Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! First up: The rest of the nation gets to see what an incompetent hypocrite Austin’s current mayor is:
Austin Mayor Steve Adler is the latest powerful democrat to prove they’re a complete hypocrite:
In a November 9 Facebook video, Austin mayor Steve Adler advised the public to “stay at home” but failed to disclose he was broadcasting from a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. But wait! It gets better (worse?)!
Adler and 8 family members took a private jet to his Mexican getaway. All of this was the day after Adler reportedly hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a hotel in Austin.
The Mexico trip with family came the day after Adler hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a trendy South Congress Hotel with 20 attendees. Adler says he consulted with health authorities prior and that guests had to undergo COVID-19 testing and practice social distancing.
Is there a “consult with health authorities prior and undergo COVID-19 testing” exception to the lockdown rules? Of course not! Laws are for the little people…
The complete absence of Joe Biden’s coattails is forcing the usually delusional Democrats to get perilously close to the truth during this self-examination. Whether the activists speaking the truth will be listened to by the Elders of the Village in the Democratic Party remains to be seen. It should also be noted that those elders are very elderly and may not be amenable to alterations in a narrative they’ve been crafting regarding themselves for decades.
Some more hard truth:
Some worry that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, may be losing its touch with blue-collar voters of all races outside major metro areas.
“We’re such a Beltway party that we can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans in the [Rio Grande] Valley who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.”
The Democratic Party has been gleefully refashioning itself as a coastal elite party for quite a while now. They traded blue-collar workers in the heartland for celebrities. Who needs to worry about jobs in Ohio when you’re partying with Beyoncé, right?
They didn’t get anything about why Donald Trump won in 2016, then they spent four years making up lies about why it happened because those lies allowed them to remain in their coastal bubbles and not get any hard glimpses at reality.
Their sense of entitlement from 2016 never went away, and they think that they’ve been somewhat vindicated by the apparent Biden victory. That victory is illusory, however. It took four years of the mainstream media being more corrupt than ever before combined with an election year global pandemic and a healthy dose of voter…irregularities to bring about this result. It really didn’t have anything to do with the Democrats and their ideas being wildly popular.
Because they aren’t.
Democrats are so blinded by their hatred for President Trump that they are unlikely to learn anything from this election.
Liberal idiots in Minneapolis keep making the same mistakes over and over again. “In case you didn’t do the math, that’s a 63% increase in the number of homicides, compared to 2019, and the year is not over yet. Just a few more holistic victims of community-based murders”
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, France’s president from 1974 to 1981, dead at age 94. He was a French conservative, which meant he was significantly to the left of Walter Mondale. He wasn’t the worst leader in France’s history, but was a big fan of a centralized EU, having helped craft a (rejected) constitution for it in 2004.
Spanish bank Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of UK’s TSB goes horribly wrong thanks to amazing IT stupidity:
Experts at the time warned that Sabadell was significantly overpaying for TSB while underestimating the potential costs of integrating the new business into its existing IT platform. But Sabadell ignored the warnings and went ahead with the operation, believing that it would serve as a catapult onto the international scene as well as cement its place as a pioneer in Internet banking. In both cases, the exact opposite happened.
Branded the “biggest IT disaster in British banking history,” the botched IT upgrade led to hundreds of thousands of customers being unable to access their online accounts for weeks on end. Standing orders, payrolls, mortgage instalments and other payments and transfers failed. Thousands of customers fell victim to fraud attacks. Even when the bank tried to apologize, it sent apologies out to the wrong people, in the process breaking the EU’s new data protection laws.
At the root of all this chaos was Sabadell’s stubborn determination to get the new IT system up and running as swiftly as possible, in order to save millions of euros in monthly fees it was having to pay to TSB’s former parent company, Lloyds Bank plc, to use its old legacy IT system. Sabadell’s Proteo4UK system was not even close to being ready to roll out at TSB, as IBM consultants brought in to try to remedy the problems have since attested. But senior management went ahead anyway, adopting, as one insider put it, a hope-and-pray attitude.
That “move fast and break things” paradigm might work fine if you’re a free social media startup, but not if you’re a bank and your buggy, incomplete code handles people’s money.
Thomas Sowell remembers Walter E. Williams. “He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.”
A short video about how Social Justice Warriors manipulate language to box in political opponents:
The people who claim that everything is sexist, that everything is racist. The people who claim that we all need to check our privilege. Those people are using a side of academic jargon. They’re using linguistics sleights of hand and emotional tricks and verbal misdirection to stack the deck and to tilt the argumentative playing field in their favor.
They’ll show up and they’ll say, we need to talk about social justice. We just want to have a conversation. We just want to talk. There’s nothing going on here. It’s just a conversation. That’s all we want. We just want to talk and have a conversation. And then they’ll proceed to say that they have good hearts and they’re going to use their voice to take up space in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, that the personal is the political, and that we have to do the work if we want to be on the right side of history.
And when you give your reply, they’re going to say, well, we need to call a spade a spade. You need to check your privilege and stay in your lane. You need to shut up and listen until you can educate yourself about your problematic ideas because you’re on the wrong side of history.
If they get angry during this conversation, they’ll claim the anger is the language of the unheard, and that their anger is fueled by love. If you get angry during this conversation, they will claim that you have white fragility and that you are crying male tears. And if you ask them to explain themselves, they will say, oh, don’t demand my emotional labor. But if you offer to explain yourself, they will say, quit mansplaining.
They rig the conversation by redefining the terms. And then they use sleight of hand to deal unfair attacks from the bottom of the deck. And all of this is done in the service of controlling the conversation
Election Day definitively confirmed the existence of hidden Trump voters. Undetected by polls and long denied by the establishment media, Trump’s surprising surge had to come from somewhere. Either these supporters were hiding from pollsters or pollsters were hiding them. Regardless, their existence raises disturbing questions about the role played by the establishment media and pollsters in influencing this election.
Election Day provided the startling revelation that a contest that supposedly had been over for months, actually would not be decided for days, and perhaps longer. In reality, the “blowout” proved a nail-biter. More unsettling is the fact that the race probably had been this close all along and that the false impression likely influenced the outcome.
As recently as October 12 the RealClearPolitics average of national polling had Biden at 52.3 percent and Trump at 41.7 percent. The average on Election Day was 51.2 percent to 44 percent. As of November 18, the actual popular vote figures are Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 47.2 percent.
From his October 12 level, Trump’s support increased over 13 percent. How could an error of such magnitude occur? Clearly a lot of hidden Trump voters came from somewhere. The question is whether they were hiding or were hidden.
Whether this was a sin of omission or one of commission has enormous implications for America’s elections. After years’ worth of concern about whether there had been Russian interference in our elections, it bears considering whether America has just fallen victim to internal tampering to a far greater degree.
The establishment media’s preferred answer to how the polls failed to detect millions of Trump voters is that the error was stupid, not sinister. “Whoops, we just missed them” — despite this being pollsters’ business, their assurance that they had “fixed” their polls’ problems from 2016, and the mistake being of incredible size. As results show, 2020’s error is greater than 2016’s.
The establishment media has readily blamed the pollsters, essentially exonerating itself by saying that it was just reporting what it was told. Yet neglected is the fact that the polls’ results were confirming the establishment media’s own bias. This bias has been repeatedly cited for decades and has never been clearer than over the last four years. As testament to the miraculous coincidence of pro-Biden polls and establishment media’s pro-Biden bias, consider the reverse: Would the establishment media have so readily regurgitated polling data showing the race as close as it turned out to be?
We say goodbye, then, to journalists elevating as worthy of public notice obvious liars and lunatics, including convicted felon Michael Avenatti, gossip columnist Michael Wolff, mental health quack Bandy Lee, and conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch — all because they oppose the administration.
Goodbye to weekly “bombshells” that land with a “splat!” instead of a “boom!”
Goodbye to near-daily input from presidential historians turned political assassins.
Goodbye to members of the press acting as if the cover artwork of the latest edition of a prestige news magazine is in some way provocative, stunning, or even particularly interesting.
Goodbye to White House correspondents pretending as if they are reporting from an active war zone or claiming they feel safer covering authoritarian regimes.
Goodbye to the Holocaust being invoked against the administration on a near-daily basis.
Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas Rangers and other officials to help the City of Dallas respond to a spike in murders and other violent crimes that has gripped the city.
Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to send help to the Dallas Police Department (DPD) which will include special agents, state troopers, two helicopters, and two patrol planes.
“The rise in violent crime in the City of Dallas is unacceptable, and the Texas Department of Public Safety will assist the Dallas Police Department in their efforts to protect the community and reduce this surge in crime.”
Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell fined $1,000 for violating his own stay at home order to visit his grandson’s birthday party. Not quite a lobbyist-funded trip to The French Laundry, but still not a good look…
Austin leftwing journalists go after (checks notes) moms and sex trafficking victims for daring to oppose police budget cuts. Next up: The cishetronormative oppression of apple pie.
What real hope and change looks like in the Middle East:
This amazing map shows the transformation @realDonaldTrump fomented in the Mideast with his reality-based foreign policy. If the swamp creatures really return it will be a tragedy. But reality is stronger than their fantasies, which is why their ME policies have always failed. https://t.co/vxJDZlP9NG
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Coronavirus is up around the world again, Democrats keep behaving badly (talk about your evergreen themes), some fun dog links, and it’s time to celebrate Life Day again!
Good news, everyone! No more lockdowns in Texas! It took him long enough, but Governor Greg Abbott realizes what Democratic governors haven’t: all the Wuhan coronavirus infection curves seem the same, lockdowns don’t seem to work, masks don’t seem to work, the survival rate for the non-elderly, non-immune-compromised is well over 99%.
Speaking of which: Sweden, after having seemed to beat the bug through a strategy of herd immunity, now sees cases rising.
This week brought news that Portland City Commissioner (as councilmembers are known) Jo Ann Hardesty called the cops over an argument with a Lyft driver days before the city council was scheduled to vote on her proposal to slash millions from the police budget.
The hypocrisy is glaring, but the bigger lesson is about the damage an activist political class can do to cities all over America if they follow in Portland’s foolish footsteps.
Hardesty has been a vocal advocate of Black Lives Matter and defunding the police. During a ride home, she allegedly belittled and berated her driver over a partially open window, a COVID-19 recommendation from the ride-sharing service itself. After the driver had enough of the abuse and canceled the ride, Hardesty refused to get out and called 911.
Portland politics have become the subject of national scrutiny by both the media and President Trump following more than 120 days of riots this year. While much attention has focused on the city’s feckless mayor, Ted Wheeler, others on the council have equally enabled a rapid descent into disorder.
Since Hardesty was elected to the council in 2018, her staunch hostility to police has earned her the approval of Black Lives Matter and antifa activists in Portland. Ordinary Portlanders have paid the price for that approval.
Days after her abuse of emergency services, the council took up Hardesy’s proposal to slash $18 million from the police budget. Already in June, she had spearheaded a successful effort to cut $15 million. Her newest proposal narrowly failed, however. Dan Ryan, the commissioner who was the swing vote, had his home vandalized that night by a mob of antifa militants.
Portlanders have suffered immensely this year from the grandstanding of left-wing politicians who run the city. Mayor Wheeler oversaw six months of anti-police riots that have turned downtown into an empty shell of itself. When the federal government sent in reinforcements in July to protect a federal courthouse under siege, the city council passed a resolution banning Portland Police from communicating with federal agencies.
see also
Hardesty’s initial police-defunding package has had deadly consequences. As part of the cuts, police units that investigate gun violence, work in schools and patrol the transit system were disbanded. The result? In just the first month, shootings increased by almost 200 percent compared to the previous year. In the months since, homicides and shootings have continued to soar.
Ding-dong, the witch is… still Speaker of the House. I foresee two more years of robust NRCC fundraising.
With Joe Biden poised to take office in 2021, reports suggest he plans to follow in Obama’s footsteps by hiring a bunch of corporate lobbyists in senior roles.
At least two former lobbyists who will assume top roles in the Biden administration previously served on Biden’s staff during the Obama administration. Steve Ricchetti, who served as then-Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, will join the White House as counselor to the president. Ricchetti founded his own lobbying firm in 2001 and worked on behalf of corporate clients such as AT&T, Eli Lily, and the American Bankers Association.
Ron Klain, who also served as then-Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, will take on the role of White House chief of staff in the Biden administration. Klain is a veteran of the K Street lobbying firm O’Melveny & Myers. His clients included U.S. Airways, AOL Time Warner, and ImClone, a pharmaceutical company whose CEO was convicted for fraud. Klain also lobbied on behalf of mortgage giant Fannie Mae in an effort to fight off stricter oversight from Congress.
Rep. Cedric Richmond (D., La.) will also join the Biden administration in a senior advisory role. The move was blasted by environmental groups that pointed out Richmond’s close ties to Big Oil. During his 10 years in Congress, for example, Richmond received more than $340,000 in donations from the oil and gas industry and frequently joined Republicans in voting against legislation opposed by the industry.
Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, will join the incoming administration as a deputy chief of staff. She is a cofounder of Precision Strategies, an “integrated strategy and marketing agency” that was recently hired by the American Investment Council, a lobbying group for private equity firms.
Speaking of Newsom: Courts don’t seem to agree with his rule by fiat:
The judge ruled that Newsom violated the state constitution by unilaterally ordering that all registered voters be sent mail-in ballots. More importantly, she found good cause for a permanent injunction restraining Newsom from issuing any further unconstitutional orders that make “new statutory law or legislative policy.”
The court rejected Newsom’s extraordinary claim that a state of emergency centralizes the state’s powers in the hands of the governor, thus turning California into an autocracy. This is the unlawful basis on which Newsom has collapsed our system of checks and balances, issuing 58 executive orders and changing over 400 laws unilaterally.
Specifically, the judge rejected Newsom’s argument that Section 8627 of the Emergency Services Act gives him autocratic powers. At least 24 of his executive orders rely on that section.
As far as the most damaging order, Newsom’s arbitrary and unscientific lockdown scheme, that too is newly vulnerable. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s new lawsuit uses the same separation-of-powers argument our victory established as a successful legal theory.
Speaking of some pigs being more equal than others: “As America locks down, 20 lawmakers from 3 states really just flew to Maui to mingle with a bunch of lobbyists at a posh resort for 4 days.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Cincinnati Democratic city councilman P.G. Sittenfeld indicted on bribery. Bonus: Sittenfeld was the third Cincinnati city council critter indicted this year.
Is actor Matthew McConnaughey going to run for governor of Texas? Eh. I like Hugh Hewitt, but the governor suggestion is just sort of tossed out there by him.
Another male feminist/anti-#GamerGater turns out to be a creeper. What are the odds?
I’m an unabashed partisan, but I’m getting pretty tired of politicians filling up my phone with text messages begging for money. Yeah, the Georgia runoff is important, I get it. But multiple text message begs a day just piss me off.
You know what’s worse than getting accidentally ejected from a fighter plane? Getting partially ejected.
This Senate hearing looks like the tale of a marooned lighthouse keeper and the robot butler he built to stave off loneliness. pic.twitter.com/7Mbvmyk19l
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
During a virtual meeting on Sept. 9, middle and high school English teachers in the Burbank Unified School District received a bit of surprising news: Until further notice, they would not be allowed to teach some of the books on their curriculum.
Five novels had been challenged in Burbank: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Theodore Taylor’s “The Cay” and Mildred D. Taylor’s Newbery Medal-winning young-adult classic “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
The challenges came from four parents (three of them Black) for alleged potential harm to the public-school district’s roughly 400 Black students [2.6% of the total enrollment]. All but “Huckleberry Finn” have been required reading in the BUSD….
And at its root, it stems from a painful personal story. Destiny Helligar, now 15 and in high school, recently told her mom about an incident that took place when she was a student at David Starr Jordan Middle School. According to Destiny’s mother, Carmenita Helligar, a white student approached Destiny in math class using a racial taunt including the N-word, which he’d learned from reading “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
Another time, a different boy went up to Destiny and other students and said: “My family used to own your family and now I want a dollar from each of you for the week.” When the principal was notified, the boy’s excuse was that he had read it in class—also in “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.” …
[T]he parents’ objections are not merely over language. They also worry about the way these books portray Black history and the lessons they might impart to modern readers.
“The Cay” and “Huckleberry Finn” feature white children learning from the suffering and wisdom of older Black men. “To Kill a Mockingbird” famously stars Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman. Its white-savior story line reads much differently nearly 60 years after its publication.
“Reads differently” is the new codeword for “offends the sensibilities of the victimhood identity politics left.” To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are two of the greatest antiracist novels in American literature, but that’s not enough for The Wokecult of Antiracism. And the excuse that somebody, somewhere might get their precious feelings hurt is a blank check excuse to ban anything, anywhere, at any time.
Back during the Kavanaugh hearings, many joked that Atticus Finch would be considered the villain of the novel today, because he disbelieved the story of a woman who claimed she had been raped. Little did we know that the left would start banning the novel for even stupider reasons.
If they can ban To Kill A Mockingbird for being racist, they can ban anything for being anything, because words have lost all descriptive power except for what serves the will of the Party at any given moment…
Joe Rogan interviewed journalist Andy Ngo about Antifa earlier in the year. Here Rogan dings leftwingers who refuse to stand up against antifa violence.
“When you’re trying to enforce your own ideology on other people, and you have no tolerance for anybody with a differing opinion, particularly journalists, that is fascism.”
In 2016, Donald Trump got a lower share of the white vote than the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and white turnout was stagnant as compared to 2012. Trump was able to win nonetheless because he got a higher share of Black and Hispanic voters than his predecessor — up roughly 3 percentage points with African Americans and 2 percentage points with Hispanics — helping tilt pivotal races in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania toward Trump.
That is, it was minorities, not whites, who proved more decisive for Trump’s victory.
Going into Election Day in 2020, Trump seems poised to do even better with minority voters. His gains in the polling have been highly consistent and broad-based among Blacks and Hispanics — with male voters and female voters, the young and the old, educated and uneducated. Overall, Trump is polling about 10 percentage points higher with African Americans than he did in 2016, and 14 percentage points higher with Hispanics.
It may be that many minority voters simply do not view some of his controversial comments and policies as racist. Too often, scholars try to test whether something is racist by looking exclusively at whether the rhetoric or proposals they disagree with resonate with whites. They frequently don’t even bother to test whether they might appeal to minorities, as well.
Yet when they do, the results tend to be surprising. For instance, one recent study presented white, Black and Hispanic voters with messages the researchers considered to be racial “dog whistles,” or coded language that signals commitment to white supremacy. It turned out that the messages resonated just as strongly with Blacks as they did with whites. Hispanics responded even more warmly to the rhetoric about crime and immigration than other racial groups.
It seems that everyone in the country except polling companies expect a big Trump victory today:
🚨 DK Election Pool Alert: With over 350K entries, a majority of people in every state besides Colorado predict that @realdonaldtrump will be the winner of tomorrow’s election. pic.twitter.com/zUF0uZZtwK
In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison is this year’s Beto O’Rourke. “Harrison has raised, and spent, more than any other Senate candidate in U.S. history — ‘as of Oct. 14, Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison had raised more than $108 million and spent more than $105 million in his quest to unseat U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham’ with another $13 million in outside spending hitting Graham.” And he’s still behind Graham in the polls.
Also, I intend to be live-blogging/live-tweeting election returns starting about 7 PM tonight. Tune in for what promises to be a host of ridiculous typos.
A preference cascade occurs when a group of people who have long felt strongly about something they felt they couldn’t express suddenly find out that there are a lot of people who feel the same way. It happened in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, when the rise of Solidarity started a series of shocks to the decaying edifice of communist control that made people realize that just about all their fellow citizens hated living under communism just as much as they did.
Now a similar preference cascade may be taking place among black Americans willing to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party.
For years, Black America’s absolute fidelity to the Democratic Party has been one of the bedrock assumptions of political calculations in the United States, with Democratic Presidential candidates regularly receiving some 90% of the black vote every four years. The pattern was so pronounced that neither Republicans nor Democrats felt the need to aim campaign pitches at black Americans, Republicans because they felt it was useless and Democrats because they felt it was unnecessary.
During the same period, cities across American enjoyed uninterrupted Democratic Party control and uninterrupted decay. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia: None has had a Republican mayor in the last half century. Black Americans voted for Democrats in near-monolithic numbers since 1964 only to see the cities they lived in continue to get worse.
The black community is not owned. They’re free Americans with free minds, talents, and ideas and deserve to practice and perfect that level of autonomy just like everyone else does.
However, the Democrats have more or less forbidden anyone from the black community from reaching across the aisle or considering any ideas that break from their approved ideological boundaries. Being a black person and a Republican will cause the Democrats to suddenly turn on you in vicious ways. They’ll lob racist names at you like “Uncle Tom” or worse.
They’ll even arbitrarily decide that you’re not really black.
It’s a brave thing to step out of line and disagree with a large group at the best of times but this is a time when political tensions are at their height. Any political or ideological disagreement could result in your entire life being destroyed by the mob.
For a black person in America, I can only imagine how difficult it is to stand up and say that you’re not going to go along with the approved behavioral codes set for you by the mainstream social guidelines. It will result in a backlash, but the black community knows how to endure, and little by little, they’re enduring the hate and anger thrown at them for reaching across the aisle and shaking hands with the man you’re not supposed to ever even look at without scorn.
It started with Kanye West hugging President Donald Trump and talking about how much he likes him. Maybe they thought that was the end of it. West is a massive talent but they could write him off as loony.
But then recently, Ice Cube thanked Trump for all the things he’s doing for the black community. Cube is a legend, and calling him crazy wasn’t going to fly in this case.
Lil Pump also came out with his own profanity ridden endorsement of Trump.
Now, as my colleague Alex Parker recently wrote, Lil Wayne did the exact same. He sent out a tweet containing a picture of him smiling with Trump and thanking him for the work he’s doing on criminal justice reform.
Democrats are incredibly upset and it’s not hard to understand why. These endorsements will have an effect. If they don’t outright turn people to vote for Trump, then they’ll do something even more horrifying. They’ll make reaching across the aisle a normal thing to do, and the distrust and prejudice against Republicans that the Democrats have built and fostered for so long will begin to dissipate.
Unapproved ideas may begin to creep in and delusions will begin to melt. The Democrat party will lose its hold on the black community and the vote they took for granted for so long will begin to lessen.
Perhaps the Democrats didn’t see this coming, but perhaps the world should have.
The black community isn’t a community known for being friendly with the establishment. They have a lot of reasons to be distrustful or resentful of it as you can imagine. Trump is anything but the establishment. He came in as an outsider whose political experience was a few failed campaigns and some meetings with politicians in the past.
When Trump hit the scene it was clear he wasn’t a part of the Washington machine. He wasn’t a politician and he didn’t care much for their rules. It was clear they hated him for it from the word “go.”
Trump began getting to work for the black community, bringing their unemployment levels to all-time lows. He lowered their taxes and opened up opportunity zones. He began channeling money to black colleges. He’s also been doing a lot for criminal justice reform, which was overdue for change.
The black community began to wake up and see what was happening. The Democrat party hadn’t been on their side for a long time. It was using them. Little by little that became apparent, and soon you had black people switching parties.
Maybe the Democrats thought they had the black community on lock, but the black community proved that they’re not owned by anyone.
The rapper endorsements were significant in a way that all those “Actors reunions for Biden” were not. Does anyone think the Seinfeld cast would endorse anyone but liberals?
Rap stars endorsing Republicans, especially a Republican President so hated by white political elites as Donald Trump, is just about unprecedented. Many black people may be low information voters, but they know their cities are broken, they know that Democrats run their cities, and most don’t think that rioting, looting and defunding the police are answers.
Seeing not just black celebrities endorsing Trump, but black celebrities whose entire images revolve around being “ghetto” endorsing Trump does carry novelty value. That’s the sort of thing that gets attention and breaks through to voters that never watch CNN or pick up The New York Times. That’s the way preference cascades start.
In the meantime, what #BlackLivesMatter seems to be accomplishing is getting black-owned businesses looted and burned and getting more black people shot.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to The New York Times. At 4 a.m. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.
Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.
Snip.
So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.
The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives.
Their stated goal—to achieve equality for blacks—masks a different agenda. In the “What We Believe” section of the BLM site, they highlight the work they do to “dismantle cisgender privilege” and their desire to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—a structure that many, including myself and Kanye West, believe is key to rebuilding black communities. The mission statement mires a message that should be about black lives in a slew of buzzwords and Marxist psychobabble. Not all the sentiments are bad, but none will create positive change in the black community.
That’s one reason why rapper Lord Jamer says that #BlackLivesMatter is “a movement that was given to us by, you know, George Soros and his f***ing boys. Because they saw how things were going and they didn’t want to go back to the 60s to where we started having our own organic movements. That was a big f***ing problem for them.” (The Black Panthers had many problems with radical Marxism of their own, but at least were not funded and controlled by Democratic Party billionaires.)
Democratic Party affiliation among young black people is at an all-time low. “Only 47% of [under-30 black voters] say that the [Democratic] party is welcoming to Black Americans, and only 43% say they trust Democrats in Congress to do what’s best for the Black community.”
A lot of black people seem to understand that the biggest problem facing black America isn’t “systemic racism,” but Democratic indifference to their suffering and the breakdown of the black family.
The American economy was doing gangbusters before the overreaction to the Wuhan coronavirus hit, with black unemployment hitting historic lows. Some of that was due to the Trump Administration actually enforcing border controls against illegal aliens. Probably no demographic has suffered from wages suppressed by illegal alien labor than working class black Americans. But the Democratic Party, seeing “demographic transformation” as a key to permanent majority status, has not just turned a blind eye the illegal alien problem but has actually encouraged it, constantly pushing for more welfare for illegal aliens and blanket amnesties for illegals.
Now that we’re on the other side of the V-shaped recovery, the economy grew at a record pace in the third quarter. Biden tax increases would kill that recovery dead.
Here’s a very short video which points out why transactional politics should trump the personal for black voters:
I think this video sums up what Ice Cube did and the thought process that has to change amongst black people. pic.twitter.com/12aBjyLdI6
This Trump billboard offers a succinct summary of the choice facing all Americans:
George Soros and the radical left have offered up #BlackLivesMatters as an AstroTurf movement providing sham leadership of black Americans to empower the hard left by cowing white liberals and to keeping black Americans voting for Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is offering real reform, a booming economy, and a very strong slate of black Republican candidates like Kimberly Klacik, John James and Wesley Hunt. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have a leader capable of closing deals others thought impossible. Is getting hosts of Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel any less impossible than getting black Americans to vote Republican?
President Trump seems within striking distance of closing that impossible seeming deal. All that has to happen is for black Americans to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party that’s ignored them for the last half century.
I’ve been meaning to do this roundtable on Austin’s future for a while, but the press of events (and fiddle-farting around on getting the right set of questions) delayed things until the headline rush toward election day finally made me send the questions out.
Last week I submitted these questions to various Austin political observers, and here are their answers:
What do you think drove the original lifting of the camping ban ordinance: An actual desire to help the homeless, virtue signaling, a desire to channel graft to their cronies (or leftwing causes), or something else?
Terry Keel (Former Travis County Sheriff and State Rep): Decriminalizing petty crimes and protecting homelessness as a lifestyle choice is one of the new mandatory forms of virtue-signaling in the U.S. for liberal politicians like Austin’s mayor and council. It is a box they have to check, regardless of its obvious detrimental effects on surrounding property owners, businesses, and the homeless themselves. It just took a little longer for the political trend to reach us in Texas than it did in the large cities on the east and west coasts.
Michael Quinn Sullivan (former CEO, Empower Texans): The Austin City Council seems perpetually vacillating between which virtues to signal. On the one hand, they are relentlessly handing out taxpayer dollars as corporate welfare to multinational corporations. On the other, they want to appeal to the leftist granola-crunching hippie culture that lives completely disconnected from the real world. The result are policies that have made Austin unaffordable and unlivable.
Dennis Farris (retired APD): I think what drove them to Repeal the ordinance was a group of anti police activists who wanted to take some power away from APD. Its apparent it wasn’t well thought out because look at the outcome. You also have to look at who is profiting from the money the city is throwing at the homeless issue. 120 million plus in budgets 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.
Adam Cahn (Cahnman’s Musings): The pre-camping ordinance repeal status quo wasn’t great. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there was a genuine reform effort. That effort was really easy for Casar et. al. to co-opt for purposes of graft.
Basically, a bunch of well meaning people who should have known better turned out to be chumps who got played for suckers by Casar.
Who is the primary driver of the homeless policy: Mayor Steve Adler or Councilman Greg Cesar?
TK: It was inevitable that they’d both push for it, though from different perspectives. Adler takes his cues from the same progressive special interests/think tanks guiding other big-city liberal mayors. Adler actually spent Austin taxpayer dollars to travel to Los Angeles to learn how to emulate that city’s homeless policies – among the worst in the nation from any sane perspective. In that regard, he has succeeded in causing more harm to Austin than any Mayor in Austin’s history. I believe Greg Cesar’s motivation is more from deeply held extreme left-wing philosophical beliefs. He’s smart enough to know that the policy is detrimental to everyone, including the homeless. But it serves his purpose because it creates a stark picture of misery which he uses as fodder to support his assertion (a false one) that American society is failing – and capitalism in particular, is a failed system – and that local government needs to redirect more tax dollars to the issue.
MQS: Steve Adler doesn’t appear to be the mayor; he seems to be Greg Cesar’s spokesman.
DF: Greg Casar is the puppet master driving every decision made in city hall.
AC: Greg Casar is the primary driver of everything that happens at City Hall.
Why has the city council not responded to the huge outcry from city residents at the explosion of homeless camping all across Austin?
TK: The Mayor and city council have shifted hard left and believe political changes in Austin leave them largely unaccountable to traditional middle-class values and the concerns of ordinary local business owners. For example, they really don’t care that Strait Music Company is now living a nightmare along Ben White Boulevard. Until ordinary voters in Austin – including democrat voters – hold them accountable, politicians like our current mayor and council will continue to tune them out. Unlike the old days, in recent years, most Austin citizens couldn’t even name their council member or mayor. That may be changing. You can be sure the mayor and council are watching nervously to see what happens to the incumbents in this current election and recall effort.
MQS: Leftists thrive on chaos. What the citizens see as a problem with explosion of homeless “camping” is what the council members see as a feature. The worse the problem they created becomes, the bigger the government solution council members (think they) can impose.
DF: They haven’t responded because they don’t know how to govern. When 10-1 was first announced former Mayor Leffingwell told me it was going to be a bad idea because they would elect a bunch of activists and not people who know how to govern and they will do something because of their activism and won’t be able to fix it even though they know its wrong because the activism rules how they think.
AC: Denial and groupthink.
Who has benefited the most financially from the explosion of homelessness?
TK: The mayor and council’s policies have ballooned Austin’s homeless population, which is a windfall for social service providers who receive a portion of the record-setting spending of millions by Austin. This spending in turn draws more homeless to Austin and keeps the problem and spending growing.
MQS: As always, government.
DF: The cronies who are running ECHO [Ending Community Homelessness Coalition]
AC: The social-services industrial complex and their assorted hangers-on are a good guess, but it wouldn’t surprise my if the honest answer is nobody.
Why was the vote to partially defund the police unanimous?
TK: The current mayor and council are all committed democrats or socialists, and they bow at the anti-police altar because they perceive their political survival as hinging on falling in line with that new political trend. The endorsement of the Austin Police Association used to be the most sought-after political endorsement of every candidate running for local office here. But recently there’s been a well-funded, nationwide progressive political trend in city politics and within the democrat party to demonize law enforcement. That caught Austin’s police union completely by surprise this election cycle.
MQS: The Austin City Council is the least diverse group in Travis County, if not in Texas. They engage in GroupThink to a degree that would make even George Orwell’s characters blush.
DF: Because Casar bullied them and if they even spoke out against the move they were threatened by the activists. I truly believe at least 5 council members do’t believe what they voted on but were afraid what would happen if they didn’t. See answer 4.
AC: Groupthink.
Do you approve of the Keel proposal to put Austin policing under control of the DPS?
TK: If enacted properly – including withholding a portion of tax dollars from Austin’s city government to fund the new APD division of DPS, this proposal would prevent what is happening right now: (1) Austin’s council shifting local tax dollars away from public safety to fund controversial leftist social programs; and (2) burdening statewide taxpayers with supplementing Austin’s local law enforcement by making it necessary for the governor to assign state troopers to make up for APD’s depleted funding. The seat of state government is by express terms of the Texas Constitution a constituent issue for all Texans. Every city in Texas derives its power and authority from the State of Texas, via our state Constitution and statutes. Local governments are creatures of the state, which determines what powers they have, what their obligations are, what privileges they hold, and what restrictions are held to limit their power. It is not the prerogative of local Austin politicians to turn the capital city into a Portland-type of chaos. The legislature has not just the authority – but a duty – to step in and act.
MQS: No; it is a bad idea. Austin voters – actively or through apathy – gave themselves this city council; they must live with the consequences. Why should taxpayers around the state be forced to subsidize Austin’s bad decisions? Letting DPS do APD’s job would reward the city council decisions. Mr. Keel’s proposal, while no doubt well intentioned, is an untenably dense bureaucratic solution, creating new functions and offices inside state agencies overlapping with the city offices… It’s the kind of “Republican” solution that empowers Democrats by duplicative and expanding government.
Rather than look for a bailout from King Greg and the Legislature, concerned residents of Austin (like Mr. Keel) should spend time and energy convincing their neighbors of the need for better thinking… or even just the need for right-thinking people to participate. The city council did not emerge from a vacuum; they and their bad ideas were voted into office by a knowing and willing electorate.
DF: Yes I fully support the proposal put forth by Terry Keel and Ron Wilson.
AC: If it were up to me, the legislature would revoke the city council’s charter in its entirety, but the Keel proposal is a reasonably decent stopgap.
Do you think Austin’s overburdened taxpayers might actually approve the rail bond?
TK: Yes, Austin’s voters may actually vote for this ill-conceived proposal if history is any guide to voting in Austin. Whether things have gotten so bad here with the current mayor and council that there will be some sort of local political awakening by voters, one can only hope.
MQS: One would hope not.
DF: If the same groups that came out to vote in the run off and defeated 2 moderates for county and district attorney then the bond might pass. They don’t see it as raising their taxes if they rent but ultimately will increase the rent they pay.
AC: My guess would be no, but Austin voters have disappointed me in the past.
If it is approved, where do you think the money will actually end up going?
TK: It will be largely wasted on legal, engineering and environmental special interests and studies.
MQS: The pockets of multinational corporations selling the latest version of snake-oil.
DF: Not to the intended projects. ATX has a history of mismanaging bond money. Look at the 90 million dollar main library that cost 120 million.
AC: Details remain to be seen, but “down the rathole” is a good macro-category.
How bad do you think crime in Austin will get if Jose Garza is elected DA?
TK: Look to Philadelphia for your answer. What Philadelphia is experiencing with [DA Larry] Krasner is exactly what’s in store for Austin if Garza is elected. In short, crimes like narcotics and certain thefts will be decriminalized and there will be zero death penalty prosecutions for the most horrific crimes. Crime victims will be a secondary consideration, subordinate to criminal defendants. The relationship between the DA’s office and the police will be dysfunctional, with the DA’s new priority being to aggressively seek criminal charges against arresting officers for perceived use-of-force violations.
MQS: Crime will be a lagging indicator, but the policies he is endorsing will no doubt have negative consequences. Let’s be clear here, though. The nice people in Terrytown and the tony neighborhoods that subsidize the Austin left might be inconvenienced, but they will be mostly sheltered. The brunt of the problems will be felt by Austin’s poorest and most vulnerable people – the one’s Garza and the rest of the virtue-signaling left claim to be helping. That’s the way it is with bad government policy, anyway. The poor are made poor, and the vulnerable become more so. Mr. Garza’s policies will simply continue that trend.
DF: I think crime is already getting bad but once elected he’s promised to not prosecute drug offenses. Most of the property crime and many of the robberies and homicides are committed to feed a drug habit or over drugs. He seems more interested in going after the cops than the criminals. Forget ever seeing another death penalty case in TC.
AC: Bad.
Do you think things will get better or worse after the November election?
TK: If President Trump is reelected, Texas holds or expands Republican rule in the statehouse, and the incumbent Austin city council members are all tossed, things could be looking up for Austin, Texas. Anything less than that, life in the city will be worse.
MQS: That light you think you see at the end of the tunnel? It’s a train.
DF: Either way it gets worse. If President Trump wins the left will riot in the street and if Joe Biden wins the far left socialists will influence him or figure a way under the 25th amendment to remove him and push this country more socialist where everything is free until they run out of our money. He’s definitely got something wrong with him.
AC: Better. One way or another (lege override/May election), the camping ordinance probably gets reinstated in ’21. In addition, even if it’s only one or two seats, changing the ideological composition of council will at least break up the groupthink.
Thanks to all of the above for taking time to participate.
The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”
For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”
There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.
President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:
An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.
“Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.
“We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”
The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:
We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.
As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.
The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.
Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.
The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.
The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.
Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.
Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.
Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.
You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.
This cycle: Amy McGrath.
after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.
And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?
There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.
Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.
Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.
NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.
“U.S. Sanctions Have Caused ‘Serious’ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.
If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?
On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.
Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?
Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?
Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.
I have been evicted from Facebook. No explanation. No appeal. I have downloaded "my information" and see nothing that explains it.
We are governed now in private, by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process. Disaster is inevitable. We are living it. pic.twitter.com/JBTFH2devl
I don't care who you are, but seeing your dog dressed as Chuckie, running towards you with his wig and little knife arm, is just funny….. pic.twitter.com/vwaX0as0qW
