Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenberger Discuss How and When San Francisco Became A Shithole

October 23rd, 2021

So how San Francisco become the homeless, crime, drug and feces-plagued wonderland that it is today? Michael Shellenberger (an author and journalists who has argued for technological solutions to environmental problems) discusses with Joe Rogan how it came to its current state.

Some takeaways:

  • San Francisco has always been friendly to illegal drugs, and in the 1800s it was the last city to shut down opium dens.
  • The movement (well-intention) to treat pain with opioids.
  • When that was restricted in 2010, a lot of opioid addicts switched to heroin.
  • After that came fentanyl, which is much easier to overdose on than heroin.
  • Meth was (is?) a separate epidemic.
  • Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. “The activists just gave the tends to the homeless.”
  • “Women are rapped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed when you can’t make payments on their drugs, drug dealers stabs you with a machete. These are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis from all the feces.”
  • “Progressives have badly misled people into thinking this is a problem of high rents.”
  • “The idea that all black people are victims is a racist idea.”

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for October 22, 2021

    October 22nd, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! Manchin stands firm, Psaki drips with contempt, #NeverTrump and #BlackLivesMatter share a sugar daddy, and “Let’s Go Brandon” pops up everywhere.

  • It’s suddenly beginning to dawn on Democrats that Manchin means it.

    Joe Manchin means what he says. Democrats and the media may not grasp this as it happens so rarely in Washington, and neither group has included that in its calculations. However, that reality keeps getting clearer and clearer, and the Punchbowl crew warn Democrats to figure it out — fast:

    Manchin has been remarkably consistent, and all the major media outlets have reported it time and time again. If you’re surprised by what Manchin is saying now, maybe you’ve been really busy, tied up on other endeavors and haven’t listened to or read what he’s said. That’s understandable. Life moves pretty fast.

    But if you have listened to Manchin and you’re still surprised by or enraged at his positions, that may be because you’re irrationally hopeful he will change his beliefs, or you’re engaging in wishful and likely unrealistic thinking. Maybe you’re just listening to what you want to hear. But don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Half of official Washington has decided that they’re going to ignore what Manchin says and believe he has a secret set of beliefs he’s waiting to unveil.

    Here’s what you have to understand about Manchin: He says what he means. When he gets heavy pressure from the left, it helps him back home.

    Here’s the reality: Joe Manchin is a filibuster-supporting conservative Democrat who is also an ardent supporter of coal, skeptical of big government and massive spending packages. He never pretends otherwise. Let’s all stop acting surprised when he says the same thing for the umpteenth time.

    No kidding. That’s always been the reality, right along with the reality of an evenly split Senate. One would think that Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer would have put those two realities together and realize that launching a massive progressive-agenda reconciliation bill would have been a no-sale from the very beginning. Up to now, Democrats seem to have talked themselves into a fantasy that Manchin was just looking for a deal, or that they could pressure him into folding.

    Now that neither approach has worked — so far, anyway — The Hill reports that Democrats have begun to panic:

    Democrats are facing growing headaches over their sweeping social spending bill as they struggle to show momentum ahead of an end-of-the-month deadline.

    President Biden will meet with groups of moderates and progressives on Tuesday, and he’s facing pressure from some in his party to take a tighter rein on the talks.

    Instead of narrowing their differences, Democrats are dealing with a near constant whack-a-mole of new problems in recent days ranging from climate provisions and child care to increasingly intense infighting between moderates and progressives.

    The “whack-a-mole” is also a product of Democratic fantasy. They larded up the reconciliation bill with the entire progressive wish-list agenda, and as those items get attention, they also draw opposition. This omnibus approach to the hobby-horse list from the Bernie Sanders wing might have worked if Democrats had a clear and significant majority in each chamber of Congress, or if they had worked out the details with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema beforehand. Biden doesn’t have the former and didn’t do any work on the latter, which is why Democrats are playing “whack-a-mole” now.

    Now, as The Hill reports separately, Manchin’s entirely predictable opposition to Green New Deal-esque legislation threatens to torpedo Biden’s entire agenda:

    The hard left is so used to the MSM pandering to their delusions of popularity that cold, hard reality always comes as something of a shock to them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • In West Virginia, Biden is at 76% disapproval vs. 19% approval. What sort of leverage can Biden exert on Manchin? (Hat tip: Jim Gerghaty.)
  • Senate Republicans successfully filibuster Democrats’ voting fraud bill. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Evidently Commie Girl isn’t a popular choice to be Comptroller of the Currency.

    Unsurprisingly, some influential Senate Democrats are getting cold feet about the prospect of President Biden nominating Saule Omarova to lead the OCC. The Cornell law professor educated in the USSR who has proposed that the Fed take over most retail banking activities from the private sector (which a Fedcoin – or ZuckCoin – just might help it to do) while wholeheartedly supporting the progressives’ “Green New Deal” agenda.

    This has, understandably, made many in both Congress, and the industry she is about to regulate, uncomfortable.

    Various Omarova commie policy proposals we’ve previously covered snipped.

    According to CNBC’s main source (who remains anonymous) is that these Senators have already shared their misgivings with President Biden.

    Her selection, coupled with her views on how to overhaul the US banking system, prompted several Senate Democrats or their staff to complain to the White House and suggest that the president’s choice will be tough to support on Capitol Hill, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    This person declined to be named in order to speak openly about private discussions between the White House and Senate offices.

    Others surrounding the OCC nomination process said a handful of moderate Democrats harbor reservations about Omarova and her aspirations to “end banking as we know it,” as she suggested in a Vanderbilt Law Review article.

    Those people cautioned that skeptical senators likely haven’t made a final decision yet but are leaning against her candidacy.

  • Why UK coronavirus death statistics can’t be trusted:

  • “Coronavirus always mutational drift at a steady rate.”

    “Just from a science point of view it doesn’t make sense.”

  • Speaking of untrustworthy coronavirus information, Joe Rogan slams Google:

  • Speaking of Google, supposedly they’re purging “Let’s Go Brandon” videos from YouTube, so let’s see how long until they ban this:

    And this evidently topped iTunes’ rap charts:

  • Virginia Tech is going to limit attendance to crack down on “Fuck Joe Biden” chants.
  • Despite having a vaccine, Putin has given Russian workers a week off due to soaring Flu Manchu cases.
  • In-N-Out Burgers closes it’s Fan Francisco store after refusing to become the city’s vaccine police.
  • Just in case it was still unclear to , yes, the National Institute of Health did fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite Anthony Fauci swearing up and down otherwise.
  • Lileks on Comrade Psaki and “needs“:

    It’s not just the vexation you get when a lot of people are crammed into one place, though. It’s imposed, by dint of not doing anything about the disorderly elements. We will not police the streets so you will step over needles. We will not clear out the encampment so you will have an inert RV fill the neighborhood with smoke when it burns. We will not do something about petty theft, so you will have to wait for the clerk to get a key. We will not confine the mentally ill, so you will be trailed for a block by someone scrabbling a hand in his pants.

    When you complain, you will be told you’re lucky not to be in the situation of the people who are causing the problems.You should be grateful you don’t have to steal Tide. You should be grateful you can afford to replace your broken stove, even though the replacement won’t come for 8 months. (It’ll be 9 next month.) I suppose that’s true, but it’s setting the bar rather low, and making the disorderly uncivil elements the baseline. Anything above that, it’s gravy.

    Revanchist running-dog lackey of the plutocratic hegemony that I am, I am suspicious when the state determintes your needs and justifies their construction. You don’t need the treadmill is you don’t need 14 varities of ice cream is you don’t need that car is you don’t need that hamburger when there’s bug protein is you don’t need fast access to unprotected detergent is you don’t need to go to that wedding is you don’t need . . . this. That. The other thing. And it is churlish of you to think you need this when (insert aching never-solved non-analogous problem that still exists despite decades of expenditures here).

    Ever seen the old Soviet ads? They’re lovely. They didn’t have 15 different brands. They just had a nice ad for marmalade, in general. No confusion. Yes, but did they actually produce any marmalade? Of course! But if there wasn’t any marmalade, because the wreckers and kulaks had prevented the fufillment of the Five-Year Fruit Spread Goals, everyone shared the experience. There was Marmalade Equity. And Comrade Brezhnev had his toast dry? He may have had some at diplomatic occasions, where it was expected.

    What you might take away from the exchange above is this: the press secretary has access to a treadmill, and it works, and if it doesn’t, there are ten others in a row just like it. And membership in the fitness club comes with the job.

  • And never forget that she, and the mandarins she represents, hate you.

    This is what Trump’s critics meant when they said we needed to restore “civility” to the White House: they meant we need the right kind of disdain for the right kinds of people, expressed in the right kinds of ways. Gone are the mean tweets, the off-color jokes, the rough pugilism. Now instead we have Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt. People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it.

    We are ruled over by a cabal of solipsists who feel outraged that the regressive pigs in flyover country express any opinions at all—about the fruits of their labor, about the security of their nation, about the health of their bodies. Their response is that we should “lower expectations” for affordable food, “welcome competition” from a rapidly arming China, and “follow the advice of health experts” on pain of unemployment.

    Who can forget the treacly grin with which Psaki invited us to “stay tuned” for Biden’s forthcoming vaccine decree? She delights in her role, which is to act out the revenge fantasies of all who felt wounded in 2016 by the mere suggestion that their virtue is less than immaculate. We have to reckon with the fact that Psaki, loathsome though she may be, is doing her job exactly as intended. Her affronts are outrageous only to the people who already hate her: from her target audience they elicit shouts of “YAS Kween” and “drag him!” She is not slipping up when she insults your intelligence and riles up your countrymen against you, when she lies unblinkingly out in the open and defies you to do anything about it. That is her job, and she is good at it. She is doing exactly what she was put there to do.

    No one with a spine should take instruction on “civility” from such a feckless cretin or anyone who enjoys her act. If we are to re-learn civic excellence, it will not be from a movement whose moral framework consists of slander and self-satisfaction. Remember that in 2022 and 2024 when they call you a fascist or a bigot or a domestic terrorist or whatever: these are people who think Jen Psaki is a good person. Their opinion about your morals literally doesn’t matter at all.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Heh:

  • “Never Trumpers and Black Lives Matter Have the Same Backer.”

    The press releases went out on schedule and the media rewrote them into news stories. A group of “principled” Republicans was going to fundraise to support Democrat congressmen.

    The stories rolled out on schedule from different media outlets while appearing nearly identical. And the real story, as usual, was not what was on the page, but what had been deliberately left out. Reuters described the Renew America Movement as a group of Never Trump Republicans “whose leadership includes former Republican Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Bill Weld of Massachusetts.” Hardly a single story mentioned the actual leaders.

    The Renew America Movement was co-founded by Evan McMullin (pictured above) and his running mate Mindy Finn. Its national political director, Joel Searby, who is quoted in the media’s writeups, was the chief strategist for the McMullin campaign. Donations to RAM go through Stand Up Republic, which is the anti-Trump group that McMullin and Finn originally set up. The press release for the new pro-Democrat campaign even came from Stand Up Republic. The media actually had to work not to mention McMullin or Stand Up Republic in its stories about the RAM campaign.

    And the media did a fine job of lying by omission to the public in order to elect Democrats.

    Snip.

    Stand Up Republic had scored $800,000 from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice and $750,000 from the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar, a Franco-Persian billionaire, is the richest man in Hawaii and the digital version of George Soros. His projects include the pro-terror site, The Intercept, and a plan to “Reimagine Capitalism”. Hewlett is a more conventional leftist setup.

    The “principled” Never Trumper network championing “moderates” to “heal our country” is actually backed by the same money as Black Lives Matter radicals and racists.

    The Hewlett Foundation is one of the backers of the Democracy Frontlines Fund which poured tens of millions into a variety of black nationalist groups including the Movement for Black Lives.

    The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a BLM umbrella group which is backed by billion-dollar leftist foundations like the Ford Foundation. Considering its wealthy anti-Israel backers, it’s unsurprising that M4BL has embraced the antisemitic BDS movement, falsely accused Israel of genocide, and tried to oust any Jewish groups that wouldn’t join them in destroying Israel.

    The Omidyar Network promised last year that it was committing $500,000 to “racial justice” and focusing on 5 groups including the Movement for Black Lives. It also couldn’t let the anniversary of September 11 pass without announcing a joint initiative with Soros, the Ford Foundation, and other leftists to pour money into Islamic groups fighting against America’s counterterrorism.

    Omidyar is also the sugar daddy of the Never Trumpers, funding The Bulwark together with the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar’s Democracy Fund has provided $1.6 million to Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together. It’s all just Democrats funding Democrats… together.

    (Hat tip: R. S. McCain.)

  • Did Southwest Airlines blink on firing employees over vaccine mandates?
  • Biden channels his inner Cornholio:

  • Fun with Slow Joe:

  • Sarah Hoyt is not impressed by arguments about the inevitability of communism:

    Yeah. Okay, the commies got a plan. That is sort of their one and only given strength. They plan, they organize, they work towards the world’s stupidest things, but they do it TOGETHER. (Eh, mostly.)

    But to believe it’s working you’d have to forget everything from the collapse of the Soviet Union (THEY surely try to forget it) to the repeated smacks on the nose they have got in America, to the fact many of you don’t seem to know that the only reason that the Soviet Union survived that long was because we FED THEM. (Seriously. We should give all those who lost relatives to the Soviet Union and its depredations, including the poor bastards in Africa destroyed by Russia’s Cuban mercenaries a chance to disinter FDR’s corpse and kick it around. It’s no more than a very mild form of justice.)

    Communism is in fact an idea so stupid that only intellectuals can believe it and try to apply it. Fortunately for them they do attract most intellectuals with the siren song of “because you’re smarter than other people, you see this.”

    Snip.

    Orwell was a believer, even if a heretic. As an adult, read the damn thing and tell me it’s in the least likely.

    Not only would it fall apart within years — if not weeks — because no one can manage a large economy well enough for it to survive that long (yeah, China. Sure buddy. If you think China is working out that well, you haven’t looked closely), but it could never extend to the whole world, or everyone would starve and die out.

    The other thing is that it’s 1940s tech extended indefinitely. This might work — eh, sort of — under really tightly controlled regimes, but sooner or letter a clever monkey (ape, d*amn it. We’re apes) throws a wrench in. The internet is a big wrench, and their attempts to put the genie back in the bottle have been markedly unsuccessful. But it doesn’t take the internet. The Soviet Union was brought down by typewriters and copiers.

  • Alec Baldwin kills a cast member of the movie he’s shooting. It may not have been his fault.
  • “Minnesota Hospital Shuts Down ER and Urgent Care Amid Nurse Strike.” That’s Allina Health in Plymouth.
  • The Washington Post wants us to invade Haiti. Remember when it was Republicans that were accused of being the warmongers?
  • Fauci flops, but the industry tries to hide it. ” IMDB just got caught with its pants down. Social media is noticing that they changed the Fauci film 1.6 audience score to 5.8, but they neglected to change the demographic data or the raw distribution, so it looks like they just faked the top-line number.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “DC assistant chief: I was told “have an abortion or be fired.” “D.C. Assistant Police Chief Chanel Dickerson…said when she became pregnant as a young police cadet, she was told she had to have an abortion to keep her job.”
  • Boom:

  • New evidence suggests the Norse were in Newfoundland in 1021.
  • Remember all the fawning coverage that former Democratic congresswoman Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill received despite banging a staffer? Yeah, it turns out that one of the journalists giving her that fawning coverage, Alex Thomas, was banging her too. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Is the most dangerous stretch of water in the world a three foot wide stream in Yorkshire?
  • Here’s a chance to buy the very earliest Apple Macintosh prototype ever offered at auction, this one with the unreliable, abandoned 5 1/4″ “Twiggy” drive, only a few prototypes of which exist.
  • “Panic At White House As All The Stores Are Out Of Depends.”
  • An oldie but a goodie: Living the dream:

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Dozens!

    October 21st, 2021

    Did you hear that some Netflix employees staged a walkout over the latest Dave Chappelle comedy special over the comedian daring to joke about transexuals rather than treating them with the holy reverence they have declared as their unquestioned due? It was all over the news, Twitter, etc.

    How many walked out? Initial reports said “hundreds,” but the actual number appears to be “dozens.”

    Dozens!

    Why is such a tiny protest accorded mainstream media coverage? Because it furthers the victimhood identity politics gaslighting narrative that “transsexual rights,” a fringe concern of a tiny minority of deeply confused people, is a broad and popular movement thanks to the magic of “intersectionaity.” As the newest addition to the Victimhood Identity Politics pantheon, transsexuals automatically became the most sacred, pushing aside blacks, women, etc.

    The overwhelming majority of the American people still understand that you cannot magically change your sex by using hormone therapy and plastic surgery to alter your outer appearance. If you have XX chromosomes you’re female, and if you have XY chromosomes you’re male. Everything else is genetic abnormality or sophistry.

    No number of protests, government dictates, or gaslighting media coverage is going to change that fact.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    Austin Police Department Morale Hits Bottom

    October 20th, 2021

    When we last checked in on the Austin Police Department, it was plagued by staffing issues due to the City of Austin defunding the police and cancelling two cadet classes, as well as Travis County DA Jose Garza’s refusing to prosecute numerous felonies, thus putting numerous criminal back on the streets to commit more crimes.

    Now this piece from Brad Johnson paints a picture of an undermanned department with a morale crisis.

    The Austin Police Department (APD) is bleeding 15 to 22 officers per month as those departing join other departments or leave law enforcement entirely. With them goes decades of irreplaceable experience and left over is a void the City of Austin aims to fill with green recruits and a “reimagined” approach to public safety.

    Political upheaval in Austin is not unlike any other situation in big cities across the country. Mass protests swept Austin as they did the nation last year after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, preceded by months of societal discord caused by the pandemic and related government shutdowns.

    That was followed by grandiose promises by progressive politicians to “reimagine” the way police interact with their community.

    Currently, APD has 200 vacancies and 104 officers on leave on top of the 150 positions eliminated during the 2020 budget cut and redirection. The department’s average response time ballooned from seven minutes to nearly 10 minutes since the summer of 2020. Specialized units are being disbanded and the officers who stay are being redeployed to street patrol to fill the gaps.

    Snip.

    Michele Aparicio first joined APD in 1997. She lasted 23 years with the department before retiring in 2020 a few months into the pandemic.

    Aparicio, a Hispanic, told The Texan that morale has long been a problem within APD and pointed to leadership and its internal decisions as its cause. “Surely seniority and experience had always played a role in promotions, but it got to the point where demographics took precedence over all else,” Aparicio said.

    This, Aparicio said, had plagued the department’s morale and devolved into poisonous interactions with its leadership.

    “There was a point where we had a meeting with Chief Manley and I asked him what he was going to do for morale, and he just put it back on me as a supervisor,” Aparicio said, adding that she was later approached by one of her superiors who informed her Manley didn’t approve of the interaction.

    “I had a lot of respect for Acevedo, he had his flaws, but he was not scared to speak up for what he believed and for all the officers of APD,” said Kyle Sargent, a former APD officer of 15 years.

    Contrasting Acevedo with Manley, Sargent added that he felt the latter began falling more in line and catering his decisions with the city council in mind — then beginning to lurch even further left than it already had been. Officer morale, Sargent said, took a hit with that transition and as Manley’s tenure unfolded, but nothing sped up the trend like what’s unfolded since.

    Snip.

    One contributing factor Aparicio identified was the racial sensitivity trainings officers were put through. “They were literally calling us racist and homophobic officers — a whole class designed to make it seem like we were guilty of being racist, of being homophobic, and that we treated other people differently,” Aparicio said.

    “It wasn’t presented as something like ‘Hey, this is what the nation is going through.’ No, it was presented as APD needs this because y’all are a bunch of racists.”

    “So, the morale was already s— to begin with and then this was forced upon us,” Aparicio emphasized. During those classes, she added, the presenters faced some serious pushback from the APD rank and file and so they “were toned down a little bit.”

    But it didn’t end there.

    Continuing that trend, this year the Austin City Council entered a contract with a consulting firm to provide racial sensitivity training for its police heavily imbued with critical race theory teachings. The city is paying the consultant $10,000 per day.

    See more on that story here.

    Things are about to get worse.

    A change in that buying forward rate is coming early next year. Sargent told The Texan he’s heard as many as 150 to 200 officers could leave in January next year before the change starts in February.

    That would be over 13 percent of the current APD employment leaving in the blink of an eye.

    When officers leave, they are often able to purchase their gun and badge as mementos of their career. But when Sargent resigned, this courtesy was denied to him per a new policy from interim Chief Chacon.

    “It was just vindictive — I felt like he was just trying to punish us for leaving and it sort of put an exclamation point on my decision,” Sargent said. “It’s a small thing but it’s that kind of stuff that just brings morale from low to even lower.”

    Other APD tidbits:

  • Speaking of low staffing:

  • Even critical departments are undermanned:

  • Making it worse: cadets that contract Flu Manchu are being told to quit…or be terminated:

    • It’s going to take proposition A passing in November to keep things from getting much, much worse.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Texas | 12 Comments »

    Democrats to Cops in 2020: You’re Evil Racists And We Want To Defund You! Democrats to Cops in 2021: We Need You To Enforce Vaccine Mandates. Cops to Democrats: Get Stuffed!

    October 19th, 2021

    After spending 2020 calling police “systematically racist” and trying to get them defunded (mainly so they could get their fingers on that money, suddenly it’s 2021 and Democrat-run cities and counties suddenly need police to be their vaccine enforcers. And police aren’t having any of it.

    Take deep blue Chicago for example:

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has foolishly put herself—and the safety of the people of Chicago—in a game of chicken, with at least half the police force ready to defy her vaccine mandate and be sent home from work by City Hall without pay, rather than comply.

    “She wants to play a game of chicken. Well, we’re in a semi. And she’s in a Smart Car. And she wants to play chicken?” said Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara told me on Thursday. “That’s her decision.”

    I figure Chicago’s little Napoleon in pants suits caves by Friday. As I type this on Thursday evening, Chicago aldermen are calling, saying she’s already blinking on her threats of “no vaccine, you’ll be sent home without pay.”

    FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE: She blinked. She did cave. After her repeated threats, she won’t withhold their pay and send them home if they don’t comply with her vaccine mandate. Lori, that’s no way to play chicken or poker. Her chicken little game has come home to roost. Cops have had enough. Now she’s pouting, driving up the ramp of the chicken coop in her little clown car.

    If she didn’t cave, victims of weekend violence would blame Lightfoot because she put her ego ahead of public safety. The smart play was to cave and call it something else. Her media friends can spin it. She can even call it victory, if she wants. But she caved. And that weakens her even more.

    (Hat tip: Rick Moran at PJ Media.)

    Unions for police and corrections officers are suing over vaccine mandates in Allegheny County:

    Across Allegheny County, public employees are fighting vaccine mandates but none as hard as those in law enforcement, which has suffered some of the highest losses from the disease.

    The unions representing the county police and the corrections officers have gone to court to block the county’s order that all employees be vaccinated or be fired.

    According to the National Fraternal Order of Police, 743 police officers have reportedly died of COVID-19, but while the FOP is encouraging officers to get vaccinated, the union opposes mandates, calling vaccines a personal health decision.

    Seattle police are bailing as well:

    The leader of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), which represents over 1,300 officers of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), is calling the COVID-19 vaccine mandate the latest in a long list of betrayals by the city of Seattle.

    SPOG President Mike Solan said city leaders could accommodate officers who don’t want the shot and keep the city safe, but they are choosing not to do that. With just days until the mandate takes effect, Solan said now is not the time to force a vaccine on officers as the police department already faces a staffing crisis.

    “Crime is surging in this city. Our community is demanding more police officers to answer the 911 calls, and the fact we’ve already lost close to 350 police officers because of the politicians’ political betrayal,” said Solan.

    Solan said that before George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, city officials called SPD a “model department” when it came to police reform. But he said the tables turned after Floyd’s death with some city leaders demanding massive cuts to the department.

    Now, Solan wants Mayor Jenny Durkan to do what some other cities have done and allow officers who don’t want to get the shot the option to wear masks, get tested regularly for COVID-19, and not have their assignments changed.

    “For some reason, this mayor is refusing that, which I think is unreasonable and is void of common sense,” said Solan.

    It’s only illogical if you haven’t been paying attention. Every knee must bend to the holy demands of the Party and the State. Heresy against the narrative cannot be tolerated.

    Los Angeles sheriff Alex Villanueva already announced that he was refusing to carry out the county’s mandate.

    What happens to Democrat-run municipalities when the police refuse to carry out unconstitutional mandates?

    Like many Democratic plans to immanentize the eschaton, they don’t seem to have thought a lot of the intermediate steps through…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Regulation, unions | 4 Comments »

    Colin Powell, RIP

    October 18th, 2021

    Colin Powell, Secretary of State for George W. Bush, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for George H. W. Bush, has died at age 84.

    Powell, a consummate Washington insider, was fairly effective in both roles. As Secretary of State, he was much better at managing relations with American allies and various international institutions than (in increasing order of general competence) John Kerry, Madeline Albright, Warren Christopher, Rex Tillerson, Hillary Clinton or Al Haig, but not among the very best of the modern era (George Schultz, James Baker and Mike Pompeo), and was notably better than successor Condoleezza Rice. He kept the Blair government onboard for Operation Iraq Freedom (at considerable political cost to Blair), effectively used the temporary post-9/11 period of international goodwill, maintained the sanctions regime on Iran, and effectively represented a President who was not loved by the “international community.”

    As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, he effectively managed inter-service relations and empowered General Norman Schwarzkopf to produce the most overwhelmingly impressive military victory by American forces since World War II.

    Powell does owe a small measure of blame in that American involvement in Iraq turned out to be a long-running, expensive distraction whose ultimate success was only cemented under the Trump Administration, but that was clearly a bipartisan quagmire, as was the long-running, expensive, disaster in Afghanistan, in which the State Department played a very baleful role.

    That he was a squishy Republican who backed Obama in 2008 shouldn’t change the fact that he was fairly adept at at implementing the policies of the Presidential Administrations he worked for, no matter how mistaken some of those policies may appear in hindsight. Powell was almost universally praised for effective and dignified management in successfully filling two different demanding roles.

    He once described himself in an interview with the New York Times in 2007 as a “problem-solver.” He offered this analysis of himself: “He was taught as a soldier to solve problems, So he has views, but he’s not an ideologue. He has passion but he’s not a fanatic. He’s first and foremost a problem-solver.”

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans | 3 Comments »

    Ruy Teixeira 2002: Hispanic Will Make Democrats The Permanent Majority Party. Ruy Teixeira 2021: Not So Fast

    October 17th, 2021

    In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that demographic changes, especially high levels of Hispanic immigration, were going to transform the American voting demographic enough the Democratic Party would enjoy a natural majority for the foreseeable future.

    Now Teixeira has been reading the tea leaves again, and his new conclusion is: Not so much.

    And once again, the culprit thwarting Democrats is Donald Trump. Like The Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, Trump is disrupting the well-laid plans of secret hidden manipulators in ways they couldn’t foresee.

    Joe Biden in 2020 characterized Donald Trump as, among other things, an unapologetic racist who particularly detested immigrants. This strand of Biden’s campaign was supposed to have special appeal to Hispanics and juice their Democratic support.

    But that didn’t happen. Instead Hispanic voters went in the other direction, giving Trump after four years substantially more support than they did in 2016. According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had an amazingly large 16 point margin shift toward Trump. Among Latinos, Cubans did have the largest shifts toward Trump (26 points), but those of Mexican origin also had a 12 point shift and even Puerto Ricans moved toward Trump by 18 points. Moreover, Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Nevada (16 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points).

    Some details:

    1. Trump’s support was higher among Hispanic working class (noncollege) voters than among the college-educated. Biden carried Hispanic college voters by a whopping 39 points (69-30) compared to just 14 points (55-41) among the Hispanic working class.

    2. Hispanic Trump voters were 81 percent working class and just 19 percent college-educated.

    3. Within the working class, the less education Hispanic voters had, the more they supported Trump. Those with some college gave Trump 39 percent of their vote, high school graduates gave him 42 percent and high school dropouts gave him 53 percent.

    4. Pew breaks income into three broad groups: lower income, middle income and upper income. Trump’s worst group by far here was upper income Hispanics where he received just 28 percent of the vote. But he got 41 percent support among middle income Hispanics and 40 percent support among lower income Hispanics.

    5. Just under a third of Hispanic voters described themselves as conservative. These voters supported Trump by a lopsided 73-26.

    6. Over half of Hispanic voters (53 percent) were very or somewhat confident in Trump’s ability to make good decisions about economic policy. Those who were very confident supported Trump 77-18; those who were somewhat confident supported him 56-40.

    7. Trump support was highest among young Hispanic voters. Those under 30 gave him 41 percent support, those in the 30-49 year old age group gave him 38 percent; those 50-64 gave him 37 percent and those 65 and over the least at 35 percent.

    And the reasons why?

    What lies behind these unsatisfying results for the Democrats? One possibility, as I have previously argued, is that Democrats fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this voter group and what they really care about. Hispanics were lumped in with “people of color” and were assumed to embrace the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all, about jobs, the economy and health care.

    For example, in the post-election wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (VSG) panel survey, well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.

    In this context, it is interesting to note that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement did not rate very highly among Hispanics. In the national exit poll, Hispanic voters were split close to evenly about BLM, 47 percent unfavorable to 49 percent favorable. This significantly trails not just black voters, but also white college graduates, who rated BLM 61 percent favorable to 35 percent unfavorable.

    Consistent with this, Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with BLM. In VSG data, despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more.

    An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans. In the VSG data, these voters agreed, by 9 points, that racial minorities have mostly fair opportunities to advance in America, by 11 points agreed that America is a fair society where everyone has a chance to get ahead and by 20 points agreed that “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

    They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.

    It is probable that Democrats will continue to have problems with this voter group until they base their appeals to this group on what these voters care about the most rather than what Democrats believe they should care about.

    The Democratic Party’s current ideological core is distinctly uninterested in any issues outside the narrow orbits of their own desires (money and power) and obsessions (Critical Race Theory/victimhood identity politics, and completely reordering society in the name of the Successor Ideology). Understanding the needs and opinions of working class Hispanics is not only beyond their current capabilities, but is something they probably feel active hostility toward even considering.

    As previous pieces here have noted, the trend toward more Hispanics embracing the GOP has been especially pronounced in Texas. Open borders do not sell to the vast majority of American Hispanic citizens, who see widespread crime, disorder and general lawlessness from Biden’s decision to cease border enforcement, adding yet another current in the tidal wave of disaster Democrats are threatening to bring down on themselves in 2022.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 7 Comments »

    A Pilot on the Southwest Vaccine Mandate SNAFU

    October 16th, 2021

    Here’s a pilot discussing the recent Southwest Airlines issues.

    His points:

  • Southwest was already running their entire operation too lean, too understaffed, too many hours for the people who are there, and thus the small disruptions spreads out everywhere. “Eventually you have to call in either sick or fatigued, and that’s gonna snowball.”
  • They’re running a lot of overtime to keep the operation running.
  • Too many pilots/trainers laid off during the pandemic, so getting them back up to speed has been a challenge.
  • The mandate is a real issue, because major airlines are considered federal contractors, and the mandate goes against union rules. “It’s a big problem.”
  • Mandate deadline is December 8.
  • Southwest is in the middle of negotiations with their pilot union.
  • The union can’t be leading the strike, because that would be illegal. But individual pilots are a different story.
  • $15 an hour airport support personnel may indeed just quit and work somewhere else.
  • A lot of older pilots (and pilot trainers) are just going to retire.

    • Time to haul this out again:

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    Posted in Regulation, unions, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for October 15, 2021

    October 15th, 2021

    Biden is bumbling, borders are crumbling, bankers are plotting, and Art is out. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green finds out the real reason behind the supply chain SNAFUs: California Democrats changing the rules because they weren’t getting enough kickbacks and graft from an efficiently functioning transportation system.

    The immediate problem, the one in Los Angeles, has been caused by the state’s vindictively regulatory state government.

    We’ll get to the trucker shortage in just a moment, but California also faces a shortage of trucks for them to drive.

    Twitter user Jerry Oakley reminds us that “Carriers domiciled in California with trucks older than 2011 model, or using engines manufactured before 2010, will need to meet the Board’s new Truck and Bus Regulation beginning in 2020.” Otherwise, “Their vehicles will be blocked from registration with the state’s DMV,” according to California law.

    Snip.

    As a result, trucks aren’t being purchased to replace the ones being regulated out of business.

    But even if there were plenty of trucks in California, there wouldn’t be enough truckers to drive them — and it isn’t because the truckers are too old.

    “Traditionally the ports have been served by Owner Operators,” Oakley says, who are non-union. But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”

    Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

    In fact, those work rules helped create the crisis conditions.

    The exact language of AB-5 was copied and pasted into Presidentish Joe Biden’s $5 trillion (Or: Five Million Million Dollar) “Build Back Better” bill currently stalled in the Senate.

    It’s one thing for Californians to screw themselves over, but AB-5 is hurting the entire country’s economy — and Washington Democrats want to take AB-5 nationwide.

  • Social Justice doesn’t want to win, it wants to destroy you:

    If you’re unaware, [David] Shor was canceled for accurately summarizing the contents of an academic paper. Shor made a point that he felt was important for the messaging of the Democrats. At the time the country was exploding in riots aligned with BlackLivesMatter and driven by anger over the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. Shor linked to a paper that argued that riots have bad political consequences for Democrats. This would not seem to be particularly inflammatory; people indiscriminately burning and smashing shit has little obvious utility for the marginalized or anyone else. But Shor lost his job for tweeting that paper and agreeing with its thesis. Similarly, the Intercept’s Lee Fang was absolutely mobbed for the crime of recording an interview with a young Black man who was critical of the riots and the protest movement from which they sprang. He almost lost his job, as well.

    (Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other.)

    Not that they had rebutted a particularly coherent pro-riot argument. There was little in the way of defense of riots in 2020 at all, really. Many attempted to invoke Martin Luther King in that regard, which is hilarious and bizarre concerning a man who among many other critiques of riots said that they “are not revolutionary but reactionary because they invite defeat; they offer an emotional catharsis, but they must be followed by a sense of futility,” and that close to the end of his life. (In their defense, almost no one who invokes MLK has actually read him.) But what Shor and Fang were guilty of was not of breaking with some intellectual mandate within liberalism but with speaking out of turn, with criticizing the wrong people. The difference between Shor and Fang’s criticism of the pro-riot side and the behavior of those who rose against them is that Shor and Fang never tried to destroy anyone, didn’t tweet at anyone’s boss in an attempt to get them fired, didn’t have the inclination or the power to punish those who dared to disagree with them. But those who targeted them were operating in a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please.

    Snip.

    The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them. Are most of these institutions false friends? Of course. But that, too, is not much of a defense.

    This tendency to be promiscuous in enthralling elites and powerful institutions should be a clue to the fact that, despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.

    Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces. (The former two groups have some overlap, but it’s not a perfect circle.) There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared.

  • Do global elites have incentives for pushing “Green Energy”/”Climate Change” nonsense? $150 trillion of them.

    Now, in case someone is still confused, none of these institutions, and not a single of the erudite officials running them, give a rat’s ass about the climate, about climate change risks, or about the fate of future generations of Americans (and certainly not about the rising water level sweeping away their massive waterfront mansions): if they did, total US debt and underfunded liabilities wouldn’t be just shy of $160 trillion.

    So what is going on, and why is it that virtually every topic these days has to do with climate change, “net zero”, green energy and ESG?

    The reason – as one would correctly suspect – is money. Some $150 trillion of it.

    Snip.

    How much would this green utopia cost, because if the “net zero”, “ESG”, “green” narrative is pushed so hard 24/7, you know it will cost a lot.

    Turns out it does. A lot, lot.

    Responding rhetorically to the key question, “how much will it cost?”, BofA cuts to the case and writes $150 trillion over 30 years – some $5 trillion in annual investments – amounting to twice current global GDP!

    At this point the report gets good because since it has to be taken seriously, it has to also be at least superficially objective. And here, the details behind the numbers, do we finally learn why the net zero lobby is so intent on pushing this green utopia – simple answer: because it provides an endless stream of taxpayer and debt-funded “investments” which in turn need a just as constant degree of debt monetization by central banks.

    Consider this: the covid pandemic has so far led to roughly $30 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus across the developed world. And yet, not even two years later, the effect of this $30 trillion is wearing off, yet despite the Biden’s admin to keep the Covid Crisis at bay, threatening to lock down society at a moment’s notice with the help of the complicit press, the population has made it clear that it will no longer comply with what is clear tyranny of the minority.

    And so, the establishment needs a new perpetual source (and use) of funding, a crisis of sorts, but one wrapped in a virtuous, noble facade. This is where the crusade against climate change comes in.

    Imagine a central banker, destroying your bank account through hyperinflation…forever.
    

  • The Biden Administration has discarded $100 million worth of border wall segments and is paying workers $5 million a day not to build the wall.
  • They’ve also halted worksite immigration enforcement.
  • Controlling (barely) all three branches of government, you wouldn’t expect Democrats to show this much panic.

    he results in 2020 came as a shock to Democrats for several reasons. First, Joe Biden’s official margin of victory, while slightly larger than Obama’s in 2012 at 51.26% to 46.8%, was half the size that polls, such as Nate Silver’s 538, had showed, at 51.8% to 43.4%. But even more concerning for Democrats, the locations of the polling error tended to be not in places where Democrats were strong, but rather either in swing areas where they hoped for gains, or areas where Obama had done well in 2008 and 2012, but Trump had won in 2016. In effect, Democrats won areas they felt were moving in their direction such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin by far less than they expected, and lost states they thought were close such as Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins.

    The implications of this in the Presidential race were obscured by the fact that the numbers showed Biden won. But they were keenly felt in the Senate races, where Democrats lost races in Iowa and North Carolina where they believed they were favored, and their candidates did worse than Biden even where he won, such as in Michigan and Maine. The result at the time was to leave the Senate at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats, a situation transformed by the victory of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock against a dysfunctional Georgia GOP in January 2021. Nonetheless, it was ominous and it set the tone for Democratic behavior in 2021.

    In light of these results, we can understand that the reason Democrats are now obsessing the filibuster is not because they have a mere 50 seats in the Senate. When Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut calls out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for blocking legislation that 48 Democrats support, he is doing so not because he believes they are likely to be 50 or 52 Senators for it in the future but because he is pretty sure 50 is as good as it is going to get. In 2008, Democrats won 60 Senate seats, and while with hindsight we can see this was a high-water mark, at the time Democrats dreamed bigger. After all, Mitch McConnell had only won 53%-47% in 2008. There were also open seats in states Obama had won in 2008 such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida coming up in 2010, and there was a path to a Democratic supermajority.

    That is not the case after 2020. In 2020, only Susan Collins won reelection in a state won by the Presidential candidate of the opposing party. Democratic challengers, including strong ones such as Montana’s two-term governor, Steve Bullock lost, and lost badly (by 10% in Bullock’s case). This was also not just a 2020 phenomenon. Despite a good year for Democrats overall in 2018, Democratic incumbent Senators lost in Florida, Indiana, and Missouri that year.

    Biden’s underperformance scared Democrats because it indicated a ceiling, rather than a floor for their strength.

    In 2022, Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all states that went to Biden, but within margins whereby strong GOP challengers, which exist in all those states, could win. More problematically, the list of Democratic targets includes only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among states Biden won, and North Carolina and Florida among states Trump won by less than landslide margins. Matching Biden exactly would get the Democrats a gain of two seats; but even in 2020 most Democratic candidates ran behind Biden, and Biden is himself deeply unpopular today.

    The situation in the House is, if anything, worse for the Democrats. Democrats lost 12 House seats in 2020. The impact of redistricting is overblown – Republicans will gain a marginal advantage from the lines, but census results show the areas growing most quickly lean Democrat – yet nonetheless, the Democrat position is so weak that any deterioration in Biden’s position will be fatal to their 2022 hopes.

    In effect, the 2021 Democratic majorities are on a “death watch,” and Democrats’ confused attempts to deal with that realization is determining their current erratic behavior.

    The split in the party is not so much between the moderates and the progressives. It is between progressives and moderates who desire political futures and those who know they have none. Pelosi is able to generally pass left-wing legislation in the House despite her narrow majority because many of her moderates know they are doomed no matter what, and are willing to cast their votes for the progressive agenda. In turn, AOC and the Squad feel free to sabotage any compromises because their own seats are safe and they believe they have time to fight another day, even if it is ten years from now. By contrast, both Sinema and Manchin seem to resent the efforts of other Democrat officials to pressure them to commit political suicide or behave as if they personally are doomed, just because it is true of some of their colleagues. In particular, rhetoric out of the Democrat caucus that Manchin is “probably in his last term anyway” or that Sinema “won’t win reelection” seems predicated on the idea that both should act as if they are finished and behave accordingly.

    But think about the deeper implications of that statement: All moderate Democrats (with the possible exceptions of Manchin and Sinema) are aching to do The Will of the Party and push the most radical, leftmost agenda possible if only it weren’t for the pesky problems of winning elections. Even moderate Democrats are leftwing radicals.

  • Democrats really want to get their hands on all your banking information. Remember how Obama weaponized the IRS? That was just a foretaste. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden: The war against terror is over! Supreme Court: Then why are you still doing all these things that are only legal if a war’s still on? Biden Administration: Yeah, when we said the war against terror was over, we didn’t mean it was over over…
  • You know Merrick Garland’s social justice warrior problem? It gets worse:

    We learned, too, that Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, through his company, Panorama Education, sells CRT materials to public schools. And yesterday, it turned out that Panorama is also spreading material calling Trump and his supporters “white supremacists”

    Alexander “Xan” Tanner, a very White man, is married to Merrick Garland’s daughter. Tanner co-founded Panorama Education, which purports to provide a data platform that delves into students’ psychosocial issues in order to help schools intervene in problems and improve the school climate. In a word, it’s creepy…

    The educational workshop released by Panorama Education, co-founded by Alexander “Xan” Tanner, the group’s president, revolves around “systemic racism” and includes an article as a resource that states the Ku Klux Klan and attendees of Trump’s rallies are both “examples of white supremacy.”

    Garland should be forced to resign.

  • “More Hunter Biden Questions: Art Gallery Repping Him Gets Big Federal COVID Loan.” Try to contain your shock.
  • A husband and wife were arrested for trying to sell U.S. submarine secrets. “Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebe, 42, and wife, Diana, 49, were charged Saturday with selling secret information to an unidentified foreign country.” Bonus! “The woman arrested with her Navy nuclear engineer husband for allegedly selling secret information about nuclear submarines to an undercover FBI agent appears to be vocally in support of Black Lives Matter and ‘resistance’ movements on her social media.” There’s a lot of shocked face in this LinkSwarm…
  • Michigan charges three women with more of that 2020 election fraud that doesn’t exist.

    Investigators determined Trenae Myesha Rainey, 28, a facility employee, did not contact residents as set by procedure and instead filled out the applications and forged the resident’s signature to each application….

    Investigators determined Nancy Juanita Williams, 55, planned to control absentee ballots for legally incapacitated persons under her care by fraudulently submitting 26 absentee ballot applications to nine identified city and township clerks.

  • “Sydney Lockdown Finally Ends After 106 Days.” Now Sydney residents just need to track down the people who ordered it and throttle them…
  • “School district equity chief canned after racist, anti-white videos surface.” That’s a good start, but every “chief equity officer” should be canned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • It’s FBI informants all the way down.
  • Empty Shelves Joe.
  • Morgan Freeman still isn’t having any of your defund the police lunacy. “I am not in the least bit for defunding the police.”
  • Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate and Clinton toady Terry McAuliffe lies again.

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe incorrectly stated on Thursday night that there were 1,142 children in Virginia’s intensive care unit beds, a gross overestimation of the virus’s current impact in the state.

    “We in Virginia today, 1,142 children are in ICU beds,” McAuliffe stated during a roundtable discussion with local reporters. The statistic is a massive overestimation. Virginia Department of Health statistics show that there are a total of 443 people of all ages currently in ICU beds, a fraction of the figure McAuliffe put forth for children.

    The state database shows the number of Virginians in ICU beds infected with COVID-19 has never come close to 1,142 since the first hospitalizations in March 2020—the peak of individuals hospitalized in the ICU with COVID-19 was on Jan. 13, when there were 587 cases. State records show that just 1,094 individuals younger than 19 years old have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Children, who rarely get seriously ill from the virus, have never made up a significant chunk of hospitalized individuals.

    McAuliffe also said during the roundtable Virginia had “8,000 cases on Monday,” another exaggerated statistic. On Monday, Oct. 4, Virginia saw 1,220 “confirmed” cases and 864 “probable” cases, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

    The state has never seen 8,000 confirmed cases in a day. According to the department, Virginia’s 7-day moving case average peaked at 5,904 on Jan. 8, 2021—a number thousands short of McAuliffe’s case assessment.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Oregon county declares “illegal pot emergency.” On the other hand, the “emergency” is that they can’t seem to regulate illegal pot farms.
  • Eight Texas Constitutional questions are on the November 2nd ballot.
  • “Longtime politician Mark Ridley-Thomas and the former dean of the School of Social Work at a university in Southern California were indicted today on federal corruption charges that allege a bribery scheme in which a Ridley-Thomas relative received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.” This is the fed indictment notice, so it doesn’t mention that he’s a lifetime Democrat, in addition to being an LA City Councileman and former state rep.
  • Dwight has more details.
  • Art Acevedo out in Miami. Sounds like a mixture of BS and real Acevedo stupidity. And it’s generally not a good idea to compare Miami Cubans to commies…
  • This is why the left feels compelled to crush police unions: “Chicago Police Union to Defy Vaccine Mandate and Dare the City to Enforce It.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Buy an electric vehicle,” they said. “They’re just as good and you’ll be saving the earth,” they said. Well surprise! “UK Readying New Law Mandating Home EV Chargers Be Shut Down During Peak Hours.” Also: “Beginning May 30, 2022, all chargers that are installed must be ‘smart’ chargers connected to the internet, allowing their functions to be limited between 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm.” Big brother in his squad car’s coming near…
  • Communist China demands that Christian pastor denounce himself for daring to preach the gospel in violation of state doctrine. Oh wait, did I say Communist China? I meant “Canada.”
  • Texas House passes Save Girls Sports act to keep them from having to compete against men.
  • UK: “Sir David Amess: Conservative MP stabbed to death. Police said a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after the attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea.” Police seem awful tight-lipped on details about the murderer…
  • “Wyoming teenager hauled out of high school in handcuffs for refusing to wear a mask.” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
  • British baker busted for selling cookies with illegal sprinkles.
  • Amy Alkon posts negative review for company trying to game Amazon reviews. result: Amazon deletes the review.
  • Heh:

  • John Deere workers go on strike.
  • Freedom Flu protest outside Southwest Airlines Monday, October 18:

  • “Southwest Airlines Offering Free Flights To All Passengers Who Are Vaccinated And Can Fly A Plane.
  • When the federal government banned sliced bread, supposedly due to helping the war effort in World War II. But nobody would admit who ordered it, or what scarce wartime commodities it was supposed to save, and the ban was lifted after two months. Sound familiar? Well, except for that whole “admitting the mistake and quickly reversing course” part…
  • You may be metal, but are you reach your hand into a shark’s mouth to remove a hook metal?
  • Armadillocon is this weekend.
  • Get hyped!

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Global Warming, Jihad, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Freedom Flu Spreads To American, United

    October 14th, 2021

    It seems that more and more airline employees are coming down with “Freedom Flu.”

    American Airlines said they would be following Biden’s (as yet unissued) Flu Manchu mandate. Result:

    United Airlines said it was going to fire 600 employees over the Flu Manchu mandate. But a federal judge just bared United Airlines from putting workers on unpaid leave:

    A federal judge has extended a ban on United Airlines putting employees on unpaid leave for seeking a medical or religious exemption from the airline’s requirement to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

    U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, granted a restraining order Tuesday in favor of employees who are suing the airline over the mandate.

    Lawyers for the employees and the airline agreed last month that United wouldn’t put the workers on unpaid leave, but the judge wrote that the agreement will expire before he can rule on the merits of the matter. That would leave “hundreds of workers” at risk of being put on indefinite unpaid leave or forced to get a vaccination that violates their religious beliefs or medical restrictions.

    The restraining order expires Oct. 26.

    I don’t think I’d undertake any air travel over the rest of the year…

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    Posted in Regulation | 1 Comment »

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