When it comes to longer videos I find interesting, I have a system for posting them here:
I see a longer video I think BattleSwarm readers will be interested in.
I go “Hey, I’ll go ahead and post that as soon as I have time to watch the whole video!”
I never have time to watch the full video.
I never post the video.
I think there are some drawbacks to the system.
This Babylon Bee (Seth Dillon, Kyle Mann, and Ethan Nicolle) interview with Elon Musk from back in December is one of those longer videos I meant to get to before now. Rather than continue to hold onto this forever, I’ve watched more of it and am posting it here.
Some topics of discussion:
How Saturday Night Live and The Onion used to be funny before they became so hard left they refused to make fun of Democrats.
The threat to western civilization by the “woke mind virus.”
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people a reason, it gives them a shield, to be mean and cruel, armored with false virtue.”
Kyle Mann: “The left is almost this religion now,where they’re so serious, and they believe what they believe with such intensity, that for us to make fun of them you know for them, it’s like you’re making fun of God or salvation.”
Musk is much higher on “sustainable energy” than I am (which you would expect for a guy that owns solar power companies), but does say shutting down nuclear power plants is a big mistake.
The craziness of trying to shut down Dave Chappelle.
“Part of why I moved to Texas, it’s just fewer strings tying you down.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden’s vaccine mandate receives another blow in court, Biden stumbles his way through another press conferences, and a Joe Rogan podcast lays bare social justice perfidy.
After SCOTUS last week rejected the administration’s attempt to force corporations to abide by the mandate via OSHA, a federal court in Texas has issued an injunction against Biden’s jab mandate for federal workers, the other part of his administration’s attempts to force vaccines on reluctant Americans – a strategy that Biden has already abandoned in favor of providing at-home COVID tests to all Americans.
Biden issued both mandates by executive order back in September.
Trump-appointed Judge Jeffrey Brown of the US Court for the Southern District of Texas said the case was not about whether individuals should be vaccinated or even about federal power more broadly. Instead, he said it’s about “whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Brown wrote.
“That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
James Lindsay (AKA @Conceptual James) did an interview with Joe Rogan that may be as devastating to Social Justice Warriors as Rogan’s McCullough and Malone interviews were to the Official Flu Manchu Narrative. Some excerpts:
On Joe Rogan, @ConceptualJames discusses how Neo-Marxist indoctrination in schools has frightening parallels with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. pic.twitter.com/T9eFBMS3Kr
Biden had a press conference where he mixed some lies in with the usual rambling.
‘My plan cuts the deficit, and it boosts the economy by getting more people into the workforce’
Biden and his aides received intense scrutiny in the fall after they clung to a line that claimed the president’s spending plans would cost zero dollars â even after multiple analyses found that was not the case.
Biden seemingly recycled that line during his press conference Wednesday when he claimed more than once that his proposals would not add to the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office found that the Build Back Better Act would add $3 trillion to the deficit by 2031 if its programs were permanent rather than allowed to expire on what critics have described as artificially short time frames designed to give the bill the appearance of costing less.
If the programs expired as written by Democrats, the Build Back Better Act would still add $367 billion to the deficit by 2031, according to the CBO.
Experts have also debunked Bidenâs claim that the bill would boost the economy overall.
The Penn-Wharton Budget Model from the University of Pennsylvania found that Bidenâs plan would reduce Americaâs gross domestic product over several decades and would even slightly lower hourly wages over the same time period.
Focus group shows that independents (people who vote for both Obama and Trump) hate Biden’s America.
these independents are âresigned rejectersâ â deeply pessimistic about the state of the country, deeply disappointed by President Biden, and about as dissatisfied with the status quo as one can get.
Alice, a 60-year-old Latina from New York who works as a supervisor for homeless services, described her community as returning to an almost-lawless Hobbesian state* of the strong dominating the weak through force, violence, and intimidation: âI think theyâve taken us back to cave-man time, where you would walk around with a club â âI want what you have.â Youâre not even safe to walk around and go to the train station, because somebody might throw you off the train, okay? Itâs a regression.â
Dickie, a 38-year-old white financial analyst from Texas concurred: âWhen Alice was talking about the cave-man thing, I can agree with that. Iâve had my bike stolen here in Austin, in a very gentrified neighborhood, four different times in the last seven, eight months. Things are kind of chaotic. I feel like thereâs no rules, really.â
Twelve of the 14 said the level of crime is up in America today compared to a year ago.
If statements like that arenât a flashing neon sign declaring âDO SOMETHING ABOUT CRIME!â I donât know what is.
“How well do the SARS-CoV-2 shots work against the Omicron virus variant? The Danish study results shown in the graph found the Pfizer and Moderna shots provide some protection for a couple months, followed by a higher risk of infection than no shots at all. I donât call that ‘working.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
An exiting resident laments the decline of Portland:
ï»ż
This small business owner in Portland is being forced to close his restaurant because of constant break-ins by homeless addicts. He says crime is rising not despite progressive policies but because of them. Heâs right. pic.twitter.com/Hkm1YSejG1
Speaking of Democrat-run hellholes in the Pacific northwest: “Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester.”
Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattleâs racial disparities are among the worst in the nation â and theyâre getting worse, not better.
At the forefront of Seattle Public Schoolsâ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.
Castro-Gill, it turned out, was a perennially unhappy toxic liar, one who misrepresented her background to the point that her own father compared her to Rachel Dolezal, and who was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct. A focus on racial oppression did not create resiliency, but rather despondency, with Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders going on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 alone.
As Castro-Gill used children for politics in the workplace, her personal life also raised questions about the costs that can incur. She married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him. Then, her previous ex-husband told me, she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.
The academic achievement of Seattleâs youth plummeted as she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on âpower and oppression.â But in this world, there was no such thing as failing: Those gaps were used to justify still more jobs and efforts like hers.
Meatloaf, RIP. For a guy I thought of more as a singer, he had a long, active, and actually pretty impressive acting career. (“His name is Robert Paulsen!”) Only a small number of you will get this:
If you’re below a certain age, or didn’t keep track of UK politics, you may not remember the Winter of Discontent. In late 1978 and early 1979, the combination of inflation, harsh winter weather, Labour government dysfunction and trade union strikes brought the UK economy to its knees and ordinary citizens to a boiling point. Rail and lorry strikes led to spot shortages, and a haulers strike left mounds of garbage littering London strikes. The end result was an upheavel that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power as prime minister, and the new Tory government would swiftly move to crush the power of the unions to disrupt public order. Labour would not regain power for nearly 18 years.
Now Joe Biden has his own winter of discontent brewing, this one engendered not by unions strikes, but by vaccine-mandate driven supply disruptions, soft on crime policies, and ruinous “green” energy policies.
First, #BareShelvesBiden still seems to be plaguing much of the country:
#BareShelfBiden this is ridiculous. Meat prices have skyrocketed if you're lucky enough to find some. Local butcher had to shut down for 2 days because he couldn't keep up w/the orders, that's where we've arrived at. Ppl are hungry, which is only 2 steps removed from desperate. pic.twitter.com/2UAkYnctT1
— đTraderJill (Pronouns: Meme Queen/Your Highness) (@LadyJustice6910) January 12, 2022
Just got back from the market.
Now tell me again democrats how there's no problem with getting supplies & all the shelves are fully stocked. đ€Šââïžđ€Ł pic.twitter.com/9Zq5hlQV2t
There appear to be shortages from Boston to Arkansas. (Again, for the record, I’m not seeing such shortages in my neck of Central Texas, where there are bare shelves for only a few items.)
Now a big winter storm has hit the Northeast, which is expected to make everything worse. That region is usually prepared for heavy snow and ice, but that was before vaccine mandates worsened the trucker shortages. Now with record numbers of people quitting their jobs, I suspect both truckers and road maintenance crews are in shorter supply than ever. Plus New England’s reliance on “green energy” and rejection of natural gas pipelines has made everything worse.
One thing that’s making shortages of all goods worse: soft on crime policies in locales with George Soros-backed DAs has encouraged widespread train robbery.
Medical equipment, designer handbags, luggage, throw pillows, airline parts, childrenâs artwork, even a new wine fridge â all those items and more have been found stolen off Union Pacific trains and discarded alongside the tracks in East LA.
Images of thousands of stolen and discarded packages alongside the Union Pacific train tracks near Union Station have people around the world asking â how does this happen? Apparently, itâs a near perfect storm of an ongoing train robbery problem, the pandemic, and the Los Angeles County District Attorneyâs policy of no-cash bail arrests.
âI have been with Union Pacific for 16 years, and I have never, ever seen this situation to this degree,â said Lupe Valdez, the companyâs senior director of public affairs.
Valdez says, on average, 90 of their containers are compromised each day. But between October 2020 and October 2021, train robberies have picked up exponentially by a whopping 356%. Union Pacific has increased its enforcement and patrols, and has put drones to work, but now they are looking into diverting trains so they donât pass through Los Angeles County at all.
âWe are making arrests, but what our officers are seeing on the ground is that people are basically being arrested, there is no bail, they come out the next day and come back to rob our trains,â Valdez said.
Union Pacificâs chief has a meeting with the LAPD next week, and last month, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George GascĂłn, calling this a âspiraling crisisâ and imploring his office to hold criminals accountable.
âEven with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals,â the letter says. âIn fact criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing â which bears no serious consequences.â
remember that amazon packaging train robbery thing im LA from last week?
Images of thousands of stolen & discarded packages alongside train tracks in Los Angeles – a near perfect storm of a train robbery problem, the pandemic & the LA County District Attorneyâs policy of no-cash bail arrests pic.twitter.com/Nds6HtMXpd
All of this bodes ill for ordinary Americans who just want to buy groceries, heat their homes, and not have their Amazon orders mysteriously disappear due to repeat offenders put back on the streets by radical Soros-backed social justice warrior DAs.
All these problems (save the weather) are ones democrats have either created or made worse.
What happens when ostensibly non-partisan institutions enter the culture wars on the side of radical leftwing social justice? They destroy themselves.
Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group.
Note the lie right off the bat. Obviously the NSBA was corrupted and infected with social justice before, but this fall was when they were caught.
Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter. It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of âdomestic terrorismâ and asked for federal law enforcement intervention.
Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.
In between, conservative think tanks, media, intellectuals, lawmakers, researchers and activists turned what might have been a forgotten mistake into a potentially fatal blow to a group that has for eight decades been a national advocate for public education.
Calling for the federal government to arrest and imprison parents who disagree with your radical leftwing ideology a “forgotten mistake” is some world-class gaslighting, Washington Post.
Note the omission of the word “parents” from that list of critics. Also note omission of the phrase “Critical Race Theory.” It was the attempt to indoctrinate children with CRT and transexual ideology that turned “parents” into “activists.”
It is a perfect illustration of how polarized education has become in the past year â a case study in how activists can shape not just big public policy debates, but also obscure interest groups that most Americans had never given a momentâs consideration.
Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this yearâs membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.
âI hope theyâll give us a chance,â John Heim, the newly installed executive director, said in an interview. His goal, he said, is to ârebuild trustâ in the association, which critics believe took sides in a partisan debate.
No, they shouldn’t be given another chance. Only an organization that has already been infected with social justice across multiple levels of the organization would think that getting the federal government to label ordinary parents who object to their radical indoctrination as “domestic terrorists” was a remotely acceptable idea, or even a conceivable idea.
In October, the association apologized and promised to conduct a âformal reviewâ of its procedures and said it would announce âspecific improvementsâ to ensure better coordination and consultation with its members, but nothing has been announced and a spokesperson would not say where the group is in this process.
No, vague, sheepish mea culpas are not enough. Everyone involved in the organization from top to bottom needs to lose their jobs and the institution shut down forever and replaced with one that will never make that mistake again. Everyone needs a pink slip.
The leftwing establishment would love if the NSBA were “reformed,” with a few insincere apologizes and a few token changes high in the organization, but their hard-left cadres still in control of the machinery deep in the bowels of the organization.
That’s why the NSBA needs to be completely destroyed. Only when backing social justice over the wishes of parents earns educators a pink slip will the fellow-travelers and weak-clingers fall away so that the real work of eliminating indoctrination and restoring education can begin.
Virginia’s incoming Attorney General Jason Miyares was sworn in today and he hit the ground running, letting go at least 30 AG staff members. “While it’s routine for lawyers at the top of the office to be replaced when one political party loses control, the number of lawyers fired surprised the outgoing Herring administration.”
Good. Newly inaugurated Republicans Governor Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Governor Winsome Sears and AG Miyares were elected in large measure because of the widespread revulsion at imposition of radical, racist Social Justice Warrior policies in schools and elsewhere. The only way to start curing these policies to is issue pink slips to the people promulgating them. Wokeness must be burned out of government and academia.
Let the purges begin.
Updated to add: BOOM!
“Gov. Youngkin to sign executive actions banning critical race theory, ending school mask mandate and rescinding vaccine mandate for state employees.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, ï»żanother high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.
ï»ż
ï»ż
After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumerâs move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. Itâs the political equivalent of Pickettâs Charge.
Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:
Have you tried calling her racist harder?
You're like an 8-year old kid playing a video game that only knows how to punch one button over and over again. pic.twitter.com/qpmcWxVnNY
Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.
She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.
âStaffers 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,â the Washington Post reports.
One former staffer told the paper, âItâs clear that youâre not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So youâre constantly sort of propping up a bully, and itâs not really clear why.â
The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.
Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the worldâs wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million â nearly as much as the federal government itself â to interfere in the governmentâs management of the election in key states.
Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didnât care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.
Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented âResistanceâ that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
Itâs not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, itâs surprising that all of them arenât screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.
With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a âconspiracyâ by a âa well-funded cabal of powerful peopleâ who worked to âchange rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,â to create a ârevolution in how people vote,â corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.
The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who â after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as âthe most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US historyâ â have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds â grave or light â which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was âokay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former â the three-hour riot at the Capitol â was â1,000 percent worse.â
Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today â the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot â there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.
Snip.
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coupâ was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic â three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress â posed anything approaching a serious threat to âoverthrowâ the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
Snip.
Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.
The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win â just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing âdomestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.
CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations â as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting â and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.
The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison â while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.
A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywoodâs efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scriptsâwhich had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television showsâwere no longer getting hired.
The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.
Snipped.
So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academyâs four diversity standardsâtouching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said âonly select staffâ would have access to data collected on the platform.)
The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.
Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writersâ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of âinclusion standards.â (âI guarantee you every studio has something like that,â a longtime writer and director said.)
Snip.
The old-timers accustomed to being on the insideâand the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid theyâd never get thereâwere one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.
âEveryone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,â said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama âThe White Lotus.â âIf you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.â
Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as âChinatownâ and âMarathon Man,â and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: âIâm all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether itâs television or movies or whatever, but I think itâs gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that canât get work because theyâre not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.â
Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: âI get so paranoid about even phone calls. Itâs so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, âDonât say anything.â It is one of those things, âWill I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?â Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and Iâm very grateful to have a great job. If thereâs any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.â
It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of âThe Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,â not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywoodâthe country, their audienceâbelieved. âHollywood was never anti-Communist,â Wasson said. âIt just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. Thereâs no morality here.â
That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, whatâs trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.
âNow, theyâll just say, âSorry, diversity quotas. Weâre just not allowed to hire you,ââ said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.
Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:
Planned Parenthood took advantage of Texans, violated medical standards, & lied. While theyâre no longer a TX Medicaid provider, they still collected millions for their bloody biz.
Iâm suing to get that wrongly-syphoned money back for Texans and stand for life. pic.twitter.com/jcI5rmWAHb
For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys â men, trucks, equipment â sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.
All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world â the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers â but that isnât who you see in the Permian. It isnât who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you donât recognize, and wouldnât unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.
Spend time in Midland (and, if youâre raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize youâre seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I donât mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathersâ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there â and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: thatâs where alienation and disconnect occur. Thatâs where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. Thatâs where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.
Read the whole thing.
Heh:
Joe Biden's presidency has fallen and it can't get up.
Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.
I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.
More Democrats behaving badly and Kazakhstan in flames. Enjoy the first LinkSwarm of 2022!
How Democrats running the New York City Department of Correction turned control over to the correctional officers union and they let the inmates run the jail.
For years, mayors and correction commissioners have allowed jail managers to place the least experienced officers in charge of detainee dorms and cells, posts that are critical for keeping order but viewed by many as the least desirable assignments in the system. The managers, who base staffing decisions on seniority, department custom and office politics, have also filled the jobs with guards who have fallen out of favor with administrators, reinforcing the idea that they are punishment posts to be avoided.
When those guards in the housing units have fallen ill, gotten injured or been barred from contact with incarcerated people for other reasons, other rules adopted by city leaders have made finding replacements unusually difficult.
Every mayoral administration since John Lindsayâs in the 1970s has signed union contracts granting unlimited sick leave to guards and the cityâs other uniformed workers. And records and interviews suggest that abusing it can carry few consequences: It can take more than a year for the department to bring discipline charges against an officer who is caught abusing sick leave.
On a Thursday in October, one Rikers jail had 572 guards on its work schedule â more than enough to fill the 363 open posts.
But 17 guards were serving suspensions or had stopped showing up for work.
Another 117 guards were on vacation, long-term leave or off doing temporary duties.
Then there were those marked âindefinitely sickâ â 136 guards who had been out for 30 days or more but were still on the payroll thanks to generous union benefits.
That tipped the balance, leaving just 302 guards to fill the 363 posts, and forcing double shifts across the jail.
When they have been told that such policies could lead to dangerous breakdowns, city leaders have not acted on the warnings. As recently as February 2018, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasioâs top criminal justice adviser presented the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, with a memo that stated that high rates of absenteeism among guards might be driving a rise in jail violence â and recommended steps to stabilize staffing and reduce violent incidents. The de Blasio administration took none of them, and the memo has not been made public.
And when conditions have spiraled out of control on Rikers in recent years, jail managers have favored quick fixes over deeper policy changes. Under scrutiny in 2014 amid reports of brutality by guards, the managers concentrated members of the Bloods gang in some units, the Crips in others, and still other gangs in other areas, hoping the practice would cut down on fights among rival groups. It did not work. Not only did incidents where guards used force rise, but some gangs were positioned to take over housing areas when the pandemic swept through and caused staffing problems.
The mismanagement over the years has left the people charged with running the jail system feeling powerless.
Putting criminals in charge of things does seem like the Democratic Party’s go-to move in a lot of areas…
For nearly two years, weâve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.
The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.
It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population in that way, deciding what can open and what canât, who must work and who must not, what we can and canât do, all based on our station in life.
It now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.
That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether theyâre being âcarefulâ and adhering to the âmitigation measuresâ or not. Whatâs even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, havenât protected against infection.
All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still, the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization, much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.
A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with COVID, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. âDid you get vaccinated?â the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: Yes, and boosted. Thatâs when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, itâs time we change our tune.
Snip.
The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. Thatâs a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean, while the virus circulated season after season.
Itâs hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that didnât happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.
Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now itâs suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.
Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide peopleâbased on one pathogenâcontradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.
In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”
Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.
Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American Leftâepitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summerâopened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.
A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.
Trump has has taken up permanent rent-free residence in their heads: “MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House’ mentions Trump more than twice as often as Biden.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
âI find some kind of sign every single day that someone has been on my ranch,â says Schuster. âEvery time I leave my house, thereâs some kind of indication that someone has been on my ranch.â
Law enforcement has been called to the Schuster property five times in the past year to respond to incidents where illegal border crossers have knocked on their door or approached their house.
Operation Lone Star, a state effort that has seen additional Texas DPS officers sent to border counties, has been a blessing to the county, according to Schuster, and a relief to the local sheriff and his small crew of deputies. Schuster believes that the DPS patrols on the highways have been a deterrent to the illegal border crossers who use the highways and then bail out to run onto private property.
However, Schuster says the problems will persist for as long as this open border policy continues.
âI donât know all the politics of it and how all that works, but weâre gonna have to do something, because my parents worked hard to buy this land. People have said, âWell, if youâre scared on your own land, you just move.â It doesnât work that way,â said Schuster. âThis is our land. And they worked hard, and they bought it, and you canât give up on that land. Itâs your legacy. Itâs your legacy for your children. And so, itâs not like you just have a house in town, and you could just sell it and move to another community. When you have a ranch, you canât do that.â
Schuster added, âIn the last year, our life has been turned completely upside down. It is something that we just had never foreseen.â
She said that beginning last January, âthe number of illegals coming through has been unbelievable. The group sizes are big. You know, growing up on a ranch, around ranching, weâve always had illegals coming through. Never saw women before, or children. Men come through, maybe two or three; if you saw [a] group of five, that was a big group. Weâve got groups of like 45 coming through.â
The sizable groups are not the only issue with this increased traffic. âââTheyâre very disruptive. Weâve never seen that before,â said Schuster. âThe people that have come across primarily from Mexico for work, going from point A to point B looking for a job, did not intentionally tear up our water systems. The debris that theyâre leaving behind is unbelievable. Iâm picking up trash on my ranch daily, theyâre leaving gates open, livestock is getting mixed up, or maybe water gaps between me and my neighbor.â
An incident over the summer left Schuster shocked when some of the illegal border crossers intentionally broke a water line. âI lost about 10,000 gallons of water this summer,â said Schuster. âIt probably took me at least six weeks to gain that much water back.â
According to Schuster, âthey couldâve reached overâit wasnât enclosedâand gotten a drink. But they just took a rock and beat this line until they broke it. Thatâs mean. Thatâs just malicious.â
Security and safety have taken major precedence in the Schuster familyâs life. Game cameras on the doors, rarely going out in the pre-dawn hours, working out of an enclosed truck instead of an open UTV on the ranch, and never leaving the house without a pistol have all become standard practice for the whole family.
Twitter user TimDCpolitico took Floridaâs voter rolls from March 31 of 2020 and compared them to the latest figures. The results, he says, are âjaw-dropping,â and I canât think of a better way to describe them.
Out of over 14 million registered voters, last year Democrats held the edge with 37.38% of registrations compared to the GOPâs 35.28%. (The remaining four million or so â around 26% â were independents or members of minor parties.)
Democrats held a two-point advantage, but higher Republican turnout has made the state safely red in the last two presidential elections.
Snip.
66 out of Floridaâs 67 counties shifted towards the red. Three hardcore Democrat counties â Broward (!!!), Jefferson, and Madison â might in some races be considered additional battlegrounds Dems will have to defend.
A fourth, Calhoun, went from dark blue to light red.
Thatâs impressive.
What should have Democrats strapping on a pair of Extra Absorbent Depends (Endorsed by Presidentish Joe Biden!) is that they lost more than 50,000 registrations in the same time period â even as the stateâs population has grown.
Republicans have gone all in on South Texas, but theyâre not content for domination of state and congressional seats. They want local government, too.
One GOP group, Project Red Texas, spent the weeks before the December filing deadline to run in the March primary election traveling the region and recruiting candidates to run for county offices, offering to pay their filing fees. The group ended up helping get 125 candidates on the ballot across 25 counties, according to its leader, veteran party operative Wayne Hamilton. He said the group paid for âwell overâ half the filing fees.
The first step on the road to winning is actually showing up.
Investors may want to think twice about putting their money to work in China, contends DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach.
“China is uninvestible, in my opinion, at this point,” the bond king told Yahoo Finance in an interview at his California estate. “I’ve never invested in China long or short. Why is that? I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the relationship between the United States and China anymore. I think that investments in China could be confiscated. I think there’s a risk of that.”
Snip.
The ongoing crackdown on the operations of big Chinese internet companies such as Didi by the government has rocked investors in the space. The clamping down on the country’s biggest tech names has now led to a tightening of listing requirements by the Chinese government.
To that end, Didi plans to delist from the New York Stock Exchange later this year not too long after a disastrous IPO (in large part because of Chinese authorities).
Meanwhile, the long reach of China’s government also hammered after-school tutoring companies such as TAL Education Group â shares of the name plunged about 95% in 2021.
All of this is in addition to China’s ongoing fight against the rise of cryptocurrencies.
The investing headwinds in the country show up in how the country’s key indexes performed in 2021.
For instance, the Golden Dragon Index â which tracks the performance of mid- and large-cap Chinese stocks â plunged about 49% in 2021. The Wall Street Journal points out the total value of China’s onshore stocks rose 20% in 2021, underperforming the S&P 500’s advance.
And none of that touches the insanely overleveraged real estate market there…
Another day, another high-profile Kamala Harris staffer leaving. “Vincent Evans, the veepâs deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, has quit to take on a role on Capitol Hill.”
Austinites (and anyone who uses metered parking) beware:
đšScam Alertđš APD Financial Crimes detectives are investigating after fraudulent QR code stickers were discovered on City of Austin public parking meters. People attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and made a payment. pic.twitter.com/Gb8gytCYn7
PayPal just informed me that they have permanently banned my account. Without giving an explicit reason why, the supervisor was extremely rude and implied that it had everything to do with my politics.
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) January 5, 2022
Seeing Collins contorted in a wheeled chair, like Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House, while his two bandmates swayed on either side of him, painlessly upright in elegant, soft grey fashions like Farrow and Ball in human form, bordered on the grotesque. It resembled a satire on the ineradicable nature of privilege and class, rather than evidence of the dynamic tension every band needs to achieve creative synthesis. It was everything the NME said punk disdained. But I canât imagine John Lydon taking any pleasure in this at all.
To say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions. And, frankly, I’m not qualified to offer much insight into either. But I suspect that he is at least more willing to let us see his human side now. His wife of over 40 years, Nora Forster, has been suffering from Alzheimerâs for the last three and he has committed himself to her full-time care. In 2010, Forsterâs daughter Arianeâbetter known as Ari Up, lead singer of female post-punk outfit The Slitsâdied of breast cancer aged just 48. Lydon knows something about human frailty, mortality, and loss.
I have the sense that after many years, not on the field of combat but behind the bare timber of the cheapest proscenium arch, the paint is wearing off both these Punch dolls. Both were iconic and pugnacious in their day, but human, all too human, too. Today, it is not prog, let alone Genesis, that attracts Lydon’s ire, but what he perceives to be the betrayal of his ex-bandmates, who have sold out the Pistolsâ musical legacy to a TV showâpeople that do indeed, as he sneered in PiL, see it as nothing more than product.
Ted Cruz has had a weird week. After the braindead boner of calling January 6 riot participants “domestic terrorists,” he had to issue a huge Mea Culpa on Tucker Carlson. Oh, and he also issued this:
Due to popular demand from angry libs, in 2022 weâll be putting out a swimsuit calendar. https://t.co/Lr1aDZIv3H
Over the past year, DeSantis has emerged as one of the most articulate political spokesmen for the antiâcritical race theory movement. His new policy agenda builds on successful anti-CRT legislation in other states but goes two steps further. First, it provides parents with a âprivate right of action,â which allows them to sue offending institutions for violations, gain information through legal discovery, and, if they win in the courts, collect attorneyâs fees. Second, it tackles critical race theory in corporate âdiversity, equity, and inclusionâ training programs, which, DeSantis says, sometimes promote racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and harassment, in violation of state civil rights laws.
At heart, the battle against critical race theory is a fight against entrenched bureaucracies that have used public institutions to promote their own racialist ideology. âThis is an elite-driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities, and elites in corporate America, and theyâre trying to shove it down the throats of the American people,â DeSantis said. âYouâre not doing that in the state of Florida.â
Following his speech, DeSantis invited me to address the crowd. I explained that the reason critical race theory has upset so many Americans is that it speaks to two deep reservoirs of human sentiment: citizensâ desire for self-government and parentsâ desire to shape the moral and educational development of their children. Elite institutions have attempted to step between parent and child.
DeSantis has deftly positioned himself as a protector of middle-American families. One of the guest speakers, Lacaysha Howell, a biracial mother from Sarasota, said that left-wing teachers tried to persuade her daughter that the white side of their family was oppressive. Another speaker, Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban-American mother from the Miami area, said that left-wing indoctrination in schools reminded her of her fatherâs warnings about Communism in his native Cuba. Both believed that critical race theory was poison to the American Dream.
As they begin their next session in January, Florida legislators have the opportunity to craft the gold standard for âculture warâ policy. The governorâs team has worked with a range of interested parties, including the Manhattan Institute, which has crafted model language for prohibiting racialist indoctrination and providing curriculum transparency to parents. The battle is ultimately about shaping public policy in accord with public values. âI think we have an ability [to] just draw a line in the sand and say, âThatâs not the type of society that we want here in the state of Florida,ââ said DeSantis yesterday. The stakes are highâand all eyes are on Florida to deliver.
How the Democratic Media Complex managed to destroy what was left in the public’s trust in it:
That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient.
Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests. pic.twitter.com/DvOzIr5JX8
As usual, elite institutions — media, government, public health authorities — love to whine about the refusal of the public to trust their pronouncements, complaining people turn to other less credentialed and worthy sources.
Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted four men on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in a scheme to rip off the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by submitting over 80 false applications for forgivable loans and writing checks to relatives and fictional employees, among other fraudulent activities.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release on December 15 that 29-year-old Hamza Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Khalid Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Abdul Fatani of Richmond, and 53-year-old Syed Ali of Sugar Land could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each count of wire fraud.
The indictments against them are the most recent in an apparent scheme that prosecutors say involved 15 defendants from Texas and Illinois, all of whom are accused of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The DOJ stated that Khalid Abbas, Fatani, Ali, and another defendant, Houston resident Amir Aqeel, 53, have been charged with money laundering in the superseding indictment. The money laundering counts carry potential sentences of up to 10 years.
Last year, a grand jury also indicted Aqeel on a charge of aggravated identity theft. The government accuses Aqeel of using stolen identities to apply for the PPP loans.
According to the DOJ, several of the accused have already pleaded guilty for their involvement, including Siddiq Azeemuddin, 42, of Naperville, Illinois, Richard Reuth, 58, of Spring, and Raheel Malik, 41, of Sugar Land, all of whom entered their pleas in October. Houston residents Abdul Farahshah, 70, Jesus Perez, 31, and Bijan Rajabi, 68, pleaded guilty in late November.
Rifat Bajwa, 53, of Richmond, Pardeep Basra, 52, of Houston, Mayer Misak, 41, of Cypress, and Mauricio Navia, 42, of Katy were also indicted last year on charges of participating in the conspiracy and committing wire fraud.
Why, it’s almost like just about all the defendants share some characteristic in common. If only I could put my finger on it…
Speaking of criminals, did mentioned that a second CNN employee was being investigated for child sex allegations? “The allegations against Rick Saleeby, a former senior producer for Jake Tapperâs âThe Lead,â appear to be connected to reporting by Project Veritas. Saleeby resigned from CNN this month.” It’s hard to keep the media pedophiles straight without a scorecard…
The City of Austinâs director of the Office of Police Oversight (OPO), Farah Muscadin, abused her authority, a third-party arbitrator decided this week.
In a 31-page decision, Lynn Gomez, the arbitrator, ruled that Muscadin and the OPO violated Article 16 of the Austin Police Departmentâs employment contract that was negotiated in 2018. Article 16 governs the parameters of civilian oversight of the department, which progressive groups lobbied hard for during the labor standoff.
âContrary to the cityâs claim, Director Muscadin was not acting within the scope of her authorityâŠ[she] clearly was seeking to dictate some future outcome rather than simply making a recommendation as Art. 16 permits,â Gomez ruled.
â[T]he evidence and arguments raise[d] by the city indicate that the city does not consider itself or OPO bound by Article 16âs provisions.â
Has the Biden Amdenistration tipped its hand that considers Taiwan too strategically important to not defend it in the case of a Chinese attack?
Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told a Senate hearing three weeks ago that Taiwan was âcritical to the regionâs security and critical to the defence of vital US interestsâ. In words strikingly similar to MacArthurâs, he emphasised the islandâs location âat a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of US allies and partnersâ.
This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan. In Beijing at least, the statement is being read as dropping all pretence that the US could acquiesce to a unification of Taiwan with China.
Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in China, believes that US strategic thinking regarding Taiwan has always followed the lines laid out by MacArthur.
Even after establishing diplomatic relations with China, the US âworked to ensure the continuation of a state of separation across the Taiwan Straitâ, Wu said. âWhen we ask the US if they do not hope to see the unification of China, they deny that. But judging from the USâs concrete actions, it is clear that they indeed do not hope to see China unify. Ely Ratner has now said this out loud.â
In Washington, too, some observers think the testimony allows little conclusion other than that the US should not allow Taiwan to become part of China under any circumstances.
Hopefully true, but betting on Joe Biden’s stalwart fortitude is putting your hopes on an extremely weak horse…
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez spotted in Miami Beach while New York City Flu Manchu cases hit alltime highs. As always, Covid Theater rules are for the little people.
I really should have bought this for Dwight for Christmas.
The Critical Drinker is not thrilled at the latest Matrix film:
Ultimately The Matrix Regenerations fails on just about every level possible. It fails to properly honor the past by leaving it well enough alone. It fails to tell a compelling new story, or add new ideas to the world it created. It fails to establish interesting new characters, or take old ones in a new direction. It fails to surpass the spectacle, energy and originality of a 20 year old film. And most of all it fails to deliver a compelling reason for its own existence. The Matrix Retaliations is a film that never should have been made in the first place.
Left-wing sponsors vs. right-wing sponsors:
This satirical video is based on an undeniable truth: the bulk of mainstream corporate and billionaire money resides in and supports liberal-left, not right-wing, media. As the Dem Party became the preferred vehicle of oligarchs, their largesse goes to those urging votes for it. https://t.co/UpuF2ZuGxr
Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! For some reason, corrupt scumbags seem to be a theme of this LinkSwarm.
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an evil empire who’s passing made the world a better place. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and even George H. W. Bush all had key roles in bringing the Cold War to a successful close.
Biden’s vaccine mandates go before the Supreme Court. There’s a good chance they lose there on federalism grounds, even as the Supremes have avoided overturning state vaccine mandates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Tom Cotton has a modest proposal: “Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.”
Last year, our nation experienced the largest increase in murder in American history and the largest number of drug overdose deaths ever recorded. This carnage continues today and is not distributed equally. Instead, it is concentrated in cities and localities where radical, left-wing, George Soros progressives have captured state and district attorney offices. These legal arsonists condemn our rule of law as âsystemically racistâ and have not simply abused prosecutorial discretion, they have embraced prosecutorial nullification. As a result, a contagion of crime has infected virtually every neighborhood under their charge.
Soros prosecutors refuse to enforce laws against shoplifting, drug trafficking, and entire categories of felonies and misdemeanors. In Chicago, Cook County Stateâs Attorney Kim Foxx allows theft under $1,000 to go unpunished. In Manhattan, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. refuses to enforce laws against prostitution. In Baltimore, Stateâs Attorney Marilyn Mosby has unilaterally declared the war on drugs âoverâ and is refusing to criminally charge drug users in the middle of the worst drug crisis in American history. For a time, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon even stopped enforcing laws against disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and making criminal threats.
All of these cities have paid a terrible price for these insane policies. Last year, the number of homicides in Chicago rose by 56%, and more than 1,000 Cook County residents have been murdered in 2021. In New York City, murder increased 47% and shootings soared 97%. In 2020, the murder rate in Baltimore was higher than El Salvadorâs or Guatemalaâs â nations from which citizens often attempt to claim asylum purely based on gang violence and murderâand this year murder in Baltimore is on track to be even higher. Murder in Los Angeles rose 36% last year and is on track to rise another 17% this year.
Soon after taking office in Boston, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachel Rollins published a list of 15 crimes that she would refuse to prosecute except under special circumstances. Among the charges on her âdo not prosecuteâ list was drug trafficking, malicious destruction of property, trespassing, driving with a revoked license, and resisting arrest. Rollins also declared that she was âgoing to battleâ against the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and has slandered Boston police officers as âmurderersâ before accusing the department of âwhite fragility.â
Unsurprisingly, Bostonâs violent crime rate surged shortly after Rollins took over, as the number of murders in Boston skyrocketed by 38% in 2020. As Rollins implemented leniency for drug trafficking, opioid overdose deaths increased by 32% in Suffolk County. As a reward for her ineptitude and extremism, President Biden nominated her to run the U.S. Attorneyâs office in Massachusetts, the very office she had gone âto battleâ against only months before. Every Democrat in the Senate voted to confirm her.
Another Soros prosecutor, Philadelphiaâs District Attorney Larry Krasner, came to office after suing the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times as a private citizen. He began his tenure by purging dozens of veteran prosecutors in his office and then slashed his jurisdictionâs prison population by over 30%. In most cases, Krasner also refuses to seek bail for accused criminals and has maintained a highly antagonistic relationship with the police, once accusing the Fraternal Order of Police lodge president of being âwith the Proud Boys.â
The number of homicides in Philadelphia has increased every year that Krasner has been DA. Last year, the murder rate rose 40% and this year it reached an all-time high.
In San Francisco, the voters elected the son of two cop-killing terrorists as their district attorney. Chesa Boudin (pictured) has since unleashed chaos on the streets of a once-great city and inaugurated what the San Francisco mayor labelled the âreign of criminals.â San Franciscoâs homelessness crisis has spiraled out of control, smash-and-grab looters are such a menace that the city had to close its downtown during Black Friday, and shoplifters have closed down retailers throughout the city. Since Boudin took over, car theft has increased by 27%, murder by 29%, arson by 36%, and burglary soared 38%.
The liberal mayor of San Francisco, as if struck by amnesia of her own tenure and complicity in the crime wave, recently emerged to condemn her cityâs appalling rise in crime. Speaker Nancy Pelosi also condemned the disorder and âattitude of lawlessnessâ in her city. However, in one of the great examples of âsee no evil, hear no evil,â Speaker Pelosi pretended to be baffled by what could have caused the crime wave. The answer is obvious: Liberal extremists like Nancy Pelosi and Chesa Boudin caused this crisis.
Conclusion: “The Republican Party must then join with independents and common-sense Democrats to wage an unrelenting war on crime. That war must begin with a campaign to recall, remove, and replace every last Soros prosecutor. Throw the bums out.”
One rule for you, another for them. “California Dems Sip Champagne, Violate State Mask Mandate While Celebrating Successful Gerrymander.”
“According to data from Nielsen/MRI Fusion, Fox News is watched by more Democrats than CNN and by more Independents than both MSNBC and CNN.” Average network news viewers want truth, not a force-fed Narrative at odds with reality. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Two defund the police state Democratic congresscritters carjacked. “In late December, two Democratic politicians were carjacked just hours apart in Philadelphia and Chicago. Ironically, both women – Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and Illinois State Senator Kimberly Lightford – supported slashing police budgets and other reform measures, which many Republicans have blamed as the cause of the rapid increase in crime.” It would take a heart of stone not to laugh…
In the now three and a half years since I have decamped with my family from Los Angeles to Nashvilleâsome have called us âearly adoptersââI have spent considerable time on phone, email and texts with old friends and acquaintances in New York and California who are asking me what itâs like. Am I happy? Should they move? Whatâs bestâFlorida, Tennessee, Texas or someplace else?
Although answering the question âshould they move?â for someone else is rather like answering for them should they marry or divorceâitâs too big a decision and really none of your businessâthat doesnât stop me from almost universally saying yes.
I do this because I have been in L.A. and NY lately and know them to have turned into the ghosts of their former selvesâbasically hellholes.
I havenât been to Chicago for a few years, but it seems to be, if anything, worse. And when I was in L.A., covering the late, lamented Larry Elder campaign, I didnât even want to go to San Francisco. That was a Golden Gate Bridge too far.
Itâs not just the pervasive homelessness and the escalating Clockwork Orange-like ultra-violence, the actual souls of the cities that I knew very wellâborn in NY and lived decades in LAâseem to have vanished.
Who wants to sing âNew York, New Yorkâ or âI Love L.A.â anymore? And can you imagine leaving your heart in San Francisco? What has happened is a true American tragedyâand itâs not just because of COVID, although that helped. The cancer has been growing for a long time.
It could be said you should stay to help resuscitate these cities although I would argue you do more for them by leaving, making those governing the citiesâuniversally Democrats, as everybody knowsâand even more those dopey enough to have voted for that governance, wake up.
But even in red states, the culture war continues…
Hundred of holiday flights have been cancelled due to “staffing shortages.” How’s that vaccine mandate working out for you, Biden voters?
How bad did New York Corrections screw up for the courts to free someone on 8th Amendment grounds? This bad. Holy crap!
8th Amendment claims are almost impossible to win, and the picture that this case paints is GRIM: inmates being kept in intake without a bed for days at a time, days without food or water, no access to medical treatment, forced fighting for entertainment bc there's no rec time pic.twitter.com/xJ085nFNGE
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t mince words in announcing legislation to outlaw Critical Race Theory in schools:
One of the first tasks of opposing a poisonous ideology is to actually speak clearly about what it is, why it’s bad, and how it works, and DeSantis does all three in announcing the STOP Woke Act, which would allow parents to sue schools that try to impose Critical Race Theory, including calling out such CRT-speak markers as “white supremacy” and “equity.”
At first glance, if enacted, the lawsuit provision suggests that the DeSantis bill would have more teeth than the Texas anti-CRT bill Governor Greg Abbott signed earlier this year. Since Florida has Republican majorities in both houses, I would expect it to pass.
