Joe mercilessly, but not quite yet. Those of us swimming in the cesspool of politics every day see Trump’s gentle pokes about Rip van Wrinkled’s manifest mental deterioration, but it’s clear that Trump is holding his big guns in reserve for the moment. Why? Well, Trump certainly wants the Democrats to go all-in and formally nominate Joethuselah before he unleashes hell like Maximus upon my uppity German tribesman ancestors. Further, you don’t want to lower expectations so much that Oldfinger gets pronounced competent simply by appearing in public without drooling all over his bib.
But mostly, Trump knows that normal people aren’t paying attention yet. In September, they will take a break from trying not to be bankrupted by stupid pols panicking over the flu and from dealing with how their kids are not going to school because teacher unions members can’t take the same minimal risk that Trader Joe’s baggers have been enduring since Day One. When people start paying attention after Labor Day, they will be expecting to see Share A Beer Joe and instead see Share An Ensure Joe.
And the Dems know that Trump will then paint Biden in all the colors of the dementia rainbow.
Even as he was leaving office, Vice President Joe Biden and his cohorts carved out their own fiefdom within the empire of liberal philanthropy and academia. They await the time when they will be able to use the trappings of public office to spread largesse and grease palms once again. As the presumptive nominee struggles to maintain a presentable and coherent front in public, the phalanx of aides and stooges around him provide an example of how lifelong politicians build personal machines using donor money, some of it from offshore strategic rivals like China.
Snip
But then there are the benchwarmers, who lack the name recognition or ambition to hack it on their own. For them, it was announced on February 1, 2017, a mere week and a half after Biden left office, that there would be the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement(PBC), a name that perhaps Derek Zoolander brainstormed for them. But rather than have the PBC on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, it was announced at the outset that its location would be in Washington, D.C. with only a satellite office back at Penn.
The PBC’s address is 101 Constitution Ave. N.W., putting it across the street from Capitol Hill and within the sixth most expensive real estate market in the United States, averaging $32 per square foot—more than Philadelphia. Biden himself would be called the “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor,” whatever that means. In its announcement, the Penn Biden Center claimed that it “promises significant impact for both Penn’s teaching and research missions. As the Presidential Practice Professor, Biden will hold joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Arts and Sciences, with a secondary affiliation in the Wharton School.”
Biden does have a profile on Annenberg’s site as a member of the teaching faculty, but according to Philadelphia magazine in 2019 he never taught a single course despite earning $775,000 in salary over two years, almost twice the annual income of the average Penn professor.
So what exactly does the Penn Biden Center do? Looking into its staff, the PBC appears to be a cushy green room for old Obama Administration aides waiting for new gigs once Polident Joe gets back into office. It doesn’t have a class or event schedule, and only two events are listed on its Facebook page history, the last one being in Chicago in November 2017. Its Twitter account mostly retweets articles by and interviews with members of its staff on niche websites for international affairs specialists like World Politics Review and Balkan Insider. In effect, the University of Pennsylvania has loaned its branding to become an expensive PR firm for Joe Biden’s foreign policy. Luckily for Penn, it’s a win-win situation for them in terms of revenue.
In May the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint against the PBC alleging that Penn had violated federal law by not disclosing the source of $22 million in anonymous donations from China (out of a total of almost $70 million from there). When this relationship was reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a spokesperson for the American Council on Education complained that there is not enough guidance from the Department of Education about how to report the donations.
ACE, a lobbying group for colleges and universities that two months later lobbied Capitol Hill for a “floor” of $47 billion in coronavirus relief, apparently thinks that demanding disclosure of the giver’s identity for a donation of over $250,000 is a “gotcha.” And who are the people who actually run the PBC?
Ariana Berengaut (Director Programs, Partnerships, and Strategic Planning)—former speechwriter for Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, before that, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.
Spencer Boyer (Senior Fellow)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and National Intelligence Officer for Europe.
Michael Carpenter (Managing Director)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, White House foreign policy advisor to Biden, and Director for Russia on the National Security Council.
Dan Erikson (Senior Fellow)—former special advisor to Biden and senior advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department.
Juan González (Senior Fellow)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, special advisor to Joe Biden, and National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere.
Colin Kahl (Strategic Consultant)—senior advisor to both Obama and Biden on foreign policy and national security affairs. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from 2009 to 2011, National Security Advisor to Biden.
Jeffrey Prescott (Strategic Consultant)—special assistant to Obama and senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States for the NSC.
Caroline Tess (Senior Fellow)—special assistant to Obama and senior director for legislative affairs at the NSC.
More details:
In 2016 Michael Carpenter, while still serving at the Defense Department, agreed with a report by the Rand Corporation that Russia could defeat NATO in less than three days. Carpenter is a staunch supporter of increasing U.S. confrontation with Russia. In 2017 he recommended deploying a combat brigade to Eastern Europe as a deterrent in his testimony before Congress’s joint Helsinki Commission hearing, a move that the Trump Administration has agreed with through steps such as deploying 500 soldiers to Lithuania in 2019. Carpenter consistently lobbied for the successful expansion of NATO to Montenegro, while warning of “Russian influence” on its election. With an active duty military numbering only 2,400, an air force consisting largely of converted civil aircraft along with a remnant of the old Yugoslav Navy, Montenegro’s membership in NATO is more a liability than an asset.
Daniel Erikson also happens to work for Blue Star Strategies, a strategic consulting company that worked with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which Biden’s son Hunter served as a no-show board member earning at least $50,000 a month. Senate Homeland Security Committee members accused Blue Star of dragging its feet in producing documents to the committee regarding its dealings with Burisma. In June Ukraine’s anti-corruption prosecutor announced that Burisma’s founder had attempted to bribe an official probing the company in order to drop the investigation.
Potentially the most controversial PBC bullpen member is Colin Kahl, who in September 2012 defended the Obama Administration against critics from the Mitt Romney campaign about its performance during the Arab Spring in the wake of the Benghazi terror attack earlier that month. He claimed that Iran had failed to take advantage of the Arab Spring earlier that year in an op-ed for Foreign Policy. The irony of the statement is that a result of that wave of uprisings is the replacement of two autocratic but stable regimes in Yemen and Syria with bloody proxy conflicts where Iran is deeply involved.
There is apparently bad blood between Kahl and the pro-Israel community. In September 2012, Kahl was blamed by Democratic insiders for a flap at the party convention in which it was omitted that the party seeks to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In 2015, while serving as Biden’s advisor on the Iran Nuclear Deal, Kahl spoke to War on the Rocks—a national security insiders’ podcast—to defend the agreement. He brushed aside criticisms that it would lead to increased terror activity by Iran. He also dismissed criticism that the deal would encourage nuclear proliferation elsewhere.
Just six months later North Korea successfully tested its fourth nuclear weapon, thereby validating those fears. In 2018 an Israeli spy firm Black Cubewas alleged to have tried to lure Kahl and fellow PBC fellow Catherine Tess into providing information on Iranian assets that could be seized as part of civil litigation. It has been reported by Al-Monitor that Kahl is handling the Iran brief on the Biden campaign after having condemned the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, and bemoaoning subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. In May 2019 he joined Rachel Maddow in order to hype fears of a U.S. invasion of Iran by President Trump, which of course later events proved was the opposite of the president’s goal. His inclusion in a future administration is sure to lead to friction with both Israel and the Sunni monarchies on the Persian Gulf if the new administration seeks to reimpose the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Joe Biden’s response to the virus makes Trump’s look masterful. Biden and his team made a series of statements in the first few months of the year that denied the seriousness of the virus and criticized President Trump for taking steps to prevent its spread.
This, too, was to be expected. Hack that he is, Biden has been wrong on almost every national security issue for as long as anyone can remember. He even advised Barack Obama against undertaking the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Karl Rove put together a list of Biden’s greatest misses on the coronavirus. He presented it on one of the Fox News programs last night.
Here is Rove’s list:
1) Jan. 31: In response to Trump’s travel ban, Biden says “this is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia.”
2) Early February: Biden public health advisory committee member says the coronavirus is less lethal than the SARS virus and a top aide says this “is probably not a serious epidemic.”
3) Mid February: Top Biden adviser says “we don”t have a Covid epidemic, we have a fear epidemic.”
4) Late February: Biden health adviser Zeke Emmanuel says many experts view the virus “like the flu” and expect it to dissipate with warmer weather moving to the southern hemisphere. Masks will not help, he adds.
5) Early March: Biden holds a mass indoor rally and criticizes the European travel ban as ineffective and “counterproductive.”
6) Mid March: Regarding Trump’s January 31st decision to close travel to China, Biden says “stop the xenophobic fear mongering.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor David Muir on Friday that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended to him by scientists.
“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden told Muir Friday, alongside his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., during their first joint interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.
Before Trump, cartoonist Scott Adams seemed like something of a centrist. But Trump’s persuasion and Democrats clinging to the Fine People Hoax seems to have red-pilled him all the way:
If Asshole Joe Biden really believes the Fine People Hoax, he's too dumb to be president. If he knows it is fake and is using it to divide the country, he is too evil to be president.
Neither of those flaws is cancelled out by his ability to read in public or ride a bike.
If you watched Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the other big, headline speeches at the Democratic convention, you might be forgiven for thinking that you had stepped into a meeting of old-time Democrats. There was less woke, radical rhetoric than in the primaries, more invocations of old-fashioned patriotic Americana, and more efforts to sound conservative themes and reach out to small-businesspeople and churchgoers. What you might have missed was the far-reaching agenda of the Biden–Harris Democrats.
Biden talked about “ending loopholes” and rolling back Trump-era tax cuts. His actual proposal would raise $3.8 trillion in new individual and business taxes and result in a tax hike, on average, for taxpayers in every income quintile.
He spoke vaguely about climate and energy. He’s actually proposing a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” in a “clean energy future,” just as a first step. This is the “Green New Deal” in all but name, on top of a vast expansion of health-care entitlement spending from a government-run “public option” of the sort that was left out of Obamacare for being too far left. Overall, Biden is proposing some $7 trillion in additional spending, most of it permanent, which will eventually require even more enormous tax hikes than the ones he has so far detailed.
Rose McGowan brings the fire:
What have the Democrats done to solve ANYTHING? Help the poor? No. Help black & brown people? No. Stop police brutality? No. Help single mothers? No. Help children? No. You have achieved nothing. NOTHING. Why did people vote Trump? Because of you motherfuckers.
Any focus on abortion would have invited a discussion of Joe Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde amendment, the measure that since 1976 has banned federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients. For four decades, Biden portrayed his support of the Hyde amendment as a fundamental matter of conscience, only to abandon it under pressure from Democratic activists in June 2019.
The Hyde amendment has been America’s most important pro-life policy for four decades: By one estimate, it has saved 50,000 lives from abortion each year. It is also popular: A poll on the eve of the 2016 election showed Americans supported it 58 percent to 36 percent.
Democratic presidential contenders snubbed from the DNC include Tulsi Gabbard. “Gabbard was the only candidate to be denied a speaking slot despite winning delegates.”
Also not speaking at the DNC: Julian Castro, who complained about the lack of Hispanic speakers. Democrats seem to be taking Hispanics for granted this year in all-out effort to pander to black voters and woke white radicals.
Democrats have said, “we care more about the woke mob than we do about standing with cops or firefighters or working men and women,” and “are the party of the rich, they’re the party of coastal elites, they’re the party of Manhattan and San Francisco.”
Cruz said, “I think what we saw tonight was the beginning of the collapse of Joe Biden’s basement strategy. Joe Biden has been hiding in his basement since he won the nomination, but tonight was Bernie Sanders’ night. Tonight — so, John Kasich is promising voters, don’t pay attention to all the craziness on the Democratic side. Joe isn’t that crazy. Well, you know who didn’t believe John Kasich? Bernie Sanders didn’t believe John Kasich. Because Bernie Sanders stood up there and said, our radical, socialist agenda has won. We’ve taken over the Democratic Party, and Joe Biden is ours. And that really underscores the stakes of this election. If the Democrats win, you are looking at Bernie in ascension. You’re looking at AOC. You’re looking at, mark my words, Elizabeth Warren as treasury secretary. Bernie might be secretary of state. These are radicals, and that’s where the Democratic Party is.”
While I tend to view “Flight 93” thinking as hyperbolic, [Harris] does present a major threat to the constitutional order, to the economy, and to established norms. Moreover, she stands an excellent chance of succeeding Biden to the presidency should their ticket be elected in November. Kamala Harris poses a far greater danger to the Republic than Hillary Clinton. Anyone who calls himself a conservative should recognize this.
Harris’s platform is so far to the left of the mainstream that she makes Mrs. Clinton, a hero to the Left for several decades, look moderate. Clinton, for instance, said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to purchase health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges but without subsidies, which is Joe Biden’s position (according to his platform, though Biden himself often seems confused about this when publicly discussing the issue). Kamala Harris backs a single-payer federal health-care plan and did not equivocate when asked whether illegal immigrants would be covered: “Let me just be very clear about this. I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.” This would mark an end to the distinction between people who are here legally and illegally and would signal to the world’s poor that it’s time to make their break for the United States. Harris also compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to the Ku Klux Klan and said we should decriminalize unauthorized border crossings. (“I would not make it a crime punishable by jail. It should be a civil enforcement issue but not a criminal enforcement issue.”)
So: a parking ticket for coming in illegally? How is that to be seen as anything other than an engraved invitation to would-be migrants? In a Senate hearing, Harris suggested ICE should be more of a welcome wagon than an enforcement agency: “Are you aware,” she said to Ronald Vitiello, acting director of ICE, “that there is a perception that ICE is administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants? And specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America?” Neither the culture nor the federal fisc is prepared for the massive disruption likely to be unleashed if an American president so encourages illegal migration. Way back in 1994, when the Democratic Party was still concerned with what the center of the country thought and felt, Mrs. Clinton said in a House hearing that her Hillarycare plan would not be available to illegal entrants: “We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country,” she said, adding that “we know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is.”
Kamala Harris laughed uproariously at Joe Biden’s suggestion that a president is constrained by the Constitution from ruling by executive fiat. This clip ought to nauseate any constitutionalist: Even Hillary Clinton would not have gone so far as to treat the Constitution as a joke. Harris, moreover, has the most extreme position on abortion imaginable. And when an undercover journalist, David Daleiden, made the abortion lobby look bad by accurately exposing the inner doings of Planned Parenthood executives, she brought the full force of the state down on his head, raiding his home and launching a vendetta that would result in nine felony charges against him. Former Obama speechwriter and leftist pundit Jon Favreau calls it “hilarious” that anyone thinks Harris is a moderate because “she has one of the most liberal records in the U.S. Senate.”
Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism.
American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them.
Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases.
Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was laying subpoenas on organizations such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a conservative-leaning group that is critical of Democratic global-warming proposals. She demanded private information that the organizations were not legally obliged to disclose, including financial information and donor lists, in order to be able to subject the supporters of right-leaning groups to legal and financial harassment. This was, as a federal judge confirmed, an obvious and unquestionable violation of the First Amendment.
It was also a serious abuse of power. Harris’s actions were coordinated with those of then attorney general Eric Schneiderman in New York, who argued — preposterously — that Exxon’s taking a different view of global warming was a form of securities fraud. This isn’t a conspiracy theory: They held a press conference and organized their effort into a committee, which they called AGs United for Clean Power.
The Wikipedia war over Kamala Harris’ race. “The battles over Harris’s Wikipedia page played out primarily over the specific term African American.”
Hey look, it’s the hoary old “the Republican who’s now voting for a Democrat has been a Democrat all along” trick. Gets trotted out every presidential election.
During Joe Biden’s presidential nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, both his personal YouTube page and the Democratic Party’s YouTube page saw strong, negative reactions from live audiences. In fact, “Dislikes” outnumbered “Likes,” in real time.
Yet both pages’ “Dislikes” mysteriously dropped in the hours after the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had concluded. The changing statistics led some on social media to wonder if the Google-owned YouTube platform was protecting Biden.
The number of Democratic convention stream “Dislikes”–or people pressing a button saying they did not like the content onscreen–dropped on Friday below where they stood on Thursday last night.
Biden as McCain:
Biden is the Democrat's 'McCain.' He is the throw-away candidate they know can't win who has been knocking on the door for the nod for a long time. They knew McCain wasn't going to beat Obama, just like they know Biden won't beat Trump.
Michelle Obama had a lot of guts rolling out the old “kids in cages” talking point. Doesn’t she know that was an Obama/Biden policy? https://t.co/hoBJX1uv5A
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This one may be a little short because I was busy buying books last night. This roundup is also light on Democratic National Convention news because, really, who has time to watch that garbage?
Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.
But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.
Snip.
Most hated Trump not because he hated or ridiculed them, but because he found them useless, as we saw from the fixations of John Brennan and James Clapper to the dazed pundits of NeverTrump to the wise men of the retired military.
What created the hatred of Trump and his supporters, then, was not a rather heterodox political agenda (see below), but a style that took on the Left on its own terms, and shocked a Republican establishment—again not just by conjuring the specter of Lee Atwater, but by shrugging as irrelevant his ostracism by the traditional conservative beltway insider.
Overview of Trump economy snipped.
Joe Biden has claimed the recent historic establishment of diplomatic relationships between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was not of the Trump Administration’s own making, but the logical epilogue to years of hard Obama Administration foundational work.
Biden is right in a sense. For eight years, his Obama team sought to empower Iran—through the lifting of sanctions; through the flawed Iran Deal; through appeasement of Hezbollah, the Assads, and Hamas; through estrangement of the Arab Gulf States and Israel—all as a bizarre Persian/Shiite counterweight to the Sunni Arab world and the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.
Obama and Biden so succeeded that they drove Israel and Gulf States to seek an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend realist partnership, whose fruition we witnessed last week.
We forget, however, when Trump entered office, that Israel was isolated. Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States were bewildered by U.S. neutrality in the Middle East. Iran was ascendant. The “jayvees” of ISIS had overrun much of Iraq with delusions of caliphate grandeur. The Ottomanizing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was supposedly our new trusted “bridge” between East and West.
Less than four years later, Iran is isolated, broke, and a veritable client of China. ISIS was bombed out of existence. Israel and much of the Arab world are more worried about Iran than they are about each other. The Palestinians are not the key to regional peace. Turkey is recognized as the rogue that it had become while relations with Greece have warmed.
The United States is energy independent of the Middle East, as is Israel—because of the expansion of fracking and horizontal drilling that a Biden-Harris Administration claims would cease upon assuming office.
Snip.
For all the hoax of “Russian collusion,” Vladimir Putin is in terrible shape and has not fooled the administration as he did with “reset” in the Obama years. In the last four years, the United States upped sanctions on Russia, crashed the world export market of natural gas and oil so dear to Moscow, beefed up NATO spending, hectored Germany about its new energy dependence on Putin, increased U.S. military capability, reached out to frontline Eastern Europe, left an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia, obliterated Russian mercenaries in Syria, sold lethal weapons to Ukraine—even as the likes of James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and an array of retired generals sermonized that Trump was a Russian “asset.” Translated that means the president who contained Putin they loathed, and the Obama presidency that empowered him they idolized.
Snip.
Trump is neither a traditional conservative in the Ronald Reagan mode nor a centrist establishmentarian Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. But he has done more culturally for the conservative cause than any president since Calvin Coolidge. Like him or not, he has appointed more constructionist federal judges at all levels than any prior Republican president in a single term.
He likewise has been more opposed than any prior Republican to the current culture of abortion on demand. His education secretary is trying to enforce the Bill of Rights on what have become sometimes neo-fascistic college campuses, and to discourage race-based set asides and de facto discrimination on the basis of race.
He is a defender of the police while acknowledging the need for greater oversight, and opposed both violence in the streets, and the appeasement of it by blue state governors and mayors. In some sense, there are no conservatives, either by temperament or by political ability, eager to stop the summer madness of statue toppling, arson, spiraling crime, shakedowns, cancel culture and the vows of Antifa and BLM that all this is the beginning of a complete rewriting of American history and a radical recalibration of our shared futures.
Between the abyss and what goes on in Portland and the Magnificent Mile, there is for the moment nothing else but Trump standing in the breach.
No president in the history of the Republic has ever been targeted for removal by the opposition party, the permanent bureaucracy, and members of his own party, and in such an illegal and unethical manner.
There was the first impeachment effort, the Beltway punditry in early 2017 calling for his removal by coup if necessary, the voting machine suits, the Clinton-Obama-Steele subversion of the Trump campaign and transition, the Hollywood assassination chic, the effort to take out former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the farce of the 25th Amendment that included the bathos of high federal officials contemplating wearing wires in private conservations with the president to the psychodrama of Professor Bandy Lee testifying before Congress about Trump’s mental state, the silly Emolument Clause gambit (Trump has lost over $1 billion while in office and taking no salary), the subversion of the FISA courts, the Russian hoax, Robert Mueller’s two-year long and $35 million witch hunt, the fabricated Steele dossier implanted in the bowels of the Obama government and media, the one-phone-call impeachment circus, the revolt of the retired generals, and what has rightly lately been called “coup porn,” the hysteria over Ukraine and the caricaturing of Trump in 2020 as Typhoid Mary, Herbert Hoover, and Bull Connor as the Left weaponized the contagion, quarantine, and rioting.
The Left, the media, and the NeverTrump Right rarely now any more argue all of the above was warranted or based on verifiable wrongdoing, but see the mish-mash instead as a righteous “any means necessary” tactic to achieve the noble end of destroying a president that they detest.
That Trump is still standing is an unrecognized tribute to his resilience, stamina, and willpower to fight it out to the bitter end.
His critics say 2020 is not 2016. This time the polls are right on, not rigged by the sort who trafficked in absurd Russian hoaxes or were mesmerized by Michael Avanetti. The silent Trump voters no longer exist, they add. The suburban mom, we are told, fears Trump’s temper more than Antifa. The fence-sitter is bothered more by tweeting than Biden’s ever-longer moments of confused silence. And on and on.
Perhaps.
But Americans at some point empathize with an underdog fighter on behalf of what they fear may be a fading America, even someone they are not always fond of, but who does not give up when bullied and subjected to a level of unwarranted abuse that they themselves know they could never endure. The Left never wished to beat Trump at the polls (indeed they feared such an ordeal); they instead wanted to destroy his person, his family, and everyone who followed him.
That Trump withstood such illegal, unconstitutional, and unethical venom also says something about those who dished it out—and, in the end, did so viciously and yet so impotently.
One of the more perplexing things was the DNC giving a speaking slot to former Ohio governor and noted mailman’s son John Kasich. Kasich brings slightly less excitement than dryer lint to any gathering he graces but what was most amusing was that during the somnambulant lead-up to the DNC, the Democrats were acting like Kasich was a real big get for them.
He’s a milquetoast squish Republican whom no Republicans like anymore, so he tucked tail and went begging for attention crumbs from the Democrats, which is the way of the spineless squishes. After backstabbing his own party to score points with the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the media, Kasich then — as Matt details at Townhall — crapped all over his hosts by disparaging Bartender of the Year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Speaking of the Russian collusion hoax, Kevin Clinesmith, the now Ex-FBI lawyer near the center of Crossfire Hurricane, just pled guilty, “admitting that he altered an email that he used to apply for a FISA warrant against former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page…The guilty plea marks the first conviction in the probe of the Russia investigation led by U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham.”
Of all of the Obama administration loyalists who contributed to the Russia collusion hoax, Clinesmith is the one most obviously guilty of a felony: he altered an email he received from the CIA to say that Carter Page was NOT a CIA source, when in fact the email said Page WAS a CIA source, and submitted that fake document to the federal court in order to obtain a FISA warrant. That is worth five years in prison and, of course, the end of his legal career. Clinesmith’s guilty plea is significant, in part, because he may be willing to implicate others who are higher in the DOJ chain of command.
— Waiting For Durham – Brian Cates (@drawandstrike) August 16, 2020
Ninth Circuit Court rules that magazine limit bans are an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment. “It should be noted that this will likely go to a full hearing of the 9th Circuit, but it also should be noted that the court is now majority Republican-appointed. If a full hearing brings the same result, then this all but forces Chief Justice John Roberts to stop being a coward and to take this up.” Flipping the Ninth is a huge achievement for the Trump Administration.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, the science behind Beirut’s big boom, and more Democrats destroying their own cities.
It’s supposed to hit 105°F in Austin today. Stay frosty…
If Obama had done this, it would be front page news on every paper in America proclaiming what a “historic” peacemaker Obama was. Since no Democrat can take the credit, newspapers that hate Trump and Israel have been downplaying the news as much as possible.
Since people are always talking about “October Surprises,” here’s a possibility: Saudi Arabia and Israel signing their own peace treaty and full diplomatic recognition. Israel and the Saudis have been secretly cooperating against the Iran-Syria axis for quite some time. And now there are public signs of a thaw, including positive depictions of Jews in a new TV drama shown on Saudi TV.
New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.
And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.
“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”
Reopening means swimming against their anti-Trump base and teachers union donors’ full-court press to amp school funding and slash teacher duties. That means the below-surface financial and political pressure Cuomo, Pelosi, and Schumer are under to make this kind of a reversal must be huge. It’s likely coming from not only internal polling but also early information about just how many people have left New York and New York City, as well as interpersonal intelligence from their influential social circles.
This means three things. First, the pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. Second, Democrats’ hard opposition to school reopenings has been politically devastating. Third, all the push polls and media scaremongering promoting the idea that most parents shouldn’t and wouldn’t send their kids back to school have failed.
However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.
Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.
One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.
“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”
She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.
“We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”
Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.
The Lucerne, at 79th Street and Amsterdam, and the Hotel Belleclaire, at 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.
“Minneapolis Forcing Riot-Wrecked Businesses To Pay Property Taxes Before Getting Permits To Rebuild.” Pay property taxes for what, since they voted to disband the police. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) (Update: Fortunately, somebody handed the City of Minneapolis a clue-by-four.)
Florida Democrats have a problem: there were supposed to be more of them by now.
Following narrow losses in 2018 races for Florida governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats emerged from the midterms with a new resolve to register more voters in the nation’s largest swing state as a path to victory in 2020. Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, fresh off a stinging 34,000-vote loss, vowed to “flip Florida blue” by registering or “re-engaging” 1 million voters, including 200,000 new Democrats added by the Florida Democratic Party.
But those initiatives fell well short of their goals. And with seven weeks until mail ballots go out in the Nov. 3 election between presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, Florida Republicans are closer to parity in voter registration than they’ve been in decades — a dynamic that may portend yet another hard-fought, narrowly decided presidential election.
“We won the voter registration war,” Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters said last week.
Voter registration — the grunt work of politics — sets the foundation for campaign season. For Florida Democrats, who historically have had a harder time turning out their voters than Republicans, it’s even more crucial.
When former President Barack Obama first won Florida in 2008, he entered the final months of the campaign with an advantage of more than 500,000 registered Democratic voters. That lead has steadily dwindled, dropping to about 259,000 in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by 112,000 votes.
New data posted online Wednesday by the Florida Division of Elections showed that, as of July 20, when books closed on eligible voters for the upcoming Aug. 18 primary, Democrats led Republicans in the state by 240,423 people — about 5,000 fewer than at the same point in 2018.
The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.
No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.
Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.
The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.
By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.
Snip.
Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.
DC comics decided it wanted to get woke, so it’s no surprise that Warner Media decided they needed massive layoffs.
It’s a “bloodbath” at the WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics, with the Editor in Chief, the Publisher, and one third of the editorial staff sacked.
Included in the sackings is — this is a rumor as of yet, not confirmed — leftwing SJW ideologue Andy Khouri, one of the absolute cancers killing the industry, who brought in GamerGate skel Zoe Quinn to “write” “comics” for DC, despite her having no comic book experience and no writing experience (outside Depression Quest and a failed kickstarter). Khouri filled DC’s Vertigo imprint with angry yet untalented SJW freaks; Vertigo was cancelled within a year.
DC had already laid off people last year, and now has to cut even more. Co-publisher Dan DiDio was fired last year, leaving the other co-publisher, Jim Lee, supposedly in charge; now Jim Lee has been pushed out of that position, though he’ll probably be kept in some other role. (He’s a major comic book artist.)
Why did this happen to DC Comics?
Let’s ask Wonder Woman and see if she can tell us.
Oh yeah, everyone involved in this deserved to lose their job:
America:
As a creative Director, this is one of the best ads I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen and worked on a lot across different industries.@realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/KcTje7ESIO
Driving back from a barbecue road trip Saturday, I saw a Trump 2020 billboard, which was simplicity itself:
TRUMP: JOBS
BIDEN: MOBS
This is pretty interesting:
Justice Kavanaugh issued a tactical nuke on George Soros & Globalism.
SCOTUS has ruled Organizations affiliated to the “Open Society” lose the protection of 1A and can be treated as international threats as this impacts supporters in the US and abroad.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian™ (@TRHLofficial) August 13, 2020
Google puts its thumb on the scale yet again:
I assumed this was a joke, but it’s real: if you Google “socialism and racism,” the top result you’re offered will be “capitalism and racism.” Big Tech gets more openly ideological by the day. And weird that one of the world’s most profitable companies hates capitalism so much. pic.twitter.com/vhSqflY74g
“I know just the thing to make him complete: Some bacon! I don’t know if it’s cooked, I don’t want to know if it’s cooked. All I need to know is that I get to give him some creepy bacon fingers!
Wants no part of the goat rodeo:
Good morning, Twitter. When you're just trying to get your drunk friend Steve home again and he wants no part of it. pic.twitter.com/5nQv467UnL
After Beijing officials have repeatedly charged Washington with violating the decades-long status quo “One China policy”, and amid ratcheting tensions over Taiwan given the highest-level meeting between Washington and the self-ruled island in decades is currently taking place with Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar meeting government officials in Taipei Monday, the region is on edge after satellite images showing a significant Chinese military build-up near the island have reportedly emerged.
The New Zealand Herald reports the alarming development that “satellite images reportedly show amphibious armored vehicles and mobile missile launchers massing at military bases near the island nation.”
Specifically, according to the report, the images show “the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moving the military vehicles into the Eastern Theatre Command on China’s coastal cities across the strait from Taiwan, with missile launchers well within range to hit any targets in Taiwan.”
It comes after threats and counter-threats of military build-up between the two, with regional analysts cited in the report saying there’s currently high risk for military clash or incident.
While it’s unclear where the newly published image featured in the New Zealand Herald is ultimately sourced from (the satellite images first appeared in Kanwa Defence Review – a Canadian military magazine focused on East Asian affairs and diplomacy), many are convinced that Beijing is sending a clear signal to Washington and Taipei. However, the satellite image could also simply reveal a military base vehicle storage depot, common at most any nation’s military bases.
I’ve covered the slow motion Chinese-Indian War before, but that’s not going away any time soon. Both side continue their military build-up along the Line of Actual Control.
Tensions are also high between Greece and Turkey, with Turkey sending a military escort along with an oil exploration ship into (disputed) Greek waters.
Tension remained high Tuesday between Greece and Turkey, both of which have warships in the eastern Mediterranean after Turkey sent a research vessel to carry out seismic research for energy resources in an area Greece says is on its continental shelf.
Greece will be requesting an emergency meeting of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council, the prime minister’s office announced following a meeting between Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias.
Ankara announced on Monday that its research vessel Oruc Reis and two support vessels would be operating in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and Greece until Aug. 23. The vessel arrived in the area Monday morning, escorted by Turkish warships.
Greece slammed the decision as an illegal act that infringed on its sovereign rights, saying the Turkish research vessel was inside an area covered by the Greek continental shelf. Greek warships were in the area and were monitoring the Oruc Reis, and the military was on alert, officials said.
NATO allies and neighbors Greece and Turkey have traditionally had testy relations and have been at odds for decades over a wide variety of issues. The two have come to the brink of war three times since the mid-1970s, including once over drilling exploration rights. Recent discoveries of natural gas and drilling plans across the east Mediterranean have led to renewed tension.
Yeah, but Greek-Turkish enmity goes back much farther than that, almost a millennium back, to when the Turkic Islamic Seljuk Empire started their conquest of the Hellenized Byzantine Empire’s Anatolia, up through the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the Ottoman conquest of almost all of Greece over the next hundred years. There then followed many unsuccessful Greek revolts, until Greece threw off the Ottoman yoke with the Greek War of independence (1821-1830). The two have fought each other several times since then, until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of the modern state of Turkey and the Grecco-Turkish War (1919-1922), where a Greek attempt to seize back Anatolian land led to a disasterous defeat culminating in the Great Fire of Smyrna. And don’t forget the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, resulting in the effective division of the island.
Are any of these actually going to blossom into full-blown war? I suspect China is just sabre-rattling over Taiwan. Their best play would seem to be to wait for the possibility of a Biden Presidency to escape the vice that President Trump’s sanctions have put them into. And China thinks it can continue to eat away at Indian territory if it just bides its time.
As far as a new Greek-Turkish War, that’s a more likely possibility, because the two really do hate each other. But one wonders whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ploy of another military adventure to distract Turkish voters from the quagmire of his current military adventures in Syria (yes, two, if you count the Afrin-Idlib incursion separate from the Kurdish buffer zone) will play well with Turkish voters.
The post title is not an invocation, but a reference to pioneering punk band Fear’s song of the same name from their album The Record
Sometimes you do calculations and get a result that you know must be wrong, and you report them anyway so others can spot your errors. Reports had the explosion shattering windows 10 kilometers away, and doing damage to the Beirut airport, so I set out to calculate the explosive yield using the Nukemap, based on shattering windows at the airport (the 1 psi overpressure ring) and ignoring radiation effects. (The nukemap interface is far more user friendly than the “Nuclear bomb Effects Computer” at the back of Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.)
Here’s the map with the resulting 1 psi ring just reaching the airport:
That’s a blast effect map for a 300 kiloton blast.
That has to be wrong, since the devastation is nowhere near that immense, and I can’t fathom even having enough space to store that much ANFO or PETN in one location. (And it was obviously a non-nuclear blast, due to lack of radiation and the color of the blast itself.)
So let’s look at some comparable explosions:
The 2015 Tianjin blast, consisting of about 800 tons of ammonium nitrate:
It’s reported that the port is under unofficial Hazbollah control, and wide-spread rumor is that it was a Hezbollah munitions or rocket factory that went up, but I haven’t seen any confirmation of this.
In the fire before the big explosion, fireworks or munitions are clearly seen going off.
The speed of the blast makes me think it was not TNT or a BLEVE. That explosion went up fast, and all at once. Here’s a Tweeter that suggests it was ammonia nitrate:
CHEMISTRY FACT: Explosives have characteristic "detonation velocities" at which shockwaves expand. Smartphone video records at 30 FPS, so the adjacent frames here suggest the front expands at ~100 m/(1/30 sec), or 3,000 m/sec. Consistent with ammonium nitrate, not black powder. pic.twitter.com/DDoVJxY3gP
And indeed that’s what the government has come out to say it is:
BREAKING: Lebanese Prime Minister says #Beirut explosions caused by an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse. He vows to punish officials responsible. 50+ dead, 3,000 injured, hospitals overwhelmed.
But how do you abandon 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate? I know Lebanon is not exactly run on western efficiency, but that much exploding stuff just lying around for six years does rather strain credibility.
But to return to the title question: ammonium nitrate is roughly 42% as effective as TNT. Which means the explosion would have been about 1.155 kilotons, or less than 1/15th the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Assuming that’s correct, here’s the revised nukemap blast:
Somehow that blast radius seems too small, as the damage and overpressure wave seemed to travel much farther than shown here. But you wouldn’t want to stand next to it.
I wrote Lebanon expert Michael Totten to ask about the blast, and he said he heard that the Lebanese Army has been storing confiscated high explosives there since 2014. If we assume that it’s ANFO rather than straight ammonium nitrate, that’s about 72% as effective as TNT, and with just under twice the detonation velocity of ammonium nitrate. That yields a blast of 1.98 kilotons. The nukemap for that:
That seems to accord a bit better with blast observations.
Biden promises to shovel trillions into Social Justice and green energy ratholes, how Democrats plan to steal the election, more Slow Joe verbal stumbles, and a potential VP pick has a commie past. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden says he wants equality. Who could be against that? But if just declaring yourself in favor of equality were enough, we would not still be arguing about equality in 2020. As always, when politicians talk about inequality, watch your wallet. And in this case, watch the Constitution, too.
In the past week, the Biden campaign has announced plans of Castro-esque length aimed at racial equality and women’s equality. We suppose we should at least welcome Biden’s continued willingness to use that old-fashioned word “women.” But Biden is so stuck in the past that he would pronounce the Equal Rights Amendment already ratified based on state legislative approvals in the 1970s. The deadline for the expiration of those long-ago votes was so clear, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg considers them dead letters. Biden would go further, demanding Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical-feminist 1970s treaty under which even Scandinavian countries get hectored for allowing women to assume the primary role in child-rearing. Biden would also restore the Obama-era unilateral executive fiat under which domestic violence and sexual violence are made the basis for political asylum, a position with no basis in the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and no limiting principle.
Human rights get rough treatment under the plans. Biden proposes to roll back due-process protections for the accused in campus sexual-assault cases. The secret ballot for union elections is to be replaced by reviving “card check” elections. Biden once posed as a pro-lifer reluctantly supporting legal abortion, while opposing — for four decades — taxpayer-funded abortion. So much for that. He pledges that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade,” and that he will “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” restore U.S. funding to the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, and “restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate” to ignore the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and restart the government’s assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Many of the proposals boil down to the same old thing: more federal spending of taxpayer money, more power and goodies for unions, more workplace regulations, more dividing people up by race. The price tag of all these initiatives adds up to some $7 trillion in new spending, most of it permanent. Right off the bat, a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” is pledged in a “clean energy future,” with the restriction that “disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment” — a telltale sign that this is more about spreading money around to favored constituencies than about “science.”
The Biden plan requires we eliminate all greenhouse gases from the electricity grid that powers the country by 2035. As is usual, Biden is an underachieving. We’re all supposed to be dead in 10 years if you believe the climate alarmists. This deadline is just more proof that no one does.
As Reason editor Nick Gillespie pointed out, the current plan is just another way to pander to organized labor. He also correctly pointed out that there is no way we should be spending $2 trillion after all the pandemic spending. However, you can be sure that it will not deter Biden.
However, the Guardian is also pointing out what serious opposition the plan will face. The program requires building tens of thousands of new wind turbines and millions of new solar panels. These numbers are likely an underestimate. Renewable energy sources are very low-density and not well suited to powering urban areas. There are also some areas of the country where neither would be particularly efficient.
Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda had reached the most elite quarters of U.S. foreign policy. Aguirre had started out of school as a fellow in the White House and a decade later had become chief of staff to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Chadda, who joined the Pentagon out of college as a speechwriter, had become a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in even less time. Now, Chadda had a long-shot idea.
They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world.
Snip.
The problem for Aguirre and Chadda was that neither young man was a marquee name. Chadda realized that the latest crop of senior officials hadn’t yet started their own named consultancies. “The thought for us was to build a living and breathing platform, with those who are enthusiastic about serving again,” he said. Staying up late one night, they drafted a plan and came up with the first target they would pitch.
Michèle Flournoy had served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. Both Aguirre and Chadda had known her well in the Obama administration. Since leaving office, she’d spent several years in consulting and was hitting her stride. With Flournoy as senior adviser, Boston Consulting Group’s defense contracts grew from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. Before she joined, according to public records, BCG had not signed any contracts with the Defense Department.
Flournoy, while consulting, joining corporate boards, and serving as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, had also become CEO of the Center for a New American Security in 2014. The think tank had an annual budget of about $9 million, and defense contractors donated at least $3.8 million while she was CEO. By 2017, she was making $452,000 a year.
If a Democrat were to win office, she would likely become the first woman defense secretary. She had considered an offer to serve as deputy to Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, but ultimately withdrew from the vetting process and stuck to consulting. “That’s more of a labor of love,” she told me. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important.”
Intrigued by Aguirre and Chadda’s idea of starting her own shop, she had one condition: find another big name, so it wouldn’t just be Flournoy and Associates.
They needed another co-founder. Establishing a new firm was an investment and a risk, and many Obama officials were already spoken for, some headhunted by corporations or consultancies, others returning to academic appointments or finding respite in research institutions—many wearing all those hats at once.
Flournoy could carry her own private practice, but she didn’t want a firm with her name on it alone. The trio reached out to defense and intelligence honchos, but with no luck. Then a particular Washington fixture came to light.
He had been Vice President Joe Biden’s right-hand man for almost two decades and finished out the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state. He was known for his unimpeachable ethics. Having written Biden’s speeches for years, he had started to enunciate with the vice president’s drawl when he appeared on CNN. He had never cashed in on his international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders.
His name was Tony Blinken. With his commitment to join Flournoy as founding partner, a new strategic consultancy was born. They called it WestExec Advisors.
Add Avril Haines, another Obama alumnus, to the list of names.
If you believe that personnel is policy, it’s worth reading the whole thing. WestExec sucked up a lot of defense contractor consulting cash.
They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically. They feel Covid-19 was not Trump’s fault, and he’s doing the best he can to contain it. They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops. They don’t want historic monuments torn down. And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.
These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense. And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.
These voters may sound like typical Fox News watchers, but, significantly, the overwhelming majority are not. Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.
Reading between the lines: “These people are beyond the reach of, or see through, the national MSM preference falsification system.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pledged $20 million this cycle to oppose Democratic-backed efforts to ease voting restrictions while Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said his campaign has assembled 600 attorneys as a bulwark against election subterfuge.
With a little more than three months until Election Day, the voting rules in key battleground states are the focus of bitterly partisan court fights that could influence the outcome of the presidential race. These include lawsuits to expand mail-in voting in Texas, extend vote-by-mail deadlines in key Rust Belt swing states and restore the voting rights of up to one million indigent Floridians with felony records.
At present, the Democrats are attempting to unseat an incumbent president by devising a plan where their candidate doesn’t have to be seen in public for most of the general election campaign. They’re desperate to keep Joe Biden hidden until as many early and mail-in votes as possible are cast for him because they know that the first time he’s on his own in public he’s going to pull down his mask and start sniffing strangers, all the while barking, “Barack likes me!”
On the rare occasions when the idiot in the basement is let off-leash by his wife and handlers, he’s babbling about President Trump trying to “steal” the election. He keeps saying it, too, most recently at a virtual fundraiser hosted by one of the celebrities Hillary Clinton thought would wish her to victory.
Snip.
In each one of these “steal the election” rants, Biden immediately rambles on about mail-in ballots. Again, that’s all they’ve got and they know it. That’s where the real election-stealing can happen and it’s not going to be done by the Republicans.
The Democrats have shown — especially in the Trump era — that most of what they throw at the Republicans is just a bunch of twisted political psychological projection.
For example, take the absurd notion that Dems have recycled from 2016. They are again insisting that President Trump won’t accept the election results, giving it a minor update, saying that he won’t leave the White House now that he’s the incumbent.
This from the party whose vanquished alcoholic grandmother from 2016 is still going on television and saying that the election was stolen from her. Throw in Stacey Abrams and her ongoing psychotic break about being the real governor of Georgia and I think we can see which side has a difficult time accepting the results of an election.
In fact, the violence we’re seeing now has more to do with hating Trump than it does with the death of George Floyd. The Democrats began their “peaceful protests” almost the moment Trump was elected and have been ranging back and forth between simple public incivility and violence ever since. It’s been one long tantrum about not accepting the 2016 election results.
“It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of s–t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s–t’, ” Sanders co-chair Nina Turner told The Atlantic.
Turner, a former Ohio state senator, was quoted in an article analyzing Trump’s paths to re-election, including by exploiting disaffected supporters of Sanders’ socialist campaign, which lost to Biden despite winning the first three state Democratic contests this year.
UK’s Sunday Expresshas a poll up showing President Trump leading Biden by a couple of points:
The third in a series of monthly Democracy Institute/ Sunday Express polls has given President Trump a surprise lead over his Democrat rival of 48 percent to 46 percent, his clearest lead yet.
Crucially, President Trump has a lead of 48 percent to 43 percent in the swing states Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which would put him back in the White House with an electoral college tally of 309 to Biden’s 229.
Specifically, in Florida Trump has a 47 to 45 point lead, Minnesota (where the black lives matters protests began) a 46/45 lead, and New Hampshire a 46/43 lead.
The polling suggests Mr Trump is emerging as the race leader because of a belief he is best in handling the economy.
With a third of voters putting the economy as the top election issue and 66 percent thinking that the economy is bouncing back after coronavirus, voters believe that Trump is better for the economy by 57 percent to 43 percent.
Snip.
According to the poll 71 percent of Trump voters are “shy” to admit it compared to 66 percent a month ago.
However, 79 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 41 percent of Biden voters, two points lower than a month ago.
Meanwhile, only 4 percent of Trump voters believe they could change their mind while 10 percent of Biden voters could switch.
And here’s a Twitter thread on just that question:
Joe Biden last year in Keene, New Hampshire: "I’ve been here a number of times…I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?” pic.twitter.com/YZBP4ybQ3z
Democrats are waking up to the terrifying realization that if #HollowJoe debates, he's done. And if he doesn't debate, he's done because he didn't debate.
Dems also suspect they really DID push Trump supporters to lie to pollsters. #Landslide2020
Bill Clinton’s ex-pres secretary (not him, not her, yeah, him) wants you to know that Biden can still lose. But you have to wade through Democratic Party talking points to get to that, so I’ve saved you some time…
‘Squad’ Member Tlaib Won’t Endorse Biden. She supported Sanders in the primaries.
“Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close To A VP Pick He Can Smell Her.”
Dawn breaks in the crowded prison cell. Not everyone is asleep — conditions are so cramped in the 70-square-yard space that 15 of the 60 inmates have to stand to give others their turn to lie down.
The lack of privacy is absolute. Toilet breaks are rationed — two minutes at a time — and in full gaze of the others.
Glass walls, cameras and microphones mean that every word and deed is recorded.
Informants placed in each cell even note down what people say in their sleep and pass it on to guards.
As with every other day, the morning begins with compulsory singing of Communist Party songs, praising the glorious motherland and its wise leader, Xi Jinping.
Then their only meal of the day arrives. Watery cabbage soup, served with a small lump of steamed dough. If they’re lucky, they may get a few grains of rice as well.
Snip.
Morning is indoctrination. Inmates — hundreds of them, all shaven-headed — sit in a vast echoing room, listening to hours of lectures on the evils of religion
The monotony of the lessons is mental torture. At the end of the class, inmates are asked ‘is there a God?’ The only permitted answer is ‘no’.
Every waking moment is an onslaught on their cherished beliefs and traditions. The half-starved inmates are even forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, in defiance of their Muslim faith.
Afternoon brings interrogations. To break their mental resistance, inmates are forced to watch others being tortured before their own sessions of questioning.
They are made to denounce friends and family, to confess to fictitious crimes such as bomb-making and espionage, and to express abject contrition — even for such harmless acts as having a copy of the Koran. Any resistance brings beatings, electric shocks and sleep deprivation.
Nakedness is another dehumanising tactic. Nudity is taboo in Islam, but prisoners of all ages are made to parade before each other and in view of the guards.
For women, humiliating gynaecological inspections are mandatory. Rape is routine.
(Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.) Previous posts on China’s concentration camp system for Uighers can be found here and here.
This is pretty horrifying: “China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization.”
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.
While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
Last week, drone footage, verified by Western intelligence agencies, emerged from Northern China. It showed Uighur Muslims bound and blindfolded, with shaven heads, being loaded onto trains that were likely headed for detention camps. In a BBC interview, British journalist Andrew Marr demanded answers from Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom. Xiaoming accused “so-called Western intelligence agencies” of making “false accusations against China.” The population of Xinjiang had doubled in 40 years, he said, which clearly proved that “ethnic cleansing” and “so-called forced abortions” had not occurred. Marr, unconvinced, retorted, “According to your own local government statistics, the population growth in Uighur jurisdictions in that area has fallen by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018. 84 percent.”
How can that be so? A recent report by the Associated Press, compiling “government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor” gives an idea.
Over the past four years, the Chinese government has spent tens of millions of dollars to violently hijack the functioning reproductive systems of minority women. In 2017, according to official directives uncovered by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, government officials backed by armed law-enforcement officers were instructed to “leave no blind spots,” “contain illegal births and lower fertility rates,” “test all who need to be tested,” and “detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”
The AP report found that “having too many children” is a “major reason people are sent to detention camps,” that “parents of three or more [children] are ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines,” and that “police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.” The report also contains shocking witness testimony:
“Tursunay Ziyawudun said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb.”
“Gulbahar Jelilova confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their children. She also saw a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant. And she met doctors and medical students who were detained for helping Uighurs dodge the system and give birth at home.”
Gulzia Mogdia was also forced to have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. “Medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body,” after which she was “taken home and told to rest, as [officials] planned to take her to a camp.”
What does the “reproductive freedom” crowd have to say about this outrage? We all know what: Exactly nothing.
The United States champions a free and open Indo-Pacific. Today we are strengthening U.S. policy in a vital, contentious part of that region – the South China Sea. We are making clear: Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.
In the South China Sea, we seek to preserve peace and stability, uphold freedom of the seas in a manner consistent with international law, maintain the unimpeded flow of commerce, and oppose any attempt to use coercion or force to settle disputes. We share these deep and abiding interests with our many allies and partners who have long endorsed a rules-based international order.
These shared interests have come under unprecedented threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing uses intimidation to undermine the sovereign rights of Southeast Asian coastal states in the South China Sea, bully them out of offshore resources, assert unilateral dominion, and replace international law with “might makes right.”
Beijing’s approach has been clear for years. In 2010, then-PRC Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told his ASEAN counterparts that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” The PRC’s predatory world view has no place in the 21st century.
The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region. Beijing has offered no coherent legal basis for its “Nine-Dashed Line” claim in the South China Sea since formally announcing it in 2009. In a unanimous decision on July 12, 2016, an Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention – to which the PRC is a state party – rejected the PRC’s maritime claims as having no basis in international law. The Tribunal sided squarely with the Philippines, which brought the arbitration case, on almost all claims.
As the United States has previously stated, and as specifically provided in the Convention, the Arbitral Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both parties. Today we are aligning the U.S. position on the PRC’s maritime claims in the SCS with the Tribunal’s decision. Specifically:
The PRC cannot lawfully assert a maritime claim – including any Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claims derived from Scarborough Reef and the Spratly Islands – vis-a-vis the Philippines in areas that the Tribunal found to be in the Philippines’ EEZ or on its continental shelf.
Beijing’s harassment of Philippine fisheries and offshore energy development within those areas is unlawful, as are any unilateral PRC actions to exploit those resources. In line with the Tribunal’s legally binding decision, the PRC has no lawful territorial or maritime claim to Mischief Reef or Second Thomas Shoal, both of which fall fully under the Philippines’ sovereign rights and jurisdiction, nor does Beijing have any territorial or maritime claims generated from these features.
The Chinese long ago borrowed the concept of the political officer (“Zampolit”) from the Soviet Union. The political officer represents the Communist Party and has the authority to overrule any order a military commander gives. In reality, the political officer usually acts as a combined morale and special events officer. The political officers are primarily responsible for preventing anything happening in their unit that would embarrass the party. For naval zampolits that meant watching out for signs of mutiny or sailors planning to seek asylum in a foreign port.
Unlike the Russian naval zampolit, the Chinese counterpart, called a political commissar is considered the equal of the regular naval commander and his superior when it comes to a “special mission”, like deliberately harassing foreign warships or opening fire on anyone. The political commissar is the same rank as the ship captain and can overrule the ship commander at any time and in any situation. It was not always that way.
An important change took place in 2018 when naval political commissars were given equal authority with the captain as “mission commander” and is expected to replace the captain if the captain is disabled by injury or sickness. The normal second-in-command (the XO or executive officer) becomes the XO for the political commissar and the captain and third, not second, in command. The practical problem with this is that the captain and XO have spent their entire careers (fifteen or more years) learning how to run a ship and supervise the crew. In contrast, the political commissar learned enough tech stuff to be more annoying. The political commissar was a professional busybody, scold and snitch. The political commissar can end the career of the captain, XO or any other officer by simply making a series of uncomplimentary reports.
The 2018 change was part of a program that began in 2016 throughout the military as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) sought to improve its control over the military. In the navy that meant the political commissar had the ultimate responsibility for achieving goals assigned to a ship. The captain is not the true commander of the ship in the Western sense. He is there to see that technical details are well taken care of and that would include taking change during very bad weather or some kind of technical (fire, explosion) problem aboard ship. The political commissar is expected to personally undertake particularly dangerous leadership missions, although only those he is qualified to deal with. That means political commissars have led boarding parties in dangerous situations but not entrusted with command during damage control situations.
The full impact of the 2016-18 “reforms” to improve CCP control of the military are still working themselves out in the navy. Western, especially American, captains are being warned that their Chinese counterparts will probably not react as quickly to an emergency or unexpected situation that that should be taken into account, or taken advantage of.
Another reason for the 2016-18 reforms was to reduce corruption in the military. In theory, political officers are supposed to prevent their commanders from getting involved in fiscal corruption, but often it’s the other way around, with the political commissars getting involved in illegal money-making schemes first. The CCP is trying to purge the political officer ranks of dishonest and unreliable elements. It is slow going. This has caused more friction between commanders and their political officers. That tends to reduce the effectiveness of the unit these two officers are in charge of. There is no easy solution to this problem.
Snip.
There’s another leadership problem China has to deal with, a problem similar to the one that seriously hurt Japan’s effort against the United States during World War II. This is the fact that the Japanese Army then, like the Chinese Army now, is the senior service to the extent that generals can overrule admirals and generally interfere in navy matters that the army generals really know little about. This is already causing China problems and there is no solution in sight. This is particularly true when it comes to joint training. In wartime, this “army runs the show” sort of thing is a serious problem, just read any history that covers the Japanese army and navy relationships during World War II.
An offshoot of the army domination problem is that there is little real joint (all services working together) planning. Currently, the Chinese army tells the navy and air force what it wants done and that is the end of that. The Chinese understand that their next war will likely be in the Pacific, not mainland China. The navy should be in the lead here but it isn’t. Worse, naval officers who spend their entire careers learning how to run a ship, eventually as captain, have to accept being second-guessed or overruled by a less experienced (in running a ship) political officer.
“US House of Representatives passes NDAA amendment slamming Chinese aggression against India.” (From Hindustan Times. Judging from Google News, there’s precious little coverage of this resolution in American sources.)
“LA Times Publishes Beijing-Funded Propaganda.” “The eight-page advertorial, called “China Watch,” was tucked towards the back of the paper’s 61-page Sunday edition. With articles designed to look like legitimate newspaper columns, the insert presents a rosy view of the Chinese economy and its businesses.”
Sobering:
If you combine Chinese Fentanyl overdose deaths with coronavirus deaths, China has already killed more Americans than World War 2.
Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.
Well, unpleasant for you.
Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.
You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so.
After all, President Hillary Clinton did.
Didn’t there arise in your mind, that agonizing Wednesday morning after Mrs. Clinton’s ruination, just the faintest notion that you had been lied to? You tracked the polls, and you reviewed the percentages – most hovering above 90% – that assured you that the glass ceiling was in for an epic shattering. And yet, no shattering was forthcoming. Whether expressly or by omission, you were lied to.
And it is happening again.
“Trump Admin Tells Minnesota Governor To Get Bent Over $16 Million Aid Request Following Riots.” If Democratic officials refuse to defund their own cities from hard-left rioters and thugs, how is that the rest of the nation’s problem?
President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was great.
First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”
Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.
Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”
Democrat M. J. Hegar won her runoff with Royce West to face incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn in November. Cahnmann thinks Hegar is a much better candidate than West, but she’s not going to get the mountains of money and fawning media Beto O’Rourke got in 2018, nor are the demographic voting dynamics of a presidential election year going to be nearly as friendly to her.
Speaking of which: “Ilhan Omar’s Payments To Husband’s Firm Top $1 Million.” She’s certainly adapted quickly to the Washington Way…
Former Auburn football coach and Donald trump-endorsement recipient Tommy Tuberville wins Alabama senate primary over Jeff Sessions. I fully expect Tuberville to crush fluke democratic incumbent Dough Jones in the fall.
Perhaps no phenomenon is more studied, marveled, and desired in the world of high tech and science than the mystery of serendipity. In seemingly every industry, CEOs pay millions in consulting, design, and architectural costs to multiply and optimize the number of chance encounters between their most creative employees — and hopefully profit from the blockbuster new products that might result. If only they could engineer the cubicles just so, or the indoor waterfall at the right angle, they might orchestrate providential encounters, or at least load the dice in their favor.
No place on the planet generates more such interest than Silicon Valley. For decades, cities everywhere have tried to replicate the Valley’s record of producing one trend-setting tech giant after another, but none has quite measured up. Like history’s other hubs of outsized accomplishment — Athens in 450 B.C., Hangzhou in the 12th century, and Florence in the 16th century — Silicon Valley has entrenched itself as the world’s centrifugal force for the biggest thing of its age, tech.
But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge — the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley’s leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work. In May, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees they were no longer required to turn up in the office. Slack said more or less the same to its workers, and the trend was made official by industry colossus Zuckerberg, who announced that he expected up to half his employees would become permanently remote.
In the years before the pandemic, talent in San Francisco and the Valley were already conflicted about whether to stay, increasingly exasperated by the cost of living. The concentration of highly motivated creators has produced enticing jobs, but also driven up prices. In Palo Alto, the median home now costs $3.2 million. In nearby Mountain View, it’s $1.7 million, and in San Francisco $1.8 million. In other words, the Valley has priced out almost anyone not making high six-figures, and even many of them. The temptation has been to flee elsewhere, and some tech talent had already been doing so.
But now, if engineers, designers, and venture capitalists are geographically disbanding, working via the cloud instead of walking Google’s halls, surfacing at Buck’s Restaurant, or the cafes on University Avenue, how will future serendipity happen?
Lincoln Project co-founder is literally a registered agent for Russia. “The media can keep calling you ‘Republicans,’ but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat.”
Body Cam Released of a Eaton County deputy fatally shooting a suspect who stabbed a 77yo man, and attacked her with 2 knives and a screwdriver pic.twitter.com/KdJKv4RllQ
— Breaking News, USA (@currentnewsUSoA) July 15, 2020
The City would cut the number of cops despite increasing response times for emergency calls and increased violent crime in the city. I suspect other cities will be facing similar budget decisions under similar circumstances.
I don’t know anyone who thinks we shouldn’t improve officer training and use of force guidelines to minimize harm to citizens. I know a number of cops who have been saying such things for years. I fail to see how decreasing the number of cops will enhance public safety.
The Republican senator asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver last week if he would allow players to wear jerseys with the message: “Free Hong Kong.” Hawley was criticizing the league after officials announced “pre-approved phrases” would be allowed on the back of jerseys while “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of China, according to Fox News.
Wojnarowski responded to Hawley with the two-word email, which Hawley shared on social media. The columnist soon issued an apology for the message.
Wojnarowski (or “Woj” as NBA followers call him) still hasn’t clarified which was offensive to him: Supporting American law enforcement officers or supporting freedom for Hong Kong.
China buys Pakistan, the Supreme Court gives Oklahoma back to the Indians, another cartel shootout in Nuevo Laredo, and cancel culture comes for everyone! Enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm!
“In a major Supreme Court decision Thursday, justices decided that a large swath of [Oklahoma], including part of Tulsa, is still an American Indian reservation. Tribal members can no longer be prosecuted by the state for crimes that happen in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.” I have not had time to read the decision, but my impression is that it’s somewhat less sweeping than the MSM is making it out to be.
China has become the ultimate fiscal lifeline for Pakistan. Decades of deficits, growing corruption, excessive defense spending and military domination have left Pakistan broke and few willing to give or lend enough cash to keep Pakistan solvent. A recent example of how this works was seen when despite economic recession and a public debt crisis (no one will lend to Pakistan anymore), the Pakistani defense budget was increased twelve percent for 2020, with annual spending now $7.85 billion. Spending on dealing with covid19 has averaged about $100 million a month and by the end of the year military spending will be at least five times what was spent on covid19. The India defense budget is also up (13.6 percent more) in 2020 to $66 billion.
The only economic relief available to Pakistan is China and CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic corridor). CPEC is a vast Chinese investment and construction effort that depends on vigorous support of the Pakistani military to succeed. China needs the Pakistani military to keep Islamic terrorists and tribal separatists from attacking the Chinese construction projects. Pakistan also helps China by keeping Indian forces occupied in Kashmir and the northwest Indian portion of the Pakistani border.
Northwest India (Ladakh State) is the current a hot spot because India has been building roads to the border and threatening to take back the portion of Kashmir Pakistan illegally, according to the agreement that established the India-Pakistan border after the British left in 1947, seized from India. Pakistan signed that agreement but had second thoughts as it was being implemented. Pakistan urged Pakistani Pushtun tribes in the area to “liberate” Kashmir from the Hindus and managed to grab about half of the disputed area. This dispute has remained unresolved ever since and led to several wars with India. Pakistan always lost but India never sent troops into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The current Indian leader is openly questioning the wisdom of that policy.
India controlling all of Kashmir is a major economic threat to China, which has invested over $10 billion to build a highway and rail line from China to the Pakistani coast and it goes through Pakistani occupied Kashmir. This link is part of the Chinese OBOR/BRI (belt and road project) which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road that for thousands of years was the main economic link between East Asia and the rest of Eurasia. The Pakistani portion is called CPEC and is costing China at least $62 billion (so far). The Indian threats to the Kashmir road-rail link are minor compared to the problems China is having with Islamic terrorist and tribal violence against CPEC projects as well as the high levels of corruption in Pakistan which are also damaging CPEC projects. This is driving up costs while lowering quality and slowing progress. But China also claims ownership of much Indian territory so helping Pakistani keep what they have grabbed is considered something of a professional courtesy. At the same time the Pakistani military have gained an ally they cannot abandon or say no to.
In June China revived the border war over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and patrolled by a small Chinese naval force. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134-kilometer long lake extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual “sneak, grab and stay” tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lake shore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.
Given this newly declared foreign threat China has, since 2019, sent new Type928D Patrol Boats to guard the lake. This fast (70 kilometers an hour) boat is armed with an RWS (Remote Weapons System) using a 12.7mm machine-gun plus two or more smaller (7.62mm) machine-guns that can be outed elsewhere on the boat and operated by one of the ten sailors on board. There is also seating below deck for up to twenty troops. India has smaller boats patrolling it portion of the 4,200-meter high lake, except for the few months when the entire lake is frozen over.
In the last decade China has been building roads into remote and formerly inaccessible (via vehicle) portions of the lake coastline. China has built some of these roads into areas claimed by India but not regularly patrolled because special mountain troops must be employed to get into these areas without coming in by boat or on foot over the ice.
India admits that the Chinese aggression along its northern border is active again and the Chinese are now actually taking control of Indian territory and apparently plan to continue doing so. Despite Indian nuclear weapons China believes it can get away with gradually gaining control over more than 100,000 square kilometers of Indian territory it claims. This will be done by grabbing a few square kilometers at a time without triggering a nuclear exchange. Fortune favors the bold, even in slow motion.
The dead were allegedly members of the Tropa del Infierno, or Hell’s Army, the armed wing of the Northeast Cartel, who attacked soldiers while they were patrolling the highway to the airport. No military personnel were reported injured in the shoot-out.
Investigators at the scene recovered two of the squad’s vehicles that were reported stolen in the United States, as well as 12 guns including two Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles and eight AR-15s.
The Northeast Cartel, a faction of Los Zetas, is headed by Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias El Huevo. A reward of 2 million pesos (US $89,000) has been offered for information leading to his arrest. Treviño is the nephew of the former leader of Los Zetas who was arrested in Houston in 2016.
Nuevo Laredo, which is right across the Mexican border from Texas, was also the scene of two previous massive cartel shootouts, in 2012 and 2018.
Her business, first and foremost, was keeping Jeffrey Epstein happy. He shared much with her father: a humble origin, a vast fortune derived by mysterious means, even rumors of ties to the Mossad and other intelligence agencies. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein also attached himself to a woman of higher status. In those days, Manhattan was party central, a place where connections were made at night, person to person. “Ghislaine was at the epicenter of all that,” says Euan Rellie, a British investment banker who knew Maxwell in both London and New York. “She befriended everybody and had a massive Rolodex of influential people.”
Those connections proved pivotal to Epstein. “I always say that Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became,” says one of Epstein’s victims. “He had the money, but he didn’t know what to do with it. She showed him.” Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, which he boasted made his New York town house “look like a shack,” and named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, which is said to have featured a specially built massage room. Maxwell is said to have shared Epstein’s bed in each of the residences, as his girlfriend, before moving on to become his “best friend,” as he called her in Vanity Fair. (“When a relationship is over, the girlfriend ‘moves up, not down’ to friendship status.”)
Maxwell soon had a bed of her own in a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, tended by a live-in couple who served as her housekeeper and driver, two secretaries (one for her and a second for Jeffrey), and an immense budget for the six properties she was managing for Epstein. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.”
She wore a large diamond ring Epstein had given her, which she called her engagement ring, according to one of Epstein’s victims. “She would say things like she was the only one who Jeffrey slept with,” the woman says. “I know that she would have died to marry him. She would have done anything for him. He trumped everybody and everything.”
There is, of course, a big difference in saying you believe black lives matter versus saying you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a very important, key distinction to make in this debate. Unfortunately, “woke” reporters here in the U.S. often deliberately blur the lines by conflating the two as if they mean the same thing, so they can play the exact type of word games they did with [White House press secretary Kayleigh] McEnany over Trump’s tweets.
Across the pond in the UK, however, there’s been an unexpected development on this front. Unlike the mainstream media here that routinely fails to make the distinction between saying “black lives matter” (blm) versus saying you support Black Lives Matter (BLM), a growing number of media outlets there have started distancing themselves from the political group because of their calls to defund the police and after a series of anti-Israel, anti-Semitical tweets posted by BLM-UK were recently posted.
Is it too much to ask for our own MSM to start waking up as well?
Cancel cultures comes for Steven Pinker. “This transparently idiotic diatribe, previously dissected by folks such as Jerry Coyne and Barbara Partee — the latter of whom notes Pinker’s role in recruiting female and minority linguists to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — can’t possibly succeed. Can it?” I wouldn’t want to bet money on that proposition. Reason and logic play no role in cancel culture.
On the other hand, Kurt Schlichter sees an opportunity to kill off academia as we know it. “Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
I think I have successfully blocked enough #MAGAts for this to work now. Take this seriously, it's going to be used as part of my champaign advertisement. Thank you.
I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Snip.
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either.
Snip.
Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.
Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round.
Couple plot to ambush the wife’s ex-husband and new wife, drive from North Carolina to Ohio to murder them. Big mistake:
According to the transcript of his Feb. 12 interview with sheriff’s deputies, Lindsey said he owns a gun, but had left it in the house earlier, and so he asked Molly if her gun was in the car. Both Duncans have Ohio conceal carry permits, which they told investigators they had obtained out of fear that Cheryl Sanders wanted to do them harm. They obtained the permits when they moved about four years ago to the area, where Molly has family nearby.
With Molly’s gun in hand, Lindsey said he exchanged fire with the man later identified as Reed Sanders. Lindsey said his ex-wife then pulled up in a vehicle, got out and also threatened them with a gun before being shot by Duncan.
The Greene County coroner said in February that the apparent cause of death for the Sanderses was multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators reported finding three weapons at the scene and multiple shell casings. The Duncans were not physically hurt in the altercation.
The ambush took place in February, but due to coronavirus-related court closures, the grand jury didn’t no-bill them until recently.
