LinkSwarm for April 2, 2021

April 2nd, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to a Good Friday LinkSwarm! I had the day off, so I slept ridiculously late, which is why you’re getting this in the late afternoon evening.

  • “9 Crazy Examples of Unrelated Waste and Partisan Spending in Biden’s $2 Trillion ‘Infrastructure’ Proposal.”

    1. $10 Billion to Create a ‘Civilian Climate Corp’

    The Biden administration proposes spending $10 billion to create a “Civilian Climate Corp.” The White House claims that “This $10 billion investment will put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice through a new Civilian Climate Corps.”

    2. $20 Billion to ‘Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice’

    The proposal sets aside a whopping $20 billion—more than the latest COVID package spent on vaccines—for “a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.”

    3. $175 Billion in Subsidies for Electric Vehicles

    Electric vehicles: A technological novelty so good it won’t catch on without hundreds of billions in subsidies. At least, that’s apparently what the Biden administration thinks, as its infrastructure proposal earmarks a “$174 billion investment to win the electric vehicle market.”

    The spending will take the form of manufacturing subsidies and consumer tax credits, which historically have benefitted wealthy families most. For comparison, the proposal carves out more for green energy goodies than it does on the total $115 billion to “modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main streets that are in most critical need of repair.”

    It’s pork all the way down.

  • Who’s in charge of the Biden Administration?

    After Joe Biden’s performance last Thursday, every American should be demanding to talk to the manager. That’s because while President Joe Biden’s pathetic display during his “matinee” presser showed clearly that he is not in charge of our country, it also begged the obvious follow-up question not being asked by the 25 reporters in the room: If Joe Biden isn’t in charge of running our government, who is?

    If you didn’t actually watch the press conference—and every American should-especially those who voted against Trump by voting for Biden because they’d thought he was an improvement—by now, you have doubtless read the accounts of the President’s cliff notes that included scripted talking points and photos of the journalists upon whom he was directed to call. His staff treated him in much the same way as does the family of someone in the early stages of dementia, where they put pictures on doors and cabinets as a reminder of what goes where.

    If Joe Biden were my next-door neighbor, his condition could be described as sad, and he would be afforded every consideration and allowance possible for someone entering the final stage of the aging process. He is not, however, my next-door neighbor. He is supposed to be the President of the United States. His performance was mortifying. This is one of the most powerful men in the world. He controls our budget. He controls our military. He controls our nuclear weapons. What he clearly does not control is himself.

    And if he isn’t in control of himself, then who is? Who is in charge?

  • You know that Slow Joe has told a particularly egregious lie when even the Washington Post has to call him on it.
  • Matt Taibbi: “Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus”:

    Update 3/21/21 “All 17 intelligence agencies,” October 19, 2016. Before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and others publicly stated that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four agencies. It was actually a hand-picked team from three agencies, and the chief conclusion from that group came mainly from CIA chief John Brennan, who in his own book, “Undaunted,” published in 2020, revealed that he had overlooked dissenting analysis from two members of the working group. Brennan said he believed “the quality of the sources justified the high confidence,” but the Times and other outlets reported that Brennan was basing much of his confidence on a single human source in Russia whose information was allowed to bypass the normal vetting process….

    So a story that began as an assessment on Russian interference agreed upon by “all seventeen agencies,” became four agencies, then it was a hand-picked group from three agencies dominated by the CIA director, who overrode dissenting analysts within the group, likely because of confidence in one human source.

    There are twenty five entries on the list, and Taibbi admits he could have gone “on and on.”

  • Democrats finally give up on stealing an Iowa congressional seat.
  • Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down Democratic Governor Tony Evers’ mask mandate. Good.
  • How cancel culture is like the East German Stasi.

  • Russia is building up forces on the Ukraine border again.
  • Just in case all my previous posts on this subject were unclear: “Free States Faring Far Better Than Lockdown States in One Huge Way, New Data Show”

    The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. First, we saw that states with the harshest restrictions didn’t necessarily achieve the best COVID-19 death outcomes. Florida has fared far better than New York and New Jersey, for example, and multiple studies have found no correlation between lockdown stringency and death rates.

    Yet lockdowns have come at an enormous economic and human cost. We’ve seen mental health problems and child suicide spikes, an increase in domestic violence, an uptick in drug overdoses, and much, much more. And, of course, the economic toll of shutting down businesses and criminalizing “non-essential” livelihoods has been devastating.

    The national unemployment rate was a poor if not disastrous 6.2 percent in February. Yet the just-released state-level unemployment rates for last month show that the devastation hasn’t been equal across the board. New Labor Department data reveal that many free states have returned to nearly their pre-pandemic unemployment rates—while lockdown states dominate the wrong end of the list.

  • Why isn’t everyone in Texas dying? “The lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.”
  • Speaking of which: A timeline on the one year anniversary of 15 days to slow the spread.
  • Louis Farrakhan supporter Noah Green killed one capitol police officer and injured another. Now that the media knows it wasn’t a white trump supporter, expect the story to disappear. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Delta hates Georgia’s policies. Communist China? Not so much.
  • The Democrats “increase election fraud so we can win” bill is unconstitutional. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “75% Of All U.S. Voters, 69% Of Black Voters Support Voter ID Laws.”
  • “Cuomo Ordered Aides To Conceal Nursing Home Death Numbers While He Negotiated $4M Book Deal.” Sounds like a corrupt, indictable offense to me…
  • The NCAA’s free athletics plantation is coming under increased scrutiny at the Supreme Court. Even famously taciturn Justice Clarence Thomas asked questions.
  • Try to contain your shock, but Cruz Noguez, the mano owned the SUV involved in the carash that killed 13 illegal aliens, was a coyote.
  • Related: “Austin Resident Faces Life in Prison for Alleged Smuggling That Killed 8 Illegal Aliens.”

    Prosecutors have also charged Austin resident Sebastian Tovar, age 24, with transporting illegal aliens resulting in death for an incident that killed eight people on March 15.

    The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a press release that a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer tried to stop Tovar, who led police on a 50-mile car chase.

    “Traveling north into the southbound lane on Highway 277, Tovar collided with another vehicle head-on, resulting in the death of eight illegal aliens that had been in Tovar’s pickup truck,” the DOJ said. “The driver and passenger of the vehicle into which Tovar collided are hospitalized and in stable condition.”

    The DOJ said that, after the incident, border patrol agents apprehended 12 illegal aliens, two of whom confessed to being connected to Tovar’s alleged smuggling activities.

    The defendants in the March 4 incident are 28-year-old Isidro Rodriguez Jr. and 18-year-old Bianca Michelle Trujillo-Lopez. They face the possibility of life in federal prison if convicted.

    The indictment charges Rodriguez and Trujillo-Lopez with illegal alien transportation resulting in death, illegal alien transportation resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy, and two counts of conspiracy.

    “Court records allege that on March 4, 2021, the defendants were traveling on FM 2523 near Del Rio when a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper attempted to stop them for speeding,” the DOJ said in a press release.

    “The driver, Trujillo-Lopez, tried to outrun the trooper, at times reaching speeds over 120 miles per hour. She ultimately lost control of her vehicle and rolled it multiple times after missing a curve on the road.”

  • Alas, state trooper Chad Walker died of his wounds. (Previously.)
  • Homeschooling triples during the pandemic
  • “Conservative Humorist Chad Prather Launches Campaign for Texas Governor.” He’s running against incumbent Governor Greg Abbott in the Republican primary. I can’t say that I’ve actually heard of Prather before (which would tend to bode ill for his chances), but he starts out with 196,000, which is more than a goodly number of Democratic Presidential candidates started out with. Of course, all of them lost too…
  • Dwight covers stopping the bleed, with a side order of Julia Child’s liver and a nice Chianti.
  • Review of Kong: Skull Island in advance of seeing Godzilla vs. Kong this weekend.
  • “Controversial Georgia Law Requires Poll Workers To Check Voters For A Pulse.”
  • “Actors Vow To Boycott Georgia And Only Film In The Xinjiang Region Of China.”
  • OK, I chuckled:

    And the incidental music is from Plants vs. Zombies…

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    Islamist Insurgency Besieges Mozambique City

    April 1st, 2021

    In our media’s relentless drive to sift through old tweets, there are several ongoing news stories given short shrift, such as an Islamist insurgency in Mozambique laying siege to a small city:

    Tens of thousands of people are feared to have been displaced following a deadly attack by Islamic State-linked insurgents on a gas hub town in northern Mozambique, aid agencies said, as rescuers searched for survivors on Tuesday.

    Many of those fleeing were believed to have scattered into dense forest or to have attempted to escape by boat when Palma came under attack on Wednesday, aid workers told Reuters. Some waded out to sea to hide, one survivor said.

    Mozambique’s government has confirmed dozens of deaths, including at least seven killed when militants ambushed a convoy of vehicles trying to escape a besieged hotel on Friday. Witnesses have described bodies in the streets, some of them beheaded.

    The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said it continued to receive reports of clashes in Palma and nearby areas on Tuesday.

    “It’s a real humanitarian catastrophe,” Lola Castro, World Food Programme regional director, told Reuters. “People are … scattered all over the place – by boat, by road.”

    Reuters has not been able to independently verify the accounts from Palma, a logistics hub for adjacent gas projects worth around $60 billion led by oil majors including Total. Most communications to the town were cut on Wednesday. Phone calls to Mozambique’s government and security officials went unanswered on Tuesday.

    Among the “shithole countries” in Africa, Mozambique (like many former Portuguese colonies) is one of the shitholiest, having suffered grievously under the policies of communist scumbag Samora Machel in the 1980s, and their per capita GDP is one of the lowest in the world. A majority Christian nation, Mozambique has been fighting an Islamist insurgency carried out by Ansar al-Sunna, AKA Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamo, AKA al-Shabaab, AKA the Islamic State, in Cabo Delgado province since 2015, and their jihadist modus operandi is very similar to that of Nigeria’s Boko Haram. Indeed, the Islamists brag about killing Christians. The Russian mercenary Wagner Group was hired to fight them, but don’t seem to have made any noticeable difference.

    A certain base level of Islamist insurgency seems to infect much of Africa. Both the Trump Administration and the French have poured considerable (if under-reported) military counter-insurgency assets into the Sahel in northern Africa, but thus far none have been involved in Mozambique. That may be about to change, thanks to a recent agreement between Mozambique and the U.S. government for U.S. special forces to train local forces, and the State Department designating al-Shabaab as a terrorist organization. Portugal is also sending some 60 trainers to help fight the insurgency.

    The precedent of Boko Haram suggests that Mozambique will be battling al-Shabaab for some time to come.

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »

    China Perfidy Update For March 31, 2021

    March 31st, 2021

    Death, taxes, and China’s communist government doing the world dirty are three unchanging verities in the modern world. Here’s a roundup of their recent misdeeds:

  • China’s contempt for us is evident in everything it does:

    Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides.

    Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a communist government.

    China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials.

    New York University students at a satellite campus in Shanghai were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities in two separate incidents earlier this month. Some U.S. diplomats in China were recently subjected to anal swab testing for COVID-19—supposedly “in error.”

    These examples of humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. China has engaged in the insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, engages in cyberwarfare, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.

    If China gives out money, it believes it owns the recipient. In the last five years, New York University has received some $47 million in gifts from China.

    The U.S. Department of Education recently cited Stanford University for failing to report more than $64 million in donations from Chinese sources since 2010. It’s no surprise that China recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.

  • Don’t look now, but China is grabbing another reef:

    About 220 Chinese fishing vessels, almost certainly part of China’s maritime militia, are now crowding around Whitsun Reef in the Spratly chain in the South China Sea in another attempt to break apart the Philippines.

    Whitsun is where the United States and the region should confront an increasingly expansionist China. The failure of the Obama administration to defend the Philippines in early 2012, in a confrontation similar to today’s, emboldened China’s regime to adopt an even more aggressive posture in its peripheral waters.

    Whitsun Reef is inside China’s infamous nine-dash line. The line on official maps defines an area informally known as the “cow’s tongue,” which includes about 85 percent of the South China Sea. Beijing maintains it has sovereignty over every feature there, including Whitsun, which Beijing has named Niue Jiao.

    China claims all the waters inside the dashes are sovereign as well, terming them “blue national soil.” There is no legal basis for an assertion of sovereignty of this sort.

    Whitsun, which Manila calls Julian Felipe Reef, is 175 nautical miles from Palawan, an island of the Philippines. The feature is within the Philippine “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ), the band of international water 12 to 200 nautical miles from a country’s shoreline.

    Since December, large Chinese trawlers have lashed themselves together and parked in formations near Whitsun. Vessels come and go, but the numbers have gone up over time. They have not been engaged in fishing.

    Beijing says the boats near Whitsun are sheltering from the weather, but they have not left in periods of sunny skies and calm seas.

    Near Whitsun, retired U.S. Navy Capt. James Fanell tells Gatestone, China is building “two concentric rings of new artificial island bases.” The outer ring is defined by Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief Reefs. The inside one is defined by Gaven, Johnson, and Hughes Reefs. Whitsun, 10 nautical miles east of Hughes Reef, is inside China’s South China Sea fortress.

    Beijing is employing the “Scarborough Model,” says Fanell, a former director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet. President Biden should be no stranger to Scarborough Shoal, also inside the “cow’s tongue.”

    Chinese vessels swarmed Scarborough after the Philippines detained Chinese poachers in early 2012. The shoal, just rocks above the high-tide waterline, is strategic because it guards the approaches to Manila and Subic Bays. It is only 124 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon and about 550 nautical miles from China’s Hainan Island.

    That spring, Washington brokered an agreement for both sides to withdraw their craft, but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough Shoal ever since.

    The Obama administration, despite the brazen Chinese seizure, decided not to enforce the agreement it had just arranged. As a “senior U.S. military official” told the Washington Post at the time, “I don’t think that we’d allow the U.S. to get dragged into a conflict over fish or over a rock.”

    And a goodly number of the idiots running Obama’s foreign policy are now back running Biden’s. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “China Mocks America for Black Lives Matter Riots It Fomented“:

    Although the United States’ stated policy objective vis-à-vis China is to continue President Donald Trump’s tough stance, the actual performance by the hapless team was anything but tough. Its agenda items included climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. No mention was made, however, of Beijing’s harsh treatment of the Hong Kong democracy movement, its horrific human rights record, or its aggressive behavior against Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Given all of that, plus the CCP’s blatant and brazen interference in U.S. domestic matters, including the espionage and intellectual property theft that helped justify closing China’s Houston consulate last year, at least some of those key issues might have been mentioned.

    Some of the reasons for the U.S. delegation’s reticence may have to do with just such Chinese influence operations, which have reached deeply into myriad U.S. institutions. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the CCP directs an organization called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which is under the authority of the CCP Central Committee. The China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), which, according to a December National Pulse report, operates under the authority of the UFWD, specifically targets U.S. media and journalists, often by sponsoring them for “familiarization trips” to China. The full list of outlets that reportedly gave “favorable coverage” to the CCP includes Fox News, the New York Times, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, The Hill, and many more. Additional mainstream outlets met with CUSEF officials in the United States.

    Every one of them either knew or should have known that the mission of the UFWD is to coordinate influence operations—propaganda—both domestically and abroad that stifles all criticism and spreads only positive views of China. Influencing those who influence American perceptions about China and the CCP means special attention for the full spectrum of U.S. media.

    In an October 2020 report, Newsweek identified hundreds of channels through which the CCP targeted “businesses, universities and think tanks, social and cultural groups, Chinese diaspora organizations, Chinese-language media and WeChat, the Chinese social media and messaging app.” Social media efforts to manipulate outcomes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election included hundreds of Facebook and Twitter accounts that pumped out divisive messaging.

    Snip.

    Let us conclude by returning to that Houston consulate, ordered closed in July 2020 by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It wasn’t just about espionage and intellectual property or technology theft. Chinese cadres posted there also were involved in direct interference in the U.S. political process, including encouraging and supporting Antifa and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement street protests.

    According to an August 2020 report in China Scope, which itself cited a Mandarin language report from Radio Free Asia in that same month, the Second Chief Directorate of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—its intelligence unit—sent staff members to the Houston consulate with a specific mission. That mission was to use data-mining technology to identify Americans who might be susceptible to messaging about participating in Antifa and BLM street protests. They then used the Tik Tok app to send those individuals videos on how to organize riots. Gordon Chang was right when he called CCP meddling ahead of the 2020 presidential election “an act of war.”

    At the Anchorage talks, Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi had the unmitigated gall to throw Black Lives Matter directly into Blinken’s face, saying: “The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as ‘Black Lives Matter.’” Blinken and his team, likely clueless about what went on at Beijing’s Houston consulate, offered not a murmur of protest.

    It’s worth mentioning that Alicia Garza, one of the three self-avowed Marxists who founded the Black Lives Matter movement, with a background in the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization, also runs a network of affiliated organizations. One of these is the Black Futures Lab. A click on the website’s “donate” button goes to a page that states: “Black Futures Lab is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.” Despite group denials of any affiliation between the two, there is no question that the CPA is supportive of the People’s Republic of China.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • How China has subverted America:

    For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

    A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

    In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

    Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

    Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.

    What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.

    Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite that loathed him.

    A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

    Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

    The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.

    Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”

    But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

    And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

    Snip.

    Even the Trump administration was split between hawks and accommodationists, caustically referred to by the former as “Panda Huggers.” The majority of Trump officials were in the latter camp, most notably Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Hollywood producer. While the film industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and appease, Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous market without observing CCP redlines. For example, in the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, Paramount offered to blur the Taiwan and Japan patches on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” jacket for the Chinese release of the film, but CCP censors insisted the patches not be shown in any version anywhere in the world.

    In the Trump administration, says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China. On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push back.”

    Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Some of those same businesses are finally hvaing second thoughts about China. “Clothier H&M [Hennes & Mauritz AB] and shoemakers Nike, New Balance, and Adidas have earned the ire of China’s Communist government. They did so by criticizing the regime’s abuse of Uyghurs and announcing that the companies would no longer get their cotton from Xinjiang, where Uyghur workers are forced to labor in slave-like conditions.” Good for them, though it still doesn’t make up for Nike’s wokeness. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Also objecting to China ties: Cornell students. “Cornell’s student assembly unanimously demanded that the university “halt” plans for a new joint degree program funded by the Chinese government, a further setback for administrators grappling with a faculty revolt over their close ties to the authoritarian country.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • State Department human right’s report decries treatment of Uighurs:

    Blinken said in January that he agreed with a determination by his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, that China was committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, which China denies.

    In addition to the “more than one million” Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minority groups it said were in extrajudicial internment camps, the report said there were “an additional two million subjected to daytime-only ‘re-education’ training”, a new reference not included in the previous year’s report.

  • Here’s another blow to the “China’s inevitable economic rise” narrative: “Owners give away flats around Beijing as falling values leave them with negative equity.”

    Property owners in areas around Beijing have been giving away their flats rather than continue to pay their mortgages, after four straight years of dropping values have left their homes worth less than their outstanding loans, according to a report from Xinhua News Agency.

    The report said Hebei province homeowners in the cities of Sanhe and Zhuozhou, as well as in Gu’an county, have been unable to sell their properties in the current market downturn. They have chosen to give away their properties, accepting the financial loss, because they can no longer afford to cover the debt.

    Zhang Yumei, an economics professor at Hebei University, commented that such flats are not really free, because the new owners must pay the outstanding mortgage. It would actually be cheaper to buy a new flat if the price of a second-hand unit has dropped more than 30%, because such a drop would leave it in negative equity, she added. Besides, nobody will take a “free” flat unless they can get a discount from the mortgage issuer, Zhang said.

    A Xinhua reporter found that the property business in the Hebei town of Yanjiao has been hard hit by the downturn in values. Many shops that housed property agents have turned to other kinds of businesses, the reporter said.

    Of course, the Wuhan coronavirus didn’t help…

  • “The Chabuduo Mindset.” Or Chinesium and the “good enough” mentality:

    Tony, an Italian friend and business owner, asked his Chinese employee to clean up a document, add a vertical line on the left and have all text aligned with that line. When he was handed the document back, the requested line was there, some text was aligned with it but some still wasn’t.

    When Tony pointed out to his employee that not everything lined up perfectly, she was genuinely surprised. From her perspective the alignment was “chabuduo”, good enough.

  • Hmmmm:

    

  • In their eagerness to rejoin the never-ratified Paris Accord on climate change, the Biden Administration is ignoring the fact that China generated over half world’s coal-fired power in 2020.

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming | 1 Comment »

    DeSantis Continues To Crush It

    March 30th, 2021

    The bloom is fully off the rose when it comes to South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who vetoed her state’s bill banning men from competing in women’s sports despite having promised to sign it. But fellow red state governor Ron DeSantis, a hero for his early lifting of the counterproductive lockdowns that crippled the economies of other states, continues to crush it.

    First he announced that Florida was banning critical race theory from classrooms:

    “Florida’s civics curriculum will incorporate foundational concepts with the best materials, and it will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like Critical Race Theory and other unsubstantiated theories” DeSantis declared to a round of applause.

    “Let me be clear, there is no room in our classroom for things like Critical Race Theory teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” he continued. “So we will invest in actual, solid, true curriculum, and we will be a leader in the development and implementation of a world-class civics curriculum.”

    Critical Race Theory, often abbreviated as CRT, is an academic theory which rejects traditional liberal notions of civil rights in favour of critical theory-inspired identity politics.
    Advertisement

    The theory rejects concepts such as objective truth, arguing that the way humans perceive reality is through a series of power structures which inform how we think and act. According to proponents of CRT, all white people are racist by definition because they have been raised under the power structure of white supremacy.

    Consequentially, CRT proponents argue that any evidence refuting their claims is inherently racist, as what is considered “evidence” or “truth” is not objective, and is instead a byproduct of the white supremacist power structures which pervade society as a whole. White people who reject claims of racism by CRT advocates, according to the theory, are expressing “white fragility.”

    Now DeSantis has vowed that Florida will not allow any unconstitutional “vaccine passport” nonsense:

    Once again Florida Governor Ron DeSantis outlines his specific direction with the COVID vaccine program. As DeSantis noted in his media statements today “we want to provide it for all, but mandate it for none.” Explaining the Florida legislative intent on further COVID laws the Florida governor went on to say the vaccine passport issue “has huge privacy implications”, and he does not support any mandated vaccine passport that would impede on the liberty and freedom of Florida residents.

    Meanwhile, Florida Wuhan coronavirus cases continue to trend down, while those in New York and New Jersey are spiking.

    Many other state governor’s could learn a great deal from how DeSantis has governor Florida.

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors | 4 Comments »

    Suez Canal Update: Ship Partially Refloated UPDATE: Freed and Moving

    March 29th, 2021

    Our short international trade nightmare may be coming to a middle:

    The stern of a huge container ship that has been wedged across the Suez Canal for almost a week has been freed from the shoreline, officials say.

    The course of the 400m-long (1,300ft) Ever Given has been corrected by 80%, according to the Suez Canal Authority.

    It added that further efforts to move the boat would resume later on Monday.

    But the head of a company involved in the rescue efforts urged caution, warning that completing the operation would not be “a piece of cake”.

    The Ever Given has been blocking one of the world’s busiest trade routes, forcing companies to reroute ships and causing long tailbacks of hundreds of vessels.

    The reports that the ship had been partially freed raised hopes that traffic along the canal could resume within hours, clearing the way for an estimated $9.6bn (£7bn) of goods being held up each day.

    But the bow is evidently still stuck:

    You would think there would be good video somewhere of it being refloated, but I’m really not seeing any. Here’s some footage of the ongoing operations, and you can see the stern back in the channel:

    Here’s a tweet with time-lapse partial animation:

    They’re now planning to use remove sand and clay from underneath the bow. If that fails to free the ship, they may need to start offloading containers.

    Update: News agencies are reporting that the Ever Given has been freed and is moving:

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in video | No Comments »

    Update: Cop Shooter Shoots Self

    March 28th, 2021

    An update on yesterday’s Blue Alert story:

    MEXIA, Texas (KWTX) – DeArthur Pinson Jr., 37, wanted in connection to the shooting of Texas DPS Trooper Chad Walker near Mexia, has killed himself, according to Limestone County Judge Richard Duncan.

    Duncan was quoted in a social media post from the Mclennan County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday night.

    The shooting happened on Highway 84 shortly before 8 p.m. Friday. On Saturday, the Texas Department of Public Safety Officers Association identified Walker as the trooper shot by the suspect.

    The wounded state trooper was listed in critical condition Friday night, according to DPS Sergeant Ryan Howard.

    Evidently the asshole who just killed himself shot Trooper Walker for stopping to try and help him:

    The officer’s association said the trooper was called to a motorist assist on FM2848, where a vehicle was disabled on the side of the highway.

    As Walker started to pull behind the stopped vehicle, the association said a man got out of the driver’s side and began to shoot multiple times into the patrol unit’s windshield. Walker was shot in the head and the abdomen.

    The man grabbed a backpack from the vehicle and fled on foot, the association said.

    Evidently Pinson never left Mexia:

    Last reports still had Trooper Walker in critical condition.

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Blue Alert in Mexia

    March 27th, 2021

    A Blue Art has been issued for this guy:

    Officials are searching for a man accused of shooting a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Friday near Mexia.

    Law enforcement officials are searching for 37-year-old DeArthur Pinson Jr., in the shooting, which happened near U.S. Highway 84 west of Mexia in Limestone County, about 81 miles southeast of Dallas, according to the DPS.

    The Texas Department of Public Safety Officers Association identified that wounded trooper as Chad Walker, a husband and father of four.

    Walker was taken in critical condition to Baylor Scott and White Medical Center Hillcrest in Waco.

    The blue alert describes him as a 37 year old, 220 pound black male, 6 feet tall, facial hair, wearing a black hoodie and shorts with a stripe down the sides. “Considered armed and dangerous.”

    Mexia is 54 miles west east of Waco on highway 84.

    If you’re in Texas, keep a lookout…

    Tags: , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Texas | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for March 26, 2021

    March 26th, 2021

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

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

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

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Except she isn’t.

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

  • Bristol is Britain’s Portland:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Things are bad, folks:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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

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

    (Hat tip: PolitiBunny.)

  • Old song, new video:

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 2 Comments »

    Norm Macdonald Slamming Bill Clinton

    March 25th, 2021

    Because our garbage ruling class is absolutely shameless, Kamala Harris will be interviewing serial rapist Bill Clinton on “empowering women“:

    Vice President Harris is being slammed over her decision to appear with former President Clinton for a Clinton Foundation event focused on empowering women amid the Covid-19 pandemic, given Clinton’s alleged history of sexual abuse.

    The Clinton Global Initiative event will take place on Friday and will be hosted by Howard University, of which Harris is an alumni.

    A press release promotes it as “a one-on-one conversation” between Harris and Clinton “on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, and empowering women and girls in the U.S. and around the world.”

    It’s amazing that not only is the Clinton Foundation/Global Initiative still out there grifting long after Hillary’s chance to influence public policy has evaporated, but still has the standing to include Harris as part of their grift.

    In light of that, here’s Norm Macdonald slamming Bill (and Hillary) Clinton on Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update:

    Yes, there was a time when SNL was actually funny, and actually went after Democratic politicians. Though many of you may be too young to remember it…

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, video | 1 Comment »

    World Finally Tired Of China’s BS?

    March 24th, 2021

    If by “the World” you mean “the EU,” then the answer is “maybe a little bit“:

    In a historic shift, the European Union has imposed sanctions against Communist China for the first time in more than thirty years. Brussels froze Chinese assets and sanctioned four senior Chinese officials for their role in human rights violations inside China — the first measure of its kind since the end of the Cold War.

    “The move from Brussels represents the first punitive measure against Beijing since the arms embargo that the then-twelve member states imposed in 1989 on Communist China due to the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square,” the French TV network Euronews reported.

    The Associated Press reported the details of the EU sanctions:

    The EU targeted four senior officials in Xinjiang. The sanctions involve a freeze on the officials’ assets and a ban on them traveling in the bloc. European citizens and companies are not permitted to provide them with financial assistance.

    The 27-nation bloc also froze the assets of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau, which it describes as a “state-owned economic and paramilitary organization” that runs Xinjiang and controls its economy.

    British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the measures were part of “intensive diplomacy” by the U.K, the United States, Canada and the 27-nation EU to force action amid mounting evidence about serious rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim people.

    The Reuters news agency described the significance of the EU measures: “While mainly symbolic, the EU sanctions mark a significant hardening in the bloc’s policy towards China, which Brussels long regarded as a benign trading partner but now views as a systematic abuser of basic rights and freedoms.”

    Those sanctions are so anemic that they make an actual slap on the wrist look like a knockout punch from a in-his-prime Mike Tyson. Anemic though they were, the United States, the UK and Canada joined in:

    In coordination with the newly announced European Union sanctions on select Beijing officials for the alleged ongoing major crackdown on Muslim Uighurs, the Biden administration has hit Beijing with its own punitive sanctions, setting tensions further on edge just two days after the conclusion of the fiery Alaska summit.

    The US sanctions target two top Chinese officials for “serious human rights abuses” against Uighur minorities concentrated in northwest Xinjiang province. Along with the EU, the sanctions were coordinated with Canada and the United Kingdom, which rolled out with similarly targeted sanctions that included additional individuals, according to a Treasury Department statement.

    “Chinese authorities will continue to face consequences as long as atrocities occur in Xinjiang,” Treasury’s Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control Andrea M. Gacki said…

    “Treasury is committed to promoting accountability for the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention and torture, against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities,” she added. The statement identified the following individuals that fall under the new US action:

    The US designated Wang Junzheng, the Secretary of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and Chen Mingguo, Director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.

    “These individuals are designated pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13818, which builds upon and implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and targets perpetrators of serious human rights abuse and corruption,” the Treasury Department added.

    The UK government meanwhile said of the coordinated actions in a statement: “Acting together sends the clearest possible signal that the international community is united in its condemnation of China’s human rights violations in Xinjiang and the need for Beijing to end its discriminatory and oppressive practices in the region.”

    Such small, targeted sanctions are basically one step up from the dreaded Strongly Worded Letter, and will not hurt China nearly as badly as the Trump Administration’s trade sanctions or the designation that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous. Nor did The Hague’s ruling against China on its South China Sea territorial claims seem to have any perceivable effect on its actions.

    But these declarations at least start to get the bureaucratic wheels rolling. The Magnitsky Act designation is treated with real ire by foreign government, so presumably some actual consequences (however slight) might result.

    But stronger medicine is required to deter China from its many criminal enterprises, and no one in the international community seems to know what might actually deter them. Or the gumption to pursue them.

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy | 3 Comments »

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »