Posts Tagged ‘Germany’
Friday, June 12th, 2020
Riots! Guns! Social Justice Warriors! Animated police dogs! Today’s LinkSwarm is packed to its furry ears…
The fire this time:
This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Looters in California stole a forklift to break into stores.
When Democratic Party race-pandering backfires.
There’s previous little evidence that black lives matter to Democratic politicians:
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Secondary evidences suggest that the Wuhan Coronavirus was already ravaging Wuhan in September and October of last year.
Texas suffers a jump in number of Wuhan coronavirus cases reported. But is it real?
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
The Bonfire of Wokeness claims the founder and editor of feminist Refinery29. Remember, you can never, ever be woke enough…
Andrew Sullivan gagged for having non-PC thoughts. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
“Thou Shalt Not Criticise Black Lives Matter”
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
Well, this is just great: “FCC failed to monitor Chinese telecoms for almost 20 years.”
Meant to post this last week: “Whitmer Lifts Stay-at-Home Order Now That People Need to Go Out and Riot.”
Canadian professor fired for pointing out that biological sex is real. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Social Justice Warriors at Cornell are trying to get Legal insurrection’s William Jacobson fired for #wrongthink.
You know what really sucks? Having your store looted. “They tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying…I’m black, look what you did to my store.”
“Black gun owners guard businesses to protect against looting in Minneapolis.”
Eleven times gun owners defended life and property.
The gun debate is over.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
San Diego County government ordered hotels not to take guests unless they were “essential” workers. This strikes me as an unconstitutional taking…
Work privilege:
San Francisco’s mass transit agency announces it will no longer transport San Francisco police to riots.
The Republican National Convention has been moved to Jacksonville.
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
It’s a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization:
“These ideas are wrong.”
Wokeness comes for the New York Times:
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
Welcome to the Year Zero:
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
“Democrats Propose Replacing All Police With Traveling Bands Of Hippies Singing ‘Imagine.'”
And speaking of damn dirty hippies, Dwight has this CBS scoop from 1967.
World War II bomber story: Two planes, one crash landing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Tags:#BlackLivesMatter, 7-Sigma, ActBlue, Andrew Sullivan, Angela Merkel, antifa, Austin, Austin City Council, Beaumont (Texas), black, Bret Weinstein, California, Canada, censorship, China, Cornell, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, dogs, education, FCC, feminists, Ferguson, Florida, Foreign Policy, Germany, Gretchen Whitmer, Guns, Jefferson County, Keith James, Kris Wyrobek, Kurt Schlichter, looting, Matthias Baldwin, McGruff The Crime Dog, Media Watch, Michigan, Military, Minneapolis, Mitch McConnell, New York Times, Paw Patrol, police, Republican National Convention, riot, San Diego, San Francisco, Social Justice Warriors, Taxes, Texas, West Palm Beach, William Jacobson, World War II, Wuhan
Posted in Austin, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2020
Well, not all of them. No blog is big enough for all China’s lies. But here’s an update on the lies being told, and crimes being committed, by China’s ruling Communist Party.
First, China’s Communist Party announced that it was going to impose a new national security law on Hong Kong.
There are plenty of direct ways the new national security law could backfire on economic freedom in Hong Kong.
For example, it criminalizes “foreign interference” without specifying who the measure targets or where the boundaries lie. Might a Goldman Sachs report out of Hong Kong questioning China’s gross domestic product data put its business charter at risk? What about Nomura Holdings downgrading a key China Inc. company?
International news organizations might feel paranoid about reporting on fraud at Hong Hong-listed companies or China corralling more than 1 million ethnic minority residents in Xinjiang province into “indoctrination camps.” It is hard to see how short sellers like Muddy Waters Research maintain Hong Kong offices when they spotlight alleged fraud at mainland companies, most recently Nasdaq-listed Luckin Coffee.
The extradition bill that helped fuel the 2019 protests, which allowed people to be moved from Hong Kong to the mainland, could return, perhaps imposed by fiat from Beijing. What multinational corporate board or startup team eying an IPO wants to have that worry in the backs of their minds? Or the specter of the Chinese Communist Party remaking Hong Kong’s judiciary and banking system in its image?
The more Xi damages China’s liberal financial zone, the more the foreign companies generating millions of jobs in Hong Kong will question why they should stay.
Next, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo declared that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous from China.
The Trump administration said it could no longer certify Hong Kong’s political autonomy from China, a move that could trigger sanctions and have far-reaching consequences on the former British colony’s special trading status with the U.S.
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced the decision Wednesday, a week after the government in Beijing declared its intention to pass a national security law curtailing the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong citizens.
“Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under United States laws in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997,” Pompeo said in a statement. “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground.”
Snip.
A finding on Hong Kong’s autonomy was compelled by last year’s Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The law signed by Trump requires such a certification each year.
Pompeo’s decision opens the door for a range of options, from visa restrictions and asset freezes for top officials to possibly imposing tariffs on goods coming from the former colony.
“The United States stands with the people of Hong Kong as they struggle against the CCP’s increasing denial of the autonomy that they were promised,” Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
Chuck DeVore says we cannot wait to confront Communist China:
As with Berlin, how the U.S., Western Europe and, more importantly, the key nations in the Indo-Pacific region react to the events in Hong Kong will end up determining the geopolitical course of this century.
That Hong Kong is no more is a fact. The form of Hong Kong, with its culture forged by the productive union of British rule of law and individual rights with Chinese entrepreneurship and diligence, may last another year or two. But the idea of Hong Kong is dead, killed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) insatiable quest for total control.
The proximate cause of Hong Kong’s demise is the CCP’s demand to use extrajudicial kidnappings, torture and executions to terrorize its 7.5 million people into submission—in short, to rule Hong Kong as it rules Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet and, someday soon it hopes, Taiwan.
The people of Hong Kong saw this day coming, but they were powerless to stop it. Hong Kong’s Basic Law agreement, the contract acknowledging Hong Kongese’ human rights, was always subject to termination whenever the CCP felt powerful enough to do so. It is, as with any agreement the CCP signs, worthless.
In the meantime, China’s communist leaders ramp up their paranoid rantings, claiming foreign “black hands” are behind the unrest in Hong Kong. Concurrently, China’s propaganda mouthpieces continue to press the absurd notion that America started the coronavirus pandemic.
Thus, crushing Hong Kong’s spirit while murdering a few thousand student democracy activists will only embolden Beijing. How can it be otherwise, as it perceives fewer consequences than the slap on the wrist it received after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989?
The problem with bombastic propagandistic lies is that they are sometimes believed. And the CCP appears predisposed to believing its own lies. To “defend” itself, the CCP may soon order its modernized armed forces into action along the first island chain, from the southern tip of Japan to the coast of Vietnam, with Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines.
The urgent task before our generation is to prevent a monstrous darkness from snuffing out freedom’s flame. We must deter the PRC from expanding its horizon to the first island chain while setting the conditions for victory—removing the CCP, as it exists today, from power. We win, they lose.
This task has already started, when the Trump administration, for the first time since the Reagan-era effort to win the Cold War, declared that the U.S. will engage a “whole-of-government” strategic approach to the challenge presented by the PRC. This approach acknowledges that the CCP doesn’t merely present an economic threat, with its unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft, as well as a military threat—but that it also seeks to supplant our values.
“Based on information from German intelligence agencies, reports indicate that Chinese Leader Xi Jinping personally asked the World Health Organization to delay the release of critical information regarding its coronavirus outbreak.”
Just this morning Instapundit offered up this flashback to 2018: “As Biden and Kerry Went Soft on China, Sons Made Nuclear, Military Business Deals with Chinese Gov’t.”
Did you know that China is involved in a border standoff with India?
Over the past month, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly moved at least 5,000 troops to the “Line of Actual Control,” which demarcates the border between China and India. The mobilization of troops to the Galwan River valley, on the westernmost border between the two countries, led to a clash on May 5, when Chinese and Indian forces engaged in fisticuffs and stone-throwing. In keeping with Sino–Indian border protocols, both sides were unarmed, but the skirmish — and another in the Naku La region near Tibet on May 12 — left several troops injured.
Though the facts on the ground in the remote Himalayan border region are unclear, satellite imagery of the area confirms a rapid military buildup by Chinese forces since April. India has responded in kind, mobilizing troops and artillery to the area in recent days, according to Bloomberg News. An Indian policy analyst who requested anonymity adds that there is also evidence that the two sides have moved aircraft closer to the region.
The apparent trigger for China’s military buildup is the completion of an Indian road in the Galwan River valley up to the Line of Actual Control, according to Indian national-security analyst Nitin Gokhale. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has long held a superior position in this frontier region, with roads and electricity lines that far surpass those on the Indian side. However, “in the last few years, India has been playing catch-up, and has finally built roads up to the LAC,” according to Dhruva Jaishankar, the director of the Observer Research Foundation’s U.S. Initiative. India’s Border Roads Organization, which is currently constructing 61 roads, has now developed the infrastructure to compete with the PLA in the disputed territory. In turn, China has attempted to preserve its advantage by pushing back Indian development, leading to intermittent confrontations. Most recently, in 2017, China’s construction of a road through Doklam, near Bhutan, an ally of India, set off two months of brinkmanship, ending with a Chinese retreat but heightening caution on both sides.
The border dispute pertains primarily to two contested territories: the Aksai Chin plateau to the west and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh to the east. Chinese offensives in the two areas ignited the 1962 Sino–Indian War, ending with an informal ceasefire as the two sides agreed to the loosely demarcated Line of Actual Control. To Beijing, the LAC granted territory claimed by Delhi on the western side of the border, which contains a strategically crucial road between Tibet and Xinjiang. In the eastern portion of the LAC, however, the PRC effectively ceded what it calls “South Tibet,” retreating to the McMahon Line, the Tibetan–Indian border drawn by British colonial officials in the early 20th century. But PRC officials still consider the McMahon Line a vestige of imperialism, and continue to lay claim to Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state of 2 million people with strong cultural ties to Tibet.
India PM Narendra Modi doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who willingly backs down…
Speaking of confronting China: “U.S. to Expel Chinese Graduate Students With Ties to China’s Military Schools.” “The Trump administration plans to cancel the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who have direct ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.”
“DOE probe into colleges finds $6B in unreported funds from China, Russia.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Chinese Yuan Suddenly Tumbling.” Wow, it’s almost as if cracking down on Hong Kong has negative repercussions for China’s economy…
YouTube deleting comments with two phrases that insult the Chinese communist party.” Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.”
Of course: “Twitter Fact Checks President Trump – But Not Communist China.” (Update: Evidently Twitter started to fact-check ChiCom statements literally this morning.)
China doesn’t like Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw saying mean things about them. I’m sure he’s crushed.
GQ “reporter” Julia Ioffe seems really unclear on the concept that Pompeo’s declarations triggers sanctions. So naturally she got schooled. And naturally, she deleted her tweet rather than issuing a correction… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“China Issues Stay-At-Home Order To Hong Kong To Prevent Spread Of Democracy.”
Tags:China, Chuck DeVore, college, Communism, coronavirus, Dan Crenshaw, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Galwan River valley, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Line of Actual Control, Media Watch, Mike Pompeo, Military, Narendra Modi, Russia, Tibet, Twitter, World Health Organization, Wuhan, Xi Jinping, yuan
Posted in Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 15th, 2020
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s theme is Democratic Governor’s ignoring the constitution to keep their precious lockdowns going, Obamagate, spying (domestic and foreign), a bit about aircraft, and funny animals. Dig in!
The economy: is the worst over? Let’s hope.
Remember how Georgia lifting the lockdown and opening the economy was going to kill everyone’s granny? Yeah, not so much: “Georgia Records Lowest Number of Coronavirus Patients in over a Month.”
More medical hope:
Ever since President Trump expressed optimism about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the mere mention of that drug can elicit instantaneous, strident, and finger-wagging condemnation by the mainstream media and all those who are pulling for the pandemic to lay waste to the economy and pave the way for a fundamental progressive transformation of America. Despite its use by health-care providers across the country and around the world to successfully treat COVID-19, you will be mocked as either a fool or a snake oil salesman if you approvingly utter the word “hydroxychloroquine” or even express hope that it can be used to save lives. The word is simply not to be tolerated in polite, progressive society.
Well, it appears that the list of forbidden words is about to get longer. The new additions include “corticosteroids” and “Methylprednisolone.”
What do these widely available and relatively inexpensive drugs with known safety profiles have in common with hydroxychloroquine? Leading physicians are using them in addition to hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID-19. And they are doing so without waiting two or three years for the results of randomized clinical trials.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States.” “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.”
Speaking of Michigan:
It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a “super spreader” event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are “racist and misogynistic” and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.
Whitmer told ABC’s “The View” that the protests are “really political” as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.
“This is not appropriate in a global pandemic,” she said. “But it’s certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.”
I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs — leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmer’s opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies.
Just in case you thought there was an end to her awful policies: “Michigan state Rep. Leslie Love (D-Detroit) is blasting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) policy of returning coronavirus patients to nursing homes, making the Detroit lawmaker the second Democrat to criticize the governor publicly in less than a month.”
Speaking of which: “NY officials allowed COVID-positive workers to stay on the job at nursing homes — the facilities account for 25% of deaths in the state.” More of that brilliant one-party Democratic rule…
“Media Lies: Democrat Governors Doing Great Jobs Despite Higher Wuhan Death Rates.”
Continuing the theme (click to expand image):
Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy: “Screw your rights. Stay at home.” Wisconsin Supreme Court: “Unconstitutional.” Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy the very same day: “Oh yeah? Then screw your religion! No meetings for you God weirdos!” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
That crap doesn’t fly in Texas:
Dallas County Commissioner Judge Clay Jenkins has repeatedly tried to act as the ruler of Dallas County by attempting to force his will on everyone within it and each time he’s been put back in his place by everyone from the citizens of Dallas County to his own fellow commissioners.
Jenkins has now awakened the wrath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who issued a warning to him and other officials in other Texas counties who are trying to illegally prevent Texans from living doing things such as attending church.
According to Paxton’s office, a warning was issued to three county judges and two mayors telling them to back off their make-believe thrones, or else there will be consequences:
Attorney General Ken Paxton today issued letters to three Texas counties (Dallas, Bexar, and Travis) and two mayors (San Antonio and Austin), warning that some requirements in their local public health orders are unlawful and can confuse law-abiding citizens. These unlawful and unenforceable requirements include strict and unconstitutional demands for houses of worship, unnecessary and onerous restrictions on allowing essential services to operate, such as tracking customers who visit certain restaurants, penalties for not wearing masks, shelter-in-place demands, criminal penalties for violating state or local health orders, and failing to differentiate between recommendations and mandates.
The curve Democrats really want to flatten:
The government-imposed lockdown needs to end. But lot’s of people have (properly) set their own lockdown standards:
Many of the most important mitigation strategies are unknown to the general public because they’ve taken place behind closed doors on the initiative of employers, not bureaucrats, and have little or nothing to do with legal mandates (which are themselves, as I can attest is the case here in Canada, a contradictory, hastily-conceived patchwork of federal and provincial directives and advisories). To give but one example I happen to be familiar with: Many of the men and women you see driving delivery trucks and construction vehicles are now governed by all sorts of rules, at pickup and drop-off, that allow them to perform their functions without coming within six feet of others. In some cases, they’ve been enabled with apps on their phones or dash-mounted tablets that permit them to coordinate these functions without any direct on-site human interaction whatsoever. Or they might be subject to thermometer-gun screenings to determine if they have a fever. Having implemented these lockdown-lite policies at great cost and inconvenience, employers aren’t going to dump them the moment the government gives them permission to do so, even though these procedures have increased costs and decreased output.
Many employers I speak to are actually far more constricted by the concerns of their own employees than by the law itself. At one workplace that I know of, the boss announced that loosened provincial restrictions mean that everyone can come back to work this month. To his surprise, his employees announced that they’d voted on the issue through Facebook, and, no, they would not be coming back, at least not yet. And in Quebec, which is starting to let elementary-school students come back to class this month, thousands of parents—a majority at some schools—have decided to keep their children home. I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. It’s lockdown by mob.
To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so it’s not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if you’re all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along.
Devin Nunes thinks that the entire Trump transition team was under surveillance by the Obama Administration. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Don Surber asked a question back in 2017 that we ought to take a fresh look at: Was Obama using the NSA to spy on Romney during the 2012 election? Given what we know of Crossfire Hurricane, would anyone put it past him?
Related:
Russia, Russia, Russia!
Oh, lovely. Crowdstrike admits that there was no evidence that Russia hacked the DNC server.
Lives better for the living:
Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would like to know the truth behind Obama’s Fast and Furious illegal gun running program. A lot of us would like to know the same thing…
EU and German courts (strangely two different things in this story) are having a pissing match over whose gavel is bigger.
Canadian Broadcasting Company can’t decide just how it wants to lie about The Epoch Times and its reporting on the Chinese Communist Party’s culpability in the Wuhan Coronavirus. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
TSMC to build chip foundry in Arizona. This is a pretty big deal, as TSMC currently has the best fab tech in the world, and this will be their first ground-up American foundry (they currently have (I think) two other American fabs as the result of acquisitions from WaferTech and TI).
“Arkansas Professor Arrested For Concealing Communist Chinese Funding.”
An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.
The New York Times reports that “Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.”
“He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,” the report notes, adding that “he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”
The report explains that Ang’s alleged hiding of the funding enabled him to also get US government subsidies, specifically from NASA, to the tune of more than $5 million.
“Chinese Government Lays Off Entire Propaganda Team As American Media Doing Their Job For Them.
“CNN Replaces President Trump’s Press Briefings With President Xi’s.”
Capitalist fungus. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
“Billy doesn’t respond well to pressure.”
“Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY.”
Important safety tip: Don’t stand on an active airport runway. This was Austin, so odds are it was an adler.
For Rich:
The Los Angeles Rams uniforms are horrible garbage.
“Democratic States Deploy Greta Thunberg Drones To Lecture People Who Go Outside.”
Water sausage eats breakfast:
Goat rodeo:
This dog is on my wavelength:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, aircraft, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Andrew Cuomo, Arkansas, Austin, Babylon Bee, Brian Stelter, China, Clay Jenkins, coronavirus, corticosteroids, Crossfire Hurricane, Crowdstrike, Democrats, Devin Nunes, dogs, EU, fraud, Georgia, Germany, goats, Greta Thunberg, Gretchen Whitmer, homeless, hydroxychloroquine, Ken Paxton, Leslie Love, Los Angeles Rams, Massachusetts, Media Watch, Methylprednisolone, Mexico, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, NFL, Obamagate, otters, Pennsylvania, Regulation, Ron DeSantis, Ronald Shurer, Semiconductors, Simon Ang, spying, Texas, TSMC, Wisconsin, World War II, Wuhan, Xi Jinping
Posted in Austin, Democrats, Economics, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, Regulation, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »
Friday, January 31st, 2020
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! If you’re reading this, you haven’t died from the Coronavirus yet, despite China’s best efforts! And so many Babylon Bee slams of CNN that I couldn’t just pick one:
This morning’s contarvirus totals:
Total Infected: 9,776 (up from 2116 Sunday)
Total Deaths: 213
Total Recovered: 187
Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 22 (China (including Hong Kong), Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Macau, South Korea, United States of America, France, Germany, United Areb Emirates, Canada, Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Finland, India, Napal, Philippines, Sri Lanka)
Thoughts: If that’s not quite exponential growth it’s a pretty good first cousin. A case in Mumbai is scary. 11 cases in Japan is scary for the opposite reason, in that the Japanese take hygiene very seriously and have been unable to prevent spread there. No confirmed cases in Indonesia, which is probably only a matter of time.
The Cornoavirus is the demon bedeviling Xi Jinping: “Yes, ‘demon’ is a metaphor for a pathogen capable of killing millions. However, it is a demon the dictatorship’s repressive policies animate and tolerate in lieu of free communication.”
2019-nCoV, however, is beyond Xi’s dictatorial control. China’s dictatorship may awe Free World idiots, but it cannot intimidate a pathogen.
The coronavirus and its potential consequences of mass death expose the dictatorship’s brittleness. If you prefer, substitute “incompetence masked by police intimidation and lack of free expression” for “brittleness.”
Brutal authoritarian political control exacts overt and covert systemic costs. Western commentators — The New York Times’ Tom Friedman is a particularly smarmy example — admire authoritarian China’s alleged skill at solving major problems that dithering Western democracies cannot. What really dazzles Friedman and his ilk is the regime’s one-command-solves-it pose. Information control, especially control of dissent, bolsters this fraud.
Since 1980, China has made extraordinary economic progress, but its government’s destructive decisions are telling. The notorious one-child policy produced a demographic devil. What Western admirers touted as a farsighted plan to promote zero population growth killed millions of baby girls, skewed female-male sex ratios and, as of 2010, began creating a worker shortage.
Doctors in China and several Asian countries — the virus is on the verge of savaging Thailand — advocate isolating infected patients. The Great Firewall of China isolates the Chinese people from global information access and sharing. Beijing demands its citizens use state-sponsored social media in lieu of global alternatives. Isolation from information sharing hinders angry citizens from criticizing the communist leaders.
But this system isolates Chinese leaders from bad news — like mass illness — that caring human beings must share….As the party bigwigs dither, a deadly pathogen kills.
More thoughts from Richard Fernandez:
It was an example of ‘No Borders’ but not in a good way. The pathogen got on a plane abetted by a delay in acknowledgement. “The Chinese government failed to act quickly enough to curb the spread of the Wuhan virus, risking further outbreaks,” Guan Yi, the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong told the Asia Times. The Chinese government’s own data, hosted on Wikipedia, confirms this. It shows how at the beginning the numbers were small, the infection still all in one place. After a week it blew up.
This illustrates how giant totalitarian governments like China’s can be at a disadvantage in dealing with emergent events. What it gains in ruthless response cannot always make up for lost response time caused by the official denial of embarrassing facts. That explains why establishments are often surprised by events like Brexit and Hillary Clinton’s shock loss. They are unexpected because they were not in the 5 year plan. They arrive like a bolt from the blue.
When the unexpected happens the official Narrative often increases the reaction time of the system. While events are slow moving there may be no penalty but in the fast moving global world threats like the coronavirus may hit the public even before institutions admit it exists. The old model of globalization has paradoxically both speeded up the rate at which events occur and slowed the rate at which behemoth transnational institutions can respond.
The result is a mismatch and failure of institutions is the theme which unites Brexit, the US impeachment and the repeated viral threats from China.
Back on January 1st, eight Chinese doctors tried to warn people about a “viral pneumonia” going around. Want to guess what happened? That’s right. They were punished for spreading rumors.
First person-to-person coronavirus transmission case confirmed in Chicago, bringing the total to six cases in the U.S.
Kurt Schlichter thinks that President Donald Trump needs to get ahead of the coronavirus curve by communicating with the public, lest the impeachment-thwarted Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) make it into his “Katrina.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meet Dr. Peng Zhou a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group. You know, the same institute that posted a “help-wanted” ad to research Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats just before the local coronavirus outbreak there. What are the odds?
Seems that the college station student reported on last week tested negative for the coronavirus. Indeed, all four suspected Texas cases tested negative.
Speaking of China, I meant to blog this and forgot until Dwight reminded me: Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, “a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.”
Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.
Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.
The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.
If one pandemic were not enough, there’s also an outbreak of Lassa Fever in Nigeria.
Know how the MSM keeps harping on President Donald Trump’s “unpopularity?” A deep dive into various poll metrics suggests “not so much.”
This is pretty interesting:
(Hat tip (and more at) The Other McCain.)
More on that CNN clip I talked about yesterday:
63 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Are they all slack-jawed yokels motivated by hostility to geography, and facts? Do they all — or even most — have strong Southern accents? And, irrespective, is a Southern accent a predictor of stupidity? Many of my neighbors have strong southern accents. One of them is a surgeon. Whither nuance?
This particular clip has landed with such a bump because it also serves as an example of how inaccurately mediocrities tend to see themselves. Rick Wilson’s joke was second-rate and obviously pre-written, and yet Don Lemon reacted as if Wilson was Dave Chappelle — even going so far as to say he “needed” it. This behavior is learned. Since Donald Trump was elected, a certain set of political “strategists” — many of whom aren’t actually strategists, Ana Navarro — have come to see CNN as a clearing house for their bad one-liners, each sitting at home preparing zingers that they hope, once delivered, will go viral. This one has gone viral, of course, but for the opposite reason than its architects hoped: Because it is pathetic.
“CNN Announces Daily ‘Two Minutes Hate‘ Segment”
“CNN Unveils New Format Where Hosts Just Watch Fox News And Yell At It.”
Possibly my fav: “Flock Of Monocled Geese In Top Hats Joins Don Lemon In Round Of Laughter At The Commoners.”
“Political correctness and liberalism are literally killing people in Seattle.
It’s about squishy prosecutors and judges who let repeat offenders walk free. It is about a city council that has designed this because anarchy will allow them to rebuild the city in a socialist image.
Today, a woman is dead and seven others are injured. A 9-year-old remains in the hospital. It is shameful but unfortunately predictable, given who we have running things around here.
Snip.
We do not let the cops do their jobs. The cops know who the gang members and drug dealers are. They also know that if they see a drug transaction and write it up for the prosecutor’s office, it’s going to get kicked because it’s not a serious enough crime. And when prosecutors pursue criminals, judges let them walk free.
The two suspects in this downtown shooting have been arrested 44 times with 20 convictions and 21 times with 15 convictions. Marquise Tolbert, the one with 20 convictions, had three felonies last year alone. You tell me how someone with three felonies in 2019 is walking around free and able to engage in a shootout that kills a woman and injures a bunch of other people, including a 9-year-old kid. Both Tolbert and William Tolliver, the other suspect, are just 24 years old. They both have previously been arrested and charged with drive-by shootings and unlawful possession of a firearm in 2018. So the courts knew full well that these were gun-toting gang members. Why did our justice system let them walk free? Why do we place criminals above law-abiding citizens?
“Trump at the March for Life Seals Irrelevancy of Never Trumpers.”
Never Trump Republicans looked even more ridiculous at the end of the March for Life than they did that morning.
Trump was embraced by the largest gathering of pro-life Americans and Trump embraced them. Trump at the March for Life:
Sadly, the far-left is actively working to erase our God-given rights, shut down faith-based charities, ban religious believers from the public square, and silence Americans who believe in the sanctity of life. They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice.
Never Trump Republicans can’t imagine a man like Trump attending the March for Life.
Never Trumpism is built on a foundation of sanctimony.
These sanctimonious few don’t like how Trump speaks. They don’t like his bombast. They don’t like his past. He’s not George Bush.
Get over it. He’s winning.
That he is not George Bush might be Trump’s greatest transgression to Never Trumpers. Much of the hatred is mercenary, as so many have suffered financially from the end of their consultancy gravy train.
But Trump actually attended the March for Life. If you don’t think that matters to the 100,000+ who marched, then you can’t judge prevailing winds.
Snip.
What’s also striking about the Never Trumpers is how their hatred resembles a pathology, like some deep raw childhood memory. Trump is their aunt’s cat who used to viciously scratch them each visit. Trump is the playground bully who threw the football at their face. Trump is the twisted cousin who made you look at his dead animals in jars hidden in the back shed. He’s the bogeyman of their nightmares.
It all wells up in them, decades later, in outbursts, fears, and rage. It’s unhinged.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome is burning out the core audiences that made the media profitable. The Impeachment Eve rallies failed miserably with turnouts in the hundreds in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. A month later, turnout at the Women’s March had declined from the hundreds of thousands to the thousands. Even as impeachment was underway, the audience wasn’t there.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Chip Roy produce a proposal to fix health care.
James Younger case ends with joint custody and crazy mom not allowed to inflict hormone therapy on her eight-year old.
Border agents find longest smuggling tunnel yet discovered in San Diego, over three-quarters of a mile. “It includes an extensive rail/cart system, forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance, and a complex drainage system.” (Hat tip: CutJibNews at Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Leaked French Internal Intelligence Report Claims 150 Neighborhoods ‘Held’ By Radical Islamists.”
Minority kids perform better in conservative school districts.
Democrats caught teaching illegal aliens how to break the law and vote. Yet again. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Bernie Sanders is backing hard left challenger Jessica Cisneros against Texas Democratic incumbent congressman Henry Cuellar for the 28th Congressional District. The winner will face Republican Sandra Whitten in the general.
Germans have proof Huawei colluded with Chinese intelligence agencies. Duh, of course they did.
IBM replaces longtime CEO Virginia Rometty with Arvind Krishna. Probably a good move. The few people I knew who worked at IBM under her tenure had little good to say about the company, whose longterm trend has been offshoring and outsourcing rather than hiring fulltime U.S. employees. But every group in IBM seems like its own little fiefdom.
Dwight offers a moderately deepish dive into two fraud cases, including a celebrated social scientist and a celebrated organic farmer.
Congrats to Republican Gary Gates for winning the Texas House District 28 special election runoff over Democrat Eliz Markowitz. This is Gates’ first successful race in eight tries, and he supposedly threw a ton of money into it.
Noted without comment: “2nd California child molester dies after beating with cane.”
Florida New Jersey Man Mayor.
“Utah man builds bulletproof stormtrooper suit with 3-D printer.” Caveat: Not all of it is bullet-proof and it took 400-600 hours to make.
Gaming the buffet. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Too painful to laugh, too funny not to laugh. Bet she was pissed off… (Hat tip: Michele Frost.)
Looks staged. Still funny.
Tags:#NeverTrump, 2020 Election, abortion, Arvind Krishna, Babylon Bee, Bernie Sanders, Border Controls, Boston University, Charles M. Lieber, China, Chip Roy, CNN, Communism, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, dogs, Donald Trump, Elections, Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz, Eric Ciaramella, France, fraud, Gary Gates, Germany, Harvard, health care, Henry Cuellar, Huawei, IBM, India, Indonesia, James Younger, Japan, Jessica Cisneros, Jihad, Kurt Schlichter, Lassa Fever, March for Life, Media Watch, Mexico, New Jersey, Nigeria, ObamaCare, pandemic, Peng Zhou, Republicans, Seattle, spying, Ted Cruz, Texas, Texas 28th Congressional District, Thailand, Thomas Friedman, transexual, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Ukraine, Virginia Rometty, Wuhan, Xi Jinping, Yanqing Ye, Zaosong Zheng
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas, Uncategorized, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 17th, 2020
Trade deals and Iran dominate today’s LinkSwarm:
President Donald Trump gets his trade deal with China.
Also, the senate just passed the USMCA trade agreement.
Iran is closer to regime collapse than ever before, says one of Obama’s National Security Advisors:
Asked about the possibility of regime collapse, General James Jones, who was Obama’s national security advisor in 2009 and 2010, said the risk for Tehran cannot be ignored.
“I think the needle is moved more in that direction in the last year towards that possibility than ever before with a combination of the sanctions, relative isolation of the regime, and then some catastrophic decisions have been made — assuming that we weren’t going to respond, which turned out to be a very, very bad decision,” Jones told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi on Sunday.
The response Jones referred to was the U.S. drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 3, a move that shocked the region and prompted a response from Iran in the form of missiles strikes on two military bases in Iraq that housed U.S. forces. No one was killed in the strikes. Washington says the strike was in response to the storming by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and purported threats cited by the White House of impending attacks on Americans.
“I think it’s clear that the regime in Iran has had a very bad couple of weeks,” Jones said. “And one of the things that people don’t talk about too much is the degree of unrest that there is in the country, which I think is significant.”
“So you take the removal of Soleimani, you take the accidental downing of the civilian aircraft coupled with the amount of popular unrest — the needle towards possible collapse of a regime has to be something that people think about. It’s probably not politically correct to talk about it, but you have to think about it.”
More on the same theme.
Strangely enough, Europe is also tried of Iran’s BS:
Germany, France and the United Kingdom have launched a formal dispute mechanism against Iran which could end up putting international sanctions on the regime. The measure was announced on Tuesday following recent Iranian violations of the 2015 nuclear deal. The dispute will now be brought before a Joint Commission made up of Iran, Russia, China, the three European signatories, and the European Union. If the panel fails to resolve the dispute, the matter will then come before the United Nations Security Council.
Even if the process gets stalled at the UN, Iran could end up facing comprehensive international sanctions — in addition to the current U.S. sanctions, media reports suggest. “If the Security Council does not vote within 30 days to continue sanctions relief, sanctions in place under previous UN resolutions would be reimposed – known as a “snapback”,” British newspaper The Telegraph reported.
Tehran formally abandon the nuclear deal last Sunday by announcing its plans to scrap the limits on enriching uranium put in place by the international agreement, Iranian state TV confirmed. The move brings Tehran within striking distance of procuring sufficient weapons-grade uranium needed for a nuclear arsenal. The regime already possesses advanced missile delivery systems capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Florida Republican representative (and veteran) Brian Mast at congressional hearing on Soleimani “If you walk out this hallway, and you take a right and a right and another right, you’re going to come to several beautiful walls that have the names of our fallen service members from the War on Terror,” Mast began. “And I would ask, can any of you provide me with one name on that wall that doesn’t justify killing Soleimani?” Dead silence ensues. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Illegal alien crossing down 78%. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Plus President Trump is transferring another $7.2 billion for border wall construction. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More swamp follies: “Federal Judge Orders Justice Department to Explain Why Awan Documents Are Being Kept Secret.”
An apparently frustrated federal judge ordered attorneys for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to appear Jan. 15 for a “snap” hearing to explain why the government isn’t producing documents sought by Judicial Watch concerning former Democratic information technology aide Imran Awan.
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta’s unusual order followed a sealed submission by DOJ attorneys Jan. 10 in the case prompted by the nonprofit government watchdog’s November 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
Such hastily convened hearings are extremely unusual in a federal judicial system so jammed that months can pass before cases are litigated in courtrooms.
“In a hearing last month, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta expressed frustration and ordered the Justice Department to explain its failure to produce records by January 10 and to provide Judicial Watch some details about the delay,” Judicial Watch said in a statement Jan. 14 about the snap hearing.
“Instead, the Justice Department made its filing under seal and has yet to provide Judicial Watch with any details about its failure to produce records as promised to the court,” Judicial Watch said.
Federal attorneys previously said in December 2019 that they were unable to provide the documents sought in the Judicial Watch FOIA requests because they include materials from a “related sealed criminal matter.”
I think we all know the real reason the DOJ won’t produce the documents: Because they’ll prove deeply damaging to Democrats. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Another week, another Muslim child sex grooming gang in the UK, this one in Manchester.
U.S. to Iraq: Hey, if you don’t want our troops there, we can always take all our military aid dollars and go home.
Crazy Canadian tranny Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv assaults a reporter.
Arizona Republican Senator Martha McSally calls CNN reporter Manu Raju a liberal hack. Good for her. (And yes, coverage of CNN’s putting it’s thumb on the scale for Elizabeth Warren and against Bernie Sanders is coming in next week’s Clown Car update.)
More about our crappy media: “So many of the people in foreign affairs journalism imbibed the “Bush lied us into war” rhetoric so deeply that they’ve concluded that American officials must be treated with way more skepticism than officials in secretive and serially dishonest authoritarian regimes. They say generals are always fighting the last war; apparently journalists are always covering the last one, too.”
Another real winner from the Islamic State:
Knife crime at 10 year high in England and Wales.
Hempstead, Texas mayor indicted on felony theft of services charges. Namely, he felt that being mayor meant he didn’t have to pay his utility bills. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti jailed after bail condition violation. There’s not a violin small enough.
Interesting thread about emergency care in America.
Oh come on! I’ve got nothing for or against Odell Beckham, Jr. (he’s a talented wide receiver; bit of a chucklehead, but far from the worst among wide receivers (*coughcoughAntonioBrown*)), and people committing actual assault against police officers should be arrested. This isn’t remotely it.
Every Brad Pitt performance ranked. Haven’t seen every one of these, but from the ones I’ve seen: Yeah. Fair enough.
Vince Vaughn, good guy.
Michigan town buys electronic nose to smell marijuana. I can’t see this as a good use of taxpayer money.
“Que es mas macho?” This guy! (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Enjoy the nightmare-fueled sounds of the apprehension engine.
This week’s dog tweet:
Tags:Border Controls, border fence, Brad Pitt, Brian Mast, China, CNN, Democrats, dogs, Football, Foreign Policy, France, Germany, Hempstead, Imran Awan, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Jonathan Yaniv, LinkSwarm, Manchester, Manu Raju, marijuana, Martha McSally, Media Watch, Michael Avenatti, Michael Shayne Wolfe, Michigan, NFL, Odell Beckham Jr., pedophilia, Qassem Suleimani, Texas, trade, transexual, UK, USMCA
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Friday, November 8th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Trump is derailing the elite’s gravy train:
Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.
What happens then?
What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.
The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.
So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:
If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.
Snip.
For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”
In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.
Full State Department review of Hillary Clinton’s emails show nearly 600 security violations.
Former Virginia democratic governor forgives current Virginia democratic governor for wearing blackface. “We’ve moved on,” says former Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe. As Stephen Green says, “it’s easy to move on when your side can’t be held accountable.”
President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.
As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.
(Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
“Maryland Officials Drop Sanctuary Policy After Illegal Alien Sex Crimes.”
Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Comedians Taking Sides In The Woke Wars.”
A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.
“No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.
“Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’
Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?
The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.
Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.
“Federal agents raided a Long Island tech firm early Thursday and arrested its top executives amid concerns the company was selling Chinese-made equipment to the U.S. military while claiming it had been manufactured in the United States. According to federal prosecutors, Aventura Technologies of Commack has been running the alleged scheme since 2006, selling equipment with “known cybersecurity vulnerability” to government and other customers.”
MSM amnesia:
Out-of-state Justice Democrats money props up Texas candidate:
Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.
Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.
“Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman tried to illegally transmit voting information over the Internet. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Disruptive Democrats crushed in The Woodlands.
“Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
Samsung lays off it’s entire Austin design team. I used to work in the building where it was housed, a few jobs ago…
Rudy Boesch, decorated Navy SEAL. He was also evidently on some reality TV show.
America: Hey Berlin, you want a statue of Ronald Reagan? You know, “tear down this wall” and all of that? Berlin: Nein. America: Too bad.
Another day, another fake hate crim—wait, a real one? Oh, against a Catholic Church. In New York City. Now I get it.
“Fringe Conspiracy Theorist Believes Epstein Just Killed Himself.”
Tags:#NeverTrump, 2019 Elections, 2020 Election, 3D Printing, 7.62x39, Adam Carolla, AK-47, Arizona, Austin, Aventura Technologies, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Bill Burr, Border Controls, Brexit, China, comedy, Crime, Dave Chappelle, Democrats, Diane Trautman, Elections, Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz, EmailGate, Gary Gates, Germany, Global Warming, Guns, Harris County, Henry Cuellar, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Jeff, Jessica Cisneros, Justice Democrats, Kurt Schlichter, LinkSwarm, Maryland, Media Watch, Military, New York, Plastikov, Ralph Northam, rape, Republicans, Samsung, sanctuary cities, science fiction, Sebastian Maniscalo, sex offender, Social Justice Warriors, State Department, Terry McAuliffe, Texas, Texas 28th Congressional District, The Woodlands, Todd Phillips, Tucson, UK, Virginia, WisCon
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 29th, 2019
From this side of the pond, the EU election results may seem somewhat baffling. Populist parties gained ground at the expense of centrist and traditional parties, but so did the Greens. This doesn’t fit our traditional left-right political schemas.
In the UK, Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party captured the most EU parliamentary seats. “Mr Farage’s party won 29 seats, the Lib Dems 16, Labour 10, the Greens seven, the Tories four, the SNP three, and Plaid Cymru and the DUP one each.” Those are disasterous results for Labour and the Tories. UKIP was wiped out and entirely replaced by the Brexit Party. The Liberal Democrats coming in second was a result I do not think was foreseen by anyone, nor the Greens doing better than the Tories. The colossal stink of the inability to deliver Brexit that clings to the Tories and Labour helped both Liberal Democrats and Greens, both being so far from power and out of the spotlight the last few years. Faced with parties run by Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, “Vote them all out!” must have seemed like a coldly rational choice.
Some interesting results in Scotland:
In Scotland, the pro-Remain SNP won the biggest share of the vote, with just under 38%, giving it three MEPs.
The Brexit Party came in second place with a significantly lower percentage – 14.8% – followed by the Lib Dems with 13.9% and the Tories with 11.6% – meaning each party has one seat.
But Labour only received 9.3% of the vote – a loss in vote share of 16.6% – leaving it with no MEPs in Scotland for the first time.
It’s hard to say what these results indicate for UK domestic politics going forward, as traditionally MEP elections have been very poor indicators of the next general election. But the giant Brexit cockup is hugely hurting both Tories and Labour.
On the results from Europe as a whole:
1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.
2) Where the center retreated, however, the populist Right did not always occupy the abandoned position. National populists (which is the approved non-hostile term for describing them) advanced moderately and consolidated their previous gains substantially in the elections. Victor Orban’s Fidesz won 52 percent of the votes in Hungary. Poland’s Law and Justice party held off a multi-party attack from an organized left-wing coalition and won a majority that suggests it will win the forthcoming national elections. France’s National Rally — the latest name for the populist Right party led by Marine Le Pen — narrowly defeated the populist-centrist party of President Macron in France. (Populist-centrism may be a novel concept, and it may prove to be an unsuccessful one, but it’s the best description yet coined of Macron’s ambiguous politics.) The political success of Italy’s populism we outlined above. And in the United Kingdom, the populist Euroskeptic party, titled with stunning simplicity the Brexit party, went from its foundation five weeks ago to become the largest U.K. party in the European Parliament, with 32 percent of the national vote and 29 MEPs. But it hopes to be leaving Parliament soon.
Populism suffered no major defeats anywhere — unless you count (and you shouldn’t) Denmark, where the People’s Party share of the vote was halved because the more respectable social democrats adopted their tough migration policy. On the other hand, populism didn’t win as many votes as the populists had hoped and as the Left and the media had feared. In particular, populists fell well short of taking control of the European Parliament or, as we shall see, even weakening the control of it exercised by the reigning centrist duopoly of Christian and Social Democrats.
3) If the center retreated and the Right advanced only so far, European Liberals (the ALDE parliamentary group) and Greens occupied the vacant ground. Greens became the second party in Germany and the third party in France; Liberal Democrats became the surprise second-place winners, after Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in Britain; and both parties did well throughout the western half of Europe. Their success is not a mystery. Progressive middle-class voters wanted more idealistic commitments to policies such as combatting climate change and opening borders than the cautious center always provided. In addition, such voters were alarmed by what they saw as the national-populist threat to the European Union — a greatly exaggerated one in reality since none of the populists outside the U.K. want to leave the EU, merely to restrain it. All the same, these voters turned out to support the EU, too, which in the U.K. explains the rise of the Lib Dems as a response to the Brexit party.
As Australian elections proved, green policies are popular right up to the point that someone tries to implement them.
Cutting to the chase:
The moderately conservative EPP will struggle to keep its preeminence within the centrist coalition because the ALDE and the Greens are ideologically closer to the socialists than to themselves; Greens within the European Parliament and Germany itself will want to use their newfound power to phase out fossil fuels, which will be resisted by coal-producing Poland and Eastern Germany; the more progressive Euro-parliamentary majority may want to press sanctions on Viktor Orban for violating “European values,” but the success of populists in half of Europe means that he now has more allies in that conflict; and, above all, President Macron has enthusiastic supporters among the ALDE liberals in the European Parliament for his ambitious integrationist projects that the Germans and other Northern European governments fear they will be asked to finance.
And these projects are indeed formidable: to centralize the power and sovereignty of 27 nation-states in European institutions without solving their existing democracy deficit; to replace their independent budgetary arrangements with a single European fiscal policy without the power of tax collection; to create a common European defense structure separate from NATO without increasing anyone’s defense expenditure; to replace fossil fuels with renewables to solve climate change without massive regulation, and a realistic plan to prevent a huge rise in energy costs for industry and consumers. This is the hubris of government, but its costs always fall on others. It is sometimes said that the error of socialists is not that they have no faith in capitalism but that they have almost boundless faith in it. They think it can bear any burden they place on it and still stagger on delivering the goods. Modern European statesmen feel the same way about their citizens. The populists remind them they’re wrong. And they haven’t gone away.
One moderating effect on an “radical center” is the fact that the structure of the EU leaves very little actual power in the hands of the EU Parliament. My suspicion is that if the EU Parliament wanted to phase out fossil fuels faster than the real rulers of the EU think wise, those policies would just magically not get implemented.
As I’ve stated before, the future of EU politics probably looks a lot like the Northern League-Five Star alliance in Italy: Moderately populist, in favor of both low taxes and a large welfare state, guaranteed to remain popular right up until the inevitable economic crash.
Tags:Brexit, Brexit Party, Christian Democratic Union, Conservatives, Denmark, Emmanuel Macron, EU, EU Elections, Five Star Movement, Foreign Policy, France, Germany, Green Parties (EU), Italy, Labour, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Northern League (Italy), Scotland, Scottish National Party, UK, UKIP, Viktor Orban
Posted in Elections, Foreign Policy | No Comments »
Friday, May 17th, 2019
Just been one of those weeks…
Are Brennan, Clapper and Comey ratting on each other? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
This is more than infuriating: “Kentucky Judges Pre-Signed Blank Legal Documents So That Child Services Could Take Custody of Kids on Nights and Weekends.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
No sooner did I put up my own piece on jihad in the Sahel than the BBC published this extensive piece about the same subject, including how jihadists came to Mali in the wake of Obama’s supergenius intervention in Libya.
The religious extremists imposed strict sharia law. In Timbuktu and beyond, they smashed shrines built for Sufi mystics, burned manuscripts and destroyed ancient artefacts.
The priceless texts would have all been lost had it not been for the old guardian families who protected what they could.
Tuaregs and Islamists disagreed over the way their new state of Azawad should be run and began to fight each other.
The government asked for foreign military help and the former colonial power France answered the call.
French troops arrived in January 2013 and were joined by African forces. Within a month, they had driven the violent extremists out into the desert and retaken the River Niger towns.
Plus the usual UN fecklessness. Read the whole thing.
“CONFIRMED: Google Gives Left-Wing Websites Preference Over Conservative Ones, Audit Finds.”
Denmark’s main leftwing party realizes that uncontrolled, unassimilated immigration hurts the poor. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.”
The New York media can’t talk about skyrocketing antisemetic attacks against Jews in New York City. Why? Because the attackers are black and Hispanic.
Idaho is ending some regulations. Which ones? All of them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
So that botched Houston drug raid is looking even more botched, as forensic evidence shows the people in the house they wrongly targeted didn’t even fire their weapons at police, and all police gunshot wounds were inflicted by other officers. It seems like just about every aspect of the raid was a lie. At this point, it seems like some rogue HPD cops straight-up murdered Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas for reasons nobody has yet been able to identify.
Speaking of infuriating abuses of power: “San Francisco Police Go After Journalist Who Revealed Public Defender’s Affair, Overdose.”
State district judge rules Houston Proposition B unconstitutional. That was the one to give firefighters pay parity with police officers, and one Houston mayor Sylvester Turner was fighting tooth and nail.
Why people die in Houston car accidents. A whole lot of “Pedestrian failed to yield to vehicle,” failure to drive in one lane” and “failure to control speed,” plus the usual smattering of alcohol. (Hat tip: Kemberlee Kaye.)
No federal high speed rail money for California. Good.
Is Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib a terrorist sympathizer? Well, here’s evidence from five of her closest friends, so you can judge for yourself:
The Air Force brings a B-52H back from the bone yard for active service duty. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Atheist visits places in America his fellow liberals forgot about, and finds not only a sense of place, but an abundance of faith:
When I first went to the Bronx, I expected that the people there, those most affected by the coldness and ruthlessness of the world, would share my atheism. Instead, I found a strong belief in the supernatural, and a faith that manifested in many ways, mostly as a belief in the Bible.
Everyone I met there who was living homeless or battling an addiction held a deep faith. Street walking is stunningly dangerous work, and everyone has stories of being cut, attacked, and threatened, or stories of others who were killed. Everyone has to deal with the danger. Few work without a mix of heroin, Xanax, or crack. None without faith. “You know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.”
There are dirty Bibles in crack houses, Qur’ans in abandoned buildings. There is a picture of the Last Supper that moves with a couple living on the streets. Rosaries, crucifixes, and religious icons are worn for protection and good luck. Pages of the Bible are torn out, folded up, and kept in pockets, to be pulled out and fingered nervously, or read over in times of stress, or held during prayers.
Latest Remainer complaint “Brexit Party logo ‘subconsciously manipulates voters into backing Farage.'”
Hot take: “Ha ha! Gene Simmons of KISS at the Pentagon! Stupid Trump!” Deeper take: As part of a military outreach program, to talk about how his mother, a concentration camp survivor who recently died at age 93, loved America and teared up watching the TV sign-off flag. “America is the promised land. For everybody.”
When I removed Creeping Sharia from the blogroll because it was no longer up, I didn’t realize that it had just been deplatformed by WordPress. (Hat tip: A comment from regular blog reader Howard.)
Supermodel appears nude in protest of not enough black babies being aborted in Alabama.
You know what Germany needs? Stricter crossbow regulation. (Hat tip: Amy Alkon.)
Haven’t seen this yet, but I want to: “The Guns and Gunplay of The Highwaymen Were Actually Accurate.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Not buying this, not even sure it will work, but buying buying your own biohacking lab is a pretty cyberpunk thing to do…
Voynich manuscript decoded?
Grumpy Cat, RIP. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Tags:abortion, Air Force, Alabama, anti-semitism, B-52, Brexit, Brexit Party, California, cats, Crime, Democrats, Denmark, Dennis Tuttle, Germany, Google, high speed rail, Houston, Houston Police Department, Idaho, James Clapper, James Comey, Jihad, John Brennan, Kentucky, Libya, LinkSwarm, Mali, Media Watch, New York City, Proposition B, Rashida Tlaib, Rhogena Nicholas, Sahel, San Francisco, Sylvester Turner, technology, Texas
Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | 2 Comments »
Friday, February 15th, 2019
There’s a much criticized spending bill with a lot of poison pill provisions and a tiny bit of border wall funding President Trump is expected to sign, and then declare a national emergency to get the wall built.
While that’s up in the air, enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Democrats don’t want to detain or deport violent felons. If that’s the hill they want to die on, bring on the shutdown. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd told Breitbart News Tonight on Wednesday that Congress had ignored the advice of experts when reaching a deal to provide less than $1.4 billion for border fencing.”
The ludicrous nature of the Democrats’ “Green New Deal” continues to haunt them, leading to a lot of walking back economically insane socialist goals. NPR has the original text of the proposal.
Jonah Goldberg on the subject:
These people think that they can adequately plan and run — for all time — an economic system from Washington that would guarantee: “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States” as well as “access to nature.”
But they can’t even plan the roll out of a non-binding resolution and some press-release materials? And, when confronted by their own words, their immediate response was to accuse their enemies of sabotaging them? Gosh, by all means, let’s give them control of the entire economy. That couldn’t work out badly. I mean “Mistakes happen when doing time launches like this coordinating multiple groups and collaborators,” when uploading FAQs, not when doing anything as simple as commandeering the bulk of the U.S. economy.
Republicans pull the dirtiest trick on Democrats ever: forcing them to vote on the Green New Deal lunacy they just endorsed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Bill Barr confirmed as Attorney General.
Amazon cancels it’s New York City HQ2 expansion plans. Government shouldn’t be throwing subsidies at targeted corporations (nor picking winners and losers). The decision is also rich, zesty schadenfreude for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez screwing over New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who both pushed hard for the Amazon deal.
This story should be absolutely infuriating to everyone on all sides of the political spectrum: rather than preserving or processing DNA rape kits, Oklahoma destroyed them.
How do Democrats expect to get socialism to work nationwide when they can’t even get it to work at one Panera Bread location?
Twitter bias is real. “Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Democrats cause climate change. The science is settled!
Those pesky peasants are threatening the EU by daring to vote for parties of which the EU elite disapproved.
Brexit update:
“Migrants” banned from Finnish schools and daycare centers because of all the rapes.
Here’s a phising scam that targets not only credit unions, but the credit union officers in charge of enforcing anti-money laundering laws.
Pro-tip: If you’re a phone scammer, try not to target the former head of the FBI and the CIA.
Meanwhile in Australia: “$500 per family for a single day’s electricity. There’s your Green New Deal.”
Germany and Japan are teaming up to oppose American foreign policy. I’ve seen this movie before, and I don’t think they’ll like how it ends…
Islamic State executioner enjoys death by tank. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More semi-informed speculation than insider knowledge: “The Notorious RBG…is not dead. But she probably soon will be.” (Hat tip: Doug Ross on Twitter.)
New frontiers in unconstitutional legislation: “The Los Angeles City Council voted yesterday to require companies who want to contract with the city to disclose their relationships with the National Rifle Association.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Disgraced former Democratic state senator Carlos Uresti sentenced to five years for bribery. Unfortunately it will run concurrently with his fraud conviction, and therefore result in no additional time in prison. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Don’t mess with Texas, Part 8,192. Doesn’t say whether the attackers were illegal aliens or not. (Hat tip: HeidiL_RN.)
There’s low, and there’s “constable stealing Hurricane Harvey donations” low.
Tesla’s Buffalo Gigafactory workers are not happy campers.
Jussie Smollett’s hate crime allegations fall apart.
New Jersey hates high school football.
I don’t keep up with celebrity culture at all, but this is freaking hilarious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who provides context for celebrity-challenged.)
“Millennials Have Discovered ‘Going Out’ Sucks.” And they only discovered this after cities pushed densification policies to hurd them all downtown where the clubs and bars are… (Hat tip: Millennial Conservative.)
Tags:Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Amazon, Andrew Cuomo, Australia, Bill Barr, Bill De Blasio, Border Controls, border fence, Brexit, California, Carlos Uresti, Crime, data security, Democrats, EU, Finland, fraud, Germany, Global Warming, Green New Deal, Harris County, Hurricane Harvey, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Japan, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Los Angeles, Media Watch, New Jersey, New York, New York City, NRA, Oklahoma, phishing, rape, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, socialism, Tesla Motors, Texas, Twitter
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Saturday, February 2nd, 2019
Warfare is an endemic part of the human condition, but for at least two millennia, Europeans were the defining practitioners of it. From Alexander the Great and the Roman legions up through the Napoleonic Wars and the Blitzkrieg, Europe was at the forefront of finding new, innovative ways of killing people on a massive scale.
Now the continent that defined warfare can’t figure out how to defend itself. Or, more accurately, they know how to do it but are singularly unwilling to spend the necessary money. For decades, Europe has let the United States do the heavy lifting on defense spending, with most nations falling below the 2% of GDP funding level called called for by NATO. (Only the United States, the UK, Greece, Estonia and Latvia met that threshold last year, with Poland and Lithuania just barely missing it.) It seems that stagnant economies and cradle-to-grave welfare states make adequate defense spending democratically unpopular in most of the EU.
Many U.S. administrations have grumbled abut this. Only President Donald Trump grumbled about it loudly enough to make progress on the issue:
NATO states have agreed to increase their defense spending by $100 billion over two years after President Trump went on a fiery tirade last July – calling on “delinquent” countries to boost their contributions by 2% to 4% of GDP. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance heard Trump’s call “loud and clear” and that member nations are “stepping up,” according to the Telegraph.
Right now these are only promises; it remains to be seen if the various European nations will carry-through.
Weirdly, at the same time Trump was pushing for adequate funding for NATO, France and Germany were signing a treaty proclaiming that they were the same country, at least as far as foreign and defense policy were concerned:
Europe’s most powerful personages on Tuesday signed a treaty for the “unification,” of Western Europe’s biggest countries. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel inked the deal at Aachen/Aix la Chapelle. It was there in the chapel that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer had knelt at Holy Mass to celebrate the signing of the 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation that sealed their peoples’ vow of friendship and cooperation. In the ensuing half century, it produced just that. France and Germany became the core of the Common Market and then of the European Union.
Today’s treaty, its pretensions notwithstanding, is between regimes that are overwhelmingly occupied trying, with decreasing success, to fend off domestic challenges to their legitimacy. The treaty is a desperate attempt by France and Germany to change the subject from their internal struggles. Nevertheless, the treaty cannot but have major and deleterious effects on intra-European relations as well as on relations between Europe and the United States.
In 1963, de Gaulle and Adenauer had hoped for even greater coordination in foreign and defense policy as well but, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, the German Bundestag added a clause to the treaty’s ratification that privileged the Federal Republic’s defense relationship with America. By contrast, the 2019 treaty’s main thrust is to sever that clause. The two countries will act “as a single unit with regard to relations with third countries.”
Lest there be any doubt, the final sentence reads: “The admission of the Federal Republic of Germany as a permanent member of of the United Nations Security Council [where it would share France’s seat] is a priority of Franco-German diplomacy.”
For other European countries, and for the United States, Macron and Merkel’s real domestic worries matter far less than the fact that, henceforth, the European core’s main weight will be wielded in unison.
Rules notwithstanding, the EU never was a club of equals. As the years passed, and especially after the advent of the Euro and the European Central Bank, Germany became primus inter pares, and then more to the point, other states learned that Berlin was the place to ask for EU favors, and Germans the folks to blame for not getting them. Henceforth, with Berlin and Paris jointly at the helm, other countries will wonder whether asking or blaming will be of any use. The EU will do whatever the two will dictate to Brussels from their joint councils of ministers.
Snip.
In sum, the new Franco-German core is sure further to erode the EU, NATO, and the United Nations. But even as the French and German alliance is poised to disrupt so many international institutions, it is soft inside because it arises from both regimes’ alienation from their own peoples.
Neither has France’s Macron found, nor is he likely to find, a way of appeasing the anger that the French people, via the “yellow vest” movement, have demonstrated for the way they have been governed for a half century; nor have Merkel and her allies on the traditional Left and Right been able to stanch the hemorrhaging of their electoral support, for reasons that differ little from those that motivate France’s yellow vests. France’s 1958 Fifth Republic constitution and Germany’s 1949 Grundgesetz largely insulate the respective governments from immediate popular pressure. But these governments’ alienation from their citizens is substantive and cultural. It is not such as can be healed by time—or by treaties.
Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and the people then in leadership positions in their countries were in basic sympathy with their peoples’ civilization. They wanted to keep France French and Germany German. As Catholics, the notion of enforcing the religion of “global warming” would have been repugnant to them, as would any of the current, ever-changing dictates of “political correctness.” They did not imagine themselves regulators of energy usage or of the details of life. As nationalists, they rejected the notion of supranational institutions beyond the peoples’ electoral control.
In all these regards, Merkel and Macron, and their recent predecessors, have abandoned their peoples. The abandonment is mutual. Consequently, their regimes are rotting. On January 22 they took another step that transfers this rot to the international institutions of which their countries are part.
France has long pushed for a “European” military structure apart from NATO, and now it may (theoretically) have the political framework to actually carry it out.
(But wait, you ask: What about that “European Defence Union?” Indeed, that does exist, in the form of the Common Security and Defence Policy under the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, bringing with it a host of other organizations and acronyms dwelling between national military command hierarchies and the EU’s luxuriant tangle of bureaucracy. Never doubt, citizen, that many connected Europeans are being paid extremely well to man the bureaucratic barricades of the CSDP…)
The irony, however, is that after more than a century of being on the losing end of Germany military might, France’s new military best buddy now sucks at war:
The biggest problem that Bundeswehr soldiers complained about was the lack of equipment, despite repeated government promises, dating back to a 2014 NATO summit, of a change in direction. That does not count as a surprising development, considering the barrage of poor press the German military has been facing.
Heavy machinery was a particular concern: [Hans-Peter] Bartels found that often less than 50 percent of the Bundeswehr’s tanks, ships and aircraft were available at any one time, either for training or operational purposes.
“Spare parts are still missing; maintenance in industry is dragging; the training programs are suffering,” Social Democrat Bartels said. “An absolute must is the acceleration of procurement.” (…)
Another worry for the Defense Ministry is the stagnation of its post-conscription recruitment drive, which began after Germany scrapped national service in 2011. Though the Bundeswehr is expanding overall (the report found a net gain of 4,000 professional soldiers), most of these were won by extending existing contracts. In other words, the German military is aging.
(Previously.)
The further irony is that, while Merkel and Macron signed the treaty, it may very well be National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Alternative for Germany’s leaders like Alice Weidel who inherit it.
In a parallel development, President Trump has informed Moscow that the United States is pulling out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. American deployment of nuclear-capable Pershing missiles in Europe were, along with SDI, key elements in forcing the Soviet Union to the bargaining table in the 1980s, but Russia has been cheating on it, and the treaty outlived its usefulness.
Speaking of outliving its usefulness, America’s political establishment seems desperate to avoid debating whether NATO itself has outlived its usefulness. The old adage “Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down” no longer seems to apply. Russia still has ample nuclear weapons and a formidable conventional force, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While Vladimir Putin shows every sign of being willing to to bite more chunks off Ukraine (and I wouldn’t put trying to reconquer the Baltic countries past him), they can’t afford to deploy their next generation weapons in sufficient numbers, their navy is in a world of hurt, and their adventurism in Syria is looking more and more like costly overreach.
This piece in National Review argues that (among other things):
The irony is that the Trump administration actually has a success story to tell about its policies toward NATO and Russia, particularly in Europe. Under this administration, the U.S. has provided lethal aid to Ukraine to fight off Russian-backed insurgents. It has made no concessions to Moscow regarding that conflict. It has increased sanctions against Russia and boosted America’s military presence in Eastern Europe.
All that is mostly true, except for the tiny, inconvenient facts that the “Russian-backed insurgents” include significant components of the Russian army and that all these efforts have been singularly ineffective at actually expelling Russian forces from Ukraine. This is not exactly a textbook definition of “success.”
I’m willing to be persuaded that NATO is still a vital alliance, but the arguments I’ve seen thus far are not doing it. And letting Turkey remain a member while its Islamist government remains at cross-purposes to NATO’s stated goals is counterproductive.
With a few exceptions, Europe’s transnational elites will continue to skimp on defense in order to continue feeding the maw of their failing welfare states as long as the United States lets them. And despite some moderate successes by the Trump Administration, I don’t see that dysfunctional dynamic changing as long as those same functionaries remain in charge.
Tags:Alice Weidel, Alternative for Germany, Angela Merkel, Bundeswehr, Cold War, Common Security and Defence Policy, Emmanuel Macron, Estonia, EU, France, Germany, INF Treaty, Latvia, Lithuania, Marine Le Pen, Military, NATO, Pershing missiles, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin
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