Israel has begun the process of flooding the network of tunnels beneath Gaza in an effort to flush out the impacted Hamas assets lodged there, according to U.S. officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military operation has so far involved the installation of seven massive pumps and testing the process of flooding the Hamas holes with water from the Mediterranean Sea, and now the great enema has begun in earnest.
“Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield,” explains WSJ. “The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.”
The tunnel system has been dug throughout much of Gaza and is also active at the Egyptian border, the crossing at which Hamas militants smuggle many of their weapons into Gaza. It is a critical infrastructure for the terrorists’ ability to continue to wage their bloody war against the only democracy in the region. Remove the network of tunnels from the table, and you severely cripple that ability.
Thanks to Home Alone and Irish we know that a particular cart of groceries went from $19.83 in 1990 to $77.28 today.
389.7% inflation over 33 years.
Annualized, that’s just 4.208% inflation, since the goal is 3%, that doesn’t seem so bad.
The problem is that cart of goods was $44.40 last year. That’s an annual inflation of 2.4755% from 1990 to 2022. Below the Fed’s desired rate, good for us, bad for the national debt.
That means we had 174% inflation in one fucking year.
A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.
The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West – with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO – expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.
Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.
Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.
Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.
What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.
For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.
The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.
Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.
Yes, I’ve seen the math – the metrics – but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.
At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.
“FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch…In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”
Jagged Little Pill is now 28 years old. I don’t think I’ve listened to it for the last 27.
Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) has won a resounding victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18) in a runoff election for mayor of Houston, carrying the race by 64 percentage points according to election results.
“Voters have spoken and I am humbly grateful to the people of Houston for electing me as their next mayor,” said Whitmire in a statement.
The election results largely mirrored the latest polling in the race where Whitmire maintained a lead over Jackson Lee, especially in runoff scenarios where negative perceptions of the congresswoman indicated many voters who had supported one of the other 18 candidates in the first round would likely move strongly towards Whitmire. Polls also indicated crime and public safety were among the top concerns for Houstonians — an issue on which Whitmire, as the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, held a distinct advantage over Jackson Lee.
I didn’t follow that race closely because it’s been obvious for a long time that Lee simply isn’t very bright, something even the lefty sorts at the Daily Beast noticed.
In the Democratic-leaning Houston, Republican-backed candidates have slightly increased their presence on the 16-member city council with the help of the local party, outreach efforts into minority communities, and campaign efforts from conservative organizations.
According to unofficial election results, candidates Julian Ramirez, Willie Davis, and Twila Carter all won runoff elections for At-Large Positions 1, 2, and 3, and incumbent Mary Nan Huffman handily fended off a challenge from attorney Tony Buzbee for District G. The victors will join incumbent Amy Peck, who ran unopposed for District A, and Fred Flickinger, who won the District E seat on Election Day last month.
Each of the five contested candidates have enjoyed the support of the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Republican Party of Texas, and groups like the Kingwood Tea Party.
Pundits frequently forget that not so long ago, Houston was a Republican stronghold. Ted Cruz won Harris County (albeit it narrowly) in 2012, and Greg Abbott carried it in 2014.
“Elon Musk took another shot at Disney CEO Bob Iger Thursday, after the state of New Mexico sued Meta for allegedly enabling child sexual abuse and trafficking – yet Disney and other woke advertisers, who paused advertising on X in a kneejerk reaction to claims of antisemitism – apparently have no problem when it comes to the sexual exploitation of minors.”
A black scholar Harvard President Claudine Gay plagerized is plenty pissed off.
One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall’s Christopher Rufo reports.
“I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” Swain wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”
Rufo interviewed Swain, who said that the plagiarism went far beyond a few paragraphs – and that Gay’s “whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.”
“She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did,” she told Rufo, adding “Something changed in the mid-1990s, [when] we were having a big affirmative action debate.”
Rufo asked Swain what she thought would happen to a white person under these circumstances, to which she replied “A white male would probably already be gone.”
Harvard announced that Gay would keep her job after a week of calls for her ouster, first, regarding her refusal to condemn calls for violence against Jews on campus, and then, after the plagiarism accusations broke. Despite a donor revolt spearheaded by billionaire Bill Ackman, a petition signed by 700 faculty members on Gay’s behalf won in the end.
Progressives kick Jews out of the club, San Francisco cleans up for a communist dictator (but not mere citizens), FBI busts a brothel catering to politicians…then refuses to divulge their clients, and The Marvels crashes and burns on opening weekend. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
To sustain the alliance between leftists and Islamists, something had to give. And that something was Jews.
After a while, it became a parody worthy of classic comedy skits: the Biden administration’s reflexive need to launch into a condemnation of “Islamophobia” every time the discomfiting topic of antisemitism came up — which, you may have noticed, it does quite a bit these days.
Progressives hate antisemitism. Not, unfortunately, the concept . . . the word. It holds a mirror up to their internal contradictions.
Jews have been among the most consequential, cutting-edge progressives in history. A few months back, I reviewed Democratic Justice, Brad Snyder’s biography of Felix Frankfurter, who may have been as responsible for forging the dominance of American progressivism as Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president he zealously served. Alas, Frankfurter would not be welcome today in what’s become of his movement — not least because of another project on which he collaborated with his mentor and fellow Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis: Zionism. That project is anathema to today’s progressives. It honors the old order and the uniqueness of a people reified in their ancestral homeland, one in which they dwelled for millennia — before Islam existed and, 14 centuries later, the notion of “Palestinians” was conceived.
Moreover, to highlight antisemitism is intolerably inconvenient to the collaboration of highest priority for modern progressives: Their partnership with sharia supremacists — so-called Islamists, adherents to “political Islam.”
Snip.
Ostensibly, it’s an unlikely partnership: Sharia supremacists despise many signal progressive causes — e.g., abortion, equality for women, civil rights for homosexuals, and “gender fluidity.” (How long do you figure the “activists” waving their “Queers for Palestine” placards would actually last in Gaza?) And it seems odd for progressives, infamously intolerant of religious liberty, to make common cause with unabashed theocrats who would impose on society a systematically discriminatory legal code enforced by barbaric punishments — of the terrorizing kind that, not coincidentally, the Brotherhood’s Hamas jihadists inflicted on Israeli men, women, and children on October 7.
But let’s dig deeper. The ne plus ultra for sharia supremacists and leftists is the extirpation of the established order. Yes, they have very different ideas about what should replace that order; but that’s an argument for later (at which point progressives would find themselves in the unenviable position of the appeaser after the crocodile is done devouring everyone else). For now, it is a marriage of convenience, a joint war of conquest against Western civilization.
Marriages of convenience are not big on commitment and loyalty. Hence, Jews — predominantly on the left, with legions of stalwart progressives who would as reflexively rebuke Islamophobia as any good Democrat — have become a casualty of that war.
The sharia-supremacist hatred of Jews is doctrinal. As the Hamas Charter relates, Islamic eschatology is consumed by an end-of-times war in which even trees and stones will help Muslims kill their mortal enemies, the Jews. The Islamic claim on the land “from the River to the Sea” also stems from scripture: Mohammed’s night ride from Mecca to Jerusalem and on to heaven. And Muslim scripture further holds that Islam’s prophet died upon being poisoned to death by a Jewish woman.
This is all very uncomfy for progressives. They really don’t do doctrine, let alone submit — or at least allow themselves to appear to be submitting — to religious doctrine. Thus must they engage in euphemistic games to sidestep reality.
“Democrat Media Arm Scrambles As It Becomes Clear They Knew About Hamas Invasion Of Israel Before It Happened. “Reports have been bubbling up that the various tentacles of the Democrat hacktivist media actually had pro-Hamas activists ‘journalists’ embedded with Hamas before and on October 7th.”
Democrats wouldn’t clean up San Francisco for mere citizens, but they did it for a communist dictator.
Apparently, the city of San Francisco can indeed clear out the tent cities of homeless, remove the human feces and hypodermic needles from the sidewalks, and make the downtown look sparking clean and shiny in just a matter of days. All it takes is sufficient motivation — like hosting a visit from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Even the New York Times can’t deny the irony that the arrival of Xi and a plethora of overseas leaders is spurring efforts that, presumably, could have been started and carried out at any point with enough motivation:
On Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, maintenance workers resurfaced uneven sidewalks and installed plywood over empty tree wells.
Nearby, a crew gave a long-derelict plaza a makeover by turning it into a skateboard park and outdoor cafe with ping-pong tables, chess boards and scores of potted plants. Elsewhere, workers painted decorative crosswalks and new murals, wiped away graffiti, picked up piles of trash and removed scaffolding to show off a refurbished clock tower at the Ferry Building. . . .
Perhaps the most obvious change has been seen at the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at the corner of Seventh and Mission Streets, less than a mile from the conference center.
Before we go any further, can I just point out how infuriating it is that we live in a country with so many genuinely heroic, inspiring, and under-recognized figures, and yet we name things after politicians whose greatest achievements were bringing back a lot of federal funds to their constituents? I realize in the state of West Virginia, that statement is blasphemy.
In a perfect irony, in August, “Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advised hundreds of employees in San Francisco to work remotely for the foreseeable future due to public safety concerns outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building on Seventh Street.” As Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst noticed, to protect the building named after the House speaker who said that border walls are “immoral,” federal officials put up a high chain-link fence.
In other words, the official assessment of the federal government is that the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is not a safe place for anyone, which strikes me as a heavy-handed metaphor.
Anyway, back to the Xi-driven cleanup:
For two years, a stubborn fentanyl market at the corner and a sprawling homeless encampment across the street became neighborhood fixtures. People regularly used drugs in an adjacent alley.
Most have seemingly disappeared in a poof…
It’s almost like the city government of San Francisco perceives Xi Jinping as the boss it needs to impress, instead of the voters whose exorbitant taxes (including an 8.625 percent sales tax!) pay city employees’ salaries. If the city is worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for a visit by Xi, President Biden, and a whole bunch of diplomats . . . why isn’t it worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for the full-time residents?
“Californians Set Up President Xi Dummy So Newsom Will Keep The Cities Clean All The Time.”
Thinks that make you go Hmmmm: “DOJ Protects D.C. Brothel Customers… As Congress Votes For New FBI Facility.”
Two tightly connected things happened in Washington, D.C., on November 8: a “high-end” brothel serving “elected officials” was shut down by the FBI, and the U.S. House approved a controversial $300 million new headquarters building for the weaponized agency.
In announcing the brothel’s bust, the Department of Justice explained that the sex-trafficking operation served “elected officials, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, attorneys, scientists and accountants, among others.”
The press release named the brothel operators: Han “Hana” Lee, 41, of Cambridge, MA; James Lee, 68, of Torrance, CA; and Junmyung Lee, 30, of Dedham, MA.
In lurid detail, the Department of Justice explained how the operators advertised their services—primarily young Asian women—for high-end customers. In order to utilize the prostitution services of the brothel, prospective clients allegedly completed “a form providing their full names, email address, phone number, employer and reference if they had one.”
Not mentioned in the press release were the names of the customers.
The announcement was made just ahead of a vote in the U.S. House, which would have defunded the $300 million new headquarters building proposed for the FBI. The facility, to be built in Maryland, will reportedly be larger than the Pentagon. The Pentagon has a total floor area of 6.5 million square feet and offices 23,000 military and civilian employees.
Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Stellantis offers buyouts to roughly half of U.S. salaried workers.” Stellantis consumed the corpse of Chrysler several years back.
“Taibbi: According To Pundits, ‘Ignorance’ Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers To Economic Confidence…The Guardian editorial Krugman linked to explains: Americans continue to believe the economy sucks, even though they’ve been told over and over it doesn’t! Why won’t they listen?…I can’t remember an instance of newspapers polling Americans about their feelings, then telling them their answers are not only wrong, but ignorant!
“Pro-Palestinian” protestors are anti-American protestors:
This is a weird story: “Congressman Pat Fallon (R-TX-4), who had filed to run for Texas Senate District (SD) 30, has now backed out and will instead run for re-election to his currently held congressional seat.” Being a state senator is all well and good, but who steps down from a U.S. Congressional seat to a state senate seat?
A BuzzFeed feature story from 2018 about a journalist who told a group of schoolchildren that he was gay was taken down just a day after it was announced that he had been brought up on child pornography charges.
Slade Sohmer, 44, the former editor-in-chief of the left-leaning video-driven news site The Recount, was freed on $100,000 bail on Monday after he was charged in Massachusetts court with possessing and disseminating “hundreds of child pornography images and videos.”
He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of dissemination of child pornography.
Asianometry takes a deep dive into Nvidia’s radical new computational lithography method for generating semiconductor masks. I know a whole lot of eyes just glazed over, but this stuff is important, and I don’t think any other bloggers are covering semiconductors. And speaking of eyes…
Speaking of disasterous superhero films, Critical Drinker goes over the compounding errors of the never-to-be-released Batgirl movie. Surprisingly, the film itself was reportedly not that bad, it’s just a cascading series of studio decisions made the film nonviable.
Snoop Dogg says he’s giving up weed. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
A full scale ground war may or may not be developing in Gaza, the Biden recession claims bank branches, California declares itself a “child molesters across from schools” friendly zone, and lots of criminals making very poor decisions. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
There was also a screening today for reporters of footage of the atrocities carried out by the organization so many college lefties are cheering for.
I joined about 20 other journalists in a 14th-floor Manhattan conference room to watch the horrific video, which includes footage and images from a range of sources — such as cameras that Hamas attackers wore, dash cams, traffic cameras, and the phones of terrorists, their victims, and first responders — providing evidence of the crimes that Hamas carried out in Israel this month. The footage shows gagged and bound civilians burnt to an unidentifiable crisp; the casual and summary execution of people, including children, cowering under desks in the dark as they hide from terrorists wearing headlamps; the grisly decapitation of a Thai worker already bleeding from the stomach by a terrorist using a garden hoe; and other horrors.
In Gaza, by contrast, there are no visible military facilities, while Hamas fighters can shed their fashionable black outfits and dress like civilians. This will not, however, frustrate the Israeli offensive, which still has fixed, immovable targets. These are the deep tunnels — too deep for aerial bombing — that Hamas has been excavating and lining in concrete for more than 10 years, using construction equipment and vast quantities of cement donated by different governments and international organisations “to house refugees”. As a result, Gaza’s refugee “camps” do not contain a single tent. Instead, they are home to a forest of high-rise apartments, which is undoubtedly a good thing, except for the fact that both machines and cement were also diverted for tunnelling on the largest scale.
These tunnels house relatively sophisticated rocket-assembly lines, motor-assembly works, sheet metal and explosives’ stores, and warhead-fabrication workshops. More tunnels house Hamas command posts and its ordnance stores of small arms, mortars and rockets. Even deeper tunnels house its leaders’ lodgings and headquarters. Finally, there are the exfiltration tunnels, though there is no sign that they were used in the October 7 attacks, perhaps because their exits had been detected and blocked long before.
When Israel’s forces enter Gaza, they will engage any enemies who resist them, but they will not go looking for them. Their task is to escort combat engineers to their job sites — the camouflaged places from which tunnels can be accessed. How do they know where these entry points are? While Israel’s aerostats with cameras, satellite photography and the pictures generated by radar returns cannot reveal tunnels, they have been used to monitor where cement-mixer trucks have stopped over the years. They cannot pinpoint tunnel entrances by doing so, but they can at least identify places worth exploring with low-frequency, earth-penetrating radars or simple probes.
The obvious danger here is that, even before the escorting troops and combat engineers descend underground to fight off Hamas’s guards and place their demolition charges, they will keep losing casualties to snipers and mortar bombs on their way to the sites.
To minimise the danger, however, the Israeli army can rely on the most heavily protected armoured vehicle ever developed: the Namer infantry combat vehicle. As well as having significantly more armour than any other combat vehicle anywhere in the world, it uses an active defence weapon to intercept incoming anti-tank missiles and rockets, and also has machine guns to fight off infantry attackers. In urban combat, tank crews firing machine guns from the top of their turrets are desperately vulnerable, but the Namer’s crew remains “buttoned up” inside the vehicle, relying on TV screens to see the outside world and operate their weapons remotely. In 2014, the last time Israeli troops fought in Gaza, most were riding thinly armoured M.113s, which were easily penetrated by RPG anti-tank rockets, with some 60 soldiers killed and hundreds wounded. Not this time.
After they reach the suspected tunnel sites, the Namers will line up to form a perimeter — an improvised fortress — to protect the combat engineers as they go about their task. It is very likely that there will still be skirmishing before, during and after each de-tunnelling operation, with Hamas mortar teams in action, as well as snipers hidden in ruins. Fortunately, the Israelis will have their 70-ton Namers, as well as their post-2014 street-fighting training, to protect them.
And they will need that protection, as dismantling Hamas’s tunnel network will take time: the one certainty in all this is that the planting of demolition charges cannot be done quickly without suffering many fatalities. This means there will be at least two weeks of war in the Gaza strip — and even this optimistically assumes that the entire tunnel system in the evacuated northern part can be cleared in a week, allowing the Israelis to do the same in the southern sector, after evacuating the southerners and sending home the northerners. The Government’s vow to persist until the destruction of Hamas will be tested every day.
During the first week of October alone, U.S. banks closed a whopping 54 local branches…
Major US banks are continuing to close branches across the US, leaving an increasing number of Americans without access to basic financial services.
Bank of America axed 21 branches in the first week of October, according to a bulletin published by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Friday.
Wells Fargo shuttered 15, while US Bank and Chase reported closing nine and three respectively.
In total, some 54 locations had either closed or were scheduled to close between October 1 and October 7.
That is just one week!
Of course bank branches have been closing at a frightening pace for quite some time now.
Last year, U.S. banks shut down about 2,000 more branches than they opened.
I do wonder how many of those closed-branches are in crime-happy Soros-backed-DA zones…
Scenes from the decline of law and order in California: “Dude is a sex offender with a loophole that allows him to be near a school and he can set up the ‘free fentanyl’ sign because he doesn’t actually have the drugs on him.” Social Justice Warriors seem to love pedophiles almost as much as radical Muslim terrorists…
“NewsGuard, a company which claims to rate media outlets’ level of ‘trustworthiness’ and therefore has a meaningful influence over ad revenue, has been sued along with the Biden administration by Consortium News, which also named the Pentagon’s Cyber Command for “contracting with NewsGuard to identify, report and abridge the speech of American media organizations that dissent from U.S. official positions on foreign policy.”
Sometimes you start working on a story, only to find out there are too many unknowns to fairly approach it from a blogging angle, or because you run the risk of looking like a complete jackass. Such is the case with this story of APD Chief Data Officer Jonathan Kringen being charged with domestic violence. Kringen is married to Anne Kringen, who seems to have been brought into APD to wage social justice against it in the wake of the “rimagining Austin police” lunacy. “I think it’s fundamentally important to involve the community voice into policing in all spheres, including the academy, and I’ll work to foster a culture of inclusivity that reflects the needs of a city as diverse and exciting as Austin.” “Provide insight into institutionalized racism and explores the underlying causes of inequality as well as tools to address these causes.” No one should be the victim of domestic abuse, but it appears that neither Kringen should be employed by APD.
Trump’s gag order is so extreme that even the ACLU agrees his free speech rights are being infringed.
The truth about Postcolonialism: “We started with Frantz Fanon calling for violent revolution, and ended with Gayatari Spivak trying to use postmodern philosophy to attack western ideas of knowledge…Decolonization for Fanon was replacing all the colonizers with colonized people, using violence (or threats of violence) in order to free colonized people from the shackles of western influence…Decolonization is the systematic destruction of any and all western influence anywhere and everywhere by any means necessary.”
“On Thursday, 32-year-old veteran NYPD Officer Grace Rose Baez was arrested along with 42-year-old Casar Martinez and charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and the distribution of narcotics after they allegedly tried to sell large quantities of drugs to a federal informant between Oct. 9 and 29.” Even NYPD frowns on such shenanigans as setting up your own fentanyl distribution network while on duty…
And they say retail workers aren’t ambitious these days: “California Home Depot Employee Arrested For Allegedly Embezzling $1.2 Million.” “She was basically just manipulating the books on how much she was depositing” and would walk away with spare cash. I know theft in California is bad, but I’m pretty sure Home Depot has all those sales computerized, and is going to catch on when you keep coming up short…
Robber: “Stop! Hammertime!” Gun store owner: “Nope!” BLAM!
The Biden economy continues to batter ordinary Americans, CIA’s bribing experts to protect China and the deep state, Ukraine makes Russian ships and air defense systems in Crimea go boom, UAW goes on strike, and sanctuary city chickens come home to roost. Plus a personal update at the end. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Joe Biden continues to work his special brand of magic on the economy: “Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession.”
Nominally, households earned more money in 2022 than they did in 2021. But thanks to inflation caused by Bidenomics, real household income (that is, income adjusted for inflation) not only fell, but fell by an amount not seen since the Great Recession.
According to Census Bureau numbers released Tuesday, median household income fell from $76,330 in 2021 to $74,580 in 2022, a decline of 2.3%. This is the biggest drop in real household income since 2010, when it fell 2.6%. Even at the height of the pandemic, when millions of people couldn’t work, real income only fell 2.2%.
The decline in real income was driven entirely by near-record-high inflation. According to the Census Bureau, inflation rose 7.8% between 2021 and 2022, which was the largest inflation increase since 1981.
Isn’t not being able to feed your family a small price to pay for our elites not having to deal with mean tweets? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A ‘senior-level’ CIA whistleblower has come forward to allege that the agency bribed analysts to change their opinion that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the NY Post.
The whistleblower told House committee leaders that his agency ‘ tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans,’ according to a Tuesday letter from the chairmen of two House subcommittees investigating the pandemic response and US intelligence, Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH).
The pair have requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s Covid-19 Discovery Team by Sept. 26.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” reads the letter from the House panel chairmen.
“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.
“The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” the letters continue, adding that the analysts were “experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”
Hunter Biden indicted on federal gun charges. A whole lot of observers think this is just an excuse to avoid indicting him (and his father) on bribery and corruption charges.
Washington refused to fully fund construction of a wall along the Mexican border as Congress obeyed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — whom Republicans bow to — and the galaxy of gangs, drug cartels, pedos, Chinese spies, terrorists and Methodists who back Democrats. There are some overlaps. My point is, Democrats cannot destroy the nation without help.
There seemed to be no stopping the onslaught. What to do? What to do? What to do?
Well, they were messing with Texas and as Texans say, don’t mess with Texas.
Its governor’s press office said in June, “In April 2022, Governor Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to charter buses to transport migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. The Governor added New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia as additional drop-off locations last year and most recently added Denver as a busing destination last month. Since beginning the migrant busing strategy last spring, more than 21,600 migrants have been transported to these self-declared sanctuary cities while providing much-needed relief to Texas’ overwhelmed border communities.”
Battles are usually fought with horses, tanks or aeroplanes. Greg Abbott used buses. As of June, he shipped 500 busloads of illegal aliens to sanctuary cities. The shipments continue.
Virginia Democratic statehouse candidate Susanna Gibson is complaining that there are videos of her having sex with her husband online. Gee, how did they get online? “Gibson had an account on Chaturbate, a legal website where viewers can watch live webcam performances that feature nudity and sexual activity…The videos show Gibson and her husband, John David Gibson, having sex and at times looking into the camera and asking viewers for donations in the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘tips’ to watch a private show.” It did not take Columbo to crack this case. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Democrat Party has a latent disaster on its hand vis a vis one RFK Jr.
On the one hand, they are fully dedicated to sabotaging his campaign. Under no circumstances whatsoever will he be permitted to win the nomination.
Even if he had 80%+ support from the electorate, the sick truth is that party leadership (influenced by the consultant and donor classes) would rather lose with Brandon than win with RFK Jr. because of what he’s liable to do to the Deep State and D.C. largesse were he ever to assume office. It would be a proverbial bloodbath for the administrative state and all of the grifters who feed on it.
On the other hand, they need to keep RFK Jr. within the Democrat Party fold because if he were to go rogue and run third party — which he, frankly, should have been doing all along — it would be a veritable death knell for the Brandon entity’s prospects in 2024, which are wafer-thin as it is.
Whatever perceived threat Cornel West poses to Brandon’s re-election with his Green Party run, magnify that threat by 10x, 100x and you’re in the ballpark of what RFK Jr. would do to the party. It’s not outlandish to speculate that a strong third-party run by RFK Jr. might literally break the Democrat Party for years or possibly forever. That’s how sick of the party’s BS its own members, not to mention independents and non-voters (the largest, unserviced voting bloc in the country), are.
RFK Jr. has already proven himself nearly bulletproof from relentless Democrat Party and corporate state media attacks — arguably on the same level in this regard as “Teflon” Don.
There’s a petition to have the Hays County district attorney removed from office.
The person who filed it? The Hays County district clerk.
The petition was filed by Hays County District Clerk Avrey Anderson on Tuesday, Sept. 12. I
It alleged that Hays County DA Kelly Higgins implemented and executed a policy or policies that refused to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense under state law.
The petition said DA Higgins has made public declarations that he would not prosecute the following:
simple drug possession offenses
simple cannabis possession offenses
procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case that they are treating transgenders
procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case they are performing abortions
According to the court documents filed, there’s been an excessive amount of felony possession of cannabis, methamphetamine and cocaine cases being declined for “random and nonspecific reasons.”
I know one of the first questions in your mind: Is Higgins a Soros-backed DA? Answer cloudy. She got $2,000 from Chip Shields in Portland, OR. Shields founded Better People, a pro ex-con thing, but I can’t find a direct Soros link to Higgins. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Things that make you go Hmmmm: “A representative of the Harris County attorney’s office told a district court judge that the county would use all legal means to prevent the deposition of the deputy director of election technology Jason Bruce.”
National Review looks back at Simon and Garfunkel. Don’t agree with everything here, but they did make some great music Back In The Day…
“14-year-old son died after attempting the ‘One Chip Challenge.’ You don’t want to jump into that sort of thing without building up your resistance first. Me, I’m pretty sure I could do it, especially if I could find a way to make money off it. Maybe I could get 100,00 people to pledge a buck for every one I eat, and then then see how many I can eat on a live-stream…
Ever wanted to hear The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz do an album of REM covers? Yeah, me neither, but here’s “Shiny Happy People.”
Also, my most recent job just ended. So here’s the tip jar, if you’re so inclined:
I don’t usual rattle the jar, because I make good money when employed, and I’m hardly destitute, but every bit helps. If you know of any remote Senior Technical Writer positions, let me know.
I haven’t been covering the Ken Paxton impeachment because I don’t think I have anything novel to say about it that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. Enjoy the Friday LinkSwarm!
U.S. credit card debt tops $1 trillion. Thanks, Joe Biden.
Truth about our current economic situation:
We went into a recession after two back to back quarters of -1.5 over a year ago. When this happened, the establishment changed the parameters that define recession. We’ve remained at a net loss with job creation and “Bidenomics”. This isn’t recovery and everyone knows it. https://t.co/RXltpBNxhp
The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes. Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.
There was a clip, there was always a clip. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing.
Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood. The audience would titter in excited anticipation.
It was a delight to watch.
Snip.
What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.
As essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. Then you moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm.
TV news was even shakier, as networks often recorded over old tapes. Some of this footage only exists today because of the obsessive efforts of one Philadelphia woman who recorded news broadcasts on 140,000 VHS tapes over forty years.
And so, if you were a pundit or a commentator or a “spin doctor” PR flak, you could say whatever suited your needs at the moment, or even lie with impunity — as long as your lie did not become its own pseudo-event. Your lasting impact was whatever stuck in viewers’ heads and hearts. And if you changed your tune in the months or years afterwards, who would remember?
The Daily Show would remember.
The explosion of live broadcast and cable news had created a new, completely under-valued resource for whoever thought to harness it: catalog clips. Soon, new digital technology could preserve content in amber, allowing for its retrieval, repurposing, or referencing at any time.
It’s a long essay, and I don’t necessarily agree with all the writer’s points, but it’s worth reading.
There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.
There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”6
One can see how Sweden’s path diverged from that of its peers by consulting the latest Human Freedom Index, which has data through 2020. During this first year of the pandemic, Sweden’s freedom rating only fell by 0.19 on a 10‐point scale, compared to 0.49 in Britain and 0.52 in the United States. The only rich country that saw a smaller decline in freedom than Sweden was Singapore, at 0.16.7
Snip.
Analysts from other countries—and even some Swedish scholars—predicted disaster. One influential Swedish model, inspired by the famous British Imperial College study, predicted that Sweden would have 20,000 COVID-19 patients needing intensive care by early May 2020 and a need for intensive care units around 40 times over capacity. By July 1, Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Imperial College model predicted between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths without mitigation efforts, and a peak demand of intensive care unit patients 70 times higher than capacity.
Snip.
When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.
“Poland Aims To Create Largest Army In Europe Within Two Years.” Golly, who would need a large army with such historically peaceful neighbors as Germany and Russia?
e Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) declared a statewide lockdown of all its correctional facilities on Wednesday morning, citing increased contraband-related incidents and drug-related inmate homicides.
TDCJ said most inmate-on-inmate homicides “are tied back to illegal drugs … and over the last five years, the volume of illegal narcotics entering the system has substantially increased.”
In response to the drug and murder epidemic in Texas jails, TDCJ is implementing the following strategies to restore order:
Systemwide Lockdown: Each facility will limit the movement of inmates and their contact with those outside the prison. Inmates and staff will undergo intensified searches to intercept and confiscate contraband.
Digital Mail: TDCJ is completing the rollout of the digital mail program. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in paper soaked in K2 or methamphetamines coming into our facilities. The digital mail program will halt this contraband being sent through traditional mail. Effective September 6, 2023, all inmate mail should be addressed and sent to the Digital Mail Center. All mail received this week will be delivered to the digital mail processing center. More information about this program can be found here: TDCJ News – TDCJ Digital Mail Rollout.
Increased K9 Searches and Other Technology: To assist in contraband detection and outside funding related to contraband, TDCJ will be deploying additional resources. Specialized search teams and narcotic dogs will be deployed to units and staff will be subject to enhanced search procedures.
Comprehensive Searches: All persons entering our facilities at all locations will undergo comprehensive searches.
“Due to the fact staff will be concentrating on these search efforts, visitation will be canceled until further notice. Inmates will still have access to the phone system and tablets,” TDCJ said.
If drugs are getting into Texas prisons, there’s over a 90% chance correctional staff are getting them in there.
“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.
“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.
Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”
Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.
CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.
“California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent.”
Remember how the UK was economically lagging other countries in Europe and Remainers blamed Brexit? Yeah, not so much.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.
These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.
The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’ The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.
Mark Felton visits Buckingham Palace, and is Not Amused. “The rooms open to the public are, of course, lavishly decorated. The amount of gold painted furniture, pianos and urns, similar to what I imagine Liberace’s house look like. The walls are hung with the usual assortment of well-fed Hanoverians.” Plus: No bathrooms for you, lowly peasant!
A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.
To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.
Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.
Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.
“Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
More Biden corruption comes to light, California gets even more crazy, and two former European Prime Ministers step out of the spotlight in different ways.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer revealed Thursday that he expects there is evidence of at least $20-$30 million being made in illegal payments by foreign nationals to the Biden family.
Appearing on Fox Business, Comer stated “We have more bank records coming in but we’re gonna exceed $10 million this week but I think we’ll get up to $20-$30 million.”
He further noted that it is becoming clear that the Bidens potentially engaged in bribery, influence peddling, and money laundering.
“This is going to be hard for Biden to explain, this is not going to go away, and I think eventually the mainstream media is going to start asking the real questions,” Comer added.
“They know there’s something wrong here. They know all the allegations have merit, because of where Joe Biden was, because of what we’ve seen on tape before, where Joe Biden bragged about firing that prosecutor,” he added,
“They know that this family created these shell companies. They know this family was money-laundering, they were profiting off Joe Biden’s influence,” Comer asserted, adding “The media knows that – they’re just not covering it.”
“I can assure you: there is more money that we’re going to be able to identify, that was transferred between foreign nationals in other countries and the Biden family,” Comer further emphasized, adding “I think, eventually, the mainstream media will turn on Joe Biden and start asking the real questions: ‘What did your family do to receive all this money?’”
Speaking of Biden family corruption: “House Oversight Panel Subpoenas Former Hunter Biden Associate Devon Archer…[The committee] is particularly interested in Archer’s involvement in the family’s international business deals, which included countries like China, Russia, and Ukraine.” Archer was in Global Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden and John Kerry’s stepson.
“Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison stepped down this week as the progressive-run city struggles with homicides, a drug crisis, and a troubling rise in violence involving teenagers.” Time to pull this out again:
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, dead at 86. Berlusconi revived Italy’s economy, but then couldn’t keep it out of the PIIGS. But for a whilehe kept the wolves at bay.
Also stepping out of the spotlight this week: Former UK Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned from Parliment. Other than getting Brexit accomplished, Johnson’s tenure seemed all sizzle and no steak.
In April 2023, an unelected Board in California voted to force trucking companies to buy zero-emission trucks. This technology is at early-stage adoption in limited segments, and infrastructure buildout is lagging behind what is required to support electrification in our industry. The Board unanimously advanced the Advanced Clean Fleet rule to accompany California’s equally tough electric vehicle sales mandate regulation, the Advanced Clean Truck rule, that would require truck manufacturers to sell zero-emission vehicles. These two regulations together are designed to create an artificial electric vehicle market sooner rather than later.
This new rule was made at the behest of the environmental lobby, which pushed for unrealistic targets and unachievable timelines that will undoubtedly lead to higher prices for goods delivered to the state and fewer options for consumers. ATA has strongly opposed this rule from the outset and testified at a hearing in Sacramento to express the trucking industry’s concerns directly to the Board.
Snip.
Today’s clean diesel trucks can spend 15 minutes fueling anywhere in the country and then travel about 1,200 miles before fueling again. In contrast, today’s zero-emission trucks:
Have significantly less range of about 150-330 miles between charging or refueling;
Need to be charged or refueled more often and for longer periods of time leading to unproductive downtime;
Cost two to three times more than a comparable clean-diesel truck; and
Weigh thousands of pounds more, reducing payload capacity and requiring more trucks and drivers to move the same amount of freight.
Also: “The California Energy Commission estimates that 157,000 chargers will need to be installed by 2030 to support California’s heavy-duty vehicle electrification goals.” Assuming there’s enough Lithium in the world for the batteries… (Hat tip: TPPF.)
Hope for San Francisco? Residents replace drug-addicted transients on their local sidewalks with large planters.
The Russian Collusion Hoax is now officially bunk, Budweiser’s self-inflicted freefall continues, blue city commercial real estate bites the moose, and a whole lot of shocked face to go around. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.
Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.
He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.
Compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the dossier is an unverified collection of opposition research accusing then-candidate Trump and his campaign aides of collaborating with Kremlin officials. The FBI used the dossier to secure a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, though its central claims were subsequently disproven by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The report notes that the FBI was quick to investigate Trump, while it proceeded cautiously with allegations against Clinton.
The 316-page report sent to Congress was nearly four years in the making. It concluded that neither federal law enforcement nor intelligence officials “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” which the FBI “swiftly opened.”
The report accuses federal officials of acting “without appropriate objectivity or restraint.” Peter Strzok, then the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, opened the investigation “immediately” at the direction of Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director. “Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump,” the report states.
It states that former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith “committed a criminal offense by fabricating language in an email that was material to the FBI obtaining a FISA surveillance order.”
Durham wrote that FBI officials continued to seek FISA surveillance while acknowledging that “they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities. And certain personnel disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination.”
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham wrote.
“Gov. Newsom Announces California Budget Deficit Bigger than Projected.” Legal Insurrection has already used the “unexpectedly” here, so I’ll just note that Newsom is the far lefty a whole lot of Democratic Party power players want to substitute for Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024.
“NIH Renews Funds for ‘Bat Coronavirus’ Research despite Energy Department, FBI’s Lab-Leak Conclusion.” That’s like catching Mrs. O’Leary’s cow after she’s burned down Chicago, strapping lit fireworks to her body and letting her loose in the dynamite factory.
“Things are so bad, in fact, that 26 Empire State Buildings could fit into New York City’s empty office space, as occupancy in the city is hovering around 50% of prepandemic levels.”
“In San Francisco, the downtown area is experiencing its worst office vacancy crisis on record – with 31% of space available for lease or sublease, the SF Chronicle reports.”
Bud Light finds out there’s no bottom to their tranny pander pit. “Sales volumes of Bud Light fell by 23.6 percent in the week ended on May 6, according to retail scanner numbers cited by Beer Business Daily that are based on Nielsen IQ data. That’s a drop from the 23.3 percent slide Bud Light suffered in the final week of April.”
Finnish nuclear plant coming online drops spot energy prices by 75%.
Republican governors released a joint statement on Tuesday pledging to assist Texas in securing its border with Mexico.
In response to Gov. Greg Abbott’s request for assistance, twenty-four Republican governors committed to helping secure the 1,254-mile-border and commended the Texas Republican for the recent actions he was forced to take due to the failures of the Biden administration’s open-border policies, according to the Washington Examiner.
“The federal government’s response handling the expiration of Title 42 has represented a complete failure of the Biden Administration,” the joint statement reads. “While the federal government has abdicated its duties, Republican governors stand ready to protect the U.S.-Mexico border and keep families safe.”
“All states have suffered from the effects of deadly illegal drugs coming across the border, and every state is a border state due to the devastating influx of drugs in our communities. Republican governors are leading the way to address the border crisis by increasing fentanyl sentencing and increasing support for law enforcement interdiction of drugs, among other measures,” they continued.
“Texas Governor Greg Abbott has exemplified leadership at a critical time, leading the way with Operation Lone Star, and deploying the Texas Tactical Border Force to prevent illegal crossings and keep the border secure. We support the efforts to secure the border led by Governor Abbott.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Abbott sent an urgent request to all of the nation’s governors asking them to band together to defeat the invasion at the US/Mexico border, something he said impacts every community in the United States.
“The flood of illegal border activity invited by the Biden Administration flows directly across the southern border into Texas communities, but this crisis does not stop in our state. Emboldened Mexican drug cartels and other transnational criminal enterprises profit off this chaos, smuggling people and dangerous drugs like fentanyl into communities nationwide,” Abbott wrote.
“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” he requested.
While no Democratic governors responded to the letter, twenty-four Republicans pledged to help from states which include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Jorge Mijares left Venezuela months ago — last November, he says. He’s been in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, for four weeks. But he planned to cross over Thursday night, as Title 42 immigration restrictions ended.
“I have the app,” said Mijares, 54. “I’m just waiting for it to tell me when to go.”
He’s not concerned about the Biden administration’s warnings against migration. After all, he has many friends who have made it across — safely.
There’s an app that tells you how to break U.S. immigration laws. Of course there is. Silly of me to be even slightly surprised. “The street finds its own uses for things” as the now-elderly cyberpunks used to say…
Twisted Sisiter’s Dee Snider is not down with your tranny madness. You submitted this with a better “we’re not going to take it” pun.
Speaking of tranny madness: Cross-dressing serial thief Samuel Brinton arrested as a fugitive from justice.
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.
Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”
The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.
At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.
The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.
Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…
You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.
Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.
Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.
Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.
Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.
Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.
Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
