Shoigu Out As Russia’s Defense Minister

May 13th, 2024

If your boss gives you one job, and you aren’t able to accomplish that one job in two plus years, there’s an excellent chance of your ass getting canned.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose military has been criticized at home for a perceived lack of progress and heavy losses during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, announced that he was replacing longtime ally Sergei Shoigu as defense minister.

The Kremlin said that Shoigu, 66, would be replaced by former First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov, 65, a little-known politician who specializes in economic matters.

Replacing a 66 year old with a 65 year old? That’s some mighty fine youth movement you’ve got going on there, Vlad…

Shoigu, who has been defense minister since 2012 and has been leading Russia’s military through its full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022, has been named to head Russia’s Security Council, which advises the president on national security matters.

The Kremlin said that as part of Shoigu’s Security Council duties, the former defense chief will advise on matters involving military-industrial issues.

He will replace Nikolai Patrushev as head of the Security Council. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Patrushev’s next position will be announced in the coming days.

Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council — which also announced the changes — said Putin has proposed reappointing Sergei Lavrov as Russia’s foreign minister.

British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said Russia’s next defense chief will be another Putin “puppet.”

Ya think?

“Sergei Shoigu has overseen over 355,000 casualties amongst his own soldiers & mass civilian suffering with an illegal campaign in Ukraine,” he wrote on X.

“Russia needs a Defense Minister who would undo that disastrous legacy & end the invasion – but all they’ll get is another of Putin’s puppets.”

The buck for Russia’s persistent inability to conquer the much smaller Ukraine ultimately stops at Putin, so sacking Shoigu will probably be as effective at winning the war as shuffling the deck chairs on the Moskva. Vast incompetence, corruption and general military rot was allowed to fester under Shoigu’s watch, but Russian military problems predate not only his tenure, but even the Soviet Union. Traditionally Russia got its ass kicked in the first year of a war, learned from its mistakes, and used an endless supply of canon fodder to wear its enemies down.

Russia no longer has that endless supply of manpower. The Russian way of war was wasteful and incompetent long before the current slaughter, and now it’s unsuccessful and unsustainable. Ukraine is destroying a half-century of stockpiled Soviet weapons using largely NATO surplus equipment, and however the war ends, Russia will no longer be seen as a great military power, much less a near-peer to the US and NATO. Russia occasionally seems to act more competently than they did in the early phases of the war, but they’re still using meatgrinder tactics that slaughter their own troops. Their notorious lack of NCOs means institutional knowledge has been hard to retain and transmit in the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances.

In a normal society, the Russian military obvious dysfunction would fall squarely on the head of Shoigu, but Russia is not a normal society. The Russian military needs reform, but it’s needed reform for pretty much the entirety of its post-Soviet existence (and much of its Soviet existence to boot). Shoigu was appointed Minister of Defense precisely because he wasn’t a reformer, as predecessor Anatoly Serdyukov had attempted to reform the military, and had stepped on far too many well-shod corrupt toes in the process.

Shoigu’s successor Andrei Belousov doesn’t exactly have typical profile you’d expect from a Minister of Defense:

He studied economics at Moscow State University and graduated with honors in 1981.

From 1981 to 1986, Belousov was probationer-researcher and then junior researcher in the simulation laboratory of human-machine systems of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.

If you were a full-time student in the Soviet Union during the period, you could avoid compulsory military service by going straight into the reserve officer services without actually doing any actual military duty. That timeline suggests Belousov went that route.

From 1991 to 2006, he was head of laboratory in the Institute of Economic Forecasting in the Russian Academy of Science. He was external advisor to prime minister from 2000 to 2006.

Belousov served as deputy minister of economic development and trade for two years from 2006 to 2008.

From 2008 to 2012, he was director of the finances and economic department in the Russian Prime Minister’s office.

Belousov has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.

On 21 May 2012, he was appointed minister of economic development to the cabinet led by prime minister Dimitri Medvedev. Belousov succeeded Elvira Nabiullina as minister of economic development.

On 24 June 2013, he was appointed as Putin’s Presidential Assistant in Economic Affairs.

On 21 January 2020, Belousov was appointed as First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia in Mikhail Mishustin’s Cabinet. From 30 April to 19 May 2020, Belousov was appointed by Vladimir Putin as Acting Prime Minister of Russia, temporarily replacing Mikhail Mishustin, after the latter was diagnosed with coronavirus. According to Politico, he is one possible successor to Putin.

So he’s a Putin toady with no military background. He will probably come in with considerable authority, but no knowledge of where the bodies are buried, or which members of the general staff are lying to him (probably all of them). The thermocline of truth is a danger for any organization, especially a national military, especially for a dictatorship where regime critics suffer alarmingly high rates of defenestration.

Can a career political functionary with no military experience successfully reform a vast national military? It’s within the realm of possibility, but no examples spring to mind. Both Casper Weinberger and Donald Rumsfeld had served in the military. Belousov could be the second coming of Henry L. Stimson, and it would still take him a minimum of 6-12 months to find all the levers he needed to actually reform the Russian military. And I would wager money that Belousov isn’t the second coming of Henry L. Stimson.

I think the most likely outcome of replacing Shoigu with Belousov will be a period where Russia switches from its current course of slow, grinding stupidity for a few months of much quicker and more disasterous stupidity.

Police Flee High Crime California For Texas

May 12th, 2024

People like to feel like they’re appreciated and make a difference. In crime-friendly California, police don’t, so they’re headed to Texas.

Hundreds of California cops are fleeing to Texas to escape ‘soft-on-crime’ policies they say have made their jobs ‘pointless’, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Rank-and-file officers up to department chiefs have hit out at state legislators, claiming a succession of ‘anti-law enforcement’ policies have made their work impossible.

Overworked and unsupported, they have instead taken up jobs in Texas and other states that are seen as tough on crime.

Evan Leona, 38, who ditched his job as a detective in a multi-agency gang unit in Fresno, California, to work for Denton Police in Texas, in 2022, said he had met ‘more than a hundred officers’ in the Dallas / Fort Worth area who had fled California.

‘There are five officers who have come from various agencies in California on my shift alone in Denton,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘The justice system just works a lot better here.’

At least in Texas, we don’t have a one-party state that’s institutionally hostile to police and the rule of law. Some locales in Texas have suffered spiking crime rates thanks to stupid policies and Soros-backed DAs (I’m looking at you, Austin), but Democrat-run California is hostile to law enforcement from top to bottom, wants to put felons back on the streets and wants to tax lawful gun owners out of existence.

Leona said the majority of those who leave headed to Texas, with others finding work in states such as Montana and Arizona.

It comes as the Golden State is hemorrhaging thousands of police every year, with numbers down by more than 5,000 since 2019.

There are now fears that high-crime Californian cities are suffering a brain drain in law enforcement, leaving the public unprotected as criminals run riot.

Just like Republicans said would happen. What are the odds?

Ray Bottenfield, a former Santa Monica College Police Captain who retired to Hewitt, Texas, admitted it had become increasingly difficult to retain or recruit officers due to the lack of support from the state.

‘When you’re getting beaten up constantly, your cost of living is getting worse and you’re dealing with all this political stuff, it is overwhelming,’ he told DailyMail.com.

Many in law enforcement blame controversial legislation including Proposition 47 and 57 for turning prisons into ‘revolving doors’ and putting their lives at risk.

Proposition 47 legalized shoplifting. Proposition 57 created legal revolving doors to put felons back on the street.

Gina Miller, a former deputy at San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told DailyMail.com that California’s legal system had left officers feeling ‘like whatever they did was pointless’.

The 37-year-old moved to Texas in 2021 and now works for Lewisville Police Department, around 25 miles north of Dallas.

She said her work now had a purpose again, adding: ‘If I take someone to jail they’re actually going to stay in jail until they see a judge.’

Officer Miller said some of her former California colleagues had quit to take up desk jobs tackling welfare fraud because they no longer felt safe patrolling the streets.

In particular, she hit out at Proposition 57, which she claims has let violent offenders onto the streets.

Put forward by then-Governor Jerry Brown and passed by voters in 2016, the law was designed to reduce prison overcrowding by offering the possibility of early parole for non-violent offenders.

But critics highlighted a loophole that meant offenses such as domestic violence and assault with a deadly weapon were not included under a list of violent offenses.

It came under the spotlight after it was revealed that Smiley Martin, a suspect in a 2022 mass shooting in Sacramento that left six dead, was released early from a ten-year sentence for domestic violence and assault under provisions set out in Proposition 57.

Miller claims the law has also put officers’ lives at risk by opening the door for violent criminals.

The officer, whose last assignment during her 11-year stint at San Bernadino was in the relatively safe and affluent city of Rancho Cucamonga, said four of her colleagues at the Sheriff’s Department were shot during her final six months.

One of them, Sergeant Dominic Vaca, 43, was killed after he was shot pursuing a motorcycle without a license plate in 2021.

There is no indication that the suspect, Bilal Winston Shabazz, had been released early under Proposition 57.

But Miller said such policies had created a general lawlessness within the state, leaving officers and the public feeling unsafe.

She recalled a time she took a man to jail for putting a loaded gun to his wife’s head, only for him to be released the same day.

‘I got into this job to try to help people and make a difference,’ she said. ‘It was heartbreaking to be telling this victim, “I know your husband just tried to kill you, but he’s already out of jail, so just call us if he comes back”.

‘To see their faces, it wears you down. You’re like: “This is stupid, because I can’t do anything for anybody”.’

Officer Leona, 38, who spent five years in Tulare County before serving in Fresno County Sheriff’s Office for a decade, said he was hospitalized following an assault by a violent criminal.

He said the suspect, who was ‘presumably high on narcotics’, had been chasing school children before running into a stranger’s garden.

A standoff with police ensued.

‘At one point, he hit me over the head with a board,’ he recounted. ‘I hit him with my baton. He picked me up and threw me through a sliding glass window into the kitchen of this lady’s house.

‘I was bleeding all over the place. He was bleeding. We’re rolling around in the kitchen.

‘It took eight officers to finally subdue him. I broke my hand. I had to get sutures on my face.

‘Another officer broke his wrist and a third officer had to get sutures or stitches with it.

‘He was only in custody for a couple months. And then he got released.’

Miller also claimed Proposition 47 had turned California’s prisons into ‘revolving doors’.

The measure, passed by voters in 2014, reclassified some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, including shoplifting where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950.

It has been blamed by some, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and California retail head Rachel Michelin for a rise in thefts after scores of stores in the state suffered brazen heists.

Sounds like there’s a grand bargain to be had: California sends Texas all its good law enforcement officers, and in return Texas sends California all the homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens so beloved by the Democratic Party over ordinary, law-abiding citizens. Then we’ll see which state prospers more. (Except we’re already seeing it. People have been leaving California for Texas for over a decade.)

Decline is a choice, and California voters have decided that they side with the Democratic Party and George Soros in embracing high crime rates and treating police and Republicans as the villains.

Now they get to live with the consequences of their choices.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

China: Old And Busted: 1 Bed, 1 Bath. The New Hotness: 1 Bed In Bathroom

May 11th, 2024

How bad does housing suck if you’re poor and live in Shanghai, China? This much:

  • “Shanghai’s landlords are quite ingenious, managing to convert even the smallest spaces into rentable rooms at high prices.”
  • Bathroom with a ladder to a crude loft above it? 600 yuan. (Exchange rate is currently running just above 7 yuan to the dollar.)
  • At least that had air-conditioning. For 300 yuan, you can get a room barely big enough for a small bed with two holes punched in the wall for ventilation.
  • For the same price, you can get a bathroom with a bed in the crawlspace right behind the toilet. “After using the toilet, the smell lingers in the room. Also don’t turn the shower head [over the tiny sink] on too high or it’ll soak the bed.”
  • One room is a twice-coffin size crawlspace off a balcony for 1,500 yuan.
  • But wait! For a mere 50 yuan, a guy rented a 0.3 square meter crawlspace he can’t fully lie down in. “Some local netizens from Shanghai commented that a closet could not be rented for 50 yuan, the price being at least 120 yuan.”
  • “This design is really thoughtful! Knowing you’d have to squat to cook noodles, they smartly place a toilet right here, complete with a door!”
  • “Here’s another place for 500 yuan rent combining living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom all in one!” Complete with cardboard box bed in the entry. “There’s a simple induction cooker for cooking, but it’s a tight squeeze for anyone a bit larger, though there is an exhaust fan. This stove is too far from the toilet. It’s inconvenient to cook while you are using a toilet, but when you shower you can easily stir fry at the same time.” No AC, but the landlord said they could add it for 200 extra yuan rent…
  • Of course, those exciting bed-in-toilet apartments are only available to people who can afford to pay any money for rent. Many can’t. “There are also groups known as Knights of the Bridge Underpass. In big cities, you can deliver food without renting a place. We found a bridge where several delivery guys and girls live.”
  • We’ve covered problems with youth despair in China before, including both the “lie flat” and “let it rot” movements.
  • “How do you deal with water and electricity?…First you can use water from public toilets, but this water is only for washing and laundry, not drinking.” To be fair, they show sinks in public toilets, so I imagine that’s where they’re getting their water, but it’s China, so who knows?
  • “Drinking water is bought from villagers nearby.”
  • “Electricity can be sourced from the batteries of delivery ebikes, which are rented for 300 to 400 a month. You can swap many each day, then connect an inverter to the battery you get 220 volt household electricity, and that solves that problem.” (220 volts was evidently standardized by the nationalist government in 1930.)
  • There’s a video blogger who lives in his solar equipped van, and he seems much better off than any other housing option covered in this video.
  • “It’s not just Shanghai. Nearly all major Chinese cities host these workers, often labeled as a low-end population. These include delivery workers, ride share drivers, factory or construction site laborers, or college students from out of town.” During America’s industrial boom, working in a factory allowed you to buy a house. Thanks to China’s factory boom, factory workers can enjoy living under a bridge.
  • “Working odd jobs, they hustle in every corner of the city, typically working over 10 hours a day without a single day off. The city’s prosperity doesn’t touch them. Their daily focus is simply on earning more money.”
  • The situation is slightly better in Beijing, which has 3 square meter apartments for 2000 yuan, and Shenzhen offers “urban villages” (I think we’d call them apartment complexes) with 1 bedroom apartments for 700 yuan a month.
  • In Guangdong, the so-called “Shango Gods” have completely given up on life and just live under bridges.
  • “The unemployed crowd together both men and women in an area filled with unbearable odors.”
  • “They work one day and rest for a week. A day’s pay can be 200 yuan, enough to sit in an Internet cafe for a week. They eat steamed buns, buy three or four to last the day.”
  • “In many cities, there are many of these so-called Shango Gods who have completely given up on life. ‘Already seeing no hope. This kind of life is actually pretty good. Wherever you go, just find a place to lie down and don’t think about anything, because no matter how hard you try, without connections it won’t work.'”
  • America is hardly free of homelessness or tiny apartments. But America’s homeless population is overwhelmingly mentally ill alcoholics and drug addicts living off handouts whose plight is catered to by a Homeless Industrial Complex that rakes off graft pretending to help them, not able-bodied young people willing to work but unable to afford even the meanest accommodations. And the smallest New York City apartments you can find on YouTube all look lightyears better than the horrors seen in Shanghai.

    Communists have long bragged about working for the proletariat, but in Communist China, the actual proletarians have been reduced to living under bridges.

    LinkSwarm For May 10, 2024

    May 10th, 2024

    Details on the people and organizations dedicated to burning America down, more Biden corruption, more of his censorship regime, a few Russo-Ukrainian War updates, and a pedophile gets ventilated. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Park MacDougald at Tablet has a really in-depth look at the radical network setting America on fire.

    Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.

    But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.

    The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago. Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades. At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.

    These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall. Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

    “What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”

    The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.

    Snip.

    The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

    JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.

    SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

    Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

    Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

    WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting.

    More info on the people backing the Stop Cop City protestors:

    Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested. CJA’s website promotes a grab bag of far-left causes, and includes a “Free Palestine” page proclaiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” To this day—eight months after the Georgia RICO indictment alleged that the Forest Justice Defense Fund was a fraudulent charity paying for ammunition purchases in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy—CJA maintains a Stop Cop City page urging readers to donate to the Forest Justice Defense Fund and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. CJA also endorsed a “statement of solidarity” with Stop Cop City, which claimed, by the inexorable logic of intersectionality, the fight against “gentrification and police violence” in Atlanta as part of the fight against climate change.

    CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network. But it has another financial supporter, one that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”

    Read the whole thing.

  • More on the same subject: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.” Surprising to people who haven’t been paying attention, maybe.

    The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

    Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.

    Soros declined to comment, but a spokesperson with the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is the founder and chairman, said in a statement that it “has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously funded the Tides Foundation and other groups, said it no longer has active grants to Tides. It also does not support Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow.

    Covers some of the same ground as the Tablet piece, but still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • MIT bans diversity statements. Good. Such racist dross only hinders real engineering.
  • Something resembling justice? “Judge Indefinitely Postpones Trump’s Classified Documents Trial.”

    Former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents is being postponed indefinitely.

    Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon ordered a new pretrial schedule for motions and discovery Tuesday afternoon after the classified documents case was originally scheduled to go to trial later this month.

    “The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon said in her order.

    The trial will likely be pushed until after the 2024 presidential election this November.

  • “The Only Problem Joe Biden Has Is That People Think He’s a Bad President.”

    It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately.

    No incumbent president should ever want to be near 43 percent in a head-to-head ballot test. Yet here is Joe Biden at 43 percent in the latest CNN poll, 43 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll, 43 percent in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, and 43 percent in the latest Harvard/Harris poll. (NB: Biden ticked up to 48 when Harvard/Harris pushed respondents to choose between Trump and Biden, and the Economist/YouGov poll had RFK Jr. in the mix.)

    Detect a trend? (There are other polls that have Biden a little higher.)

    It’s no mystery why Biden’s polling is at crisis levels.

    An incumbent president’s level of support in a reelection bid is typically tethered closely to his job approval. It’s hard to get much more than a couple of points above it. Biden’s job approval is at 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average and at 39.3 in the 538 polling average.

  • How Hamas Bought Joe Biden.

    Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.

    As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.

  • In one of the world’s least anticipated sequel, a Chinese lab has spliced snippets of Ebola to create a deadly new virus.

  • More details on the Biden Administration’s censorship regime.

    Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 800-page report that reads like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

    Take a look:

    • In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”
    • In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”
    • In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”
  • There’s chutzpah, and then there’s chutzpah: “Denver Illegals Make Demands, Include ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Food, Lawyers, Unlimited Showers And Warnings Before Evictions.”
  • It was fun seeing Ukraine’s Bradley’s take out Russian tanks with their Bushmaster, but they just took out a T-80 from a mile away with their TOW missile, which is the recommended method of a Bradley killing a Russian tank.
  • Ukrainian drone hits Bashkiria Oil Refinery some 1,500km from Ukraine’s border.
  • In addition to using high tech weapons against Russia, Ukraine is also using caltrops to shred their tires, a weapon first deployed by the Roman empire.
  • “Pedophile Surprised By Seattle Police Takes The Hallway Temperature Challenge.” Purp pulls a gun and gets multiple mags dumped into him. (Hat tip: Active response via KR Training.)
  • I have heard the Social Justice Warrior suing, each to each. I do not think that they will sue for me… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The most gun-friendly states of 2024. Texas ranks 8th.

  • So the City of Pasadena, Texas was hassling Azael Sepulveda’s Oz Mechanics car repair shop over parking for no apparent reason, came to an agreement to settle his lawsuit, and now says, get this, they don’t have to follow the agreement because they claim the city enjoys “immunity” from lawsuits. “The property he purchased had housed another auto mechanic shop for more than 30 years and included five parking spaces, but under revised ordinances, the city demanded that Sepulveda provide 28 parking spots.” Somebody in the Pasadena city government deserves a dick punching…
  • Brandon Herrera finally produces an AK-50 that doesn’t jam or spontaneously disassemble.
  • The Jerry Seinfeld Pop-Tart Movie Is The Least Funny And, Quite Possibly, Worst Movie Ever Made.” I rather doubt the latter, but the trailer I saw of it did look pretty dire.
  • Hamas Celebrates Proposed Ceasefire With Rocket Barrage.”
  • “Uighur Slaves Struggling To Keep Up With Demand For Palestinian Headscarves.”
  • Save the puppies!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Paxton Sues NGO For Aiding Illegal Alien Invasion

    May 9th, 2024

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took time out from his busy schedule of suing the Biden Administration to sue an NGO aiding the Biden Administration’s illegal alien invasion.

    The legal battle between Attorney General Ken Paxton and the non-governmental organization (NGO) Annunciation House, a nonprofit Catholic charity, has a new development after Paxton stated he has reviewed documents that show the group’s “operations are designed to facilitate illegal border crossings and to conceal illegally present aliens from law enforcement.”

    Paxton has filed a temporary injunction in an effort “to halt its systemic criminal conduct in Texas.”

    “Any NGO facilitating the unlawful entry of illegal aliens into Texas is undermining the rule of law and potentially jeopardizing the safety and wellbeing of our citizens,” said Paxton in a press release. “All NGOs who are complicit in Joe Biden’s illegal immigration catastrophe and think they are above the law should consider themselves on notice.”

    Included in the 585-page legal filing is recorded testimony from an employee with Annunciation House.

    According to the filing, Annunciation House’s executive director “regularly admits aliens that it knows came into the country illegally; and chooses not to require any form of identification from its guests.”

    Additionally, the director “admitted that Annunciation House refuses essentially any and all law enforcement requests to enter the premises in the absence of a warrant.”

    In March, an El Paso judge blocked a previous lawsuit Paxton had filed against Annunciation House. The judge was critical of Paxton’s motivations, stating, “There is a real and credible concern that the attempt to prevent Annunciation House from conducting business in Texas was predetermined.”

    “Both the Attorney General and Annunciation House are now obliged to litigate this matter within the guidelines set forth by the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, created to ensure fair play between litigants,” the judge wrote.

    Paxton filed the initial lawsuit after Annunciation House did not produce documents and records sought by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The nonprofit said it was only given “one day to turn over a broad swath of records to the Attorney General without an explanation.”

    Founded in 1978, Annunciation House is filed as a 501(c)3 organization, which allows it to be recognized as a nonprofit charitable, religious, or educational organization that receives tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service.

    The organization says it has “hosted over 500,000 migrants, refugees, and immigrants from over 40 countries.”

    The illegal alien invasion of America is being guided and funded by radical leftwing entities (NGOs and others) in cooperation with the Biden Administration. Ken Paxton and Texas have proven that the states don’t have to take this conspiracy to break the law lying down.

    Profiles In Pettiness

    May 8th, 2024

    From California comes an amazing profile in pettiness. A school superintendent threatened action against members of a softball team and their parent over not clapping loudly enough for her own daughter.

  • Marian Phelps was superintendent of the Powey Unified School District north of San Diego.
  • “As you see, everyone clapped, but Phelps was upset because she said the claps weren’t loud enough.” Never be the first one to stop clapping for Stalin’s daughter, comrade…
  • “Phelps accused Doe and her friends on the softball team of not clapping loud enough when her daughter received the most valuable player award…the lawsuit says Phelps ordered school personnel to investigate the incident as a case of bullying.”
  • “One of the softball coaches said he was concerned about being fired. ‘The other coach who stood up to this has been fired. and so I’m in the same predicament.'”
  • “After meeting in a closed door session, school board members for the Poway Unified School District have voted to unanimously terminate superintendent Marian Phelps.” It seems like lying to the board finally did Phelps in.
  • There’s a line in the Christopher Durang play Beyond Therapy, where someone recounts going to see a production of Peter Pan, where Peter says “You didn’t clap loud enough! Tinkerbell’s dead!” It’s hard to imagine the level of pettiness it takes for a school district superintendent to kill their own career over people not clapping loudly enough. I suppose this is the inevitable consequence of entitlement thinking and obsessing over “microaggressions”…

    Given The Chance, Austin Voters Escape Austin

    May 7th, 2024

    Not living in Austin, I missed the news that several de-annexation elections were on the May 4th ballot.

    In 2017, Texas lawmakers passed a bill stopping cities in large counties from being able to annex areas if residents didn’t want to be part of the city. But between the time the law passed and when it went into effect, many areas were annexed.

    Last year, lawmakers passed House Bill 3053 to allow neighborhoods that were annexed during that time period to disannex, if voters approve.

    Lost Creek in West Austin is the largest area proposing to deannex itself from the city. It’s been a part of Austin since 2015, but many residents have been petitioning to separate them from the city, claiming they’ve been paying city taxes for services that have been lacking. Neighbors in the area have had to pay for off-duty sheriffs to patrol the area.

    The results? Anywhere voters voted (for a couple of propositions, literally no one showed up to vote), they voted to get the hell out of Austin.

    Three areas voted to disannex from Austin after saying they’re paying for services they don’t receive.

    Katieva Kizer lives on Blue Goose Road in northeast Austin, which is one of the six neighborhoods that voted to leave Austin’s city limits on Saturday.

    “The whole time we’ve been with them, it’s been a run around as to who should provide anything,” Kizer said.

    Texas passed HB 3053 which stopped cities in large counties from being able to annex areas if residents didn’t want to be part of the city. But between March 2015 and December 2017, many neighborhoods were annexed.

    “My grandfather fought the annexation of this little area the whole time here until he died in 2015,” Kizer said. “He was the kind of guy that would call the county … Call the city and tell them, ‘You need to come do things.’”

    Kizer said they never got any benefits from the city in the seven years they were annexed and that their roads and water infrastructure deteriorated.

    “I did call and contact the city for services, and they’re like, ‘No, we’re not up to date in your area to provide those services,'” Kizer said. “Huge potholes everywhere … They didn’t actually come and fix our road until they started doing new construction in the rest of the area. It was only to benefit the newcomers to the area, not anybody that’s already been here and paying taxes.”

    Lost Creek, Blue Goose Road and River Place Outparcels voted to leave Austin on Saturday. Kizer was one of the three people to vote and said there are nine or 10 houses in their 28-acre neighborhood.

    “They can’t tell you that every vote doesn’t count because three of us voted, and it could have just been one of us,” Kizer said. “If it was none of us, then it would have stayed the same. So every vote does matter. It does count … Because just the three of us made the decision for all of us.”

    Disannexing means they will no longer receive certain city services, like fire or police protection, no street maintenance, public health sanitation, and more.

    “There weren’t a lot of things to look forward to or that they were giving us,” Kizer said. “So, the major benefit is that I get to go back to being county taxed.”

    Lost Creek, the largest of the neighborhoods at 738 acres, had more than 1,500 people vote with 91% for disannexing. River Place Outparcels, a 212-acre area, only had one person vote for disannexing, and no one vote against it.

    The City of Austin seems to have no problem finding money for the homeless industrial complex or funding toy trains, but falls down on basic necessities like fixing potholes.

    As foretold by the Historical Records

    Until Austin gets its act together (or the charter is revoked), maybe the legislature should let any neighborhood in Austin vote to disannex itself from the People’s Republic…

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    Sony Surrenders In Battle Of Helldivers 2

    May 6th, 2024

    It’s always fun when a giant multinational corporation tries to pull an extra-slimy move and the consumer backlash is so fierce that they have to back down.

    Helldivers 2 is a super-popular game created by Arrowhead Game Studios but published by Sony that sold a zillion copies on release. Then Sony got the bright idea to retroactively force PC gamers to link their Steam accounts to their PlayStation Network (PSN) accounts, even though this was not a requirement at launch, and the fact that PSN isn’t even available in some 177 regions would mean the game would be rendered useless for multitudes of buyers. The outcry was so vast and fierce that Sony had to back down.

    Following extensive player backlash, Sony has walked back its plans to require PC players of Helldivers 2 to link their Steam accounts with a PlayStation Network (PSN) account. The requirement had previously been scheduled to take effect May 6. Now, it will be optional for PC players of the third-person sci-fi shooter.

    “Helldivers fans—we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update,” Sony wrote early Monday morning. “The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward. We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans.”

    Arrowhead Game Studios CEO and Helldivers Creative Director Johan Pilestedt thanked Sony for changing its stance. “I am impressed by the willpower of the Helldivers 2 community and your ability to collaborate,” Pilestedt wrote Monday morning. “I want to thank our partners and friends at PlayStation for quickly and effectively making the decision to leave PSN linking optional. We together want to set a new standard for what a live game is, and how developers and community can support each other to create the best game experiences.”

    Sony’s decision to switch course comes after Helldivers 2 faced criticism from fans over the PSN account-linking requirement. The game, which was released back in February, did not require PC players to create or link a PSN account upon launch and didn’t clearly warn players that they would have to create one at a later date or later lose their ability to play the game. According to Sony, PSN account-linking wasn’t required at launch due to “technical issues.”

    Steam gamers felt blind-sided by the announcement that they would have to sign up for what is primarily an account for PS4 and PS5 console owners despite being PC gamers. Others expressed frustration because PSN accounts aren’t available in every country. This would have meant that gamers in 177 countries—mainly nations in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Africa—would have no longer been able to play Helldivers 2 without a VPN. Some players cited security concerns with Sony, such as the data breaches it faced in 2011 and 2023, as the reason they don’t want to create or connect a PSN account.

    Here’s Penguinz0 covering the decision and its walk-back in much more pungent terms:

    “Sony, leave it alone.”

    Indeed.

    Chalk up a rare win for the good guys over corporate stupidity.

    Is Austin’s Toy Train Finally Dead?

    May 5th, 2024

    Austin’s liberal establishment has been trying to trick taxpayers into pouring billions into their light rail boondoggle for decades, finally winning an apparent victory when voters approved a scheme in 2020. But it turns out that the terms of the ballot language may have doomed the project.

    Austin’s controversial light rail program, approved by voters in 2020, could be null and void due to an allegedly unconstitutional financing proposal.

    According to press reports, during a court hearing, proponents of the transit scheme found themselves unable to defend the project’s ability to borrow money. Absent this authority, it is unlikely to continue.

    At issue is the convoluted structure of the measure presented to voters in 2020. Designed to evade state limits on debt and borrowing (which seemed like a money laundering arrangement), the measure created a so-called “governmental corporation” called the Austin Transit Partnership. According to the 2020 proposal, the Austin Transit Partnership was supposed to be funded by a one-time increase to the city’s maintenance and operations property tax.

    However, proponents of the project lowballed the cost estimate.

    Austin’s liberal establishment, lowball cost to get something passed?

    Combined with Biden’s inflation, this has led to a situation where the Austin Transit Partnership now needs to borrow substantial sums.

    Unfortunately for proponents, state law prohibits using maintenance and operations property tax dollars to pay debt for so-called ‘governmental corporations.’ While a second component of the property tax—interest and sinking—could be used to pay debt, that’s not what was approved in 2020.

    It was obvious to any non-Democrat that the Project Connect light rail project was a boondoggle from the git-go, just as the previous light rail effort was a failure. The fact that more than three years on, Project Connect still doesn’t have a definite plan or path is a handy indication of its dysfunction. Hopefully Texas courts will put it out of Austin taxpayer’s misery.

    But I’m sure lots of consultants got paid quite handsomely…

    Kentucky Ballistics Tangles With .50 BMG Again

    May 4th, 2024

    I assume that everyone reading this remembers when Scott of Kentucky Ballistics almost died when a spicy .50 BMG round blew up his gun. Evidently Scott can’t resist the siren song of the .50 BMG, and here’s two more videos where he rides the lightning.

    First: I suppose it was inevitable that someone would build this, and that someone turned out to be Noreen: A .50 BMG pistol. And yes, he straps on the body armor before shooting it.

  • It’s still technically a rifle because of the 16 1/2″ barrel.
  • Bolt action.
  • The usual shooting of food (tubs of mayonnaise and corn syrup, eggplant, and, for some reason, canned snails) ensues.
  • The muzzle blast is “like getting punched in the face by a really weak person constantly.”
  • No, he doesn’t attempt to shoot it one-handed.
  • Next up: He examines the danger of “scope kiss” when firing guns, starting small and working all the way up to a Smith & Wesson 500 Magnum and a Serbu BFG-50.

    Yeah, you don’t want to have your face too close to the scope when you fire…