“[T]hey will lose the lifeblood of the revenues they receive from property taxes in Texas,” Abbott explained. “What this does, in English, is it is going to defund cities and cities’ ability to operate at all if they try to defund law enforcement.
“We believe in law enforcement in Texas and we are not going to allow a replication of the types of policies we’ve seen destroying cities like Seattle and Portland and others.”
Abbott accused such liberal precincts of “caving to the forces of socialism” even as crime increases, and added that some are allowing their municipalities to be “hijacked.”
“So Texas is laying down a marker and that is, whether it be the city of Austin or another city, such actions are not going to be tolerated. In Texas, we embrace law enforcement, we will not accept turning power over to these socialistic forces that seek to abandon the rule of law and abandon the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”
However, unlike Abbott’s various Wuhan Coronavirus mandates, this will require the Texas legislature to enact, which won’t happen until next year. And Socialist Austin city councilman Greg Casar says it won’t deter his anti-police agenda.
Meanwhile, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell blasted Austin’s defunding vote and asked Gov. Abbott to send more law enforcement. “In the correspondence, Gravell blasts Austin City Council members for cuts to the Austin Police Department valued at $150 million — including some $20 million in immediate budget cuts and a transfer of several departments away from police oversight to civilian functions, such as interacting with the homeless and dealing with mental health-related cuts.”
It always seems to go back to the decision to make Austin bumsville, doesn’t it?
“There were thousands of pounds of trash, human waste, and needles washing through our backyards and the creek bed.”
Kevin Ludlow struck a nerve after posting his time-lapse video of the Windsor Park creek, which runs from Cameron Rd., into the neighborhood behind Ludlow’s house, and continues east. It even runs past a new community pool and water park.
The video in question:
The portion of creek bed which runs the length of the Heritage at Hillcrest apartment complex, behind his back yard, and down a couple of blocks further is prime real estate for the city’s growing homeless population because of its shade and relative seclusion.
Since the beginning of 2020, Ludlow noted the population of homeless individuals living in the creek bed grew to a few hundred people until its apex a couple of weeks ago. A storm came on July 31, causing the creek to flood and wash the piles of debris further down the area.
The issues that have arisen downtown and in the city’s business-heavy districts have been well-documented, but it has extended beyond these areas.
Snip.
In his video, Ludlow was able to record footage of campers smoking crack and shooting up heroin. Multiple times, campers became confrontational over his documentation.
He added that because regular syringes can be hard to come by, campers turn to insulin needles — which are much smaller both in length and tip — of which he’s found numerous on the ground.
He underscored, “I’m a pretty progressive-left guy, but [allowing homeless camping] has helped nobody, especially the homeless.”
Snip.
Back in October, Austin Police Department Chief Brian Manley reported statistics showing a 15 percent increase in violent crimes wherein both the victim and the suspect were homeless from July through September of 2019 compared with the same time frame the previous year.
Austin’s homeless problem has been growing for decades, but a watershed moment occurred last year.
In June of 2019, the Austin City Council approved the rescission of its public camping and lying ban. It went into effect in July and has led to a massive uptick in the unsheltered homeless population ever since, as more transients made camp on public property ranging anywhere from parks, sidewalks, underpasses, and more.
The city’s stated intention was that the policy change would bring the homeless population into sheltered facilities wherein they could receive whatever aid they needed.
In this year’s homeless population survey, the city recorded a 45 percent increase in its unsheltered population and an 11 percent decrease in those sheltered. There was an unmistakable incentive to leave shelters or the woods and live on the streets.
The city eventually reinstated some of the restrictions in place before July 2019 but stopped well short of fully reinstating the ban. The issue has grown substantially and fractured the community and its elected council considerably.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of crime and the homeless:
Adler emails his Senior Policy Advisor to confirm homeless crime stats as reported by the Statesman. Adler is advised that the Statesman did them a favor by not emphasizing the 5 yr homeless crime rise & instead focusing on the violent crime by the non homeless. That figures. pic.twitter.com/oTIqsUQU5n
Things that make you go “hmmmm”: “Austin council member Jimmy Flannigan has received more than $17,000 in contributions from members of a real estate development company that has worked on several city projects, as well as a lobbying firm that has many real estate, business and events clients, according to his latest campaign finance report.”
Speaking of Jimmy Flannigan:
This must be the email that got Jacob Aronowitz his new position as Jimmy Flannigan's field director. ATX you have been warned. pic.twitter.com/leJLtPt3rG
“Funding that upholds our dignity.” What bilious, gaseous nonsense. What he probably meant to say is “the graft that lines our pockets.”
Cahnman floats a radical solution: revoke the City of Austin’s charter, abolish the city council and have functions carried out by the county and state.
Idiot rioters and their identifying tattoos, more elected Democrats behaving badly, and a higher than usual helping of cute animals. Enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm!
Borepatch points out that U.S. Wuhan coronavirus deaths hit post-March lows. Also, all U.S. deaths are now far below the norms.
This was not just a bad flu. The data are crystal clear on that.
However, the data did not justify shutting down the economy. The data did not justify preventing you from saying goodbye to Grandma on her deathbed. The data did not justify prohibiting public gatherings at funerals. The data did not justify shutting down Sunday church. The data did not justify shutting down the schools. The data don’t justify mandatory mask wearing. The data don’t justify the hype.
George Soros-backed St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies for using guns to protect their homes, illegally took several trips took several trips paid for by activist groups that she failed to disclose. Fair and Just Prosecution is the name of the activist group in question.
Tennessee Democratic state senator Katrina Robinson was charged with swindling $600,000 in federal funds to pay for her wedding and a lavish lifestyle.
“Say Her Name” is one of the slogans that activists have connected to this Louisville shooting, but if we want to understand why police shot Breonna Taylor, there is another name that needs to be said — Jamarcus Glover.
Glover is a 30-year-old narcotics trafficker who police say was dealing crack cocaine and marijuana out of a “trap house” on Elliott Avenue in Louisville’s west side. According to a police affidavit, detectives had Glover and his accomplice Adrian Walker under surveillance, and had seen their car — a red Dodge Charger with Mississippi plates — “make frequent trips” from the Elliott Avenue “trap house” to an apartment 10 miles away on Springfield Drive. Detective Joshua Jaynes wrote in the affidavit that Glover was using the Springfield Drive apartment as his mailing address; Jaynes said he had witnessed Glover pick up a postal package at the apartment; and, citing his “training and experience,” Jaynes stated his belief that Glover “may be keeping narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics” at the Springfield Drive apartment. All of this was stated in an application for a search warrant of the Springfield Drive apartment where Breonna Taylor lived.
You see, Jamarcus Glover was Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. They broke up a couple years ago, according to a lawyer for Taylor’s family who said she maintained a “passive friendship” with Glover. This “friendship” apparently included allowing Glover to receive his mail at her apartment, and, although there is no evidence that Taylor was ever involved in Glover’s drug operation, the “training and experience” of Detective Jaynes led him to believe there must be some connection. This was convincing enough for Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw, who approved the so-called “no-knock” warrant for Taylor’s apartment, and also approved nearly identical warrants for the four other addresses linked to Glover’s drug operation, including the Elliott Avenue “trap house.”
Louisville police served all five warrants almost simultaneously, shortly after midnight on March 13. Glover was arrested at the Elliott Avenue address, but the raid on Taylor’s apartment went horribly wrong. Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was part of the five-man squad assigned to serve the warrant on the Springfield Drive address, said the squad was told in a preliminary briefing that this was a “soft target” because Taylor was believed to be alone in the apartment. Therefore, Sgt. Mattingly said, the decision was made for officers to knock on the door and announce themselves as police, despite the authorization for a “no-knock” entry. Sgt. Mattingly knocked for about a minute, he said, before the supervising lieutenant ordered them to “hit it,” using a battering ram to breach the door.
Inside the apartment, however, Breonna Taylor was not alone. She had a new boyfriend visiting her, and they were watching a movie in her bedroom. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker (no relation to Glover’s accomplice Adrian Walker) had a legally owned pistol, and when he heard somebody pounding on the front door, he grabbed his weapon. Why? Because he was “scared to death,” believing that the person pounding on the door might be Taylor’s drug-dealer ex-boyfriend. Walker and Taylor emerged from the bedroom into the hallway of the apartment and, Walker said, Taylor called out, “Who is it?”
The next thing that happened, in Walker’s description of the incident, is the door “comes off its hinges” — the police are busting in, but he doesn’t know it’s the police. If you’re dating a drug dealer’s ex-girlfriend and somebody busts through your door at 12:30 in the morning, what do you do?
Walker fired a shot, hitting Sgt. Mattingly in the thigh, and Sgt. Mattingly immediately returned fire, getting off six shots. Two other officers also opened fire. In total, police fired at least 22 shots, none of which hit Walker, but Taylor was struck eight times and died on the scene. Although a grand jury indicted Walker on a charge of attempted murder of a police officer, that charge was dismissed in May at the request of Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine.
Lest people think I always follow President Trump’s policy position, here’s another one I differ on: Russia shouldn’t be let back into the G7 as long as they’re occupying parts of Ukraine.
Speaking of super-genius rioters and tattoos, Edward Thomas Schinzing was arrested on federal arson charges in Portland thanks to the fact he was shirtless and had his own name tattooed across his back.
The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.
It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.
The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.
Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.
Meet the source for all the most salacious claims in the debunked Steele dossier: Russian-born habitual drunk Igor Danchenko, who used to work for the Brookings Institution.
From the “facts pulled out of our ass” department:
Other outlets have asked for this evidence too, and have similarly come up with nothing.
"Richmond officials have presented no direct evidence showing white supremacists organized the protest, encouraged violence or participated in any property damage."https://t.co/RJKpblJXi5
Well, every single gun nut in America has spent their entire adult life being continually mocked, insulted, and belittled by the left. You’ve done nothing but paint us as the bad guys.
In Hollywood, we’re always evil, stupid, violent, malicious, redneck, racist, murderers. That’s so ingrained in the liberal religion that when “ally” Harvey Weinstein was trying to get out of being a sleazy rapist, his repentance consisted of promising to make more movies about how the NRA is bad.
In the news, everything is always our fault. If there is a mass murder, we can always count on the vultures to swoop in and blame America’s gun culture. They flog it for weeks on end, 24/7 coverage, hoping for gun control. And if the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative, it drops off the news in mere hours.
And then at the local, state, and federal level, legally speaking, the left fucks us at every opportunity. You ban everything you can get away with. You ban things that literally make no sense. You ban shit just out of spite.
When we fight back against gun control laws, you declare we are stupid because only the police should have guns (hey, aren’t those the guys you are protesting right now?)
“Stupid racist rednecks! We live in a civilized society! Don’t you realize the police will protect us?” until when your democrat cities are on fire, and you call 911 and the operator tells you sorry, the police can’t come to your house right now, please try not to get murdered… How is that strict gun control working out for you?
Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.
But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?
How fucking gullible do you think we are? Like holy shit. Damn dude!
Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.
You’ve already thrown the black community under the bus, cheering as their neighborhoods get burned and yours are safe. Seriously, white liberals are the shittiest “allies” in history, and your moral foundation has the consistency of Play-Doh. Your moral compass is a wind sock.
If you’ve ever read about the the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and said to yourself “You know, there just wasn’t enough rioting and violence going on there!” you may get your wish:
More than 100 law enforcement agencies have reportedly pulled out of security agreements to send personnel to help with security at the Democratic National Convention next month in part because they are concerned about recent efforts to limit law enforcement’s use of tear gas and pepper spray in responding to violent riots.
Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales was ordered last month to change the department’s policies to ban the use of tear gas and pepper spray.
“Since the Milwaukee order was issued, more than 100 law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin and across the country decided against coming to Milwaukee, Morales told WTMJ-TV on Tuesday,” the Associated Press reported. “They were concerned with directives placed on the police department, including not allowing tear gas or pepper spray, he said.”
In Wisconsin, Franklin Police Chief Rick Oliva said, “It is apparent there is a lack of commitment to provide the Milwaukee Police Department with the resources it needs to ensure the safety of peaceful protesters, attendees, citizens and police personnel. I can not send personnel if they are not properly equipped or will not be allowed to engage in appropriate actions which would ensure their safety.”
Waukesha Police Chief Daniel Thompson responded by indicating that his department would not be sending officers to event, saying, “I understand that use of chemical irritants and pepper spray is serious and those are to be used only when legally justified. But when you take that out of the continuum that doesn’t leave the officers much other than getting harmed or using deadly force and that’s not good for any officer or the public.”
The news comes as violent left-wing riots have rocked multiple cities across the U.S. in the weeks since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“Unfortunately, some have chosen to respond to George Floyd’s death in a far less productive way – by demonizing the police, promoting slogans like ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), and making grossly irresponsible proposals to defund the police,” Attorney General William Barr said in prepared remarks to the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “The demonization of police is not only unfair and inconsistent with the principle that all people should be treated as individuals, but gravely injurious to our inner city communities. There is no harder job in America today than being a police officer.”
This will provide a handy test of just how much control centrist Democrats have over the radical antifa and #BlackLivesMatter rioters their financial backers have helped underwrite. My guess is: Less than they think.
The Milwaukee DNC has been scaled-down to being “mostly” virtual, but hundreds still plan to “protest.” Maybe the larger #BlackLivesMatter/antifa community will see it as a new opportunity to bus in for mayhem and to set an entirely new city on fire.
The International Order of Police and Fraternal Order of Police have both endorsed President Trump, and given how much leftwing activists openly hate their guts, I’m betting a lot more prominent local police unions will follow suit.
Come convention time, one wonders if the entirety of the Milwaukee police force will stage a “blue flu” sick-out.
Alternately, the DNC may view this as a great excuse to completely cancel all the “in-person” portions of the Democratic National Convention entirely. The certainly don’t want to expose Joe Biden to any more human interaction than necessary…
Guns are flying off the shelf, India isn’t rolling over for China’s aggression, and things just keep mysteriously blowing up in Iran. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
The media have claimed over the past three months: 1. Cuomo was great; 2. Seattle's CHOP and Portland were paradisical; 3. Mass riots were no biggie; 4. Enormous BLM protests provided no health risk in the midst of a pandemic. I can't imagine why they have a credibility gap.
Gun sales are up big. “A record 10.3 million firearms were purchased in the first half of 2020, according to NSSF’s adjusted NICS data. They report, ‘The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.'” Makes sense, since they disproportionately live in Democrat-controlled cities where they’ve let rioters, arsonists and looters run rampant…
“Trump Task Force to Dismantle MS-13 Takes Down Gang’s Key Leaders.”
Thanks to Barack Obama’s open border policies, MS-13 was energized with new recruits provided by a steady flow of illegal immigrant minors. When the Obama administration started welcoming a barrage of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) in 2014, Homeland Security sources told Judicial Watch that the nation’s most violent street gangs—including MS-13 and the 18th Street gang—were actively recruiting new members at U.S. shelters housing the minors. The Texas Department of Public Safety subsequently confirmed that the MS-13 is a top tier gang thanks to the influx of illegal alien gang members that crossed into the state under Obama’s disastrous program, which saw over 60,000 illegal immigrants—many with criminal histories—storm into the U.S. in a matter of months. Tens of thousands more have entered since then.
Snip.
The cases announced this week include an indictment against a high-ranking MS-13 operative, Melgar Diaz, in Virginia. Diaz is charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, conspiring to kill or maim persons overseas, conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, conspiring to finance terrorism, and; conspiring to engage in narco-terrorism, in addition to racketeering conspiracy and drug trafficking. In another case eight MS-13 members were indicted in New York for committing six murders, two attempted murders, kidnapping, narcotics felonies and related firearms offenses. In Nevada 13 MS-13 gang bangers, including leaders of the “Hollywood Locos” clique and “Los Angeles Program” were charged with multiple counts of narcotics distribution and weapons crimes. The task force is also responsible for the indictment in New York of Alexi Saenz, an MS-13 leader accused of committing seven murders, including two high school students with a machete and baseball bat. “MS-13 is a violent transnational criminal organization, whose criminal activities respect no boundaries,” said [Joint Task Force Vulcan (JTFV) director John Durham]. “The only way to defeat MS-13 is by targeting the organization as a whole, focusing on the leadership structure, and deploying a whole-of-government approach against a common enemy.”
China may be a powerful adversary to India, but its bluffs can be called. And that is what India has done in the last two weeks, making a host of decisions that, seen in the perspective of the stand-off with China, represent its resolve and constitute a sustained effort on several fronts — military, diplomatic, economic, social — to make China pay.
Previously, India had never taken sides with or against China on the Hong Kong protests. But this time around, it took a strong stand on the passage of the new security law, which is an attempt to stifle the city’s pro-democracy movement.
It has also blocked Chinese firms from investing in India under the free FDA route, taken several initiatives to force a global probe into the source and origin of COVID-19, and, as mentioned above, banned a host of Chinese apps.
That’s not all. India’s railways ministry has canceled a signals and telecom contract with a Chinese company for a mammoth freight corridor project in Uttar Pradesh. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) have decided to exclude Chinese firms from providing telecom equipment and cancelled their plans for upgrading 4G services. The roads department has announced that no highway projects will be awarded to China. The power ministry is looking to curtail imports from adversarial nations, including China. The move is aimed also at reducing the ability of adversarial nations to cripple India’s power infrastructure through cyber attacks.
Several Indian states have followed up on the national government’s moves. A push to deny a Chinese firm, Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Co Ltd, a contract for the construction of a critical section of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS corridor, is ongoing. The state of Maharashtra is on the verge of cancelling three agreements with Chinese firms. It includes an agreement with China’s Great Wall Motors (GWM) to set up an automobile plant near Pune and produce electric vehicles there. However, the state is going ahead with nine other agreements signed with the U.S., Singapore, and South Korea, indicating to China what’s to come.
Next was a heavily fortified, highly restricted, underground nuclear enrichment facility. Then power stations, a port, a health clinic and a petrochemical plant.
For weeks, things have been blowing up or catching fire in Iran.
The two most significant incidents were a June 26 explosion at Khojir, near Tehran — a liquid fuel production site for the country’s missile program — and more recently, a blast deep underground at the Natanz nuclear facility on July 2.
Red Bull decides that they don’t want to go broke, refuses to get woke. “Red Bull has fired two ‘diversity directors’ who tried to force the company into virtue signaling about Black Lives Matter while also dissolving several ‘culture teams’ who were pressuring Red Bull to take a more aggressive ‘woke’ political stance.” Good for them.
Gerald Walpin had been investigating Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA basketball star and Obama supporter, for misusing federal grant money from AmeriCorps. The program was created by the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 and grew to over 80,000 members. Program participants received benefits such as student loan deferment, living allowances, health benefits, career opportunities and training, and so forth. The program has done some good but has also been plagued by waste and corruption.
He found that Johnson gave $850,000 of AmeriCorps grant money to a nonprofit organization he founded called St. HOPE Academy. In addition to being improperly used to pay AmeriCorps volunteers for political activity, to wash his car, and to run his personal errands, Walpin also discovered that Johnson had used AmeriCorps grant money to pay hush money to underage girls, who were students at St. HOPE Academy, that he had sexually assaulted and then staged a cover-up.
Walpin called for Johnson to be criminally prosecuted. Instead, Johnson was able to get a sweetheart deal avoiding prosecution if he paid back the money. This deal was approved by Alan Solomont, a major Democratic fundraiser who was also the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS).
Walpin was furious about the deal and made it known, prompting his illegal firing. Following the firing, the Obama White House waged a smear campaign against Walpin, making bogus allegations that he appeared “confused, disoriented and unable to answer questions,” and exhibited “behavior that led the [CNCS] board to question his capacity to serve.”
If there were no police, if the police were defunded, wealthy people would hire private security guards, but the people who cannot afford private guards need to have a well‑funded police force. I am in favor of extra funding for the police. Give them better training. Teach them how to subdue people without using lethal force.
The problem with the UN is not that it passes too many resolutions, but too few. It never attacks its favorite countries. It applies a double standard of injustice. It has devoted more time to condemning Israel than all the other countries of the world combined. Let us see what it says about recent reports concerning murders in Iran of gay people, for instance the recent murder of a 14‑year‑old by her father as an honor killing. Let us see what it says about so many of the violations of human rights around the world. Well, do not hold your breath. It will say nothing. It will focus only on Israel and the United States. There is a case to be made for the United States withdrawing and defunding…
Plus some observations on recent Social Justice Warrior/Cancel Culture issues. Not in agreement with everything (he opposed elected judges), but worth reading. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
During the height of the coronavirus lockdown, with a substantial portion of the world’s population in quarantine and the global economy sliding toward a deep economic recession, most of us still ate our fill every evening. We should rejoice in this miracle. Hunger, which has accompanied humanity from our beginnings, has practically disappeared. Isolated cases of malnutrition—but not of famine—remain, due to local conflict and extreme forms of poverty, themselves on their way to remission.
Since 1970, world population has doubled—but food production has tripled. In 1970, India was known as “the famine continent,” and the economic literature was uniformly pessimist, an echo of the writings of Thomas Malthus, who proclaimed 170 years earlier an inevitable contradiction between demographic growth and agricultural growth. Humanity escapes this proclaimed fate, thanks to science and commerce—the two foundations of progress, including agricultural progress.
Snip.
What saved us from famine was the 1970s Green Revolution: a combination of species selection, hybridization, and the application of farming techniques such as irrigation and fertilization. When these techniques were applied to wheat and rice, average yields tripled, especially in India, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The leaders of this revolution, which we do not celebrate enough, were two agronomists: Norman Borlaug, a Texan who transformed wheat cultivation in his laboratory near Mexico City; and M. S. Swaminathan, an Indian from Chennai who applied Borlaug’s method to rice in a laboratory near Manila. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (Swaminathan was overlooked). Never was the Nobel Peace Prize more deserved—or so soon forgotten.
Progress is seldom, if ever, unanimously welcomed. Activist groups in India and the United States have blamed Borlaug and the Green Revolution for creating new inequalities. It’s true that all Indian peasants were equally poor and hungry before the Green Revolution. Those who applied Borlaug’s recommendations became more prosperous than those who stuck to the old methods. It’s easy to achieve equality when there is nothing to distribute; leftists seem to prefer scarcity to plenty if plenty implies unequal portions. The same people who condemned the Green Revolution now oppose GMOs. Their ancestors, in the early nineteenth century, justified destroying new textile machines using the same arguments. Science progresses; ideologies spin their wheels.
Kanye West explains why he’s against abortion. Man says a lot of wacky things, but he sounds truly sincere about this and his faith.
Small engine maker Briggs & Stratton declares bankruptcy. The very last paragraph mentions seeking a new deal from United Steelworkers of America. (Hat tip: ASM826 at Borepatch.)
James Lileks goes to town on that stupid “Classical music is white supremacy” essay.
Yesterday’s LinkSwarm embedded a bodycam video of an Eaton County deputy fatally shooting a knife-armed suspect who had just stabbed a 77-year old man. Today we’ve got an after-action breakdown of the shooting, including additional footage from a home surveillance camera.
A few thoughts:
She did an admirable job of clearing the error quickly.
Talking about the bump and rack being unnecessary, I think it all happened so fast she just hadn’t processed that the perp had managed to put her gun back in battery.
The bodycam clearly shows this was a justified shooting. The sad truth of the madness running rampant in 2020 is that if the perp had been black, boundless multitudes would be calling for (at the very least) her firing for using “excessive force.” And, if she was employed in a locale run by a certain type of Democrat, she probably would be fired to appease the rage mob.
I emailed Karl Rehn to get his reaction: “I thought she performed well. The ASP analysis is solid regarding bad grip.”
Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.
Well, unpleasant for you.
Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.
You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so.
After all, President Hillary Clinton did.
Didn’t there arise in your mind, that agonizing Wednesday morning after Mrs. Clinton’s ruination, just the faintest notion that you had been lied to? You tracked the polls, and you reviewed the percentages – most hovering above 90% – that assured you that the glass ceiling was in for an epic shattering. And yet, no shattering was forthcoming. Whether expressly or by omission, you were lied to.
And it is happening again.
“Trump Admin Tells Minnesota Governor To Get Bent Over $16 Million Aid Request Following Riots.” If Democratic officials refuse to defund their own cities from hard-left rioters and thugs, how is that the rest of the nation’s problem?
President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was great.
First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”
Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.
Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”
Democrat M. J. Hegar won her runoff with Royce West to face incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn in November. Cahnmann thinks Hegar is a much better candidate than West, but she’s not going to get the mountains of money and fawning media Beto O’Rourke got in 2018, nor are the demographic voting dynamics of a presidential election year going to be nearly as friendly to her.
Speaking of which: “Ilhan Omar’s Payments To Husband’s Firm Top $1 Million.” She’s certainly adapted quickly to the Washington Way…
Former Auburn football coach and Donald trump-endorsement recipient Tommy Tuberville wins Alabama senate primary over Jeff Sessions. I fully expect Tuberville to crush fluke democratic incumbent Dough Jones in the fall.
Perhaps no phenomenon is more studied, marveled, and desired in the world of high tech and science than the mystery of serendipity. In seemingly every industry, CEOs pay millions in consulting, design, and architectural costs to multiply and optimize the number of chance encounters between their most creative employees — and hopefully profit from the blockbuster new products that might result. If only they could engineer the cubicles just so, or the indoor waterfall at the right angle, they might orchestrate providential encounters, or at least load the dice in their favor.
No place on the planet generates more such interest than Silicon Valley. For decades, cities everywhere have tried to replicate the Valley’s record of producing one trend-setting tech giant after another, but none has quite measured up. Like history’s other hubs of outsized accomplishment — Athens in 450 B.C., Hangzhou in the 12th century, and Florence in the 16th century — Silicon Valley has entrenched itself as the world’s centrifugal force for the biggest thing of its age, tech.
But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge — the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley’s leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work. In May, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees they were no longer required to turn up in the office. Slack said more or less the same to its workers, and the trend was made official by industry colossus Zuckerberg, who announced that he expected up to half his employees would become permanently remote.
In the years before the pandemic, talent in San Francisco and the Valley were already conflicted about whether to stay, increasingly exasperated by the cost of living. The concentration of highly motivated creators has produced enticing jobs, but also driven up prices. In Palo Alto, the median home now costs $3.2 million. In nearby Mountain View, it’s $1.7 million, and in San Francisco $1.8 million. In other words, the Valley has priced out almost anyone not making high six-figures, and even many of them. The temptation has been to flee elsewhere, and some tech talent had already been doing so.
But now, if engineers, designers, and venture capitalists are geographically disbanding, working via the cloud instead of walking Google’s halls, surfacing at Buck’s Restaurant, or the cafes on University Avenue, how will future serendipity happen?
Lincoln Project co-founder is literally a registered agent for Russia. “The media can keep calling you ‘Republicans,’ but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat.”
Body Cam Released of a Eaton County deputy fatally shooting a suspect who stabbed a 77yo man, and attacked her with 2 knives and a screwdriver pic.twitter.com/KdJKv4RllQ
— Breaking News, USA (@currentnewsUSoA) July 15, 2020
The City would cut the number of cops despite increasing response times for emergency calls and increased violent crime in the city. I suspect other cities will be facing similar budget decisions under similar circumstances.
I don’t know anyone who thinks we shouldn’t improve officer training and use of force guidelines to minimize harm to citizens. I know a number of cops who have been saying such things for years. I fail to see how decreasing the number of cops will enhance public safety.
The Republican senator asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver last week if he would allow players to wear jerseys with the message: “Free Hong Kong.” Hawley was criticizing the league after officials announced “pre-approved phrases” would be allowed on the back of jerseys while “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of China, according to Fox News.
Wojnarowski responded to Hawley with the two-word email, which Hawley shared on social media. The columnist soon issued an apology for the message.
Wojnarowski (or “Woj” as NBA followers call him) still hasn’t clarified which was offensive to him: Supporting American law enforcement officers or supporting freedom for Hong Kong.
Biden drifts left, embraces the Green New Deal, and lifts his platform from Bernie Sanders. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden signs up for the Green New Deal. You know, if primary voters wanted a socialist takeover of the economy, they could have just voted for Bernie Sanders…
Joe Biden is looking at building 500 million solar panels, slashing U.S. carbon emissions within 15 years, and rapidly expanding a government-sponsored health care plan. He wants to overhaul the way policing is conducted on American streets and the way success is measured in primary schools.
Over the past week, the presumptive Democratic nominee has offered the biggest burst of policy proposals since he effectively won the nomination, including a plan to spend $700 billion on American products and research. It marks a significant move to the left from where Biden and his party were only recently — on everything from climate and guns to health care and policing — and reflects a fundamental shift in the political landscape.
The new plans, which have come in speeches, interviews, and a 110-page policy document crafted with allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), provide a window into how Biden would govern, and they kick off a new phase in a campaign that until now has focused mostly on President Trump’s performance. As Biden releases more plans — including one on climate and clean energy investments this week — he appears to be drafting a blueprint for the biggest surge of government action in generations.
“I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR,” Sanders, a democratic socialist who does not offer such assessments lightly, told MSNBC.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden issued a statement Wednesday evening in which he said he is “disappointed in today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision” in the case Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.
“I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the [2014 Supreme Court] Hobby Lobby ruling,” Biden said.
Barack Obama famously (infamously?) said that he wanted to “fundamentally transform” America. Thankfully, he was unable to completely do that. Now Obama’s senile Mini-Me, Joe Biden, is parroting his former boss and going on about “rebuilding” and “transforming” our beloved country.
Snip.
America is just fine, thank you. Warts and all, this 244-year-old experiment in freedom is — put mildly — freakin’ glorious. Every leftist who says America needs to be rebuilt or transformed is lying.
What’s really disturbing is that Joe Biden is the most moderate of the Dems to emerge from that large primary field. If he’s going on about transformation then the center of American politics has moved too far to ever get it back to anything resembling “normal.”
We’re fine here, Joe. We won’t be needing your help.
Putting aside the fact that Biden almost certainly doesn’t have the capacity to consistently write his own tweets, one is left wondering exactly what he plans to transform “this nation” into. Given how much the nation has already been transformed over the last several months, with the continued tolerance of the destruction of cities and America’s history, the promise of some higher level of radicalism coming should worry everyone.
Biden is not a moderate and never has been. The fact that he likely didn’t write the above tweet is perhaps worse than if he had. He’s surrounded by radicals, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his actual campaign staff, some of whom are alumni of the Sanders and Obama campaigns.
I’d go further and say that it’s not playing into Trump’s messaging but that it’s reality. Biden is telling us who he is and he has continuously done so. The idea that he’s a moderate is a myth perpetuated by people who want it to be true, i.e. voters who are not comfortable with the current cultural revolution but still want to vote for Biden. They are deluding themselves, believing that he’ll flip a switch when he’s president. He won’t and there’s absolutely no reason to believe he won’t govern exactly as he’s campaigning.
Since that day in May when I announced I would support Donald Trump for president, my motives have been questioned, my integrity assailed, even my intelligence challenged. That’s okay.
I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I am also a black man, the son of a World War II veteran and a proud American.
In recent weeks, there have been absurd calls to defund and disband police departments across the country by Democrats in response to the unjust murder of George Floyd. These are extreme calls that will only lead to more pain and suffering in our most vulnerable communities.
As the former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, I’ve had to manage one of the largest police departments in the state. I’ve had the experience of dealing with police shootings and comforting the families of victims. But at the same time, I’ve also had the experience of losing two black police officers. I’ve had to comfort their families in the middle of the night and console their young children. I know firsthand when others are running away from chaos, police officers are running into the fight to protect and serve.
President Trump was sickened by the death of George Floyd and fully committed to ensuring that he will not have died in vain. The president has taken a commonsense approach to heal our nation. President Trump made clear that he will protect all Americans, serve as an ally to peaceful protesters and always uphold law and order.
But the protesters were determined to sow chaos and destruction, all in the name of racial equality. Listen, during my first legislative session in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1993, I filed the first bill in my career to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. But I also understand the preservation of our history — the good and the bad. And still I bow to no one in my advocacy for the black community.
But unlike other Washington politicians, this president actually backed up his words with actions. He signed an Executive Order on police reform — taking steps to build a better bridge between law enforcement men and women and their communities.
The landmark Executive Order encourages police to implement best practices to protect the people they serve. It sets the highest professional standards for law enforcement officers, while promoting peace and equality for all Americans.
Under the order, the Trump administration will now prioritize federal grants from the Department of Justice to police departments that meet these high standards. Additionally, the order pushes forward the creation of a national database of police misconduct. This database will root out bad cops and help create accountability between police agencies.
Where were Joe Biden and the previous administration for 8 years in the White House on this issue? I’ll tell you. They were absent in unifying this country.
The forces of anti-Trump hatred comprise not just Democratic aspirants to high office but also, and more significantly, the media (social and otherwise), the spoiled, pajama-boy Left, and—above all, perhaps—the entrenched administrative apparatus of government, the self-engorging bureaucracy of the state whose fundamental allegiance is to the principle of self-perpetuation.
It is all of that which Donald Trump came to office to sweep clean, like Hercules confronting the Augean stables. The first time around the reaction was a compact of contempt and ridicule, but that was only because Trump could not win. The smartest people in the world—Bill Kristol, Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow—they all knew he couldn’t win. So they didn’t come together in a single caterwauling primal scream to stop him.
This time they have. And since they control almost all the major megaphones, it can sometimes seem that everyone is against Donald Trump and no one is for him.
It can seem that way, but of course it is not. And that is chiefly for two reasons. First, there are those 63 million voters—perhaps it will be 66 or 68 million this time. Voters whose voices you don’t hear in the pages of the New York Times and whose rigged Google searches and Facebook hot spots somehow leave out of account. They’re sitting at home watching their cities burn, watching monuments to Columbus, to Washington and Thomas Jefferson be defaced or toppled. They see that, and they hear a nonstop litany telling them how racist they are and how evil America is.
And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.
Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.
Employing the same pro-growth policies that turned the stagnant Obama-Biden economy into a record-setting dynamo in recent years, President Trump is orchestrating an unprecedented “V-shaped” recovery as our country emerges from pandemic-related lockdowns. The past two months have both seen blowout new records for job creation — 2.7 million new jobs in May, followed by an even more incredible 4.8 million new jobs in June.
The recovery has been rapid, but our progress remains fragile, and America’s beleaguered workers and business owners could not withstand the strain of Biden’s new taxes and regulations.
Biden’s proposal to halt all fracking would be particularly disastrous, both economically and geopolitically. Over the course of just four years, Biden’s fracking ban would destroy an estimated 19 million jobs and shave over $7 trillion from our national GDP.
But Biden’s radical environmentalism gets even worse.
For the first time in over half a century, America has become a net exporter of fossil fuels under President Trump, whose common-sense deregulatory agenda has allowed our country to become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. This means our country is now less reliant on Middle Eastern dictators for its oil, and American consumers are paying less at the pump and on their energy bills.
Joe Biden, however, wants to restore the sort of punitive regulations that were the centerpiece of the “war on coal” waged during the Obama-Biden administration.
Economic growth and innovation would also be severely undercut in other ways by a Biden presidency. In 2018, the Commerce Department calculated that total regulatory costs were equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the entire national economy — an alarming statistic that President Trump has made it a priority to correct.
As the most far-left of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, Biden’s platform is replete with proposals to increase the burden of bureaucracy even more.
I truly believe Jill Biden wants to be Edith Wilson 2.0. Woodrow Wilson’s wife basically ran the White House after his stroke in 1919. She only had to do that for two years. I’m pretty sure that Jill Biden would like at least an eight-year run at the gig.
When Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep’s handlers first began letting him do videos from his quarantine basement, Jill was often sitting at his side, grinning like a proud mother whose idiot underachieving kid had just successfully recited the alphabet for the first time. It was, quite frankly, very creepy to watch.
I’m still convinced that the overarching Democratic National Committee plan is to get Biden elected, whisk him back to the basement until Inauguration Day, then tell everyone that he’s had a medical situation of some sort shortly after that. Then his progressive VP can take over the job of running the country off a progressive cliff.
I am also firmly convinced that Jill Biden has other plans.
For reasons beyond my comprehension, Team Biden keeps releasing videos of this drooling moron. They are all painful to watch, and it seems at times to be a little cruel to mock him. He is, however, making a bid for becoming the most powerful man in the world. As long as he is running, Biden is fair game.
Jill Biden knows that and she doesn’t care.
The longer the Joe Biden Obvious Decline Circus is allowed to go on, the more I’m convinced that Jill Biden is a power-hungry madwoman who so desperately wants to be in the White House that she is willing to subject her husband to what has now become bipartisan ridicule.
Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.
Liberal organizations have seized upon the promise of Biden to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, urging him to consider someone like Leslie Abrams, the sister of Stacey Abrams, or liberal academic Michelle Alexander, who compared the nation of Israel to apartheid South Africa. Though Biden himself has not yet released his own shortlist of potential nominees, progressive activists who would wield immense power in his potential administration are already narrowing down the names.
Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.
We cannot afford to give Biden the opportunity to appoint new Supreme Court justices. With so many important cases decided along such narrow political lines, and with the “conservative majority” becoming increasingly fragile as Chief Justice John Roberts continues to drift leftward, the way to prevent a liberal takeover of the highest court in the land is to ensure that the next few vacancies are filled by reliably conservative judges.
Biden finished fifth in Iowa to Hillary and Obama in 2008. And Biden has not aged well in the intervening 12 years.
In the past month, Democrats have made the same mistake they have made in every election they have lost since 1968. They turned their backs on patriotism.
The liberal scorn of patriotism will once again backfire. Democrats are burning down their cities. Conrad Black sees this destruction as re-electing the president.
He wrote, “This is some new form of farce noire, a nightmare of outright idiocy, part slapstick and part horror, playing on a gigantic stage. Fortunately, we know it has to end on November 3, but the audience will likely tire of it and bring down the curtain well before then. No society can tolerate this for long. The arsonists will not burn down society; the society will awaken and banish the arsonists.”
There is an element of extortion in all this. Democrats are saying everything will return to normal only if we elect Biden.
Otherwise…
The attacks on the flag and the nation’s Founding Fathers (as well as Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) show an arrogance and tone-deafness. Americans still love their country. Be they the sons and daughters of slaves or slave owners or people who were neither, Americans are proud of their country and proud of their heritage.
I said 37 states in January. I say 37 states in July because Democrats have done not one thing to win over Trump voters, who were enough in number to win 30 states and the presidency in 2016. Seven more Hillary states will flip. I mean, does anyone seriously believe Minnesotans will not switch to President Trump after the George Floyd riots?
Here’s a long, flattering portrait of Michigan Democratic representative Elissa Slotkin, who came in the semi-blue-wave of 2018. Ignore the fawning and the credence given the now-debunked “Russian bounty” scandal and read the part where she thinks Democrats are deluding themselves if they think 2020 is in the bag:
“I don’t believe it,” Slotkin says matter of factly. “Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars. I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”
I stop Slotkin there. Is her gripe that these snapshots—the polling, both public and private, that shows Republicans bleeding support across the board—are accurate in the present, yet subject to so much volatility in the future as to be worthless? Or does she believe the snapshots themselves are inaccurate here and now?
“I think they’re inaccurate,” she replies without hesitation. “Here’s the thing. When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview. … It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”
Only one pollster, Slotkin says, admitted that he got it wrong. That was the person—Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based firm—she hired.
“He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”
Slotkin, ever the intel analyst—identifying trends, compiling a report, presenting a conclusion—tells me, with a high degree of confidence, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”
Veepstakes: “The Biden VP Pick Who Would Satisfy Both Ilhan Omar and George Will. California Representative Karen Bass’s low-key manner and progressive credentials could strengthen Biden’s campaign when he needs it most.”
Veepstakes: Profile of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Because being less strident while letting the city you lead burn less than Minneapolis is evidently a qualification.
Job numbers boom! Ghislaine Maxwell captured! CHOP chopped! It’s your Friday before Independence Day LinkSwarm!
4.8 million jobs added in June, blowing away all estimates. This is what keeps Democratic strategists up at night: Between lockdowns and riots, they’ve done everything they can to kill the Trump economy, and the Trump economy refuses to die.
Hillary Clinton today after hearing of the news that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, there is a reason Epsteined is trending right now. pic.twitter.com/SrGorHPigu
Speaking of the intelligence community, here’s why that Russian bounty story was crap. And all your liberal Facebook friends shared it because they don’t care whether a story is true or not, as long as it hurts Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It is not transcendentally stupid for the alleged anti-racism rioters to destroy a Lincoln statue, though, to normal people, it looks like the act of drooling morons. Now, a good number of these cesspeople are drooling morons, but that does not change the fact that trashing POTUS #16’s statuary is brilliant.
They have confused their targets – us – by casting off the constraints of coherence.
Oh wait, you thought that these folks were trying to make a point about racism being bad. And you thought, because that’s how those of us who weren’t raised on Instatwitbook, soy, and critical race theory, that if you point out that something is unreasonable then that will cause the person you were instructing to rethink it. After all, trashing some Honest Abe totem in order to illustrate how racism is double-plus-ungood is about a “12” on the 1-10 scale of unreasonability. And yet, you can point that out all day and they don’t care.
In fact, they laugh at you for doing so.
It’s not about making sense. It never was. It’s about making you kneel.
If you look at everything that is going on, the one common denominator is that every action the woke insurgents take is designed to strip you of your ability to defend your interests, or property, or rights, or life. The idea is to leave you utterly vulnerable, totally exposed, at which point they can do with you as they see fit. The nicer ones will merely reeducate you then demand humiliating submission and tribute. History (and their social media feed) teach that others will happily murder you. Doubt me? Just ask your local kulak.
Stripping you of defenses takes many forms. One form is defunding and abolishing the police. Oh, someone will be wielding force in society. It just won’t be people accountable to or inclined to protect you. Another form is literally stripping you of your defenses. Why is gun control such a fetish for these creeps? Because you with a gun have the ability to not just say “no” but to exact a price from those who wish to compel a “yes.” So, of course, they want to eliminate your ability to have weapons, but they also want to eliminate, as a practical matter, your ability to use them to protect yourself.
Look at what happened when the pink polo shirt gun guy quite reasonably grabbed his AR-15 as the savages descended on his property and the cops were AWOL. St. Louis’s Soros-bought DA – who last month released all the arrested rioters – threatened to prosecute him. The media is slandering him too. A pack of jackals threatened his property, his family, and even his dog, and he’s the bad guy for not showing his belly? You see the same fake furor every time some citizen has his car surrounded by a feeding frenzy of scumbags and plows through them to escape. Ignore that the slime are now shooting people they try to trap. The idea is to make you give up instead of fight back because if you fight back, the law comes down on you instead of the criminals.
Soros really is a shrewd investor.
The law – and the law generally says you can reasonably defend your life and property (please consult your local laws for specifics and get proper training) – means nothing if corrupt Democrats ignore the crimes of leftists and prosecute normals who dare resist the Blue Terror, which is kind of the point. You thought you could rely on the law and on the government to protect you. Nope. And now you can’t protect yourself either.
And then there’s reason. That’s a defense too. You can use reason, make arguments, present evidence, and convince people. Not if making sense is beside the point.
You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like “facts” and “evidence.” Yet so many of us see what’s happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy’s latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.
Forget the bizarre and evil concept of national original sin that is the malignant idea that America is built upon “systemic racism.” America’s true systemic flaw, arising at the time of those miserable progressives of yesteryear and continuing up through the miserable progressives of this rotten year, is what we now call “liberalism.”
Oh, it’s not classical liberalism, with its concern for expanding economic and personal rights – you know, individual liberty. The current inverted mutation of liberalism is all about constricting economic and personal rights and forcing individuals into collective boxes where their individuality is subsumed into an easily exploited and manipulated conformist whole. Want to test out this hypothesis? Look through the endless woke tweets of your favorite hack journalist, pinko pol, or Hollywood half-wit, or even go up to some self-described liberal in your own life, and see if you can find one iota of deviation from any of the approved liberal dogma. Good luck. You won’t find a smidgeon of nonconformity. You won’t detect a molecule of dissent. These people are the Borg, if the Borg worked in a giant space coffee house, had Bernie stickers on their spaceships, and could not do a push-up. You can’t reason with them – appealing to reason is futile.
Systemic liberalism is the real poison in America’s veins, not the fanciful notion pushed by bigots, charlatans, and demagogues, that the American enterprise is dedicated to invidious discrimination on the basis of race.
Left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committee—the Real Justice PAC—with an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.
But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.
Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC’s data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The third—Middle Seat Consulting—was cofounded by one of the PAC’s original leaders, Hector Sigala.
“There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly.”
“For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits what’s called ‘private inurement’ or excessive benefit to an individual from the organization’s coffers,” Walter said. “Real Justice PAC isn’t a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesn’t have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like ‘dark money’ influence—should be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies.”
Ding, the PAC’s technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms’ state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.
Seattle’s lawless CHAZ/CHOP zone finally demolished not due to all the murders, but because the scumbag protestors approached the mayor’s house. We can’t have the rabble bothering the more equal pigs!
Slowly but surely, all the Social Justice rioters are being brought to actual justice: 44 scumbags arrested in Scottsdale.
The antifa ringleader of the attempt to pull over the Andrew jackson statue was also arrested. “Jason Charter was arrested at his home by the FBI and U.S. Park Police on Thursday morning and charged with destruction of federal property.”
Our ruling class: “Peter Newell was the former co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity. The 77-year-old from Wood Green, north London, was sentenced last month at Blackfriars Crown Court. He admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16.”
Wary of closer Indo-American ties, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Global Times news outlet published editorials cautioning India from involving itself in U.S.-China tensions and serving as an American pawn against China. Picking up on this notion, Brookings scholar Tanvi Madan believes closer India-U.S. ties triggered the border standoff, with Beijing intending to show India its rightful place.
Instead, China’s deadly actions might have achieved exactly the opposite—cementing New Delhi’s strategic tilt towards Washington.
Hey @tiktok_us, why do you paste from my clipboard every time I type a LETTER in your comment box? Shout out to iOS 14 for shining a light on this HUGE invasion of privacy. inb4 they say it was a "bug" pic.twitter.com/MHv10PmzZS
And it’s not just Tik-Tok! “Other news apps caught red-handed: ABC News, Al Jazeera English, CBC News, CBS News, CNBC, Fox News, News Break, NPR, ntv Nachrichten, Reuters, Russia Today, Stern Nachrichten, The Economist, and Vice News.”
“Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows.” Absent other corroborative samples from that timeframe, I would guess it’s a case of sample contamination or a false positive. Still: a data point.
Will the hard left actually succeed in defunding the police in Minneapolis? They’re sure going to try, but voters can put a stop to this nonsense:
The Minneapolis City Council on Friday unanimously advanced a proposal to change the city charter to allow the police department to be dismantled, following widespread criticism of law enforcement over the killing of George Floyd.
The 12-0 vote is just the first step in a process that faces significant bureaucratic obstacles to make the November ballot, where the city’s voters would have the final say. It also comes amid a spate of recent shootings in Minnesota’s largest city that have heightened many citizens’ concerns about talk of dismantling the department.
The proposed amendment, which would replace the police department with a new “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention” that has yet to be fully defined, next goes to a policy committee and to the city’s Charter Commission for a formal review, at which point citizens and city officials can weigh in.
What do you want to be that, if it passes, the Minneapolis crime rate will sore and all the money spent on the “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention” will disappear into the pockets of radical “community activists” and the Democratic Party?
But: “Minneapolis council members who voted to dismantle the police use private security.” Of course. Some animals are more equal than others.
Hopefully voters will reject the proposal and vote in some city council members who aren’t hard left toadies. But keep in mind that Democrats control all of Minneapolis and most of Minnesota’s government (Republicans hold a one seat edge in the senate), which would suggest that the prognosis for full recovery from this Social Justice Warrior infection is grim.
If they do succeed in defunding, countless innocent people are going to die for the sins of one police officer.
Like holy shit. Damn dude!
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