Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Facebook Manager Of Community Development Allegedly Busted In Child Sex Sting

Thursday, February 17th, 2022

This seems like an important breaking story:

That “allegedly” in the title is for legal reasons (even child rapist scumbags are entitled to the presumption of innocence under the Constitution), but “Sure, I flirted with a 13-year old and set up two meetings with him, and gave him my hotel room number, but I never intended to follow-through on ‘make out with you, touch you, suck you!'” is hardly a compelling defense. Indeed, defense lawyers will be playing this tape for clients for years to come just to drive the “No, seriously, just shut the fuck up” point home.

Remember how everyone laughed at “Pizzagate,” at the very idea that there was a ring of powerful Democrats that engaged in pedophilia? Well, that particular instance may well have been bunk, but since then we’ve had Epstein’s “suicide,” every other member of Antifa seems to be a convicted sex offender, and we’ve had high profile pedophiles unmasked at such liberal bastions as CNN and now Facebook.

But it seems less like a ring than a widespread fraternal organization with many different chapters.

How many more leftwing child predators are still out there?

Austin News Roundup For January 13, 2022

Thursday, January 13th, 2022

Here’s a roundup of Austin news that’s been clogging the chute:

  • Alder aide pleads guilty to federal charges:

    A former Austin city staffer has pleaded guilty to taking payments from a nonprofit that won a federal contract he promoted while working as Mayor Steve Adler’s aide.

    Frank Rodriguez, 71, who left his job as a senior policy adviser to the mayor after the American-Statesman investigated his actions in 2017, pleaded guilty this month to conspiring to misapply federal funds and to falsifying records. He faces up to five years in prison and will be sentenced March 24 in federal court.

    Snip.

    Latino HealthCare Forum, a nonprofit that Rodriguez co-founded and once ran, reaped $1 million in public money for programs Rodriguez helped create, the Statesman uncovered in its investigation.

    Rodriguez stepped down from the nonprofit to join the mayor’s office in 2015. However, he still applied for federal Affordable Care Act grant funding on behalf of the nonprofit, calling himself the organization’s chief development officer who would work full time as the project’s director, investigators said.

    FBI investigators confirmed Statesman reporting that Rodriguez used his city job to influence the success of his own application, then benefited financially from the application’s success.

    It’s all about the Benjamins.

    In January 2017, while Rodriguez was still a city employee, he emailed other city staffers a document entitled “Crisis.docx,” after learning about the Statesman’s investigation.

    Pro-tip: Never leave an email trail for your graft and fraud, especially if you’re using or interacting with government email systems…

  • Austin returns to Stage 5 of Covid Theater.
  • With lunatic socialist Austin City Councilman Greg Casar running for congress, there’s a a special election to replace him on January 25.
  • Police catch wanted sex offender in the act of raping a 7 year old boy, only for Associate Judge Christyne Harris Schultz to set bond at a paltry $50,000 rather than $1 million.
  • Austin Network looks at the Homeless Industrial Complex.

    Homeless normativity is not a known term as it is something I made up, meaning that politicians and local authorities have allowed for a normalizing of homelessness through telling the cops to no longer enforce laws [AKA decriminalization] like illegal camping, littering, panhandling, or public defecation. This has gone on in coastal state big cities for the last several years and has allowed for the initial shock of homelessness, that “I need to do something” mindset of volunteering to hand out food or donate the clothes you never wear, to an acceptance that clothing and food will not help and that the sympathetic hobo-like bums of yore are now a more zombified set and not to be approached. It’s as if homelessness has become mainstream, no longer an outlier underground element of society. In this acceptance by local government–but not necessarily you–there is the phenomenon that if you speak ill of these folks that you are a bigot and discriminating against a group that needs your unlimited patience and big hearted compassion. There is an added narrative of urban camping and a nostalgia for bucking the trend of 9 to 5 and being off the grid, resulting in a romanticized bent to it regardless of the apocalyptic conditions.

    The mystery of this apathy can be explained in an invisible threat to America’s democracy, the Homeless Industrial Complex. The term, co-opted from Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex, may prove to be more difficult to unravel than its military version.

    The HIC (Homeless Industrial Complex) has proven to perpetuate homelessness through an alliance of special interest groups, local bureaucracies, advocacy groups, even construction developers. The most formidable and largest of scale example of this is when politicians use public money to build, via private developer, some form of housing, like apartment complexes or renovating an inner-city building into SRO (single room occupancy). Local agencies collect development fees, and a non-profit is contracted to run the property for the undetermined remaining life of the property. The problem, of course, is the exorbitant costs for this process. The product ends up being well over the price of any private, competitive construction endeavor. Then the people hired to run the properties operate under an extensive system of bureaucratic costs of high salaries, outreach campaigns, catered lunch meetings, and, yes, corruption.

  • Speaking of which: Just how did Austin spend federal dollars to fight homelessness?

    So when we look at direct assistance to families, here’s how some of that money was spent: take the community services block grant for $1.2 million designed to provide direct financial assistance to families.

    As of February, $244,277.99 had been given to 367 people in 131 households. The KVUE Defenders asked for an update and did not get a response.

    A little more than $1 million ($1,041,851) was set aside to help people experiencing homelessness and impacted by COVID-19. That money went to pay the leases for five hotels that were used as pro-lodges, which according to the City, helped provide temporary shelter to 615 people.

    Another $1 million went to emergency rental assistance that money ended up helping 147 people. The City goal was to help 143 people over 12 months. That goal was surpassed within seven months.

    Snip.

    In a recent city council meeting, the City’s homeless officer, Dianna Grey, said the City really needs $515 million more.

    “That plan is to house 3,000 people … hundreds of them getting houses this year and 3,000 people over the course of the next three years. And that would be drastic,” said Casar.

    For the math challenged, that’s $171,666 per homeless person housed. I bought my own house for slightly less in 2004. Seems like there’s an awful lot of graft going on there…

  • Is Facebook moving its headquarters to Austin? Maybe.

    Facebook’s parent company Meta has become the latest California corporation to at least partly move to Texas as it has signed a massive lease called “the largest ever in downtown Austin.”

    “The lease is the largest ever in Downtown Austin and larger than the entire Frost Bank Tower in terms of square feet,” KVUE reported.

    The Austin Business Journal reported the lease includes all office space in the city’s tallest tower. The skyscraper is still under development.

    “Months of speculation have come to an end as California-based Meta Platforms Inc. — the parent company of Facebook — recently leased the entire commercial half of Sixth and Guadalupe, the 66-story high-rise under construction downtown that will be Austin’s tallest building when finished. The social media company has also pledged hundreds more jobs in the Texas capital,” the report said.

    The lease includes 589,000 square feet across 33 floors of the skyscraper.

    “We first came to Austin over 10 years ago with just seven employees, now over 2,000 of us are proud to call Austin home. We’re committed to Austin and look forward to growing here together,” Katherine Shappley, head of Meta’s Austin office and vice president for commerce customer success, told the outlet.

    Facebook announced in July that it would be embarking on a “metaverse” initiative, changing the company’s new name to “Meta.”

    That’s probably good for Austin jobseekers with technical skills, but bad for people trying to afford housing downtown. Speaking of which:

  • “New data shows a continued increase in rent prices for Austinites.” “New numbers from ApartmentData.com show apartment rents in the Austin area went up about 25% between December 2020 and December 2021.”
  • Excerpts From Joe Rogan’s Interviews With Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone

    Saturday, January 1st, 2022

    Two Joe Rogan interviews with two different doctors appear to be key to understanding how the United State and various national government and international agencies have embraced counterproductive Covid Theater policies:

  • Dr. Peter McCullough
  • Dr. Robert Malone
  • Tiny problem: I don’t have Spotify*, and even if I did, I haven’t yet had time to listen to all of two 2.5+ hour podcast episodes, especially given the end-of-year crunch. The world being what it is, I suspect several of my readers are in the same boat, here are some abstracts from other people who have, some quick and dirty video snippets, etc.

    Over at Podcast Notes, they not only have the audio of the McCullough interview up (started listening, haven’t finished yet), they also have a super-handy summary of what was discussed. Some high level points:

    • We are not attempting to treat COVID-19 at home to prevent hospitalizations and deaths as an outcome
    • Early treatment of COVID-19 is the key to survival because you take the edge off viral replication, reduce inflammation, and prevent thrombosis
    • 50-85% of COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided if we adopted early treatment
    • “The 800,000 deaths we have right now, I can tell you to a one they’ve received either no or inadequate early treatment.” – Dr. Peter A. McCullough
    • “We’ve had a giant loss of life…It seems to me early on there was an intentional, very comprehensive suppression of treatment in order to promote fear, suffering, isolation, hospitalization, and death. It seemed to be completely organized and intentional in order to create acceptance for and promote mass vaccination.” – Dr. Peter A. McCullough
    • If this was just about COVID (instead of power) we would’ve seen four pillars to the response: reduce the spread of infection, early treatment, improvement of hospital treatments with monthly updates from officials, vaccination (it has a role but not the silver bullet)
    • Reputable hospitals (e.g., Harvard) STILL do not have COVID-19 treatment protocols
    • Vaccines are a piece of the puzzle but are not treatment
    • While most people are going to be fine, the vaccine has caused death and adverse outcomes in organ systems for a large number of people with higher susceptibility
    • A young boy is more likely to be hospitalized of myocarditis post-vaccination than ever be hospitalized from COVID-19 respiratory illness
    • We are not transparent on vaccines: we should be regularly reviewing safety, revisiting efficacy, and creating a profile of who it is or isn’t recommended for
    • COVID-19 false narratives: asymptomatic spread & testing, you can get COVID repeatedly, take a vaccine every 6 months, you should still wear a mask if you had and recovered from COVID, vaccines are fully FDA approved
    • A person is not science! Science is ever-changing and evolves with better and more well-informed data
    • The idea that people in positions of authority are presenting information without a fair balance of risk versus benefit is a dangerous precedent

    There’s a lot more there about Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine and monoclonal antibodies. And the parts about the powers that be supressing preventative treatment in favor of pushing vaccines as the only solution are pretty damning:

    • “We’ve had a giant loss of life…It seems to me early on there was an intentional, very comprehensive suppression of treatment in order to promote fear, suffering, isolation, hospitalization, and death. It seemed to be completely organized and intentional in order to create acceptance for and promote mass vaccination.” – Dr. Peter A. McCullough
    • There is evidence of extreme collusion on the part of Pfizer, Moderna, NIH, and many more “public service” agencies
    • Moderna was working on the vaccine before the virus ever came out of the lab
    • A Johns Hopkins 2017 symposium called the SPARS Pandemic outlined that we would face a coronavirus related to MRSA and SARS that would devastate the United States, shut down cities, induce confusion, and railroad people into mass vaccination
    • The average death certificate takes 6 weeks to produce – how did the media get numbers so quickly? At some point, we essentially had a COVID death scoreboard
    • The number of COVID-19 deaths and testing has been padded to some degree: deaths padded by underlying factors that contributed more to death than the COVID; testing from duplicates
    • Check out: “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey by Peter Roger Breggin & Giner Ross Breggin – this book has thousands of citations as to how this was coordinated and planned

    He also talks about “Mass Formation Psychosis”

    • It’s clear there are a lot of people not acting well and unable to have normal conversations and discussions about COVID-19
    • Mass formation psychosis: group think that has developed so strong, it leads to something horrific (such as mass suicides in religion, walking into gas chambers in Germany, etc.)
    • Key components of mass formation psychosis: (1) period of isolation (lockdowns); (2) withdrawal of things taken away people used to enjoy; (3) incessant free-lowing anxiety (constant news of deaths, tally, spread); (4) must be a single solution offered by an entity in authority (vaccination)
    • In mass formation psychosis, it doesn’t matter the absurdity of the solution
    • People were so far in the trenches, they didn’t want to accept the research (read more here and here) that COVID-19 was not spread asymptomatically – it’s only spread from sick person to susceptible person
    • Check out: “The United States of Fear by Tom Engelhardt

    I would add that Flu Manchu Madness followed closely on the heels of (and blended into) Trump Derangement Syndrome.

    Anyway, there’s a lot to chew on, even from just the summary.

    Given that the Malone segment isn’t up anywhere but Spotify yet, here are some snippets from Twitter:

    And here’s a bit of inception:

    That’s all I’ve got time for right now, some excerpts of excerpts. But it will help you get up to speed on the conversation around these two important podcasts.

    *Yeah, I know it’s free to sign up for. No, I haven’t done so, because I’ve developed an aversion to signing up for anything I don’t have to. But if Rogan’s show is the certain of serious coronavirus conversation in America, I may have to…

    LinkSwarm for December 10, 2021

    Friday, December 10th, 2021

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

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

    Now on to the LinkSwarm!

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

    Josh Rogin delivers an unnerving scoop in the Washington Post:

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Shut up, because social justice!”

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

    “Shut up, because social justice!”

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

    “Shut up, because social justice!”

    Some pro-forma Harris defense snipped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Another redpilled liberal abandons the Democratic Party.

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Chinese real estate giant Evergrande has officially defaulted.

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

    Smoke and mirrors all the way down…

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

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

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

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

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

    Spain has taken to pushing the intruders back into Morocco.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Boom 2:

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

  • Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro on The Virtual Metaverse

    Thursday, November 11th, 2021

    Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro discuss Facebook’s announcement of a virtual reality “metaverse.” Some interesting discussion, though little that will be of surprise to anyone who read cyberpunk in the 1980s:

    Shapiro: “I wonder with this stuff if we’re innovating ourselves out of existence as a civilization.”

    Shapiro:”Let’s just take this on the most baseline demographic level. None of them get married, none of them have babies. In two generations, this ain’t gonna matter. You’re gonna have a good time in the virtual reality and then they’re gonna be no babies to carry this on and the only on earth are going to be religious Jews, religious Catholics and religious Muslims and that’s it.”

    Knowing Facebook, I can only assume their Metaverse will be plastered with annoying ads and “features” you hate. Also, just as soon as you get comfortable in the Metaverse, they’ll change the interface…

    Did Google Break The Law?

    Sunday, October 24th, 2021

    I know that headline is more than a little ambiguous, as Google has probably broken multiple laws, if only because they’re so big and there are so many laws. But “Did Google break the law using sneaky, underhanded means to carry out anti-competitive trade practices to kill off an alternative ad allocating system called ‘header bidding’ because it threatened to damage one of its biggest revenue streams” is way too long for a blog post title.

    As a prelude, here’s a brief description of header bidding and how it differs from Google’s “Waterfall” system:

    Header bidding is an advanced programmatic advertising technique that serves as an alternative to the Google “waterfall” method. Header bidding is also sometimes referred to as advance bidding or pre-bidding, and offers publishers a way to simultaneously offer ad space out to numerous SSPs or Ad Exchanges at once.

    Normally, when a publisher is trying to sell advertising space on its site, the process for filling inventory goes something like this:

    First, your site reaches out to your ad server. In general, direct-sold inventory takes precedence over any programmatically sold options. Next, available inventory is served through the site’s ad server, such as Google DoubleClick in a waterfall sequence, meaning unsold inventory is offered first to the top-ranked ad exchange, and then whatever is still unsold is passed along to the second ad exchange, and so on. These rankings are usually determined by size, but the biggest ones aren’t necessarily the ones willing to pay the highest price. (For publishers, this means lower overall revenue if the inventory isn’t automatically going to the highest bidder.)

    To further complicate the process, sites using Google’s DFP for Publishers has a setting that enables them to outbid the highest bidder by a penny using Google Ad Exchange (AdX). And since AdX gets the last bid, they are generally in a position to win most of these auctions.

    Publishers end up feeling like they aren’t making quite as much money as they would without Google meddling in the bids.

    How Does Header Bidding Help Publishers?

    Header bidding is a way for publishers to have a simultaneous auction from all the bidders, rather than the sequential strategy that Google uses. By placing some javascript on their website, when a particular page is loaded, it reaches out to all supported SSPs or ad exchanges for bids before its ad server’s own direct-sold inventory is called. Publishers can even choose to allow the winning bid to compete with pricing from the direct sales.

    Got that? Here, as best I can understand, is a summary example:

    Say Joe Blow’s Ad Agency and Attack Lawyer Collective wants to be the top bidder for serving ads up for the keyword “mesothelioma” (which, at one time, was the priciest keyword you could buy for digital ads), and it is willing to pay, say, $100 per 1,000 impressions. Under Google’s waterfall method, they would never get to bid if Big Madison Avenue Ad Agency was in the top tier of bidders even though BMAAA only offered $50 per 1,000 impressions, because Google would sell those ad slots only to the highest bidder in the top tier, and would never get down to Joe Blow in the third tier. (This is all greatly oversimplified, and feel free to correct/amend this example in the comments.)

    Well, due to the big antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by some 38 (last time I looked) state attorney generals (including Texas), lots of dirty secrets and memos have come to light as part of discovery. Many of the most serious bits were redacted, but that was just changed by judge’s orders:

    Two corporate behemoths getting together to strike insider deals with each other that freeze out competitors is pretty much textbook anti-competitive practices 101 stuff.

    Holy shit! Google and Facebook are agreeing not to cooperate with any antitrust action by the federal government to bring action against the other. That’s not a red flag, that’s the Nostromo‘s flashing lights and screaming self-destruct klaxon in the original Alien.

    So according to these documents, Google is not only a monopoly, it is a coercive monopoly that uses illegal anti-competitive trade practices to stifle competition.

    And since the lawsuit was brought by a bipartisan coalition of state attorney generals, Google can’t just buy a few tens of millions of dollars worth of Hunter Biden painting to make the entire thing go away…

    LinkSwarm for October 9, 2021

    Saturday, October 9th, 2021

    Biden sinking, China stinking, Facebook’s fake whistleblower, and more border woes. Enjoy a special Saturday LinkSwarm!

  • Of course the Biden Administration tucked a multibillion dollar handout to illegal aliens into the reconciliation bill. It’s what they do. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Does this border look controlled to you?

    

  • Related: “69 Percent of Hispanics Disapprove of Biden’s Handling of Immigration.”
  • Indeed, Biden’s poll numbers are so low that even CNN has noticed. “Just 32% of independents approved of how Biden is handling his job while 60% disapprove in a new Quinnipiac University national poll… In 2010, the Republicans picked up 63 seat, with being up 19 points among independents.”
  • Short-term debt limit extension bill passes. Tastes like chicken…
  • The reconciliation bill is deeply hostile to marriage. Well, it’s no surprise, since happily married couples with children are increasingly an obstacle to Democratic Party control…
  • This explains a lot:

    U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland. In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner. Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. Panorama Education is the ‘social learning’ resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.

  • Remember Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate? It doesn’t exist.

    So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.

    That’s why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate haven’t yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.

    According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements.

    Let the lawsuits against private companies firing people for refusing the vaccine for which no mandate exists begin!

  • “Ontario doctor resigns over forced vaccines, says 80% of ER patients with mysterious issues had both shots.”
  • Holy crap: “Wuhan and US scientists planned to create new coronaviruses.”

    Scientists from Wuhan and the US were planning to create new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic codes of other viruses, proposals show.

    Documents of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), leaked last month, reveal that the international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data of closely related strains and grow completely new viruses.

    A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.

    Here’s a novel thought: How about you not do that?

  • Did I mention that Wuhan scientists also wanted to genetically engineer coronaviruses that were more infectious to humans and release aerosols containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” among cave bats in Yunnan, China? And they also applied DARPA grant! Who the hell was asleep at the grant proposal switch while Chinese biological warfare scientists were going full Frankenstein?
  • Also: China started ordering more testing kits six months before we started hearing about the Flu Manchu outbreak.
  • Truth:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another Chinese real estate developer defaults, this one an Evergrande-linked firm called “Jumbo Fortune Enterprises.”
  • Facebook’s fake “Whistleblower” Frances Haugen was part of the election meddling team that suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. Also: “She’s receiving ‘strategic communication guidance’ from former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm Bryson Gillette, which is run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there until September 2020.” Basically she’s a pawn to let Facebook suppress even more conservative stories.
  • Another day, another hate crime hoax.
  • Amtrak! Come for the crappy service, stay for the routine drug sweeps! (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Australian cop resigns over enforcing tyranny:

  • Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan are all scheduled to lose out on Texas government bond underwriting due to their refusal to deal with companies that make modern sporting rifles.
  • Citizens sues five members of the Round Rock ISD school board for violation of the Texas Open records Act.
  • Another day, another shootout on Sixth Street. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.” Given how crappy California’s business climate has become, this was pretty much a forgone conclusion. Come on down, Elon.
  • And here’s the supercondensed backstory:

    If you’re wondering who Lorena Gonzalez, she’s a Democratic California assemblywoman…

  • “Gavin Newsom Named U-Haul Salesperson Of The Year.”
  • Amazon is looking at leaving Seattle. “After years of deteriorating relations with their home city of Seattle and its ultra-progressive city council, Amazon’s CEO [Andy Jassy] made it known that the online giant may look for greener pastures. Citing the city’s hostility toward their presence, Jassy suggested that the suburbs are looking better and better for a new home to its 50,000-employee home base.”
  • Speaking of Seattle, over 400 police officers may be facing termination over refusal to get vaccinated. Good thing Seattle is a peaceful utopia where there are never any antifa riots…
  • Venezuela subtracts six zeros from its currency. This is your economy on socialism.
  • “Afghanistan is literally about to go back to the Dark Ages since the Taliban didn’t realize they have to pay their electric bills.”
  • The China/India border is getting frisky again. “Sources mentioned that patrol parties of both the countries came face-to-face in Arunachal Pradesh, which led to some jostling before they disengaged. The incident took place last week near Yangtse in the Tawang sector.” Arunachal Pradesh is basically the complete opposite end of northern India from where most of last year’s clashes occurred.
  • Did China lose coal shipments waiting for docks to open up to India? Source is a little “rah-rah India,” so grains of salt are probably in order.
  • Are you using the wrong plunger? This plumber seems to think that this one is the new hotness for clearing toilets.
  • Heh:

  • How to tell a prison from a public school.
  • “Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook.”
  • Let’s ride!

  • The System is Down…The System Is Down…

    Monday, October 4th, 2021

    Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down right now. Botched upgrade? Misconfigured router? Expired signing certificate? Who knows? I’m just going to assume its a problem with their latest SuppressAllPostsQuestioningTheHolyVaccineMarrative.yml file. But it’s a reminder of how deeply interconnected all online systems are these days, and how many different things can go wrong at different layers.

    Expect a sudden burst of productivity from American companies.

    And just in case you didn’t get the reference:

    Edited to add: Additional detail:

    Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook…

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    Speculation is that Facebook engineers have locked themselves out of their own network, meaning someone with physical access to the servers will have to fix things…

    Edited to add 2: Krebs offers more details:

    Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

    Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

    In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

    In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

    “Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

    Developing…

    Edited to add 3: Seeing reports that Gmail is down for some people. It’s not down for me. I just tested and it’s working fine.

    Updated to add 4: Facebook appears to be back up, but is way wonky…

    LinkSwarm for September 17, 2021

    Friday, September 17th, 2021

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

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

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

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

    I guess Bret Weinstein spoke too early

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

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

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

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

  • More military resignations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Coronavirus actors in Australia?

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

  • LinkSwarm for May 21, 2021

    Friday, May 21st, 2021

    Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
  • Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter, but worse:

    There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.

    We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

    Snip.

    For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.

    Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.

    During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,

    Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.

    Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?

    That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.

    Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.

    Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.

  • “‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.” Electing the hard-left to control your cities the quickest way to destroy your quality of life. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Masking doesn’t do jack against Flu Manchu:

    The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.

  • Israel reaches ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.

  • Of course the Associated Press knew they were sharing an office with Hamas:

    The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.

    Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.

  • Peace-loving Palestinian supporters in London: “‘F**k the Jews’ ‘Rape their daughters.'”
  • More of the same fun in New York City: “‘Pro-Palestinian’ Gangs Attack Jews In Multiple Locations in Manhattan.”
  • “China aligns with Palestinians to deflect criticism of Uyghur Muslim genocide.” Call it the Axis of Scumbags. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brandon Smith on why the U.S. military will never be woke:

    The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.

    The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.

    Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?

    As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.

    The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.

    To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.

    Snip.

    Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).

    But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.

    Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.

    Snip.

    Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.

    For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.

    The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.

    And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.

    This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.

    The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).

    While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.

  • Thanks to antifa, a Soros-backed DW and underfunding the police, Portland is enjoying record-breaking levels of violence and homicide.
  • They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
  • Alan Dershowitz wonders why the hard left loves Palestinian terrorists.

    In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.

    On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

    Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.

    The usual history snipped.

    The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.

    Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.

    Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.

    The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.

  • Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:

  • Orthodox Jews: “Live Near Hipsters, Vote Like Mormons.”

    The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.

    Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”

    This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.

    The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.

  • Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”:
    

  • Facebook “fact check” is just there to push the proper narratives, the truth be damned.
  • Scottish university may expel law student Lisa Keogh for daring to point out women have vaginas.
  • AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
  • Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
  • “19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
  • Speaking of New Jersey, a single rural New Jersey deli has a market cap of $100 million.
  • “Man Hijacks School Bus Full of Children, Gets Frustrated And Lets Everyone Go Because The Kids Won’t Stop Asking Him Questions.”
  • Speaking of attempted crimes gone wrong:

  • Boom:

  • Rudy Tomjanovich inducted into the basketball hall of fame. Long overdue.
  • “BLM Sends Rioters To Gaza To Protest Israel By Burning Down Palestinian Businesses.”
  • “Biden Worried Gas Shortages May Hurt Carter’s Chances Against Reagan.”
  • I laughed: