Posts Tagged ‘Baltimore’

LinkSwarm for July 29, 2022

Friday, July 29th, 2022

The Biden Recession picks up downhill speed, liberals are spending $160 million to seize control of elections, Biden wants to starve your children until you accept transgenderism, and another Soros-backed DA gets the heave-ho from voters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!



  • GDP shrunk by .9% in Q2, making the Biden recession official, no matter how much Biden Administration officials and their Democratic Media Complex toadies attempt to spin it otherwise.
  • Another sign of the Biden recession: car repos are soaring.
  • Manchin caves, helps pass bloated spending bill. Because there’s nothing so good for fighting inflation as deficit spending…
  • The FBI sabotaged the Hunter Biden probe in 2020. This is my shocked face.
  • Estimates that over 75,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the invasion of the Ukraine.
    

  • “How the Left Hopes to Seize Control of Local Election Offices.

    Two big money liberal operations, ready to spend $80 million each, are trying to determine who controls elections and how in the years ahead.

    “The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.

    One of the two liberal groups, Run for Something, is a political action committee founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. In the spring, Run for Something established its Clerk Work project with the goal of electing clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections.

    The PAC says it will promote thousands of election administrators in the years ahead. But for 2022, it reports endorsing 11 candidates competing in races in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

    Local election clerks generally are empowered to interpret and enforce state election regulations. They often have discretion on matters such as whether to count absentee ballots that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.

    According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, county-level election officials are elected in 22 states. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more offices.

    In any case, donating to specific candidates to oversee elections could directly or indirectly affect who holds these positions.

    Some practices of local election administrators also could be guided by another $80 million effort by the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of mostly left-leaning organizations financed in part by Big Tech executives to train local officials in running elections.

    Snead and other critics say they see parallels between Run for Something and efforts to elect liberal prosecutors financed by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.

    “What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”

  • Good news! Indicted, Soros-backed Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid.

    When Soros-backed socialist son of convicted terrorists Chesa Boudin was recalled as San Francisco DA, the writing was on the wall. “Decarceration” is a disaster for everyone . . . except criminals.

    Now another Soros-backed “decarceration” state’s attorney has lost her reelection bid. It’s not clear if the multiple crimes for which Marilyn Mosby has been charged are the impetus for Baltimore’s voters deciding it’s time to move on or if it’s the shocking crime rates in the city as a result of her radical anti-law and order agenda. Maybe both.

    Mosby rose to national attention in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots and for her hyper-politicized botching of the prosecution in those cases.

    Fox News reports:

    Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.

    The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.

    Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.

  • Object to tranny madness? No school lunches for you!

    In May, the Biden administration announced that any school that participates in the federal school lunch program (which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service) must allow students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers and play on the sports teams aligning with their gender identity if they want access to funds for the program — effectively holding money meant for ensuring student nutrition in exchange for compliance on radical leftist gender ideology.

    Now, twenty-two Republican attorneys general are fighting back by suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over that new guidance.

    “We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”

    According to the Washington Times, nearly 30 million students take advantage of the National School Lunch Program at about 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions. The Biden administration policy was seen as a direct assault on the 18 states with existing laws barring male athletes from participating in female sports.

    The lawsuit argues that the Biden administration (again) violated the Administrative Procedures Act by issuing regulations without going through the rulemaking process and that Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on employment discrimination, doesn’t apply to Title IX as the Biden administration claimed when they announced the guidance.

    “This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III said. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”

  • Beto O’Rourke Campaign Staffers Vote to Unionize.” I can hardly wait for the first strike…
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm.” Russian missile system being transported by rail…in the US.
  • Samantha Bee’s show gets cancelled by TBS.

    In other news, Samantha Bee was evidently still on the air somewhere.

  • Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 jacket went for $2.8 million at auction.
  • “10 Biggest Adjustments Fleeing Californians Have To Make In Their New States.” One of my favs: “Man-buns are unacceptable in a professional setting. Or any setting.”
  • “CDC Declares Gay Orgies An ‘Essential Activity.'”
  • LinkSwarm for January 28, 2022

    Friday, January 28th, 2022

    More Democrats accepting foreign payola, Russia sabre-rattles over Ukraine, a Supreme Court justice retires, Canada revolts, Harris County’s soft-on-crime policies are getting cops killed, and the war over tranny madness spreads. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm.
    

  • “China’s Huawei Pays Tony Podesta $1 Million for White House Lobbying.”

    Long time Democratic power broker Tony Podesta has earned $1 million over the past half year lobbying the Biden White House at the behest of a blacklisted Chinese tech giant, recent federal disclosures show. Huawei, which was placed under trade sanctions during the Trump administration, paid Podesta $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 in an attempt to shake off the trade impact of the restrictions, according to the disclosure form filed on the evening of Jan. 20.

    With the $500,000 Podesta made from the previous three months lobbying the White House, he has been compensated $1 million over a six-month period for the lobbying effort.

    Podesta’s latest lobbying campaign targeted the Executive Office of the President and centered around “telecommunications services and impacted trade issues,” the disclosure said.

    Huawei, once the world’s largest telecom makers, has been facing international scrutiny in recent years. U.S. authorities have flagged the China-based company as a national security threat, saying the company’s close ties with China’s ruling communist regime, as well as Chinese law, could make it a potential espionage tool for Beijing.

    A stream of U.S. sanctions since 2019—which have barred Huawei from using U.S. technology and software, and shut out its gears from critical U.S. infrastructure—have slashed the company’s annual revenue by a third. In November, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that further tightened restrictions on Huawei by restricting it from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S regulators.

    Battered by the restrictions, Huawei has ramped up its U.S. influence operation in recent months. Podesta is one of half a dozen lobbyists the firm has engaged since July, which includes a former congressman and one former congressional aide, according to disclosure filings….

    Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as White House chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was also a former counselor to President Barack Obama, overseeing climate and energy policies.

    There’s your swampy Democratic Party corruption and graft, right there out in the open for all to see.

  • Speaking of open corruption: “Companies Linked to Putin’s Pipeline Contributed to Schumer Campaign.”

    Affiliates of two European companies that fund Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline contributed to the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who Republicans say has blocked sanctions on the Kremlin-backed project.

    ENGIE North America and BASF Corporation each gave $2,500 to Schumer in September through their corporate political action committees, according to newly disclosed Federal Election Commission records. ENGIE North America’s parent company and a BASF subsidiary are part of a consortium of five companies that finance Nord Stream 2, which will transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. While President Joe Biden has called the pipeline a geopolitical threat to Europe that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin, last year he waived sanctions on the project.

    Republicans have pushed for legislation to enforce sanctions only to be met with resistance from Senate Democrats and the White House. Schumer for months blocked Republican requests to vote on a sanctions bill. He approved a vote on sanctions legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) earlier this month in exchange for Cruz lifting holds on several State Department nominees. The bill received bipartisan support by a 55-44 vote, but Senate Democrats used filibuster rules to block its passage. Democrats say they want to use sanctions against the pipeline as a last resort should Russia invade Ukraine.

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • Nor is this foreign influence peddling new: “Convicted Pedophile Funneled Millions In Foreign Cash Into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign.”

    Convicted pedophile, UAE adviser and central witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, George Nader, has pleaded guilty to his role in helping the UAE funnel millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions into US campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, according to The Intercept, citing federal court documents filed last month.

    In a December sentencing memo, federal prosecutors disclosed that Nader had agreed months early to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the US government by pumping millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – concealing the foreign origin of the funds.

    Snip.

    Nader is accused of taking instructions from UAE Crown Prince [Mohammed bin Zayed], and gave regular updates on his efforts to get close to Clinton.

    In total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE business to [Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy”] Khawaja – CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. According to prosecutors, the funds were disguised as a routine business contract between the two men. Of the total transferred, more than $3.5 million came from the UAE government and was given to pro-Clinton Democratic political committees. Prosecutors have yet to publicly identify what happened to the remaining $1.4 million Nader transferred to Khawaja.

    Khawaja’s money laundering for Democrats was previously mentioned in this LinkSwarm. How many of the travails of the last five years boil down to Democrats trying to avoid going to jail for their corruption?

  • Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer announced he’s retiring. Biden, pandering as always, announces he’s going to nominate a black woman.
  • Speaking of the Supreme Court, the Biden Administration has reluctantly decided to obey its ruling on business vaccine mandates.
  • Canadian truckers have formed the largest convey in history to protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns. It seems pretty massive:

    How massive would the protest have to be to make Justin Trudeau change course? Leftists hate giving up government control of people’s lives, no matter how unpopular….

  • “Trudeau Claims Truckers Only Hate Him Because He’s Black.”
  • Speaking of which: “L.A. Schools Will Require Non-Cloth Masks (Even for Sports) and Vaccination Next Year.” As if parents even needed another reason to flee Los Angeles public schools…
  • School masking and closure policies are even driving liberal moms out of the Democratic Party.

    Tracy Compton, a mother of two in Fairfax, Virginia, had voted for Democrats for as long as she can remember, until the COVID-related school closures.

    ‘I tried and went to apply to work with the Democratic Party. I was told I was not allowed to become a member of the Democratic Party [in Fairfax].’

    A recording of a reorganization meeting showed fellow Democrats deeming Compton too ‘anti-school’ to be part of their political efforts.

    What made Compton anti-school?

    She wanted the public schools to fully reopen.

    When Compton worked to collect signatures for a recall petition for the local school board, she was welcomed out of the rain by a Republican party tent, even after telling them she was a Biden voter.

    In contrast, when Compton offered the petition to those inside the Democrat party tent, she was yelled at.

    Now? Given a hypothetical matchup between Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden vs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, she said she’d vote for the Republican in a heartbeat.

  • “Florida Is so Red, Democrats Can’t Even Field Candidates in Some 2022 Races.”

    All Florida trends are coming up sunshine for continued freedom from Covidstan. Recently Republican registrations surpassed Democrats in the state for the first time. Net domestic migration to the state also increased during COVID. Many commentators attribute both to Governor Ron DeSantis’s pandemic management policies. Just how bad does 2022 look for Democrats in the state? According to the Miami Herald:

    Evidence is piling up that Democrats in Florida have no clear bench of candidates willing to challenge Republican incumbents in South Florida, in what’s expected to be a daunting and expensive 2022 cycle for their party.

    Two first-time candidates who made early announcements they would run for South Florida House seats have both since dropped their bids to pursue runs for state office. A rumored likely candidate for federal office, former state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, was recently nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.

    The three Florida seats in question represent districts in Miami, including Reps. Carlos Giménez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart. Giménez is the former mayor of Miami-Dade County and an immigrant from Cuba. Salazar defeated Clinton ally Donna Shalala in 2020, and Diaz-Balart has represented his district since 2002. The Herald called these districts competitive and said redistricting provided Democrats an opportunity.

    However, the only potential candidates are a few retreads who lost in 2020. Reportedly, Shalala, who is knee-deep in Clinton ick, may be considering a rematch with Salazar. She served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and as President of the Clinton Foundation from June 2015 to March 2017. Former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost to Giménez in 2020, may also jump in the race. To date, neither woman has announced their intentions.

    Unless you owe someone favors, why run an almost certainly losing campaign in a red wave year?

  • Masks don’t work:

  • Lockdowns don’t work:

  • “During the last year’s attempts to defund the police and reduce the number of violent encounters on the street, Baltimore kicked off what they call the Safe Streets Project.” Surprise! A Safe Streets worker was one of three people killed in a shootout. Dwight would be disappointed if I didn’t include this:

  • In addition to looting, murder and arson, the primary accomplishment of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be making donations disappear.

    No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found.

    BLM’s shocking lack of transparency surrounding its finances and operations raises major legal and ethical red flags, multiple charity experts told the Washington Examiner.

    “Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said of BLM.

    BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors appointed two activists to serve as the group’s senior directors following her resignation in May amid scrutiny over her personal finances. But both quietly announced in September that they never took the jobs due to disagreements with BLM. They told the Washington Examiner they don’t know who now leads the nation’s most influential social justice organization.

    Paul Kamenar, counsel for conservative watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center, said a full audit and investigation into Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, is warranted.

    “This is grossly irregular and improper for a nonprofit with $60 million in its coffers,” Kamenar said.

    You don’t say…

  • Fifty years ago yesterday, three Black Liberation Army gunman ambushed and murdered NYPD officers Gregory Foster, 22, and Rocco Laurie, 23.
  • Are illegal aliens being given fake IDs at the border? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Sundown Joe unwittingly greenlights a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right now there’s a lot more jaw-jaw than war-war. I’ve avoid penning a thumbsucker on the situation because I’ve been too busy.
  • China deploys satellite grappling technology. Gee, if only an American president had created a special branch of the armed forces to handle space-related national security concerns… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Virginia Republican Delegate Nick Freitas is done with having Critical Race Theory advocates calling all who oppose them racist:

    (Hat tip: Not The Bee.)

  • Pro-illegal alien amnesty Americans for Prosperity: Here, Republicans, have some endorsements. Republicans: Hard pass.
  • Illegal alien charged in murder of Harris County Constable Corporal Charles Galloway.
  • And three more Houston police officers were shot yesterday.
  • In California, 26 year old child molester sentenced to juvenile detention because he identifies as female. Another gift from Soros-backed DA George Gascon.
  • Today’s unexpected ally in the war on transgender madness: actor Sean Penn.

    Sean Penn is doubling down on his defense of traditional gender roles.

    In two separate interviews this month, the two-time Academy Award-winner and ex of Madonna made comments bemoaning his perception that men are becoming more feminine.

    “I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminized,” the 61-year-old told the UK-based publication The i in an interview ahead of the UK release of his new film “Flag Day.”

    “I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”

    In a subsequent interview the “Milk” star did with The Independent this week, he dug his heels into the polarizing opinion, going even further in his critique of men who challenge gender norms.

    “There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt,” he told the publication. Furthermore, he noted that the women in his life don’t seem bothered by the patriarchy.

    “I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them,” he said.

    Penn is wrong about an awful lot, but he’s right about this.

  • Intel to build $20 billion chip manufacturing facility near New Albany, Ohio (near Columbus), starting with two fabs. Intel had already announced a big investment initiative, and announced their were building two new fabs in Arizona last year. The Ohio location is a surprise, since there’s no fab infrastructure there, but evidently Ohio is throwing lots of money at them.
  • Vegetarian “meat” company Impossible Foods just laid off a bunch of people. “Technocratic elites have decided in the so-called ‘Great Reset’ in a post-COVID world that peasants should eat plant-based meat instead of the real thing as a way for ‘sustainable nutrition.'”

  • Yikes!

  • Bill Burr contracts Flu Manchu, reacts to it in Bill Burr-esque ways.
  • The new Superman is a “bisexual climate warrior.” Those comic book issues aren’t exactly flying off the shelf.
  • Speaking of comics: This comic page just sold for $3.3 million. A wee bit rich for my blood. And is possibly more than the artist made over his entire career working at Marvel…
  • Heh.

  • “Biden Warns Russia That If They Invade Ukraine, America Will Evacuate Haphazardly And Leave $86 Billion In Weapons Behind.”
  • “Biden Administration Mounts Daring Mission To Evacuate Hunter’s Remaining Cash From Ukraine.”
  • “Amy Schneider’s Winning Streak Ended After Being Asked To Name The Gender That Has Two X Chromosomes.”
  • I’m sending out a new SF/F/H book catalog Real Soon Now. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
  • I think my dogs want me to step away from the laptop.

  • LinkSwarm for January 14, 2022

    Friday, January 14th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.
    
    

  • After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin declares for the zillionth time “Nah, I’m good.” And…
  • Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
  • But don’t let the focus on Manchin and Sinema fool you. Several other Democratic senators secretly opposed ending the filibuster as well.
  • Indeed, it sets up a no win scenario for some of them.

    If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

  • Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:

  • Baltimore Democratic State’s Attorney and Soros-tool Marilyn Mosby, “the city’s top prosecutor, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of perjury and filing false mortgage applications related to her purchase of two Florida vacation homes.” You may remember Mosby from such previous hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law” and “I want the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson.”
  • Think the supply chain is screwed now? China just locked down several big ports over Flu Manchu.
  • “To staff, Kamala Harris is a clueless bully who refuses to do her homework.”

    Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.

    She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.

    “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.

    One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Google, Twitter employees flood Democrats with donations as companies are accused of censoring conservatives.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Dr. Malone on Gettr.)
  • “J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election.”

    The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

    Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

    Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

    Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

    It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.

    With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

  • Why Democrats must make a mountain out of the molehill of January 6.

    The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

    That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

    Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

    Snip.

    That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

    Snip.

    Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.

    The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

    CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.

    The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • EU to exempt luxury yachts from carbon taxes because of course they are.
  • Hollywood’s new rules.

    A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.

    The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.

    Snipped.

    So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)

    The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.

    Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)

    Snip.

    The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.

    “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”

    Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”

    Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”

    It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”

    That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.

    “Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.

    Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…

  • Steve Harvey says that wokeness has killed comedy.
  • Biden’s approval ratings hit new lows. Again.
  • Speaking of Biden, I wonder if this is what it’s like inside Biden’s head: A myriad of voices, and no independent will at the center.

  • Speaking again of Biden, remember that he backed a lot of economic turkeys other than Theranos.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:

  • “Senate Democrats Block Cruz’s Effort to Sanction Russian Pipeline.”
  • Mike Rowe discusses why 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs, and the coming severe shortage in trades workers.
  • Speaking of Rowe, here he discusses why the nonstop panic porn has desensitized Americans.

  • And speaking of healthcare worker shortages:

  • For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
  • Dwight has a good, deep dive on the course he took on how to survive a gunfight out at KR Training.
  • The Young Conservatives of Texas have their ranking of legislators out.
  • TPPF’s Joshua Trevino has a pretty swell essay about Midland-Odessa.

    What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.

    All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.

    Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Heh:

  • Lunatic stabs police dog to death. Lunatic gets dirtnapped. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
  • So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
  • A list of Austin restaurants that closed in 2021.
  • Bill Burr remembers his friend Bob Saget.
  • Impressive!

  • Richard Hammond makes the case for classic cars.

    They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.

    I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.

  • “Supreme Court Sets Dangerous Precedent Of Letting The American People Make Medical Decisions For Themselves.”
  • “FBI Promises To Make Hoaxes Less Obvious This Year.”
  • Dog stolen from man on Christmas Day found and returned. Man, these winter allergies are real killers…
  • LinkSwarm for August 13, 2021

    Friday, August 13th, 2021

    Happy Friday the 13th!

    This week’s LinkSwarm features Democrats behaving badly (a timeless theme).

  • Immediately after Senate Republicans caved on the pork-filled infrastructure bill, Democrats turned around and passed a highly partisan $3.5 billion budget bill. Good job, idiots.
  • Hunter Biden is the gift that keeps digging: “The Russians have videos of me doing crazy f***ing sex!’ Hunter Biden is seen in unearthed footage telling prostitute that Russian drug dealers stole ANOTHER of his laptops.” 1. Hunter has more Russian-related felonies in a single weekend than Donald Trump had in his entire lifetime. 2. I don’t lose pennies the way Hunter loses laptops…
  • “How Many Other Andrew Cuomos Are Elites Covering For?”

    The obvious fact is, however, that this corrupt corporate press and the Jennifer Rubin “conservatives” of the world are the ones who propped Cuomo up as “the gold standard,” to use Joe Biden’s words, even describing themselves as “Cuomosexuals.”

    Cuomo’s “radical transparency” made him a “terrific bureaucrat,” they said. Cuomo is “inspiring, uplifting, fascinating,” and truly “magnificent,” they insisted. He’s “honest, direct, brave,” and what “real leadership” looks like. Elites gave him an Emmy and blessed him with softball interviews and comedy-hour airtime, with left-wing activists working behind the scenes to discredit Cuomo’s accusers.

    Tuesday’s resignation signals it’s the end of the road for Cuomo — for now. But if the media can sit and twiddle its thumbs — or worse, kiss keister and perform comedy sketches with giant Q-Tips — while thousands of elderly folks die in New York nursing homes and women in the double digits tell of a gropey governor’s disgusting habits, we must ask: How many other Andrew Cuomos is the media covering for?

    Covering for elite misconduct is a perpetual problem in the media; it didn’t start with Cuomo. As Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson wrote on Tuesday, the media did the same with Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Theodore McCarrick. Don’t forget Bill Clinton or Roman Polanski, either.

    “Everyone knew. No one cared. No one said anything until forced to. Then the feigned shock and outrage, the concern about the treatment of women, the hand-wringing and Me Too-ing, the performances on social media,” Davidson wrote. “As long as sexual harassment, assault, abuse, even the sex trafficking of underage girls stays quiet, then [the media] stay quiet, too.”

  • “New York’s Capital Is Crazytown

    You read all this and think: The governor is a letch, a creep, a dirty old man. But also a nut—a high-functioning one, a politically talented one, but a nut. Only a nut would do these things, and only a nut would think he wouldn’t be found out.

    No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.

  • Cuomo could still end up in prison. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Arizona state Sen. Tony Navarrete resigns seat after arrest in child sex abuse case.”
  • Old and busted: Democrats want to segregate students by race. The new hotness: Democrats want to segregate students by race.
  • How inflation is undoing the four years of wage growth and price deflation President Trump brought to the economy.

    Read the whole thing, especially the parts on the EU and Canada.

  • Devin Hogan, head of the Minneapolis Democratic Party, said that burning down a police building was “an act of pure righteousness.”
  • “Swiss Police Threaten to Stop Enforcing COVID-19 Rules. Group warns in letter that lockdown laws violate fundamental rights.”
  • Oregon has decided that it’s going to stop requiring Oregon high school graduates to prove they can read and write.
  • Baltimore professor arrested for dealing math. “Prof. Edward C. Ennels taught math at Baltimore City Community College but appears to have been offering a running lesson on supply side economic theory. Ennels reportedly was selling grades on a sliding scale depending on your worth and your ambition: $150 for a C; $250 for a B; and $500 for an A. He has now earned jail time after pleading to 11 misdemeanor charges, including bribery and misconduct in office.”
  • Speaking of Baltimore schools failing their students: Some Baltimore high school students test at grade school levels.
  • Dan Crenshaw slams Jennifer Ruben for a huge mistake:

    That’s a big mistake even by her standards. How did she make it? The Texas Tribune screwed the pooch on the original story:

    That’s a hell of a correction. “When we wrote Nolan Ryan struck out 383 batters in a single game, we meant he struck out that many in a single season…”

  • YouTube takes down another video by Rand Paul.(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Dumbass: Running from the police. Extra Dumbass: In a stolen vehicle. Super Turbo Dumbass: On a stolen ATV. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Mongo ist nur Schachfigur im großen Spiel des Lebens.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Dems Considering Another Lockdown To Wipe Out The Few Small Businesses That Survived The Last One.”
  • “Bill Gates Announces He Too Will Go To Space Once His Rocket Is Finished Installing Updates.”
  • Golden throats:

  • LinkSwarm for June 11, 2021

    Friday, June 11th, 2021

    Joe Manchin, controlling the border, and Soros-backed DA’s doing their best to bring back the high crime rates of the 1970s top this Friday’s LinkSwarm:

  • Seems like this should be a bigger story than it is: Mexico just had it’s midterm elections. But that’s not the big part: “97 politicians had been assassinated. Along with almost a thousand being attacked in some way, shape, or form. Just in this election cycle!”
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says that he will refuse to vote for the Democratic Voter Fraud Enablement Act of 2021. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act.”
  • Indeed, Manchin just crushed two anti-democratic Democratic power grabs:

    Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.

    Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”

    “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.

    Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.

    “Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Manchin is thwarting The Will of The Party, so naturally Jemele Hill is calling him a racist.
    

  • Remember how Democrats were sure Hispanics would usher them into permanent majority status? Not in Texas:

    Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.

    Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.

    The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.

    “We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”

    Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.

    But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.

    Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.

    Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.

    “Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”

    It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.

  • Indeed, illegal border crossings hit 180,000 in May. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to build the border wall in Texas the Biden Administration stopped work on.
  • Meanwhile, since being put in charge of the border crisis, Kamala Harris not only hasn’t visited the border, she laughs off questions about it. (Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation.)
  • Speaking of illegal aliens, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that those who entered the country illegally and were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons are not allowed to apply for a green card. Also note the Justice Elana Kagan-penned decision makes no mention whatsoever of the “undocumented.” She refers to them, using the standard statutory language, as “aliens.”
  • “LA Sheriff Attributes Crime Surge To Soros-Backed DA Gascón, Supports Recall.”

    The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.

    “In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.

    “We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”

    The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.

    While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.

    “You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.

    “There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”

  • Speaking of Gascón: “Double murderer approved for parole at third hearing; prosecutors barred from attending under Gascón’s reform.” “Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.” It appears that there’s nothing Soros-backed DAs enjoy more than putting violent, dangerous felons back on the street.
  • Dozens of Baltimore businesses plan to go Galt:

    It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.

    In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”

    What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.

    The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.

    “What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.

    The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:

    • Pick up the trash
    • Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
    • Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
    • Empower police to responsibly do their job

    The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.

    You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…

  • “DeSantis Signs Bills Combatting Chinese Communist Party’s Influence In US.””The first bill is intended to safeguard public institutions from ‘undue foreign influence,’ DeSantis said at a press conference, noting that the bill will prohibit ‘agreements between public entities and the Communist Party of China or Cuba or any of these malignant forces.’ The second bill criminalizes theft and trafficking trade secrets under Florida state law.” If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, right now DeSantis would be the early favorite for the GOP nomination.
  • More words from the man in question:

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Obama Administration Lifted Block on “Gain of Function Research” Just Eleven Days Before President Trump Took Office, January 9, 2017.”
  • Own any of the estimated 40 million guns in America with a pistol brace? Congratulations! The Biden Administration wants to make you a felon.

    “Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.

    [Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”

  • How’s that socialized medicine working out for you, UK? “Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England.”
  • Old and busted: Young families buying homes. The new hotness: Pension funds buying homes. “The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there.”
  • The Kung Flu lockdowns were a war on the working class:

  • Fake Florida coronavirus “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones suspended from Twitter.

  • Charles C. W. Cooke wonders what use Chris Cuomo is to CNN?

    Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?

    At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.

    It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.

    On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.

    Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.

  • Speaking of CNN, they also brought back Jeffrey “lubin his” Toobin. Proving yet again that the the Democratic Media Complex will alwaqys refuse to apply its rules to their own.
  • Jon Del Arroz wins his lawsuit against Worldcon for calling him racist:

    The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)

    At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.

    Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Not-so-much news: Gun control bill fails. News: In California.
  • For all the disappointments of the Texas 87th legislature’s regular session, a number of pro Second Amendment bills were passed.
  • Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman resigns, said to be interested in running for Attorney General against incumbent Ken Paxton and George P. Bush.

    This is probably the wrong Eva to use as clip art here.

  • French France’s Emmanuel Macron Urges G-7 To Sell Gold Reserves To Fund Bailout For Africa. I imagine that the other G-7 members responses to this proposal ranged from “Are you high?” to “Die in a fire.” (Plus an “Is Matlock on yet?” from Biden.)
  • Chinese Police Storm Rare Student Protest Inside Nanjing Normal University.”
  • “50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat.”
  • Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker has his truck broken into while he was in San Antonio. The Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime stances just keep reaping their rewards…
  • Speaking of Carriker, he just hit 10 million subscribers.
  • Three reporters at the New York Post are breaking the first rule of Fight Club. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The world’s creepiest McDonalds is an abandoned barge.
  • Crazy criminals, UK edition:

  • Babylon Bee counts down genders:

  • How to Protect Your Shopping Trolley From Improvised Explosives.” However, I feel compelled to point out a technical error: The Trophy active protection system is not yet available on the British Challenger tank, making it deeply unlikely that the system would be made available for a Tesco shopping cart.
  • LinkSwarm for May 14, 2021

    Friday, May 14th, 2021

    The Biden Recession blooms, Bibby bombs, Baltimore burns, inscrutable Flu Manchu somehow infects the vaccinated, and Canada’s institutional religious hostility inflicts its revenge on the pastor that defied them. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Carter Malaise II: Inflation Boogaloo: The core inflation rate is now at 11%. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • If inflation wasn’t enough to remind you of Biden’s reboot of That 70’s Show, how about long gas lines? An east coast gas pipeline was shut down by ransomeware attack launched by a hacking group called DarkSide.

    Rendered with the magic of dyslexia

    We’re actually very fortunate that a for-profit gang carried out this hack, rather than a terrorist group or state actor.

  • “South Carolina Follows Montana In Ending All Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Programs.” Strange how the government paying people not to work hurts jobs numbers…
  • Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (WV) says he’s not going to let the Democrats’ election-theft bill pass. Good for him. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Seeing some reports stating that Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, but seeing some Twitter commentary that, no, they haven’t entered, but that IDF artillery and tanks are pounding Hamas tunnels.
  • Why won’t those violent Israelis just let themselves be killed?

    Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

    But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

    This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

    The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

  • Hamas is the instrument of Iran’s proxy war against Israel:

    Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons. “Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons,” Khamenei said in an online speech.

    “With divine guidance and assistance, we planned, and the balance of power has been transformed in Palestine, and today the Gaza Strip can stand against the aggression of the Zionist enemy and defeat it.”

    Khamenei went on to offer the reason why Iran was sending rockets, missiles and tons of explosives to the Gaza Strip: “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous tumor in the region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

    Khamenei’s admission shows how the mullahs in Tehran have been lying to the West for many years. In 2011, Mohammad Khazaee, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations, sent a letter to the President of the United Nations Security Council in which he vehemently denied that Iran was smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip.

    

  • Baltimore was one of the first cities to try “de-policing.” How did that work out for it? Not so hot:

    This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.

    Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.

    The tried “broken windows” policing without understanding it:

    The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.

    O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.

    The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.

    In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.

    True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”

    Then they adjusted:

    O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”

    Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.

    And then the Social Justice started:

    Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.

    First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.

    Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”

    So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Baltimore’s Soros-backed City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby can’t be bothered to indict antifa rioters, but she can ask the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson for daring to criticize her.
  • Speaking of defunding the police, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey admits that defunding the police was a huge mistake. If only the rest of the Minneapolis had realized this before all the deaths.
  • “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.”
  • Russia’s robot army is mainly vaporware.
  • Just about everything they told us about transmission vectors for Mao Tze Lung was wrong:

    Bars, gyms and restaurants. Those were just a few settings health experts warned could become hotbeds for COVID-19 spread as states began reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 following the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

    Yet, public data analyzed by ABC News appears to tell a different story. The data from states across the country suggests specific outbreak settings (including bars, gyms, restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and stores — for the full list, see graphic below in story) only accounted for a small percentage, if any, of new outbreaks after the pandemic’s inital wave in 2020.

    Snip.

    Based on ABC News’ analysis of public data of all coronavirus cases in four states and D.C., the outbreak settings accounted for less than 5% of all COVID-19 cases in those states.

  • “World’s Most Vaccinated Nation Sees Active COVID Cases Double In Under A Week.” Mysterious uptick in the Seychelles.
  • Another data point: “Yankees Suffer COVID Resurgence As 8 Fully-Vaccinated Players, Staff Test Positive.” A fluke? Bad batch of vaccines? Bad batch of tests?
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • “Why Did Biden Census Bureau Add 2.5 Million More Residents to Blue-State Population Count?” The question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?
  • Kansas’ Republican legislature overrides Democratic governor’s veto of election integrity bill.
  • Texas congressman Chip Roy is running ran against Elise Stefanik for conference chair to replace Liz Cheney. (Oops, he lost, 134-46.)
  • Remember the Polish pastor who kicked police out of his Canadian church? Well, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The State: “Calgary pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for holding a church service.” That will teach him for daring to think Canada has freedom of religion…
  • How we got to the Ever Given. The first container ship only carried 58 boxes. Current container ships can carry as many as 24,000…
  • “Former Democrat Speaker of House in Oregon Arrested for Sex Trafficking.”

    Dave Hunt represented Clackamas County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 2003 through 2013. Hunt was the former Democratic Leader, Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House for the State of Oregon. As a legislator, Hunt the sponsor of a bill criminalizing sex trafficking in 2007. Hunt is currently a lobbyist working to influence the very chamber he left.

    However, even more ironic in 2011, Dave Hunt use his position to support and vote for HB 2714. That bill created the crime of commercial sexual solicitation, the exact crime police used to charge Hunt when he was arrested and cited.

    Sort of sounds like a garden variety prostitution solicitation charge. But if he’s one of the legislators to redefine that as “sex trafficking,” my sympathy is extremely limited.

  • Colorado Democrats give up on their gun control push. (For now.) Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I-40 bridge over Mississippi closed due to a giant crack in a key structural beam.
  • Telsa plans more expansion in Travis County.
  • NRA’s bankruptcy petition has been dismissed. Understandably, since it seemed a transparent ploy to begin with. It’s too bad Wayne LaPierre seems intent on dragging the NRA down with him…
  • Mark Sebu follows up on the Kentucky Ballistics explosion. Evidently it would haven taken 161,520 PI to shear the threads off the Sebu RN 50. Also, there were no pre-cuts on the sabot, suggesting it may indeed have been a counterfeit SLAP round that caused the explosion.
  • Not the Babylon Bee: O.J. Simpson backs Liz Cheney, accuses the Republican Party of “dishonesty.” I don’t feel I can adequately parody this real-life event, even though I should probably take a stab at it…
    

  • Sign you may be in a cult: They keep keep the mummified body of the dead leader in someone’s home, covered by Christmas lights. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter James May found out that trickle charging a Tesla S’ main car battery didn’t charge the ordinary car battery, the one responsible for regular electric systems…like unlocking the hood latch to reach the same battery. Result: an hour of work just to reach the dead battery.
  • Speaking of impractical automotive accoutrements, here’s a Bugatti watch with a “working” W16 engine, yours for a mere $280,000…
  • Foamy: “Stop saving the stupid people!”
  • “Disney To Remove Problematic Kiss From Classic Movie, Snow White Will Now Remain Dead.”
  • Pipeline blues:

  • “Damnit! I had two sawbucks on Beatlebaum!”

  • LinkSwarm for April 30, 2021

    Friday, April 30th, 2021

    If you live inside the Austin city limits and haven’t voted yet, don’t forget to vote to reinstate the camping ban tomorrow!

  • Joe Biden declares war on America:

    The country had “done nothing about immigration in 30 years,” (most of them under Clinton and Obama), except that under Trump illegal immigration was reduced by 90 percent, and the principal problem was effectively solved until Biden stopped construction of the southern border wall and reopened the borders. He said it was time to do something about the ”dreamers” but that was not the policy of his party when Trump attempted to help them. Biden called for resources to deal with the “root cause of why people are fleeing” Central America as if it were the business of the United States to raise the welfare of those poor countries, and feed more graft into them, rather than to monitor its own border and apply a sane system of an admission of immigrants.

    He revived the old Obama nonsense about combating employment with unionized green jobs, and leaped into the time warp of bygone days with the bunk that “the middle class built the country and the unions built the middle class, and we must promote the right to unionize.” Unions today are an almost wholly retrograde force redundant to market pressures for higher wages and better working conditions and largely confined to the stagnant backwater the public sector.

    The former administration created huge numbers of “millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes…adding $2 trillion of debt and extending the pay disparity between the chief executive and the lowest wage earner to 320 to 1.” Naturally ignored were the facts that under his predecessor the income taxes of 83 percent of taxpayers were reduced, the number of positions to be filled exceeded the number of unemployed by over 750,000 and the lowest 20 percent of income-earners was in percentage terms gaining income more swiftly than the top ten percent.

    He taxed the former administration with “trickle-down” economics, though that charge was leveled at President Reagan’s massively popular and successful economic policies. Most outrageously, Biden took all credit for 220 million vaccinations with no hint that if it had not been for Trump’s direct intervention to accelerate the development of vaccines, none of it would have happened.

    Almost as disingenuous was the claim that House of Representatives Bill Number 1, which would effectively eliminate any serious method of verifying the validity of individual votes, is really an attack on the Republican effort to attack “the sacred right to vote.“ That bill is almost certainly unconstitutional, would institutionalize and protect mass ballot harvesting, and it ignores the fact that 77 percent of Americans support photo-identification for voters.

    The climate was again bandied as an “existential crisis” even though Biden acknowledged that the U.S. only provides 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. He also omitted to mention its splendid record in reducing those omissions even though there remains no convincing argument that they are relevant to the alleged crisis. Foreign affairs was an unrecognizable dreamworld: ”while leading with our allies” and “working closely“ with them to deal with Iran and North Korea, (principally by recommitting the West to acquiescing in Iranian nuclear militarization), he will ”stand up to (Chinese leader) Xi” whom he realizes is ”in deadly earnest” in his determination to supplant the United States as the world’s most important country.

    After the usual reassertion that everyone is created equal, Biden slipped in the need to ”root out systemic racism that plagues America… White supremacy is terrorism” and has “surpassed Jihadism” as a menace. He gave no hint of what he thinks of organizations that are constantly threatening to burn America down if they’re not successful in extracting a full-body immersion in self-humiliation from the majority of Americans who despise all racism. Rarely in his rabidly bowdlerized summary of the nation’s affairs does the president allow the truth to intrude. This made the opposition response by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina particularly effective.

    (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)

  • Dissecting Biden’s lies.

    Biden tried to persuade his audience that gun violence has exploded due to the expiration of the ban on “assault weapons” in the early 2000s.

    In fact, says [David] Harsanyi, “the rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.” Indeed, “from 2006, overall homicides fell ten out of 14 years” and “twenty-one years after a gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault-weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit a historic low.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • North Carolina Senator Tim Scott have the response speech to Biden’s. Naturally, Democrats went full racist in response.
  • MIT study: Social distancing and limited occupancy are bunk.
  • Unions Sell Out Their Own Workers for the Biden Energy Plan“:

    Another pro-President Joe Biden union just told its rank-and-file members: Sorry, guys, you are all fired.

    Last week, the United Mine Workers of America union endorsed Biden’s energy policies. Yes, you read that right. The coal-mining union bosses have embraced a bill that outlaws coal mining.

    This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing Biden for president. He repaid them with his first act as president — killing the Keystone pipeline. So now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.

    Did anyone bother to actually ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?

    They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their own union bosses.

  • “Bill to Ban Critical Race Theory from Texas Classrooms Passes House Committee.”

    State Reps. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) and James White (R-Hillister) are each carrying an identical duplicate of the bill, though the Public Education Committee of the Texas House only passed Toth’s. White’s twin never received a hearing.

    The bill tackles a number of educational tactics feared by some Republicans to be nascent trends in the classroom, such as “action civics,” overly political curriculums, and a strain of sociological thought which organizes racism through structural rather than interpersonal terms, translated from academia to popular literacy by bestselling writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and commonly called “critical race theory.”

    Specifically, the bill would adjust three key areas of education: the state curriculum, classroom education, and training for teachers and other employees.

    It would require the State Board of Education to include an understanding of the country’s founding documents in the state curriculum standards, as well as an understanding of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government.”

    On top of barring teachers from asking students to engage in political activism, the bill would also forbid teachers from promoting racial preferences or concepts like inherent racism and racial guilt. It bans similar ways of teaching with regards to gender, such as fostering guilt on account of sex, teaching inherent or unconscious sexism, and encouraging worse treatment for one sex over another.

    Lastly, it would forbid “training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex” for school employees.

    Good. Critical Race Theory is pure poison.

  • Tape leaks exposing the truth about Iran’s government:

    Deeply embarrassing leaked audio has surfaced which has sparked a crisis in Iran and which may negatively impact ongoing nuclear talks in Vienna. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was heard in audio confirmed by The New York Times as authentic saying that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) overrules many government decisions, strongly suggesting it’s the military that’s actually fully in control of the country. While this may be to some degree stating the obvious, it’s hugely unexpected for Iran’s top civilian diplomat to actually candidly admit as much. One state media newspaper has already emphasized it’s a major “scandal” for the country.

    Zarif is typically very guarded, but in the tapes that surfaced Sunday (it’s unclear at this point the origin of the leak) he’s heard discussing slain Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani and how the elite commander undermined him in a variety of ways, noting he often went against Iran’s interests. The audio interview took place over two months ago, reports say, and was intended as a classified “oral history” project covering President Rouhani’s two terms in office from Zarif’s perspective.

    “In the Islamic Republic the military field rules,” Zarif is heard telling a pro-government journalist.”I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.” He goes so far as to say that Soleimani would often task himself as Iran’s top diplomat with “requirements”.

  • “John Kerry, Enemy of Israel“:

    We know now that former secretary of state John Kerry isn’t merely a critic of Israel; he is an adversary. In leaked audiotapes obtained by the U.K.-based Iran International, as reported by the New York Times, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a supporter that the former secretary of state had informed him about “at least” 200 covert Israeli actions against Iranian interests in Syria. Zarif listened to this information in “astonishment.”

    Snip.

    A high-ranking American official feels comfortable sharing this information with an autocratic adversary — a government that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, regularly kidnapped them, interfered with our elections, and propped up a regime that gasses its people — about the covert actions of a long-time American ally. What else did he tell Zarif? The Times doesn’t say.

    It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel was more reluctant to share intel with the United States when Democrats such as Kerry show more fondness for those making genocidal threats against the Jewish people than they do for the state that protects them. It’s worth remembering that others like Senator Chris Murphy (who is now “requesting a classified briefing” on the Natanz incident, in which Israel likely sabotaged a nuclear facility) also secretly met with Zarif in Munich in a coordinated effort to undercut the Trump administration’s efforts to derail Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program — an incident that comports far more closely with the definition of “collusion” than anything turned up against Trump officials. We have no idea what Murphy discussed with Zarif, either.

    We do know that after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani — head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and the terror group behind the death of over 600 American servicemen and thousands of others — Kerry and Murphy were among the many people scaremongering over a “massive regional war” that never materialized. In his leaked conversation, Zarif says of Soleimani that “by assassinating him in Iraq, the United States delivered a major blow to Iran, more damaging than if it had wiped out an entire city in an attack.”

  • Illinois judge finds state firearms ID law unconstitutional:

    “A citizen in the State of Illinois is not born with a Second Amendment right. Nor does that right insure when a citizen turns 18 or 21 years of age. It is a façade. They only gain that right if they pay a $10 fee, complete the proper application, and submit a photograph.

    If the right to bear arms and self-defense are truly core rights, there should be no burden on the citizenry to enjoy those rights, especially within the confines and privacy of their own homes. A citizen’s Second Amendment rights should not be treated in the same manner as a driver’s license.”

  • “One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is ‘Murderapolis‘ Again.”

    It simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.

    “We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)

    The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree…)

    “There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.

  • Texas school district with no racial achievement gap inexplicably institutes white-shaming critical race theory classes. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • “Texas Senate Approves Ban on Puberty Blockers, Sex-Change Surgeries for Minors.”
  • “Chinese Smart TV-Maker Accused of Spying on Owners’ Other Devices. “Smart TVs made by Skyworth were found to have an app — Gozen Data — installed on the Android-based operating system of the TV, according to a post on the V2EX website titled ‘My TV is monitoring all connected devices.’ According to the post, Gozen Data scanned for and collected the names of his computer, his network interface card, IP addresses, and the usernames of those connected to his and other local wifi networks.” Chinese electronic devices spying? Try to contain your shock…
  • “Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.” Fire everyone.
  • Dan Crenshaw update:

  • People you’re not allowed to make fun of part 1: cop suspended for daring to make fun of LeBron James.

    But: Just pulled in $100,000 from GoFundMe.

  • People you’re not allowed to make fun of part 2: University of San Diego law professor Tom Smith may be fired for daring to make fun of the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Eric S. Raymond thinks that since Microsoft makes most of its money off its Azure cloud services these days, and most of their cloud stuff is already on Linux, that their desktop future is actually running Windows on top of Linux via an emulation layer. Maybe. But if the history of tech teaches us anything, there will probably be some new, unforeseen technology that massively disrupts the entire market. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Still a lot of pollen this time of year…

  • Researchers remove offerings left in “Satanic” Icelanidc cave intended to help ward off the apocalypse. The rest of the script pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it? (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec.)
  • Merica:

  • “Dems: ‘If America Isn’t Racist, How Do You Explain These White Hoods We’re Wearing?'”
    

  • What sort of grade do you get if you don’t even show up for school for two years? In Baltimore, a D-. “Nearly half of students in one Baltimore high school have 0.99 GPA or lower.” (Hat tip: Nick Short.)
  • What happens when a hot round blows up your singles-shot .50 BMG in your face. Short summary: Holy crap! For values of “Holy crap!” that includes a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, Lifeflight, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood. This is probably a good excuse to throw up another link to Dwight’s overview of his “stop the bleed” course.
  • I was thinking of bidding on this, but I fear the shipping from Europe would be prohibitive.
  • “College is a $120,000 hooker, and you are an idiot who fell in love with her!”
  • “Biden Official Confirms Plans to Ban Fried Chicken and Grape Drink.”

    The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to institute more measures to safeguard black lives by banning products they like. After it was announced that the Biden administration would prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes, officials are looking at other ways the government can save the black community from itself.

    Only days after the menthol ban was announced, the FDA declared that it was pushing full steam ahead with its effort to rescue the black community through what they refer to as “strategic race-based prohibition.” An FDA official explained that the fried fowl and grape-flavored cola – also known as “grape drank” – must be banned because “these hopeless negroes don’t know how to act.”

    “Preventing black people from killing themselves by banning certain products is the least we can do given the level of oppression they have endured in this country,” said a high-ranking member of the Biden administration. “This is why fried chicken and grape soda have to go.”

    He added: “How could they possibly survive if we don’t make these decisions for them?”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • There’s something weirdly fascinating about this video of England from 1901:

  • I bought some original art based on a timeless theme. And that theme is “Godzilla.”
  • It’s Friday!

  • LinkSwarm for March 26, 2021

    Friday, March 26th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Slow Joe slows the economy and holds a press conference, global trade founders on a single choke-point, and Democrats behave badly (a LinkSwarm evergreen). Plus a load of Archer memes.

  • “Slow” evidently applies not only to Slow Joe Biden’s mental speed, but also to the effect he’s having on the economy. “Americans’ Income Collapsed By Most On Record In February,” falling 7.1%.

  • Slow Joe finally held a press conference. It didn’t go well. “President Joe Biden struggled through his first official press conference on Thursday, pausing frequently to check his notes on the podium and occasionally losing his train of thought as if distracted by the voices echoing madly in his geriatric brain.”
  • Tucker Carlson also reviewed Biden’s “slow and painful” performance:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Only five months too late, Georgia finally passes bill to fight election fraud.
  • Lockdowns kill:

    Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.

    The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.

    Some of those deaths could be undetected Covid-19 cases, and some could be unrelated to the pandemic or the lockdowns. But preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks due to failure to receive prompt treatment. Many fewer people were screened for cancer. Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.

    Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. The number of people killed last year in motor-vehicle accidents in the United States rose to the highest level in more than a decade, even though Americans did significantly less driving than in 2019. It was the steepest annual increase in the fatality rate per mile traveled in nearly a century, apparently due to more substance abuse and more high-speed driving on empty roads.

    The number of excess deaths not involving Covid-19 has been especially high in U.S. counties with more low-income households and minority residents, who were disproportionately affected by lockdowns. Nearly 40 percent of workers in low-income households lost their jobs during the spring, triple the rate in high-income households. Minority-owned small businesses suffered more, too. During the spring, when it was estimated that 22 percent of all small businesses closed, 32 percent of Hispanic owners and 41 percent of black owners shut down. Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”

    The deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year, according to a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke, who analyzed the effects of past recessions on mortality. Other researchers, noting how educational levels affect income and life expectancy, have projected that the “learning loss” from school closures will ultimately cost this generation of students more years of life than have been lost by all the victims of the coronavirus.

    After the pandemic began in March, the number of excess deaths in the United States rose for all American adults. During the summer, as the pandemic eased, the rate of excess mortality declined among older Americans but remained unusually high among young adults. When statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control totaled the excess deaths for age groups through the end of September, they reported that the sharpest change—an increase of 26.5 percent—occurred among Americans aged 25 to 44.

    That trend persisted through fall, and most of the excess deaths among younger people were not linked to the coronavirus, as researchers from the University of Illinois found by analyzing excess deaths from March through the end of November. Among Americans aged 15 to 54, there were roughly 56,000 excess deaths, of which about 22,000 involved Covid-19, leaving 34,000 from other causes. The Canadian government also reported especially high mortality among Canadians under 45: nearly 1,700 excess deaths from May through November, with only 50 of those deaths attributed to Covid-19.

  • The Suez Canal is completely blocked due to a giant container ship having run aground. “Each day the canal is blocked, it halts about $9.6 billion of traffic through the world’s most important shipping lane.”
  • Kurt Schlichter on Noem’s tranny pander:

    Noem has – perhaps had – a future as a conservative conservative, and her utterly insane unforced error last week has hugely damaged her prospects. There are lessons here, people.

    What did she do? She vetoed a bill defending women athletes from the insanity of letting men dominate them, a “style and form” veto, and then offered the most weaksauce weasel word explanation imaginable. Here tweet thread trying to explain it was lame; her appearance on Tucker was condescending gibberish. Watching it, woke cons started out disappointed with her and ended up infuriated at her. Here’s the irony – Kristi Noem stepped on her Ted Lieu in the context for a transexual policy issue.

    It was really quite remarkable how amateurish and totally unnecessary it all was, but we’ve been seeing a lot of this lately. Recently, Greg Abbot decided to label all of Gab’s users “anti-Semites” because…well, who knows? It’s one of those things that you do that ticks off the base while the liberals continue to hate you. Good plan.

    On the plus side, it lets us disqualify the weakhearts now.

    It’s unclear who told Noem this was a great idea, but that person ought to be exiled to one of those other Dakotas. It’s 2021 and there are Republican consultants who still think the base is dumb. SMDH. The base is not dumb. The base is based. And we’re not going to be fooled with painful tweet threads and interviews about how 2 + 2 = 5 and how we need to not fight because it might make our enemies angry with us or – horrors! – cost us something to make a stand. Noem decided that instead of holding strong on an issue that conservatives care about, she would not merely rollover to the tech/Chamber of Commerce lib axis but also attempt to talk us into thinking this was just a routine administrative decision and that she is totally behind us 100 percent.

    Except she isn’t.

    We’re not stupid. Is she? Because if she thinks that conservatives, the cheated-on spouses of American politics, are not hyper-vigilant to any sign of betrayal then she’s too dumb to be our prezzy. We’ve been shafted too many times, and she is hallucinating if she thinks anyone will get a pass – including her. One of the most basic things we expect GOP politicians to do is protect our girls from getting clobbered by boys pretending to be girls. This is not one of those fringe issues where we’re, “Yeah, okay, sometimes you gotta compromise.” This is foundational.

  • Bristol is Britain’s Portland:

    Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police. They also came armed with explosive mortar fireworks, a favorite projectile weapon among antifa to disorientate, deafen, blind and injure cops.

    Though the protest-turned-riot was ostensibly organized to oppose the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would allow police to impose more conditions on protests and increase penalties for those convicted of vandalizing statues, among other things, the demonstration had all the hallmarks of a far-left gathering.

    The ‘Kill the Bill’ protest was promoted by the Bristol chapters of a Black Lives Matter-style group, Extinction Rebellion and Momentum, the hard-left wing within the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, British antifa groups also encouraged their comrades to support the violence.

    ‘Be careful about sharing footage with people’s faces who aren’t wearing masks,’ warned one antifa group. ‘Solidarity with all the comrades out there in Bristol fighting the bill and facing hard repression,’ tweeted Brighton Antifascists. ‘Spread the fire,’ they urged. And the fire spread.

    Hundreds of protesters had gathered earlier in the city center carrying hammer and sickle flags, symbols of anarchist-communism, and signs against racism and fascism. The most frequent message spray-painted on vehicles and buildings at the riot? Antifa’s adopted slogan of ‘ACAB’ — all cops are bastards.

    I recently visited Bristol. I noticed immediately that the leftist student politics of the University of Bristol and other colleges seemed to define the city’s wider political culture. That is, Bristol is a left-wing political monoculture, much like Portland.

  • Speaking of which: “The Dream of the ’90s Died in Portland“:

    Around the turn of the century, Portland was the new belle on the block, not despoiled like San Francisco or in bed with high tech like Seattle. Oregon was not known nationally for much more than Nike and pinot noir and former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, but maybe (with the exception of Packwood) that was OK. Maybe the city could debut as a fresh canvas, eco-friendly and affordable, a place to achieve your achievable dreams.

    A lot of people were willing to take the chance, including my family. We moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2004, and for a while, everything seemed on the up. The city in 2009 was, according to The Wall Street Journal, attracting “college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country.” New residents built the city they wanted to live in: farm-to-table restaurants and 40 million brewpubs and too many bike paths and aggressively progressive politics. When then–Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swung through on the campaign trail in 2008, more than 75,000 people lined Portland’s waterfront to see him.

    Portland had entered the national stage. Was it a little bit goofy, a little bit twee? Sure, but also energetic in the way a young city can be, with people cutting what seemed to be genuinely new paths. Would the dudes slinging Korean barbecue out of an old R.V. take it brick-and-mortar? Who knew? Who cared? The dynamism of what-could-be hung in the very air.

    Snip.

    Portland’s leadership seemed likewise unserious. Democratic Mayor Sam Adams had to fly home from Obama’s first inauguration to face charges of having had a sexual liaison with an underage legislative intern with the readymade name of Beau Breedlove, and in 2019 he was accused by his former executive assistant of sexual harassment. In 2015, Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber resigned amid allegations of influence peddling by his fiancé.

    “It’s not a well-governed city. It’s not a well-governed state. Portland has basically had three failed mayors in a row,” says T.B., who previously held a high-ranking position in state government and who asked not to be identified by name. “Tom Potter was a former police chief who became mayor. He was totally hapless. Sam Adams was hyperkinetic, one thing after another and scandalous and so totally ineffective. And then Charlie Hales—I don’t know exactly what happened to him, but he also served one term; they all did. And now you have Ted [Wheeler], who I think has had three police chiefs since taking office. There’s certainly political instability at the municipal level, to say the least.”

    Out of instability, good things nevertheless grew—including Portlandia. The comedy series debuted in 2010 and served up the city at its most parodic, with real-life Mayor Sam Adams playing a bumbling mayoral assistant and restaurant diners demanding the life story of the chicken they were about to eat.

    The show riffed on slacktivism and five-hour yoga classes and men whose only “safe space” was Reddit. It was often genuinely funny. Who didn’t like to laugh at themselves?

    Snip.

    Young people had come here to achieve those achievable dreams. What was taking so long? Why did they have to live three, four people to a house, when just a few years ago rent was affordable? When my husband told baristas at the cafés he owned that, no, he couldn’t raise the starting wage to $12 an hour—this was in 2014—seeing as they also received tips and health insurance, the response was a general chilling, an “us against them” ethos that seemed to seep into the city. Activists became more vocal, denouncing businesses they saw as anti-LGBTQ. The city’s most active queer center was called out in 2015 for being too “white-centric.” And in 2016, students at Reed College formed RAR (Reedies Against Racism) and staged a protest against the 1978 Saturday Night Live skit “King Tut,” claiming Steve Martin’s portrayal of the Egyptian pharaoh was racist. “The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface,” a student told the student newspaper.

    The anger seemed free-floating; it was gathering momentum, was becoming an identity in itself.

    When Donald Trump won the presidency, Portlanders’ anger catalyzed into a manic animus that took the form of compulsive marching and letter writing and CNN watching and the schadenfreude-tinged hope that Mike Flynn/Stormy Daniels/the Russia scandal would sweep the president out of office any day now. In this way, Portland was not different from other heavily Democratic U.S. cities.

    Snip.

    But there was a problem: Trump was both far away and a master of eliding responsibility. Without the satisfaction of seeing their enemy downed, people grew antsy. Someone needed to take the blame for stagnant wages, and rising rents, and what some saw as the misallocation of social and emotional resources. And so, in a preview of the protests that would come to roil Portland following the death of George Floyd, those who considered themselves more finely calibrated toward injustice than the rest of us took matters into their own hands.

    “You probably remember there was massive rioting in the Pearl District the day after Donald Trump was elected. Millions of dollars of damage were inflicted,” says journalist Michael Totten. “How many people in the Pearl District voted for Donald Trump? It’s probably not even 1 percent. Who on earth are these people who declare war on a place where nobody voted for Donald Trump? That’s not how people in a democratic society are supposed to behave. You don’t go trash neighborhoods with the opposing political party in a healthy democracy, but they didn’t even do that. They declared war on the city as a whole.”

    If there was zeal in using one’s power thus, crude as it was, there was also a mandate: If good citizens needed to fight racism, why not start at home? The food world, which arguably more than any industry had put Portland on the cultural map, was the first target. Andy Ricker, whose restaurant Pok Pok was the only place the late Pulitzer Prize–winning food writer Jonathan Gold wanted me to take him when he visited Portland in the early 2010s, was called out for making Thai food while not being Thai. Two young women closed their burrito cart within days of opening it after they received multiple death threats for making homemade tortillas despite not being Latinas. The local press, which had once lauded such people and places, now published lists of business owners “wantonly cooking the food of other countries, arguably at the expense of people from those very cultures.”

    So much for ALL being welcome. People instead seemed to be asking: Are you with us or against us?

    Then details of the riots and assaults. If anything, author Nancy Rommelmann is far too even-handed with antifa’s crimes, and fails to note that their antics preceded Donald Trump’s election by quite a while.

  • Another week, another investigation of Baltimore Democratic politicians. “Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, subpoenaing her campaign and the couple’s business records.” You may remember Marilyn Mosby from such hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law.” The family that grifts together… (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Displacement. “Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry”:

    Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.

    Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

    Things are bad, folks:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “Secret Service Investigated Bizarre Gun Incident Involving Hunter Biden in 2018.”

    The U.S. Secret Service reportedly got involved in a bizarre incident back in 2018 involving Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, and Hallie Biden, who was married to the late Beau Biden.

    According to the report, on October 23, 2018, Hallie Biden, who became romantically involved with Hunter sometime after Beau’s death, found Hunter’s .38 revolver in his pickup truck, which was parked at her house, then took the gun to a nearby grocery store and threw it away in a trash can behind the building. Upon returning to retrieve the gun from the trash, the Bidens discovered it was no longer there, reports Politico.

    Delaware police investigated, concerned that the grocery store’s proximity to the local high school might mean the missing gun could be used in a crime. But then, Politico notes, a “curious thing happened.”

    Two sources, one with direct knowledge of the incident, say Secret Service agents allegedly approached Ron Palmieri, the owner of the gun store where Hunter bought the firearm, in order to retrieve the paperwork involving the sale.

    The owner of the store refused, suspecting the Secret Service officers intended to get rid of any evidence of Hunter’s ownership of the gun in the event the gun would be involved in a crime.

    Honestly, it’s probably not even the tenth weirdest and/or most corrupt thing Hunter Biden has been involved in… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, Democratic Party operative and coronavirus expert impersonator.
  • “GOP senators blast filibuster racism charge, ask why Dems used it to block Tim Scott’s police reform bill.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Someone is trying to torpedo the historic Abraham Peace Accords between Israel and various Arab states. Namely the Biden Administration:

    Media reports on March 18 revealed that the United Arab Emirates has suspended its plans for an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi with Israel, the United States, and other Arab signatories to the historic peace agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration. Supposedly, the Emiratis are angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed as a “prop in his election campaign.”

    In fact, as the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.

    Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?

    Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.

    No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.

    But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.

    But isn’t peace in the Middle East the collective dream of the Beltway policy establishment, left and right? Trump, love or hate him, got Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan as well as the UAE to normalize relations with Israel, the first peace agreements with the Jewish state since Jordan signed in 1994—and Biden said he wanted to build on the Abraham Accords. But as it turns out, “peace” has a very particular meaning for American policymakers. For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.

    Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords. To bind Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the Trump White House had to bracket the issue that previously kept these traditional American allies apart—the Palestinians. That alone earned Trump the wrath of Washington’s wise men.

  • Speaking of Israel, they had yet another inconclusive election, the fourth since 2019.
  • “Yale Psychiatrist Who Declared Trump Mentally Unfit Has Been Fired, and She’s Suing.” Funny how that happened when Bandy Lee broke the Goldwater Rule. I would break out an appropriately tiny violin, but I’m afraid my atomic force microscope is being recalibrated…
  • Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-Round Rock) wants to force every school system to hire social justice warrior “diversity, equity, and inclusion officers.”
  • Down at the state level, some black Democratic office holders oppose the radical transsexual agenda as well:

    South Carolina State Rep. Cezar McKnight (D) has represented his district for six years. It’s heavily Democratic, and two-thirds African American — two demographics that people don’t typically associate with social conservative causes. But the threat of transgenderism to our kids isn’t just a conservative concern, McKnight insists. “Black Democrats tend to be more conservative than white progressives,” McKnight told an AP reporter. They’re very much on board with the idea that children should not be pressed to permanently mutilate their bodies over gender confusion that is almost always temporary.

    That’s why McKnight felt comfortable introducing a bill that would ban minors from pursuing transgender treatments or transitioning until they’re old enough to vote. “I would not have ever put this bill forward if I didn’t think the people in my district wouldn’t be receptive, and they are. Pastors, young parents, older parents, they all tell me the same thing: if you want to do this, wait until you’re 18.” A member of the Legislative Black Caucus, he says he’s received “an outpouring of support from his constituents, “who have told him that, while they don’t necessarily oppose this type of procedure on its face, they think that it’s one that should only be made when a person has reached adulthood.”

  • Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo’s book on how he bravely spread the Wuhan coronavirus in New York nursing homes has reportedly garnered a seven figure advance from the Crown Publishing Group. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Target: Since you keep burning and looting our stores, I guess Minneapolis doesn’t really need a Target.
  • 55 people explain their woke breaking point.
  • I previously missed Benjamin Chen’s New York City hit and run rampage in a $700,000 Gemballa Mirage GT supercar:

    Open and shut case? Well, evidently not for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. They just dropped all charges against Chen. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Warner Brothers to abandon HBO Max experiment, and will stick to theatrical release for major films starting in 2022.
  • Spanish porn star charged with murder in photographer’s toad-venom death.” The sort of headline that makes a New York Post headline writer say “God, I love my work!” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Heh:

  • Jessica Walter, RIP. She was one of the all-time best crazy female stalkers in Play Misty for Me and was legendary as Mallory Archer:

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • “Media Now Claims Shooter Was Factually Arab, But Morally White.”
    

  • I Cooked a Chicken by Slapping It.”
  • Feel-good dog story:

    (Hat tip: PolitiBunny.)

  • Old song, new video:

  • LinkSwarm for March 5, 2021

    Friday, March 5th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! More Democrats behaving badly, and Orange Man Bad simply refuses to abandon the spotlight…

  • Americans are in favor of confronting China over heinous human rights abuses, even if it means risking economic ties.
  • Trump Eviscerates Biden’s Record in Blistering CPAC Speech.” Shotgun, meet barrel of pike. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Despite having the entire American political establishment against him, Trump’s agenda is more popular than ever. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • The Biden Administration is already a disaster:

    What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office? Well, there’s putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him. There’s telling the American people that their kids can’t go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something. There’s another war in the Middle East. Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.

    His administration had someone named “Ducklo” who was mean to women. He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women. And Neera Tanden’s confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.

    If this is normalcy, what’s a freak show look like?

    Are you * voters starting to feel a bit of buyer’s remorse? Let me ask it another way. Everybody enjoying your $2,000 check? Oh well. On the upside, they impeached Trump…and failed. Again, after sucking up two weeks of the Senate’s calendar. So, what do you have to show for yourself, * voters?

    Failure.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • The Democrats’ pork laden “relief” bill includes massive health care subsidies for the rich:

    The massive coronavirus relief bill racing through Congress provides substantial new health-insurance subsidies to upper-income households. A 60-year-old couple with two kids making $200,000 would receive a subsidy of $12,000. In some parts of the country where premiums are high, families with incomes exceeding half a million dollars will qualify for thousands of dollars in subsidies to buy an ObamaCare plan. In contrast, a family of four making $40,000 receives an added benefit of just $1,600.

  • It also includes 25 weeks of paid leave for bureaucrats with children in closed schools. Meanwhile, parents with closed schools held hostage to teacher’s union who aren’t bureaucrats can drop dead.
  • The fall of Michael Madigan, America’s last machine boss:

    Newly minted as a committeeman, Madigan was sent to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a delegate representing Daley’s interests. He voted for the most constricting “pension protection” clause in the nation, which guaranteed government-employee unions benefits the government couldn’t afford in exchange for their backing of the Democratic machine, tying the state to an anchor of massive debt in perpetuity. He also voted for changes in the property-tax system that would later make him a millionaire through his law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, which specialized in appealing the tax assessments of the most valuable real estate in the Midwest and skimming off the reductions granted by political allies who heard the firm’s appeals.

    Later that year, Madigan was elected state representative for the 22nd House District of Illinois. He would go on to be reelected 25 times, eventually being elevated to House speaker after he was made gerrymanderer-in-chief following the 1980 Census. The redistricting process had been expected to hurt Democrats badly, but Madigan’s cartographical cunning staved off a political bloodbath and earned him the title of “political wizard” from the Chicago Tribune. Many representatives now owed their seats to his pen, and they elected him speaker in 1983.

    For all but two of the next 38 years, he would hold the speaker’s gavel, wielding parliamentary rules that gave him more power than any other legislative leader in the country. His one-man rule was finally merged with the party power structure in 1998, when he became chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois. This made him a one-stop shop for special interests looking to pass or kill legislation. Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility provider, last year was forced to pay a $200 million fine for attempting to bribe Madigan by providing no-work contracts and other perks to the speaker’s inner circle. Though he denied wrongdoing, the scandal ultimately hastened his downfall.

    The wreckage of Madigan’s decades-long reign is obvious. When he became speaker in 1983, Illinois had a perfect credit rating. Since 2013, it’s had the worst credit rating in the nation, just one notch above junk. The reason is that while Daley built his political army with federal money, Madigan built his with state money, specifically state debt. Political foot soldiers owed generous pensions, early retirements, and other perks to the speaker’s protection. His fingerprints are on nearly every bill that enhanced state pension benefits, borrowed money to cover their costs, or shorted contributions to the systems to avoid difficult choices over the course of his 50 years in power.

    The result of all those unsustainable promises is the most severe public-pension crisis in U.S. history, one with far-reaching implications for Illinois government. Since 2000, the state has cut spending on child welfare and other programs that help those in need by one-third after adjusting for inflation. Over the same time, spending on pensions and pension debt has increased 501 percent. The same story plays out at the local level, as Illinoisans are saddled with property-tax bills on par with their mortgages — bills that sap home equity out of once-prosperous Black communities, particularly — in exchange for sub-par services that get worse each year.

  • “Liberal elites are driving minority voters from Democratic Party“:

    If you haven’t read New York magazine’s interview with David Schor, an Obama campaign veteran and liberal data analyst, it’s worth your time.

    His post-mortem of the 2020 election shows how Democrats have increasingly become a party of college-educated whites, whose hard-left views aren’t fully shared by the black and Hispanic communities they claim to champion. His findings echo the concerns of older progressive analysts such as John Judis.

    Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, Schor finds, Democrats gained 7 percent among white college grads, but lost 2 percent of African Americans and 8 to 9 percent of Latinos, as well as about 5 percent of Asian Americans.

    Socialism and “defund the police” were the chief reasons, Schor says: “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”

    Even on immigration, “If you look at, for example, decriminalizing border crossings, that’s not something that a majority of Hispanic voters support,” Schor says.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Far-left Social Justice Warrior and Hillary Clinton toady Neera Tanden withdrew her nomination to become director of the Office of Management and Budget when it became apparent she didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.
  • Speaking of Biden nominations in trouble, Xavier “I Hate Nuns” Becerra’s nomination is no slam dunk either.
  • When I saw a headline on a deadly crash involving an SUV carrying 25 people, I went “Obviously it must have been full of illegal aliens.” Well, guess what?
  • Just as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lifted coronavirus restrictions month before Texas, so too he’s way ahead of Texas Governor Greg Abbott in proposing concrete election integrity laws.
  • Andrew Cuomo abused his power as Governor to sexually harass me, just as he had done with so many other women.” What, you’re saying it’s not perfectly normal for a governor to ask female aids to play strip poker?
  • Why is the media finally getting around to metooing Andrew Cuomo? To protect other Democratic governors from their disasterous coronavirus policies:

    In a just world not plagued by a fake and corrupt media, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) would be on the edge of resigning his office today, not over a handful of times he allegedly got aggressive with women, but over his sociopathic executive order that required nursing homes to accept patients still infected with the coronavirus.

    That, after all, is the real scandal here, the true scandal, an act so monstrous Cuomo knew he had to cover it up, which he did by falsely blaming the order on the Trump administration and then lying about just how many seniors died as a result.

    But instead of being pressured to resign over that, he’s being hit with perfectly-timed allegations of sexual misconduct, two involving former staffers, one involving a complete stranger he met at a wedding.

    As these things go, while his alleged behavior is inappropriate (especially in the workplace), it’s nothing compared to the credible allegations against His Fraudulency Joe Biden, which involve a full-blown sexual assault allegation. Biden got away with much, much worse, so…

    So what’s going on? Why is America’s corrupt media not at all interested in some 15,000 dead senior citizens while they tar and feather Cuomo over the allegations he made three left-wing women uncomfortable?

    The answer is obvious…

    Four other Democrat governors issued the same sociopathic nursing home order as Cuomo. Four other Democrats ordered infected coronavirus patients be admitted into nursing home facilities where 1) the most vulnerable live, and 2) they’re not set up to handle an infectious virus.

    What this means is that if the corrupt media were to do the right thing (like that will ever happen) and go after Cuomo over his deadly nursing home policy, it would open a Pandora’s Box against these four Democrat governors and the Democrat party as a whole, which is something our fake media will never do.

    Democrats must be protected at all costs, even if the cost is thousands and thousands of lives.

  • When a Cuomo marries a Kennedy.

    So welcoming was the Kennedy clan that the exes of either sex stayed on as friends. Andrew put a stop to that. For Kerry, that meant no more former boyfriends, not even those whom the Kennedys regarded as family. That was the word, and Andrew was dead serious about it. The new rule reinforced the doubts the family had had about Andrew from the start: he wasn’t fun; he didn’t get fun. He was, to put it mildly, a spoilsport. Unlike the Kennedys, too, he didn’t mask his ambition with charm, and no one, not even his in-laws, would stand in his way. And, as Andrew’s star at HUD rose, he seemed increasingly to regard those in-laws with disdain.

    He hated the gatherings in Hyannis; he always felt like the odd man out. The joshing around, the freewheeling talks—Andrew was just too tightly wound to join in. One night, as was typical, the family began singing songs, each member singing a favorite. “The Kennedys are terrible singers, but it’s one of the great joys,” explained Douglas Kennedy. “One time Joe [Jr.] is up there, and he sings ‘Danny Boy,’ and everyone is happy about it. Except Andrew. He’s on the couch with his arms folded, looking disgusted by the whole thing. Everyone is calling for someone else to sing a song. ‘Andrew, you sing,’ someone says. But he says, ‘No, I’m not Irish.’ So someone else says, ‘Sing something Italian.’ Andrew still won’t, so I sing ‘Volare.’”

    Andrew stopped going to Hyannis at one point, a family member recalled. But he made sure to be with the clan at any gathering covered by the media. Early on, the family noticed that at every visit to Arlington Cemetery to honor their father or uncle, Andrew situated himself just so. “He would always find the exact perfect place to stand so he could be in the newspaper the next day,” recalled a relative. “So if that meant grabbing [Ethel’s] hand and walking to the grave, or standing next to John or Caroline, he would get himself in the frame. That was his whole thrust.”

    His “thrust” seems to have changed a bit…

  • Pro-#BlackLivesMatter Portland city councilwoman Jo Ann Hardesty allegedly fled scene after hitting another car. Try to contain your shock. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Hellhole Portland: “Defunded Police Were Too Busy With Shootings to Stop Antifa Rioters.”
  • Ninth Circuit Vacates California Magazine Ban Decision.” Good, though there’s still a chance for an en banc hearing.
  • Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy convicted of corruption and influence-peddling, and sentenced to a year in prison.
  • Why Arab armies suck:

    [Kenneth Pollack’s Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness] identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.

    The education system in Arab societies drilled in these values to the point that they became central to soldiers’ behavior. “Typical Arab educational practices relentlessly inculcated the values, preferences, and preferred behavior—the culture—of the wider society,” Pollack writes.

    Pollack also explains that Arab military programs are modeled on the educational methods of the larger society, reinforcing certain patterns of behavior and conditioning soldiers to act and think in “ways that reflect the values and priorities of the dominant culture.”

  • You didn’t really think that Google Chrome’s incognito mode would protect you, did you?
  • Fighting woke racists at Smith College.

    I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.

    Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.

    Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.

  • “Baltimore HS Student Who Passed Only Three Courses in Four Years Ranks in Top Half of His Class.” It’s a real mystery why they have the highest VD rates in the country
  • One thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on: John Kasich is a worthless pile of nothing.
  • Sad news: Austin-based movie theater chain The Alamo Drafthouse has filed for Chapter 11. That’s reorganization, so most theaters will stay open. A good thing, too, since I’ll probably see Godzilla vs. Kong there…
  • Papa Johns founder John Schnatter vindicated. Laundry Service “the branding company hired which was hired by Papa John’s to improve its image, was caught on a ‘hot mic’ brainstorming ways in which it could use comments made by Schnatter to damage his image.”
  • In Soviet Russia, guitar shreds you! (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Sanitizer”:

  • “Estimated 9 Billion Already Dead From Texas Mask Mandate Reversal.”
  • “Texas Governor Hailed As Conservative Hero For Ending Unconstitutional Mandates He Implemented.”
  • “G.I. Joe To Be Replaced With Genderless G.I. Pat.”
  • “Can You Find All 17 Instances Of Racism On This Page From A Dr. Seuss Book?”
  • “Report: Women In Hell Still Trying To Turn Up The Thermostat.”
  • “Lunchtime!”

  • LinkSwarm for October 9, 2020

    Friday, October 9th, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Worth reading the whole thing.

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

  • OK, I laughed: