Posts Tagged ‘Hamas’

LinkSwarm for October 9, 2020

Friday, October 9th, 2020

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s topics include Texas, voting fraud, and Texas voting fraud.

  • Potentially the biggest story of the week is President Donald Trump authorizing the release of all documents relating to the Russian Collusion Hoax and Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in unredacted form. We were already getting a steady trickle of those declassified. Let’s see if this turns it into a flood.
  • Borepatch thinks the election is over. “The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown. The breathless hyping of the ‘rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation. They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them. That’s all gone now.”
  • How dare Trump recover?

    A keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! — to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the president’s attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctors’ orders. Wouldn’t that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement next door in the Senate this month?

  • “Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying.” “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!”
  • “Party That Wants To Run Your Healthcare Roots For Political Opponent To Die.”
  • Anti-Trumpers and their festival of hatred:

    Some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into founts of seething malevolence.

    It’s deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.

    People don’t like what threatens them, especially if they have no immediate factual answer to some of the evidence presented to them. What’s left to them is to explode—which this person did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess, although I don’t know, and I’m certainly not about to ask, that she and plenty of other people I know might be rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trump’s diagnosis.

    Are they “possessed?” Is this “demonic?” I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I tend to think in psychological terms because these people are, for the most part, not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.

  • This week’s #BlackLifeMatters riots come to you from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Kurt Schlichter on dangerous talk from stupid people:

    Wishing that your opponent dies of a disease is pretty bad, but some go beyond the passive voice when hoping for our deaths. They seek to do it. Exhibit A is tech overlord Dick Costolo, a former Twitter CEO apparently, who tweeted on September 30th, “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” So Dick, which by coincidence also happens to also be your name, you want to play horsey, huh?

    I guess casually cheering the murder of political opponents gets you some guffaws from your pals in Palo Alto cafes. But those of us who have ventured outside of the carefully constructed (and costly, in terms of sweat and blood) safe space that is the United States, and who get that the natural state of man is not driving Teslas and sipping bespoke Napa Chardonnay in prosperous, secure enclaves with one’s liberal cronies, know better. People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.

    One challenge for the dilettantes of death is to find the people who would actually commit political murder for them, but money and institutional inertia make that possible. As we have seen, woke zillionaires can fund their own lil’ revolutionaries. They are the ones behind Antifa, and if Donald Trump is reelected, we will likely see the DoJ (once Trump rids himself of the worse than useless FBI Director Christopher Wray, who never met self-serving establishment narrative he didn’t eagerly hump like a horny dog rubbing on the nearest leg) forced by Bill Barr to concede that this is an Astroturfed RICO conspiracy paid for by rich leftists. Yet, Antifa is not a combat organization (unless you are one person surrounded by a dozen of these brownshirts) but an information operation asset.

    But the Dicks of the elite are spoiled and soft and while this all seems like fun and games to them, with somebody else doing the murdering, they don’t realize that history holds that the status quo doesn’t remain in effect for everyone else when one group decides to alter it to its advantage. That is the plan – the establishment, outraged at the people who held them accountable for their legacy of failure, incompetence, and corruption by electing Donald Trump and a Republican Senate, intend to alter the status quo to ensure that this outrage never happens again. They intend to add states to increase their leverage. They intend to change voting laws to allow cheating and impose “campaign finance laws” that will be enforced against your candidates but not against establishment candidates to ensure there are no more troublesome populist alternatives. They intend, using tech companies and big corporations, to impose thought control and punish dissenters by cutting them off from access to the routine modes of living in this society – social media, banking, transportation, education. They intend to pass laws to disarm you so the ultimate failsafe of freedom is negated. And they intend to pack the Supreme Court to ensure they can’t be stopped by that pesky Constitution.

    But they will expect you to remain static and to respect and obey as if nothing has changed. You must be loyal to the institutions that betrayed you because…well, that’s unclear. Perhaps they hope you’ll just keep going along as if nothing is different out of habit, or from fear of losing what little they have left to you.

    Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Medical experts: Lockdowns do more harm than good.” You don’t say.
  • More studies find face masks ineffective against the Wuhan coronavirus than found them effective. I suspect that N95 masks might well be effective, but not this ‘wear any damn thing” Virus Theater we’re stuck in.
  • Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey puts the kibosh on last-minute Democratic attempts to force through online voting.
  • SCOTUS to DC District Court: No, you can’t rewrite South Carolina voting laws a month before the election just to give Democrats a better chance to win. Not yours.
  • Carrollton mayoral candidate arrested on 109 counts of mail ballot braud. For the Texas geography challenged, Carrollton is part of the Greater Dallas Metroplex.

    Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters.

    Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.

    According to a press release from Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, his office was tipped off to the possible mail-ballot harvesting scheme on September 23 by the Denton County Elections Office.

    Multiple mail ballots had been requested on behalf of Carrollton residents to be sent to a post office box in Lewisville, which purportedly belonged to a nursing home facility. Investigators contacted the voters and found they had not made the ballot requests.

    Investigators also learned the post office box was obtained using a fake Texas driver’s license and fake student ID from the University of North Texas, and they began surveilling the post office.

    On October 7, investigators saw the suspect pick up a box of requested mail-in ballots and take them back to his residence in Carrollton. Officers obtained a search warrant for Mohamed’s home and inside found the fake driver’s license and box of ballots—several of which had been opened.

  • What it’s like to be a cop in the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter era:

    I’m a police officer in a major American city. Many of you reading this have seen a movie or TV show set in this city. Some of you have vacationed here. We have a big problem with poverty, unemployment, people scamming the welfare system, drugs, and violent crime.

    Honestly, though, who I am and where I work isn’t important—what I stand for is. I show up every day I’m scheduled to work, on time, and I work. I don’t hang out at the station, I handle calls for service and I constantly back up other officers. I quickly progressed to different specialized units and, over time, even began to help out at the academy and became a Field Training Officer.

    But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.

    Snip.

    Call someone out on being a worthless lazy officer? Is that worthless lazy officer a lieutenant’s mistress?! You just earned yourself a transfer to night watch in some outpost no one wants to work.

    In every major city there’s a punishment assignment. Everyone who’s ever been a city cop knows this to be true.

    After a while, that same lazy officer who’s been sitting in that same lieutenant’s lap, or who’s never really done anything noteworthy, except maybe they went to the right school or are in the right clique, they now have time on the job and they take the sergeants test. They pass and, if your department doesn’t go straight down the list, they’re now a supervisor! Newer officers have no idea they’re working for someone who’s telling them someone else’s war stories or making themselves seem more important than they really were in the situation.

    Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the “interest of transparency,” they know we can’t pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. It’s just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isn’t at fault. I am.

    Snip.

    You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police.

    Some mayors have made it known to their department brass they’d rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand.

    You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city won’t have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up!

    Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. They’ve all already moved on to the next rage-bait.

    Who gives a f— if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person.

    Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur — oftentimes with stolen firearms. I’ve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) I’ve stood over. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape.

    So, in a knee-jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

    Read he whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • New York Times editorial writer is shocked, shocked to find left wing anarchists burning down America. (Hat tip: Vikingpundit.)
  • Real antifa group or an amazing parody of same? The answer may shock you!
  • Hamas: Hell yes, we’re getting missiles from Iran.
  • Seven of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own aides have accused him of “improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses” in relation to Austin investor Nate Paul.
  • Former Paxton assistant and current United State congressman Chip Roy called on Paxton to resign, which is not a good sign.
  • Lockdowns are the new global warming.
  • Boeing moving all 787 production from Washington State to South Carolina. How’s that hard left Democratic governance working out for you?
  • Speaking of Democratic governance, Baltimore’s next mayor is complaining about Donald Trump when he should be complaining about his fellow Democrats:

    Baltimore is no more “unjust” now than it was before its murder rate soared half a decade ago. What has changed is that Baltimore is less policed than it was back then. And that’s thanks to the policies and pronouncement of its pathetic Democrat mayors and other leading pols.

    It seems clear that Brandon Scott will continue in their tradition. Thus, it seems equally clear that Baltimore will remain exhibit A when informed people talk about the breakdown in law and order under the watch (if you can call it that) of Democratic mayors.

  • Today’s Democratic politician receiving a felony indictment comes to you from Rochester, New York, where Democratic Mayor Lovey Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance fraud charges. “At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warren’s political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Democrat Party official arrested for allegedly pulling knife on ‘Women for Trump.'” “The communications director for the Democrat Party of Washington County, Oregon [Clayton John Callahan], was arrested after allegedly pulling a knife on female Trump supporters at an outdoor event hosted by the Oregon Women for Trump.”
  • “Texas Partisan Index: Rating Senate Districts From Most Republican to Most Democratic.”
  • European Union slaps tariffs on Chinese, Indonesian and Taiwanese steel for price dumping.
  • ESPN got woke, and now it’s going broke, or at least laying off between 300 and 700 employees. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Fake investor con artist hauls in a cool $30 million.
  • All the media Trump-bashing just makes people like President Trump more.
  • Truth:

  • Interesting Twitter thread on how Google, Facebook and Amazon all straight-up lied to the Australian government about anticompetitive practices.

    Worth reading the whole thing.

  • The Red Headed Libertarian notes that the MSM seems to intentionally conflate anarchists with legal militias, and offers a brief history lesson:

  • OK, I laughed:

  • Trump Offers Bold New Peace Plan For Palestinians To Reject

    Wednesday, January 29th, 2020

    President Donald Trump has unveiled Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Let me summarize:

    Blah blah blah two state solution blah blah blah land for peace blah blah blah settlement building freeze blah blah blah $50 billion in aid.

    What, too cynical? So is the plan. In one way it (like all the previous Middle East peace plans) is a serious plan, in that if the Palestinians accepted and implemented it, it would bring enduring peace and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The cynical part is that there’s no way in hell the kill-crazy death cults in charge of Gaza and the West Bank will ever agree to it.

    And indeed, it’s worse than previous peace plans they rejected, including the 2008 Olmert plan where they got 94% of the West Bank and got compensated with another 6% elsewhere. But that’s what happens when you spend the last 12 years sucking, Israel completes a strong security barrier, and the entire Middle East landscape falls out from underneath your feet. Most of the other Arab countries are tired of the Palestinian bullshit, and Egypt, UAE, Bahrain, Oman and the Saudis have been dropping hints they should take the deal, or at least start negotiating based on it.

    I suspect President Trump offered it as a win-win-win situation, which is to say he wins no matter what the Palestinians do. If they take it, great! He brought peace to the Middle East! If they don’t, he can say he made a serious proposal, backed by Israel and supported by other Arab countries. (And he know Democrats will call him an evil racist trying to screw their pet Palestinians no matter what.) And if the Palestinians don’t take the deal but use it as a starting point, he’s provided Israel with a very strong opening position.

    Further, he got signoff on the deal both of the aspirants to the Israel PM seat, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz…

    Sorry, wrong Gantz

    …which would insulate him from charges of favoring Netanyahu if Democrats weren’t so reflexively hostile to Israel.

    Palestinians reacted to the proposal in the traditional way: By burning stuff.

    This peace proposal will be rejected by Palestinians because it’s a peace proposal, and it doesn’t achieve their “river to the sea” goal of the complete eradication of Israel. Other Arab countries will not backing the proposal will make noises about “returning to the 1967 borders,” which is about as likely as the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire.

    No matter how good Donald Trump’s persuasive skills may be, this peace plan won’t succeed because the Palestinians are led by crazy and/or corrupt scumbags, who will never make peace as long they continue getting paid not to.

    The Middle East peace process is all process and no peace.

    LinkSwarm for August 30, 2019

    Friday, August 30th, 2019

    I hope you’re ready for the Labor Day Weekend. I certainly am…

  • At the G7, President Donald Trump is the popular one. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Three documents President Trump should declassify. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Obama’s Social Justice Warrior dictates harmed American military readiness.
  • Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
  • Boris Johnson has outflanked remainers by proroguing Parliament for a Queen’s speech.

    For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.

    Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.

    Following this maneuver, Johnson’s Tories have surged in the polls.

  • How President Trump started a war between the UN and Hamas:

    While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.

    Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”

    The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.

    The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.

    Snip.

    “I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.

    Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.

    The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.

    But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.

    Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.

    Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.

    The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.

    Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.

    But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.

    The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.

    But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.

    Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.

  • Feminists just couldn’t accept their victory:

    In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.

    Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.

    Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.

    As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!

    Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?

    So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.

  • Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:

    You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.

    Monsters!

    Fascists!

    Meanies!

    Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.

    Drink in their pain.

    Drink it all in.

    Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.

    Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).

    This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.

    Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.

  • Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:

    After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:

    Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.

    No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.

  • “Young Turks Host Hasan Piker Mocks Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s War Injuries, Declares America Deserved 9/11.” Thought about noting this for the Joe Rogan interview with Dan Crenshaw post, but decided the little shit just wasn’t worth mentioning there.
  • You can see the progress on the border wall here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow.”
  • “NAACP President to Reporter: ‘I don’t talk to fucking Jews.'” That’s president of the Passiac NAACP, not the national organization. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Iranian rocket blows up on pad.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Karachi, Pakistan suffers through a plague of flies:

    First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.

    And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.

    Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.

    “There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”

    The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.

    Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Guy does the opposite of what I do every day, going out on the Internet without any blockers of any kind to see what sorts of tracking cookies he picks up. He picked up hundreds. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Homeowner in Round Rock? The city council is going to be taking more of your money.
  • Lying about lobsters.
  • Stationary bicycle maker Peloton is preparing an IPO despite never having been profitable, having no realistic plans to be profitable, and a CEO who makes more than the CEOs of Ford, Home Depot and Cisco. “So, Peloton, while pretending to be a technology company, lost $195 million last year, yet paid its top three executives more than $50 million (up from $17.9 million in Fiscal Year 2018).”
  • “Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
  • Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
  • “Liberals Clarify They Only Want Black Voices To Be Heard When They’re Saying Liberal Things.”

    “When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”

  • A heh for the weekend:

  • LinkSwarm for June 14, 2019

    Friday, June 14th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Border control, Social Justice Warriors, Iran and Geto Boys all feature in today’s roundup…

  • The idea that we can go back to a “Pre-Trump Normal” is an illusion.

    Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.

    Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal.

  • Iran evidently limpet-mined two tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
  • One reason Iran is desperate: The Trump Administration’s sanctions are working:

    These actions on the part of Iran follow a series of sanctions from the US Treasury Department, which on Wednesday (June 12) imposed sanctions on a financial conduit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, and last week (June 7) sanctioned Iran’s largest petrochemical holding group.

    US officials are also considering sanctions against the Iranian financial body that was established as a trade channel with Europe – a move that would underscore US intolerance to any international workarounds to the Iran sanctions campaign.

    You don’t need to read the tea leaves closely to know the administration’s plan for its “maximum pressure” campaign. But one thing the tea leaves don’t show are plans for war. And the reason is simple: the sanctions are working to help achieve President Donald Trump’s priority goal, which is to undermine Iran’s influence and support for terrorism in the Middle East.

    The Treasury’s latest steps follow a State Department press briefing, during which its spokesperson, Morgan Ortagus, listed the negative effects Iran sanctions were having on that country’s terrorist proxies and on its other actions in the region. She pointed to the Lebanese group Hezbollah’s “pleas for public donations via billboards, posters and collection cans” and stressed that “Iran is withdrawing Hezbollah fighters from Syria and cutting or canceling their salaries.” This is a big deal.

    She also pointed to Hamas’s austerity plan in Gaza and to the IRGC’s budget cuts for Iraq Shia militia groups. She highlighted fuel shortages in Syria due to the cut in Iranian oil supply and noted the IRGC cyber command “is short on cash.”

    Others have also picked up on this emerging trend: that Iran sanctions are starving Iran’s proxies of critical funds. The Washington Post reported that US sanctions against Iran have “curtailed” Iran’s finances to Hezbollah, which “has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending.” A fighter with an Iranian-backed militia in Syria told The New York Times that he lost a third of his salary and other benefits, lamenting, “Iran doesn’t have enough money to give us.”

    When he withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or what is often called the Iran nuclear deal, last year, President Trump made his top goal clear. Before even addressing Iran’s nuclear capabilities or speaking about working toward a new agreement, he emphasised Iran’s support for terrorism and plans for regional influence as among his key concerns and reasons for withdrawing from the deal. Working to undermine that behavior has been the administration’s top priority in its Iran policy.

    Sanctions are particularly taking a bite out of Hezbollah. One wonders, yet again, what the Obama Administration thought it was achieving with the insane and costly Iran deal…

  • Venezuelans reduced to barter.
  • This essay suggests that defeating Social Justice Warrior madness will be more difficult than we think, because it’s essentially a religious phenomena:

    The shock presidential election of 2016 might have prompted partisans on both sides to ask whether the vocabulary on which they relied had become a lifeless hindrance. On the Left, the Clinton political machine suffocated every dissenting voice within the Democratic Party, which denied its members the opportunity to rethink the identity politics death-grip that was strangling them. Then as now, Sanders, more smitten by Marx than the halfway-Nietzscheanism of identity politics, invited his fellow Democrats to step back from the brink. Alas, itself guilty of class privilege, the donor class of the Democratic Party living in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and in the wealthy enclaves surrounding New York City needed a fig leaf to cover its class sins—and, so did not, and will not, allow Sanders to win the Democratic nomination and thereby reveal their unrighteousness.

    The Democratic Party will again double down on the rhetoric of identity politics, lose the 2020 presidential election, and conclude—as it did with Russiagate—that some demonic force temporarily bent the arc of history in the wrong direction. The demonic force responsible this next time around? “Hate speech” from the lips of those in the center and on the Right who refuse to rehearse the Red Letter political liturgy identity politics tirelessly repeats—or bow before the false gods that identity politics worships.

    Partisans on the Right were given a gift: President Trump. He came into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party understood him not. Many did not want to receive this gift. Having read their Aristotle and Burke, and wishing to remain gentlemen, they withdrew from the political fray—preferring the decorous tyranny of candidate Clinton, the very paragon of identity politics, to the incivility of candidate Trump who, alone among Republican candidates, had the temerity to combat it. “Our tastes, not our ideas, define us”—that is what the 2016 election apparently taught the GOP.

    Now forming a Conservative Book Club of sorts, these gentlemen ponder great ideas, entice donors to fund their conferences and think tanks, and all the while enjoin us to believe the vocabulary of the pre-2016 Republican Party continues to be adequate to the troubles we face. It is not.

    Today, whether at conservative conferences or in conservative think tanks, the listener even moderately attentive to the conversation will hear of the perils of progressivism and of cultural Marxism, of the need to defend family values, of the importance of being pro-life, of the importance of free markets, and of the threat of multiculturalism. These terms—indeed the constellation these terms form—emerged during the Reagan Presidency, more than three decades ago. If the 2016 Presidential election tells us anything, it is that this verbiage has hardened into nearly lifeless political rhetoric, sustained on life support through institutional buy-in and the assurances of political philosophers sympathetic to conservatism who tirelessly promote the link between the veritable ideas they study and the political vocabulary that has been in place for decades is timeless.

    Times have changed, however. Philosophy must gently persuade; that is its privilege and its weakness. Philosophers are concerned with eternal truth. Partisans, by contrast, are concerned with timely rhetoric, opinion, and persuasion. They must engage in comparatively immediate combat. So long as conservatives inattentively conflate philosophizing and partisanship, they will continue to produce partisan vocabularies that masquerade as eternal truth—and partisans unable to respond in a timely manner to shifting times. To win, partisans must know when the weapons of their enemies have changed. Wars—and this is a crucial point to understand—are not won using weapons from earlier engagements. Only armchair soldiers and Conservative Book Club members have the luxury of replaying those battles.

    Neither liberals nor conservatives understand the weapon of identity politics, and the immense destruction it can cause. Identity politics does not simply parse different kinds of people. Identity politics is concerned with the relationship of transgression and innocence between different, purportedly monovalent, kinds of people. Identity politics is not just about who we are, it is about a moral stain or purity that defines who we are.

    The language of stain and purity, of transgression and innocence, is Christian language. Other religions are concerned with these categories as well, but our long familiarity with Christianity in America means that the invocation of these categories by the practitioners of identity politics derives from Christianity, and from Protestantism in particular. Surveys may indicate that America has lost or is losing its religion; the fever of identity politics that now sweeps the nation suggests these surveys are looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions. America has not lost its religion. America has relocated its religion to the realm of politics.

    Identity politics transforms politics. It turns politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. Ponder for a moment, Christianity. Without the sacrifice of the innocent Lamb of God, there would be no Christianity. Christ, the scapegoat, renders the impure pure—by taking upon Himself “the sins of the world.” By the purging of the scapegoat, those for whom He is the sacrificial offering purify themselves. Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities. He is the transgressor; all others—women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQs—have their sins covered over by the scapegoat, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.

    The theological perversity of replacing the Divine Scapegoat of Christianity with the all-too-mortal white heterosexual male scapegoat does not imply that he is innocent. Rather, in identity politics, the white heterosexual male becomes more than who he really is—a member of a scapegoated group who takes away the sins of the world, rather than a mortal, like everyone else, involved in transgression, and searching for redemption. The mystery of transgression and innocence, however, cannot be resolved at the level of groups, because in reality not one of them is univocally pure or stained. But identity politics stands or falls on the claim that groups are such unities of transgressors or innocents. Therein lies its weakness, at which all the armament allied against it must be aimed.

  • Charles Murray changes his mind. “I want to shut down low-skill immigration for a while.”
  • “Open borders advocates are panicking after the arrest of Irieno Mujihca, the leader of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a pro-open borders group funded by globalist financier George Soros that has worked to undermine United States immigration policy and sponsor Central American caravans.”
  • Hispanics stick with Trump despite tough border stance.” Despite, or because? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Tech reporter Peter Bright has been arrested for soliciting sex with children online. He was employed by Ars Technica until recently. A federal complaint alleges that Bright sought to molest a 7- and 9-year-old and met with an undercover agent for this purpose, at which point he was arrested. It also states that Bright claimed to be in a sexual relationship with an 11-year-old.” Was he a “male feminist” and “anti-#GamerGater”? Of course he was.
  • Twitter suspends Project Veritas for revealing Pintrest block pro-life website Live Action as porn.
  • University of Alabama returns donor’s $21.5 million and takes name off law building, partially over Alabama’s abortion law, but partially just because he was kind of a dick.
  • “Agriculture Dept. Employees Are Really Upset They Might Have to Live Among the Rubes in Flyover Country.”
  • “The folks running The Bulwark must decide which they value more, being conservative or being anti-Trump. They have, I’d argue, already picked the latter.”
  • Texas Senator Ted Cruz and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez team up again on a bill to make birth control available over the counter.
  • “Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Everyone’s Pay Should Be Equal, But My Pay Should Be More Equal Than Others.‘”
  • New York Times leftist: “Hey Rep. Dan Crenshaw! If you really cared about 9/11 victims, you would have co-sponsored the 9/11 Victims Compensation fund!” Rep. Dan Crenshaw: “I did.” New York Times leftist: “Uhhhhh….” DELETE DELETE DELETE. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina indicted on 12 felony counts of voter fraud.
  • “President Donald Trump will award the Medal of Honor to former Army Staff Sgt. David Bellavia later this month, the White House announced Monday, making him the first living Iraq War veteran to receive the nation’s highest military decoration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • We could be heroes, just for one day… (Hat tip: @evangie.)
  • Woman kills boyfriend over alien reptile cult. “Shriner told NJ.com she believed Rogers was a ‘Vampire Witch Reptilian Super Soldier.'” Plus: liquor and firearms! Going to use the “David Icke” tag even though he’s nowhere mentioned, as that’s how I keep track of all the reptoid news…
  • Bad Idea Theater: Netflix Roast of Anne Frank. You’re probably thinking to yourself “Must be The Onion or The Babylon Bee.” No, this is an actual thing that people actually did. (Indeed, Jewish comics seemed to be the driving force behind it.) I suspect it’s only the second unfunniest spoof on the Holocaust, behind Heil Honey, I’m Home, which was also a real thing.
  • I’ve managed not to have any news about Houston rap group Geto Boys in a LinkSwarm ever, and now two pieces drop this week. First, dwarf frontman Bushwack Bill (legal name Richard Shaw) has died at age 52 from pancreatic cancer. Now Scarface, AKA Brad Jordan, is running for Houston City Council. (Hat tip for both: Dwight.)
  • High School Valedictorian’s speech slams teachers and administrators for their utter incompetence and failure. Oh, did I mention it was in California?
  • How to assemble a P-47 on the ground with hand tools.
  • ThinkGeek, RIP.
  • “House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-Fil-A.”
  • “Did Leonard Nimoy Fake His Own Death So He Could Seize Control of the Illuminati?” I’m gonna go with “No” here…
  • UNMAKE.
  • “England Forced To Crown Donald Trump As King After Strange Woman Lying In Pond Lobs A Sword At Him.”
  • A funny, heartwarming story that doesn’t start out that way at all.
  • I was sad because I had no shoes, but then I met a puppy who had no feet:

  • LinkSwarm for November 30, 2018

    Friday, November 30th, 2018

    Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

  • Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
  • Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
  • MSBNC in action:

  • Hamas is still freaking out over that Israeli raid a few weeks ago. “Hamas officials suspect Israel has been operating a base inside Gaza, and Hamas is turning itself inside out trying to figure it out.”
  • ESPN has lost 14 million viewers over seven years. How’s that “all social justice warrioring, all the time” format working out for you? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Deutsche Bank offices raided:

    In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.

  • Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:

  • GM’s destructive subsidies:

    General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.

    Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.

  • The Second Amendment was always an individual right.
  • Detecting a stealth aircraft is one thing, but shooting it down during the terminal tracking phase is another.
  • Don’t be Dick’s.
  • Things to be thankful for:

    The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.

    We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.

    Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.

    No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.

    Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.

    Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.

    So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • The case against carbohydrates gets stronger.”

    People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.

    Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.

    Snip.

    We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.

    For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.

    Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.

    This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight  —  lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.

  • “Half As Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project.”
  • Evidently Creepy Porn Lawyer is considered a crook even by his porn star client.
  • Actual headline, not from The Onion or The Babylon Bee: “PETA Defends Graphic Animal Mutilation In Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.”
  • “Aides Force Ocasio-Cortez To Watch Entire Run Of ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
  • Ricky Jay, RIP.
  • LinkSwarm for November 16, 2018

    Friday, November 16th, 2018

    Welcome to the Friday before Thanksgiving! I hope you have your family gathering, gluttony and/or shopping plans all laid out. I tend to avoid Black Friday sales unless I happen to be near a used bookstore. (And speaking of booksales, I’ll be putting out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog after Thanksgiving, so drop me a line if you’re interested.)

  • Florida: DeSantis wins, Scott leads Nelson in senate race, where it goes to a hand recount. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Meanwhile, both Broward and Palm Beach counties, where most of the Democrat shenanigans occurred, missed the machine recount deadlines, so the initial tallies stood.
  • In all the bad recount news, here’s one bit of good news: Utah incumbent Republican congresswoman Mia Love is now expected to win reelection after recounts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • A bit more analysis of the midterms:

  • Democratic presidential preferences for 2020: 1. Joe Biden, 2. Bernie Sanders, 3. Beto O’Rourke, with senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker trailing.
  • Speaking of longshot Presidential contenders, Michael Avenatti Arrested for Alleged Domestic Violence. Remember: Believe all women, except when they accuse Democratic political operatives.
  • Heh: “Hillary Clinton Receives Large Cash Advance For ‘What Happened 2’ Ahead Of 2020 Presidential Run.”
  • Pentagon fails first audit, as expected. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Joy: “Beijing is sharply speeding up a large-scale buildup of military forces in preparation for a future conflict with the United States, according to the congressional commission report made public Wednesday.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Over 50 million Chinese apartments are empty. (Caveat: Some sort of malware on ZeroHedge is trying to do a drive-by DMS install on that page. They should look into that…)
  • Austin’s sick leave ordinance was just struck down by the 3rd Court of Appeals. “The requirement violates the Texas Constitution because it is pre-empted by the Texas Minimum Wage Act.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Another week, another fake college hate crime.
  • Any time Israel tries to defend itself: “Shame! Shame!” Any time Hamas fires missiles at Israeli civilians from Gaza: “Oh look! It’s my lunchbreak!”
  • The Ammo.com folks wrote in with this piece on an armed American populace and asymmetrical warfare, making some of the same points I’ve made before. But keep in mind that no one actually wants a second American Civil War save parts of the Twitter echo chamber and some of the more delusional Antifa types.
  • Who frontman Roger Daltry “detests Jeremy Corbyn (whom he, not without cause, calls a “communist”), supports Brexit, and says of the Labour party, ‘It pains me to say it, but in my life a Labour government comes in with incredible optimism and leaves the country in the sh*t.'”
  • Stan Lee, RIP.
  • Roy Clark, RIP. To TV viewers, he was that guy on Hee-Haw. To fellow guitarists he was a legend. Here’s a nice rendition of his signature piece:

  • William Goldman, RIP. The Princess Bride is a swell novel, and he penned more than his share of great Hollywood movies.
  • If you’re going illegally carry a concealed gun without a permit, maybe you shouldn’t make yourself look like The Joker. And yes, it’s exactly the state you think it is. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Nothing says “I hate Trump” quite like shouting “Heil Hitler!” at a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.
  • “It’s a nice day to…START AGAIN!”
  • Israel Kills Hamas Commander in Gaza

    Monday, November 12th, 2018

    Welcome back my friends to the war that never ends:

    Seven Palestinians, including a local militant commander, have been killed during a covert Israeli operation in Gaza, Palestinian officials say.

    An Israeli soldier was also killed and another wounded, the Israeli military said, after a firefight erupted.

    Palestinians said an Israeli unit travelling in a civilian vehicle had killed the Hamas commander.

    It was followed by rocket-fire into Israel, while on Monday a Palestinian mortar hit an Israeli bus.

    The bus in question:

    Initial reports say the vehicle was empty, although a 19-year-old was seriously hurt, Israel’s ambulance service said.

    According to Palestinian sources, the Israeli unit was about 3km (2 miles) inside the Gaza Strip, which borders Israel, when it fired at Nur Barakeh, a commander of the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’ military wing.

    The incident is reported to have happened east of Khan Younis, in the south of the territory.

    A gun battle erupted and Israeli tanks and aircraft opened fire in the area, witnesses said.

    Hamas did its usual “launching terrorist rockets at civilians” thing.

    So Hamas is attacking civilians, and Israel is hitting terrorist targets in response.

    You know what the situation would be like right now if President Donald Trump hadn’t moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem?

    Hamas would be attacking civilians, and Israel would be hitting terrorist targets in response.

    It can’t be said too often: The “Middle East Peace Process” is all process and no peace.

    LinkSwarm for August 10, 2018

    Friday, August 10th, 2018

    This week has been saner but still busy:

  • Israel and Hamas have essentially been going at it all week.
  • “Illegal Immigrant Released by ‘Sanctuary City’ of Philadelphia Convicted of Child Rape.”
  • Why Dianne Feinstein was an easy mark for Chinese spys:

    In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.

    The warning proved prescient.

    One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.

    After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.

    Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.”

    Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records.

    Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship.

    Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC.

    China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.​

  • “Of all Donald Trump’s many sins against the Great Church of the Transnational Leftist Establishment, his greatest may be his stubborn refusal to subordinate the needs of the normal citizens of the United States to the dogmas of our alleged betters.”
  • Good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun in Florida.
  • Elites vs. the Deplorables:

    Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. Caputo, however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.

    If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.

    If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege.

    Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.

    Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?

    Snip.

    “In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.”

  • “It has become apparent that the Democratic Party and its media supporters seem to have a problem with representative democracy and how it works. They lost an election they thought they’d handily win, and their reaction to it has been to have a long, screeching public tantrum.” (HT AoSHQ)
  • That “Democratic Socialist wave” crested and broke-up before it ever hit the shore: Just about all Bernie bros go down in Democratic primary defeats. “Rather than demonstrate that his movement has a broad reach across the electorate, Sanders has instead demonstrated that’s a fringe movement even within the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why the left are afraid of Jordan Petersen.

    It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

    When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

    In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”

    If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.

    Though it must be said that only a small fraction of the amorphously named “alt-right” embraces identity politics. (Hat tip: Will Shetterly on Twitter.)

  • Syrian chemical weapons scientist blows up real good.
  • Social Justice Warriors want biological women to never win another women’s sporting ever again.
  • Why Europe is drafting away from America.

    The global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.

    Snip.

    Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.

    Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.

    One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.

    (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)

  • Is an upset brewing in Rhode Island?
  • Woman who was the daughter and granddaughter of women who used men simply as sperm donors wonders why men are suspicious of her. Also, from the comments: “What the writer only lets on, deep into the article, is that she was raised in a lesbian commune.”
  • Not even Democrats are wild about an abortion mill parking lot comedy tour. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Austin’s CodeNext planning process dies a very justifiable death.
  • Austin American Statesman kills weekly Spanish-language newspaper, offers all Statesman staffers voluntary severance package. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • DIY Pancreas. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Ocasio-Cortez Severely Burned After Accidentally Touching Book On Basic Economics.”
  • Ten honest plumbing tips. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • A tweet:

  • Everything In the Middle East Is Blowing Up

    Sunday, July 15th, 2018

    Or to put it another way, everything in the Middle East is blowing up slightly more than usual:

  • Hajin, reportedly the last Islamic State stronghold in Syria, has come under sustained attack by coalition forces. There are supposedly some 4,000 heavily dug-in Islamic State fighters there, but that number sounds way too high, being about the number of Islamic State fighters who defended the much larger Raqqa. Hajin is described as a “small city,” but it really looks more like a large town, perhaps on the order of a county seat for a mid-sized Texas county. It’s hard to imagine 4,000 besieged defenders holding out in a such a small area for the eight months since the fall of Deir Ez-Zor, just on the logistical difficulties of maintaining food and ammunition. But anything close to that number would explain why that Islamic State pocket has been so hard to eradicate. But the area is now being pounded with Syrian Democratic Forces artillery and coalition airstrikes, while SDF ground forces push into Hajin.

  • There was a report that “More than 30 soldiers and officers of the pro-Assad forces, including 13 officers, were killed by aerial bombardment in attempt to seize Hajin.” Since the Islamic State has no air force beyond the occasional drone, that would mean the coalition was bombing pro-Assad forces because they were on the east side of the Euphrates. But at least one Tweet suggests that report is false. “There was no attack by the Syrian Arab Army towards Hajin and there are no clashes between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian Arab Army. These attacks are only happening on social media.”
  • The SDF has also been making a large (and largely under-reported) push to roll-up what remains of the Islamic State in sparsely-occupied eastern Syrian along the Iraqi border, capturing a string of tiny villages as they push south.

  • Widespread unrest has broken out across southern Iraq (with a few outbreaks elsewhere), including strikes, protests and street blockages over government incompetence at providing basic services like electricity and water.
  • The war in Yemen grinds on. Saudi-backed forces have failed to capture the Houthi-occupied port of Hodeidah. There’s also mutterings about a peace conference. And there’s no telling how much a yesterday’s 6.2 earthquake might shake things up. (Sorry.)
  • Finally, Israel and Hamas went at it again. Hamas fired a bunch of projectiles into Israel, and Israel walloped a bunch of Hamas assets in Gaza. You know: the usual. But the Israel retaliatory raids were reportedly the biggest on Gaza since 2014.
  • Hey, Did You Notice That Israel/Hamas War?

    Thursday, May 31st, 2018

    I know CNN may not have had time to cover it, what with having to interview Stormy Daniels lawyer so many times, but did you notice that Israel and Hamas fought a short war a few days ago?

    Israel struck dozens of targets in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after coming under a heavy barrage of mortar and rocket fire by Palestinian militants.

    The Israeli military said it carried out over 35 airstrikes on seven sites across Gaza, including a cross-border tunnel controlled by Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the two primary militant groups in the Palestinian enclave — The Associated Press reported.

    Beginning early Tuesday morning and continuing past nightfall, Palestinian militants launched roughly 70 projectiles toward southern Israel, according to the Israel Defense Forces. One mortar shell landed near a kindergarten just before it opened, and three IDF troops were injured in the bombardment.

    The Daily Caller was even kind enough to embed this IDF tweeted infographic:

    That Hamas happy kidnap tunnel Israel blew up was 1.2 miles long and extended into both Egypt and Israel.

    Did you notice that this dustup barely rated a blip from our mainstream media?

    It used to be that military action by Israel would dominate headlines for days, with Democrats rushing to cameras to sonorously demand the President personally intervene with Israel (always with Israel, never with the Scumbag Terrorist Enemy of the Week) to impose a unilateral ceasefire so as not to wreck the endless “Middle East Peace Process.”

    Mark that down as another thing killed by the Age of Trump. It’s gone from “If It Bleeds, It Leads” to “Print It If It Hurts Trump.” (Never mind that this endless molehill mongering has only strengthened Trump.) “Car bomb explodes in Beirut” was front-page news back in the 1980s, but today there are multiple concurrent wars going on in the Middle East that won’t make the news for weeks at a time. (When’s the last time you saw a top-of-the-fold story on the war in Yemen?)

    An end to the MSM’s fixation on Israel to the exlusion of every other country in the Middle East is probably all to the better. Now if only the MSM could be convinced to cover the violence committed against Americans in Democrat-run cities like Chicago and Baltimore with the same fervor they used to cover random dead Palestinians…