They’re Not Going Back

June 2nd, 2021

There’s a very early Laurie Anderson song called “Walk The Dog” where she riffs on (among other things) a Dolly Parton song:

“I just want to go back to my Tennessee mountain home now.”

Well, you know she’s not gonna go back home.

And I know she’s not gonna go back home.

And she knows she’s never gonna go back there.

And that’s a good summary of many former office workers post-coronavirus: They’re never going back.

With the coronavirus pandemic receding for every vaccine that reaches an arm, the push by some employers to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal.

While companies from Google to Ford Motor Co. and Citigroup Inc. have promised greater flexibility, many chief executives have publicly extolled the importance of being in offices. Some have lamented the perils of remote work, saying it diminishes collaboration and company culture. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon said at a recent conference that it doesn’t work “for those who want to hustle.”

But legions of employees aren’t so sure. If anything, the past year has proved that lots of work can be done from anywhere, sans lengthy commutes on crowded trains or highways. Some people have moved. Others have lingering worries about the virus and vaccine-hesitant colleagues.

And for [Portia] Twidt, there’s also the notion that some bosses, particularly those of a generation less familiar to remote work, are eager to regain tight control of their minions.

“They feel like we’re not working if they can’t see us,” she said. “It’s a boomer power-play.”

It’s still early to say how the post-pandemic work environment will look. Only about 28% of U.S. office workers are back at their buildings, according to an index of 10 metro areas compiled by security company Kastle Systems. Many employers are still being lenient with policies as the virus lingers, vaccinations continue to roll out and childcare situations remain erratic.

But as office returns accelerate, some employees may want different options. A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work. The generational difference is clear: Among millennials and Gen Z, that figure was 49%, according to the poll by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News.

“High-five to them,” said Sara Sutton, the CEO of FlexJobs, a job-service platform focused on flexible employment. “Remote work and hybrid are here to stay.”

The lack of commutes and cost savings are the top benefits of remote work, according to a FlexJobs survey of 2,100 people released in April. More than a third of the respondents said they save at least $5,000 per year by working remotely.

This is especially true in high tech. If you have in-demand skills (full-stack developer, AI expertise, etc.), lots of companies are vying for you, and all of them have remote-work infrastructure already in place. Chances are good you login into a VPN in the morning, communicate via email and Slack, have your meetings on Zoom, code on your laptop, then check your work into a remote repository running a continuous integration/continuous deployment platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc.) that builds and tests your software. There’s zero reason for you to spend your time commuting to the office. And if your current employer won’t let you work from home, another will. And that other company can be located anywhere, and they can hire the best talent for their position no matter whether they have a local office.

I, for one, save just shy of an hour a day working from home rather than braving Austin roads, and my dogs are much happier.

How can you keep them in the big city once they’ve tasted life back on the farm?

Assuming the farm has Internet…

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Posted in Economics, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

This Day All Bills Die

June 1st, 2021

If you’ve been following the Texas legislature for any appreciable length of time, then the close of the 87th Legislative Session must have felt eerily familiar to you: A whole bunch of conservative priority bills made it to the one yard line, only to be killed by various political maneuvers and the legislative schedule.

Texas Speaker of the House Dade Phelan let Democrats kill the election integrity bill by walking out, thus preventing a quorum:

On Sunday night, with just hours left for the Texas House to give its final approval to legislation, Democrats left the chamber and busted the quorum.

By doing so, they were able to kill multiple bills in the process, including a high-profile omnibus election integrity bill and a bail reform bill.

Both bills were deemed priorities of Gov. Greg Abbott in February.

In order for the House to conduct business, a quorum of two-thirds of the chamber’s members (100 out of 150) are required to be present.

Despite being an emergency priority item that lawmakers have been allowed to address since February 1, Senate Bill 7—election integrity legislation that has been the target of Democrats nationwide—was scheduled to finally be passed on Sunday afternoon, just hours away from the midnight deadline.

As debate began, Democrat members started to leave the chamber, taking their voting keys with them.

When a vote was taken on whether to excuse one of the members, the tally revealed that only 86 members were present in the chamber.

The House then adjourned until 10 a.m. on Monday, without objection.

Abbott quickly took to Twitter to say election integrity, as well as bail reform, would be among the items added to a special session call.

A ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying also died, as did bills on banning men from women’s athletic competitions and banning child sex change operations. (In addition, the previously discussed Critical Race Theory bill passed with so many Democratic amendments that it may end up being worse than no bill at all.)

These were just many of the conservative priority bills that died in the session. Michael Quinn Sullivan provided the following scorecard via email:

Incompetence or sabotage? It seems like no matter who sits in the speaker’s chair, be it Dade Phelan, Dennis Bonnen or Joe Straus, conservative bills make it through the Senate only to die in the House at the last minute. It’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again.

I’m not enough of an insider to tell you exact culprits behind killing conservative legislative priorities (though Speaker Phelan obviously deserves a considerable share of blame, as does Republican state representative Jeff Leach, who’s delaying tactics over a point of order helped doomed many of the above bills).

Governor Greg Abbott is threatening to veto legislative funding in retaliation for Democrats walking off the job, and threatening to hold a special session to get it done. I’m all in favor of calling a special session to pass those items, but it’s unclear whether it would be a special summer session or the already-planned redistricting session after census data is made available. It’s also unclear whether any legislator would be motivated by the threat of losing their $600 per month paycheck.

In any case, what is clear is that conservatives need a new gameplan for the next special session. If you have any ideas on what that should be (or have good candidates (besides Democrats) for who is really the power behind killing conservative bills), feel free to share them in the comments below.

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Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 5 Comments »

Memorial Day: Remembering John Henry Pruitt

May 31st, 2021

This Memorial Day we honor Marine Corporal John Henry Pruitt, who not only won the Medal of Honor, he won two Medals of Honor (the Army and Navy versions) for the same action:

For extraordinary gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while serving with the 78th Company, 6th Regiment, 2d Division, in action with the enemy at Blanc Mont Ridge, France, 3 October 1918. Cpl. Pruitt, singlehandedly attacked two machine guns, capturing them and killing two of the enemy. He then captured 40 prisoners in a dugout nearby. This gallant soldier was killed soon afterward by shellfire while he was sniping at the enemy.

Here’s a short video on Pruitt, primarily voiceover narration over stock footage, but it does give additional information:

“He died from his wounds on October 4, 1918. It was his twenty second birthday.”

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Posted in Military, video | 1 Comment »

Movie Review: The Bridge on the River Kwai

May 30th, 2021

The Bridge on the River Kwai
Directed by: David Lean
Written by: Pierre Boulle (novel), Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (screenplay)
Starring: Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald

I usually save movie reviews for my other blog, but this fits in thematically with Memorial Day (and also with a cross blog debate on the best war movies), so here we go.

Set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma during World War II, it follows a battle of wills between Japanese camp commander Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), who must use prisoner labor to build the titular railway bridge, and newly arrived British Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), the stiff upper lip, by-the-book commander to end all stiff upper lip, by-the-book commanders. Saito needs his bridge built by mid-May or he’ll have to commit suicide. Nicholson insists that he will only cooperate if the entire operation is done by the book (with him commanding his troops and officers exempt from manual labor, as per the Geneva convention).

The battle of wills between the two men makes up the core of the first half of the movie. Saito theoretically holds all the cards, but Nicholson will not give an inch. Saito threatens to machine gun the allied officers for disobeying, leaves them standing to fry in the sun all day, then confines them to a punishment hut and Nicholson to a hot box for days on end, all to no avail. Meanwhile, bridge construction falls further and further behind schedule.

Saito eventually has Nicholson pulled from the hot box, barely able to walk, on the raw edge of consciousness, and plies him with food and scotch, only to have Nicholson refuse him yet again.

In the end, both men get their demands, and all it costs them is everything. Saito gets a much better bridge built, but is absolutely emasculated in the process. There’s a dinner party where Nicholson tells Saito the Japanese have done everything wrong and the bridge must be rebuilt in a new location, in the process getting all his demands met and subtly demonstrating that he, not Saito, is the one calling the shots.

There is a secondary plot that follows William Holden as American officer Shears, who manages to escape the camp, and then is recruited by British Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) to help a commando squad travel across the jungle to blow up the bridge. That part of the movie is solid as well, and is what drives the film’s climax.

One surprise is just how funny The Bridge on the River Kwai is, in a very low-key, black comedy way. Saito’s blank-eyed helplessness in the face of his ongoing humiliation is a constant source of amusement, and many of the meetings between Nicholson and Saito are darkly hilarious. Supposedly Lean didn’t want Guinness’ portrayal to have that comic edge, but in many ways it really makes the movie.

Guinness gives an Oscar-winning performance for the ages as Nicholson, a stubborn, decent, blinkered officer who does the wrong thing (aiding an enemy’s war effort) for all the right reasons. He’s a tragic figure who’s more right than wrong, successfully standing up for his men but trapped by his own adherence to regulation. Hayakawa isn’t nearly on that level (there were probably a dozen Japanese actors who could have turned in a more nuanced performance at the time), but he’s good enough. Holden and Hawkins turn in solid performances, and the rest of the cast is filled with great British character actors.

It’s a war film with barely any combat, a two-and-a-half hour film that never seems to drag, and remains not only a great war film, but a great film period, winner of seven Oscars, including Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture, and currently sits at 167 on the IMDB Top 250 list.

Back in the dim mists of time, I also read the Pierre Boulle novel the film was based on, and it’s worth reading on its own. One bit left out was that one of the commandos was a former bridge engineer who had redesigned a single truss over and over again until he had reduced the amount of steel used by half, which gave him ample motivation to want to blow up a bridge….

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Posted in Military | 3 Comments »

Memorial Day: Remembering William James Bordelon

May 29th, 2021

This Memorial Day weekend we celebrate Medal of Honor winner, Texan, Marine Staff Sergeant and combat engineer William James Bordelon, who lost his life securing a beachhead during the invasion of Tarawa. His official citation reads:

For valorous and gallant conduct above and beyond the call of duty as a member of an assault engineer platoon of the 1st Battalion, 18th Marines, tactically attached to the 2d Marine Division, in action against the Japanese-held atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, 20 November 1943. Landing in the assault waves under withering enemy fire which killed all but four of the men in his tractor, SSgt. Bordelon hurriedly made demolition charges and personally put two pillboxes out of action. Hit by enemy machine-gun fire just as a charge exploded in his hand while assaulting a third position, he courageously remained in action and, although out of demolition, provided himself with a rifle and furnished fire coverage for a group of men scaling the seawall. Disregarding his own serious condition, he unhesitatingly went to the aid of one of his demolition men, wounded and calling for help in the water, rescuing this man and another who had been hit by enemy fire while attempting to make the rescue. Still refusing first aid for himself, he again made up demolition charges and singlehandedly assaulted a fourth Japanese machine-gun position, but was instantly killed when caught in a final burst of fire from the enemy. SSgt. Bordelon’s great personal valor during a critical phase of securing the limited beachhead was a contributing factor in the ultimate occupation of the island, and his heroic determination throughout three days of violent battle reflects the highest credit upon the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.

Tarawa was the first amphibious landing of the island hopping campaign where American troops met serious resistance at the beach, with Imperial Japanese troops fighting down to almost the last man, resulting in over 1,000 American dead and 2,000 wounded in 76 hours of combat.

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Posted in Military, Texas | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for May 28, 2021

May 28th, 2021

Like inflation and unemployment, crime rates are rising again. Biden is really the 1970s gift that keeps giving!

  • Democrats are weaker than they appear:

    Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.

    Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.

  • Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:

    A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

    Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.

    Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.

  • Speaking of rising crime rates, having Soros-backed Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner overseeing Philadelphia has helped create the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast:

    Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.

    It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.

    You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.

    You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.

    Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.

    Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.

    As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.

  • Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
  • In news of the Biden recession, both both inflation and unemployment picked up in April. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as ‘based on false history’ and ‘teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.'” Good.
  • Kurt Schlichter: Bring on the ‘Asperger’s Republicans’:

    Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.

    And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.

    Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.

  • Also weighing in against Critical Race Theory: Austin Knudsen, Montana’s Attorney General.
  • How Democratic foreign policy “experts” are projecting their own failures on Jared Kushner:

    For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.

    But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.

    And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.

    Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.

    This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.

    Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

    These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
  • “Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
  • Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
  • “Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.

  • “Support for Black Lives Matter Movement Collapses Among Whites and Hispanics, Drops For Blacks.” The only question is why it took so damn long, when it’s been obvious for a long time that it is radical marxist garbage.
  • Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
  • Ted Cruz gets Biden ATF director nominee David Chipman to admit under oath that he wants to ban the AR-15. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of Ted Cruz: Israel has a right to defend itself.
  • “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months after Joe Biden left office.” What a curious coincidence!
  • “China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
  • CNN hits new lows. I suppose I should clarify that’s new ratings lows… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Screwed up even by the standards of Baltimore.
  • Politifact tries to fact check The Babylon Bee yet again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • IDF stats:

  • Interesting: Higher reasoning functions wake up first from anesthesia. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Enjoy the original video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.” A very different sound mix as well.
  • If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
  • Now you’ll finally get a chance to read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel.
  • “Public School Teachers Issue Students Their Summer Book-Burning Lists.”
  • “Newsom Announces Sweepstakes Where 5 Lucky Winners Get To Move Out Of California.”
  • A vicious pack pulls down its pray:

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    Posted in Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Social Justice Warriors | 4 Comments »

    Guns Are Hard

    May 27th, 2021

    If you wonder why it takes so long to get new guns into production, Ian McCollum has an answer for you: Because designing and manufacturing guns is hard. Mainly because of the extensive trial and error necessary to establish the correct tolerances for each part.

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    Posted in Guns, video | 2 Comments »

    How Many Of Steve Adler’s Lies Can You Count In This Joe Rogan Interview?

    May 26th, 2021

    Here’s an excerpt from an interview Joe Rogan did with Austin mayor Steve Adler:

    How many lies can you spot? Here are a few.

    Before they repealed the camping ban: “I had more and more neighborhood associations complaining about more and more encampments, and I had no solution to that.”

    Of course you did. You and the city council could have let Austin police enforce the law and either cleared homeless encampments and/or arrested people for breaking the law. That would have prodded the sturdiest beggars to move on to greener pastures. But the city council wouldn’t let APD enforce the law because there was no money to rake off to leftwing activists as part of the homeless industrial complex.

    So instead you made the problem ten times worse.

    His claim that “90-95% success rate” for “housing first” curing the problem is absolute garbage. Mentally-ill, drug-using transients don’t become magically sane or drug free because they’re in a hotel on the taxpayers dime.

    “Smaller cities than Austin have 3-6x the amount of homelessness.” So that’s why you imported west coast policies to Austin? So you can increase the size of the homeless population like they did? If so, mission accomplished.

    “They told me the same thing as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.” Oh, so you sought advice from the cities with the worst homeless problems and the most obvious failed policies that made the problem worse! Genius!

    When he says that the “overwhelming majority” of the current transient population are “from here,” either he’s lying or his staff is. A good two-thirds of the current homeless population seem to have come from out of town. And they’re not coming from “the areas immediately around us,” they’re coming from Houston and the Metroplex so they can do drugs and sleep in the street and not be arrested.

    “We needed to get people off the streets.” Yeah, that’s why you turned every park and overpass into Bumsville: To get them off the street. Pull the other one.

    “If all they’re doing is surviving…” And by “surviving,” he means “shooting up heroin in public.”

    And note throughout the newly-minted PC neologism “people experiencing homelessness,” which I’m sure focus groups much better than “drug addicted transients” and “gibbering street lunatics.”

    Also, that veterans program isn’t the shining success that Adler is making it out to be. According to a friend that applied for veteran housing, there was a nine month wait, so they put your name on a list, and if you couldn’t accept right then (say, you had just signed a lease), your name went right back to the bottom of the list.

    I suspect the rest of the interview would offer up a lot more lies to flag…

    (Hat tip: Teddy Brosevelt.)

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, video | 6 Comments »

    Report On Police “Reform” In George Floyd Square Interrupted By Drive-By Shooting

    May 25th, 2021

    Man, those police “reform” efforts just keep paying dividends:

    If you put this in a novel, editors would reject it as too unsubtle.

    Maybe CNN will tell us it was a mostly peaceful drive-by…

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

    Constitutional Carry Passes

    May 25th, 2021

    Good news! The Texas legislature just sent Constitutional Carry to the Governor’s desk:

    After passing different versions of House Bill (HB) 1927, a bill to allow Texans over the age of 21 who can legally possess a handgun to carry it in public without a government-issued permit, both the Texas House and Senate approved a final version of the legislation that will now be sent to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

    Abbott said earlier this year that he would sign the bill, known as “constitutional carry.”

    “The House was very proud of the version of the bill that we sent over and the Senate was very proud of the amendments that they added,” Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler), the bill’s author, told The Texan.

    “We felt like some of the protections for law-abiding citizens were diminished in the Senate version, and so we fought to get some of that back.”

    After the Senate approved the bill with a number of amendments tailored to concerns voiced by law enforcement, the bill returned to the House where Schaefer decided to send the bill to what is known as a “conference committee.”

    In the conference committee, five members from each chamber worked out the differences in the two versions to create a compromise known as the conference committee report.

    The ultimate version of HB 1927 contained many of the variations of the amendments that were included in the version passed by the Senate rather than what the House first approved.

    After being signed into law, Constitutional Carry will go into effect September 1.

    The good news is the extension of protection for our constitutional rights, and may create a whole new cohort of legal gun owners in Texas. The bad news is that this might make it even harder to find ammo…

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    Posted in Guns, Regulation, Texas | 14 Comments »

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