Berkeley Retail Shutting Down Just Like San Francisco

September 24th, 2023

Rising crime, looting, and tolerance of drug-addled transients taking over the streets has led to an exodus of retail establishments from San Francisco.

Now another Democrat-controlled California city is enjoying the same exodus of retail establishments: Berkeley.

Here YouTuber Metal Leo looks at streets near Cal Berkeley University, where store after store after store are closed, boarded up or for lease.

Banks, pharmacies, cinemas, pizza chains: all closed. The only thing that seems to be open are Starbucks.

There are stores that were last Radio Shacks, which haven’t been around since 2017, which suggests Berkeley’s decline has been underway long before California’s Flu Manchu shutdowns (though obviously those didn’t help).

Is it the crime? The lawless disorder? The insanely high taxes and rent? Mortgage backed securities rules? Probably some combination of all of the above.

He doesn’t seem to come across any homeless sleeping on the streets, perhaps because Berkeley has started doing aggressive homeless camp clearances, which might have encouraged them to move over into Oakland or across the bay.

There is one amazing find: An apparently working payphone!

This video should remind you of the similar ones Louis Rossmann did of New York City before he left.

Berkeley’s last Republican mayor left office in 1971. Since then it’s been Democrats or “Berkeley Citizens Action” (social justice before it was called social justice) running the city. Jesse Arreguin, the current mayor of Berkeley, says he wants to “restore Berkeley to the forefront of progressive leadership on the environment and social justice.”

Looks like he’s succeeded.

This is your city on social justice.

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 9 Comments »

Ken Paxton On The Forces Behind His Impeachment

September 23rd, 2023

Now that Ken Paxton has been acquitted of all charges, Paxton can talk about the forces that conspired to push his bogus impeachment, which he does in this interview with Texas Scorecard’s M.Q. Sullivan.

  • MQS: “We had a secret investigation take place in the Texas House, with unsworn witnesses offering uh what John Smithy described as triple hearsay as evidence [and] no public hearings.”
  • MQS: “It’s been said that the Republicans were told this is a loyalty vote to the speaker of the House [Dade Phelan], and if it’s taking out Ken Paxton is what it takes to show loyalty, you have to do it.”
  • KP: “Democrats have figured out they can block vote. There’s 65 of them. Right now they block vote. They go to the Republicans and they say ‘We’ll get you elected as as speaker if you do what we say. We want to negotiate this deal.’ And so then that speaker who’s really controlled by the Democrats only needs 10 Republicans votes and then the Democrats effectively control [the House].”
  • KP: “I don’t think it’s any accident that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice had two lawyers involved with the House investigating committee.”
  • KP: “I think the Biden Administration was tired of being sued. We’d sued him 48 times in two and a half years, and have been relatively successful with those cases, and I think that was a directive to the Democrats.”
  • KP: “[Phelan] was directed by the Democrats.” House Republicans need to be as united as Democrats.
  • KP: “They never had any evidence, and they obviously didn’t when they got to the Senate floor. But I think the message was ‘Do what we tell you to do or else.'”
  • MQS: “It seemed apparent to a lot of observers that the old Bush machine was ratcheted up against you. Johnny Sutton, Karl Rove, folks like that, who had not had much to say about Texas politics, their fingerprints were all over this from from very early on.” Sutton held several roles at the state and national level under George W. Bush, and was eventually appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas.
  • MQS: “It seemed like it started off as a way to benefit George P Bush.” As you may remember, George P. Bush got slaughtered by Paxton in the Republican Attorney General race runoff in 2022, when Paxton got over 2/3rds of the vote.
  • KP: “This whole Coincidence of George P., after, what, 10 years of not having his license, on October 1st he asked the State Bar to get his license back. That just so happened to be that later that day that the these employees of mine told me that they’d turn me into the FBI. So somehow on that same day, before I knew about it, George P. is applying for his license.”
  • KP: “I think that that was the first sign that the Bush people were involved in this. And I think you can see from Johnny Sutton representing every one of these employees, that he was he’s doing this for free for the last three years, without ever sending a bill or even having a fee arrangement, that doesn’t make any sense either.”
  • KP: “Karl Rove wrote the editorial and he was directed, and I think given, that editorial by Texans for Lawsuit Reform. So you have all of these Bush connections that sought to get rid of me.”
  • MQS: TLR “is a group that has been kind of the de facto business lobby for more than two decades.”
  • KR: “They have definitely changed. They become a lobby group. They’re beholden to large, either corporate interests or individual interests, that don’t necessarily reflect the views of the Republican party.”
  • Sullivan suggests Paxtons problems may have started when he started targeting big tech and big pharma.
  • KP: “There’s a reason that we we’re looking at Big Tech, because they control the marketplace and they’re trying to control speech and control entire market activity on on advertising. There are issues related to them being deceptive in how they advertise, and also in what they tell consumers about what they’re doing with their information.”
  • KP: “Big Pharma obviously involved in this vaccine mandate, and potentially getting away with not actually testing their their vaccine, and telling us it does one thing when it does another.”
  • Paxton also brings up the role of banking as an industry that may not have been happy with him.

    • In another interview with Tucker Carlson, Paxton said he considers Texas Senator John Cornyn “a puppet of the Bush family” and will consider running against him in 2026.

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    Posted in Crime, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 5 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for September 22, 2023

    September 22nd, 2023

    My Hunter Biden corruption evidence, a Democratic Senator catches federal corruption charges, more blue cities suffering from Biden’s open border policies, California goes looking for cops in Texas, and a new Bill Burr movie looms. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Now we know at least one of the people bribing Joe Biden buying Hunter Biden’s “artwork.”

    The person who paid as much as six figures for “artwork” by an untrained painter also received a prestigious government appointment from the artist’s father, President Joe Biden.

    Now congressional investigators want to know if Biden’s decision to name Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad was in any way related to her purchase of artwork by Hunter Biden, a middle-aged man who paints as a hobby.

    House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is now asking Naftali and White House Counsel Stuart Delery to answer questions as to whether the Biden family is using Hunter’s “art” as a means of selling White House access.

    The White House has previously claimed the identity of Hunter Biden art purchasers would be concealed to prevent any undue influence, but nothing prevents the purchaser from identifying themselves to Joe Biden when seeking an appointment, and now at least one purchaser has been identified as someone who sought White House access.

  • Democratic Senator Robert Menendez and his wife indicted on federal corruption charges.

    Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted on corruption charges by federal prosecutors on Friday morning in a Manhattan court in an influence-peddling scheme involving Egypt.

    The unsealed indictment revealed that Menendez’s wife, Nadine, New Jersey real estate mogul Fred Daibes, and two other business associates are being charged along side the lawmaker.

    Led by Southern District of New York attorney Damian Williams, in June 2022, investigators conducted a search of Menendez’s residence in New Jersey and found $100,000 worth of gold bars, nearly half a million dollars in cash, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” and a brand new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible.

    “Menedez and Nadine Menedez agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menedez’s power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect and enrich” his allies “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt,” the indictment reads. “Among other actions, Menendez provided sensitive U.S. government information and took other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt,” the filing notes.

  • More money for illegal aliens means less money for other New York City functions.

    New York City will cut overtime pay for its police officers and three other agencies to help reduce costs driven by the city’s unprecedented migrant crisis, City Hall announced Monday.

    Jacques Jiha, the budget director for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, told the city’s police, fire, corrections, and sanitations departments in a Saturday memo to each submit an overtime pay reduction plan “to reduce year-to-year OT spending.”

    He also wrote the four departments must submit monthly reports “to track overtime spending and their progress in meeting the reduction target” once Adams issues the order.

    Jiha also noted the current assistance provided by President Joe Biden and New York governor Kathy Hochul is not enough, prompting City Hall’s decision to cut overtime pay among other financial measures.

    “The amount of aid we have received from the federal government and the state has been grossly inadequate and there has been no progress on a statewide or national decompression strategy,” Jhia wrote in the memo, first reported by Politico. “The city can no longer continue to shoulder these skyrocketing costs and balance the budget without making very difficult choices.”

    Crime has risen in New York in recent months as more than 100,000 illegal immigrants have poured into the city.

    The leader of a police union said the overtime pay cuts will lead to fewer cops patrolling the streets, resulting in more staffing shortages.

    “It is going to be impossible for the NYPD to significantly reduce overtime unless it fixes its staffing crisis,” Patrick Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association, told the New York Post. “We are still thousands of cops short, and we’re struggling to drive crime back to pre-2020 levels without adequate personnel.”

    “If City Hall wants to save money without jeopardizing public safety, it needs to invest in keeping experienced cops on the job,” he said.

  • The Homeless Illegal Alien Industrial Complex pays very, very well in Chicago:

  • Ukraine destroys Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters.
  • “The Biden admin cut the razor wire Gov. Greg Abbott put along the Rio Grande, so Abbott immediately sent the Texas National Guard to put up even more.”
  • Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson switches to the Republican Party. “While Dallas has thrived, elsewhere Democratic policies have exacerbated crime and homelessness.”

    “I have been mayor of Dallas for more than four years. During that time, my priority has been to make the city safer, stronger and more vibrant,” Johnson wrote in his article.

    “That meant saying no to those who wanted to defund the police. It meant fighting for lower taxes and a friendlier business climate. And it meant investing in family friendly infrastructure such as better parks and trails.”

    Johnson said he does not plan to alter his “approach” to being mayor but is switching his party affiliation.

    “When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican,” Johnson said.

    The mayor was a leading opponent of calls to decrease funding for the Dallas Police Department after the 2020 demonstrations against police violence. Johnson proposed cutting salaries at city hall instead.

    In his announcement, he also touted Dallas’ decreasing crime rate and the Dallas City Council’s reduction of the property tax rate.

    While city mayors are nonpartisan officeholders in Texas, Johnson was a Democrat during his nearly five terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

    This is both unexpected and big news. Lots of Hispanic politicians in Texas have switched to the GOP, but this is the first case I can remember of a high profile black Texas Democratic politician switching to the GOP.

  • Exercise helps prevent Alzheimer’s thanks to a hormone called irisin.
  • Antifa rioter sentenced.

    A 35-year-old Renton man was sentenced on Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court to 40 months in prison for his role in a plot to burn the Seattle Police Officers Guild building in downtown Seattle during the September 2020 protests.

    The defendant, Justin Christopher Moore, pleaded guilty in September 2022.

    At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Lauren King said, “What you did showed a complete disregard for human life. Our ability to peacefully assemble is a fundamental right to our society. Your acts of violence can deter people from exercising that fundamental right.”

    According to records filed in the case, Moore made and carried a box of 12 Molotov cocktails in a protest march to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building on Sept. 7, 2020. Ultimately the marchers were moved away from the building in downtown Seattle. Police smelled gasoline and grew concerned about the intentions of protesters. The box containing the 12 gasoline devices was found in the parking lot next to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building.

    Using video from that day and from other protests, as well as information from the electronic devices of other co-conspirators, Moore was confirmed as the person seen carrying the box of destructive devices.

    In June 2021, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Moore’s residence. They seized clothing that is consistent with the images of what Moore was wearing when he carried the Molotov cocktails. From the basement storage area, they also recovered numerous items that are consistent with manufacturing explosive devices. Law enforcement recovered a notebook in which Moore had made entries related to the manufacturing of destructive devices and the ingredients necessary.

  • University of North Texas tries to cancel musicology professor. Professor wins in court. Again.

    The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down another defeat to the University of North Texas and a victory to Allen Harris in a lawsuit defending the First Amendment rights of Professor Timothy Jackson, after UNT shut down his journal, The Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The decision can be located here.

    In January of last year, Allen Harris had already prevailed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The District Court Judge Amos Mazzant rejected UNT’s motion to dismiss the complaint of Professor Timothy Jackson in a strong decision available here.

    Ordinarily, the case would then proceed to discovery and eventually to trial. But UNT invoked its right to a special appeal (called an interlocutory appeal) that is allowed only to the state under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. At first, Texas was expected to make an argument defending UNT’s right to do whatever it wanted with Timothy Jackson’s journal.

    The Journal of Schenkerian Studies is dedicated to a late 19th/early 20th-century Austrian-Jewish music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and his systematic, graphic methods of music analysis. In July 2020, Timothy Jackson defended Schenker in the pages of the Journal from an attack by Hunter College Professor Philip Ewell. Professor Ewell labeled Schenker a “racist” and, indeed, the entire tradition of Western classical music as “systemically racist.” This dispute would have remained a typical academic tempest in a teapot, but the University of North Texas swiftly condemned Jackson’s defense of Schenker and classical music. At UNT, defending classical music and its theory against charges of “racism” is a “thought crime.”

    Graduate students quickly condemned Professor Jackson for “racist actions” and various other derelictions that they claimed hurt their feelings. Calls for Professor Jackson to be fired quickly escalated, and the vast majority of Jackson’s fellow faculty members jumped on the bandwagon. Sixteen of them signed a graduate student petition calling for his ouster and for censorship of the Journal. Discovery revealed that at least one did so without even reading or understanding what the petition said.

    The most important thing at the University of North Texas was to demonstrate pious commitment to “anti-Racism,” no matter how irrational or lacking in substance–or contrary to evidence. As the Dean of the College of Music admitted in open court, the Journal was “put on ice.”

    In July 2020, Professor Jackson stood alone against this tide. Had the case been allowed to proceed after Mazzant’s strong decision on the motion to dismiss, the Journal would likely be back in publication by now. Yet censorship is so important at the University of North Texas that the state exercised its right to a special appeal in order to halt discovery in its tracks.

    Some technical legal analysis omitted.

    The ruling is a clear warning to do-nothing boards of trustees and boards of regents that they have an affirmative duty to ensure that public universities uphold constitutional rights in education. From now on, they will also enjoy a no qualified immunity from personal suit, at least in the Fifth Circuit. UNT’s Board of Regents had direct governing authority over all UNT officials. They too can therefore be held accountable under the Ex Parte Young for sitting idly by while career university bureaucrats trampled Professor Jackson’s free speech.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Regulations (California and federal) are crushing the trucking industry.

    Unfortunately, the federal government continues its misguided attempts to control an industry regulators know little to nothing about. But today’s attempts tend to focus more on something they understand even less than trucking: technology.

    The electronic logging device (ELD) has been around since the late 1980s. The devices were first adopted by large nationwide fleets to simplify managing their plethora of drivers, and eventually became a way to lower insurance costs. Manufacturers and employers claimed the devices prevented drivers from driving longer than legally allowed, therefore reducing the number of tractor-trailer-related crashes. It was under the latter premise that the DOT mandated that all trucks be equipped with ELDs no later than the end of 2017. Unfortunately, fatal accidents involving tractor-trailers have seen a recent increase following a sharp decline. This correlation suggests that mandating ELDs has not had the promised or intended safety improvements.

    More recently, environmental regulations requiring manufacturers to reduce emissions gave us the diesel particulate filter (DPF), an exhaust treatment system that replaces a standard muffler. While there is no current federal mandate requiring a DPF, the filters are required by the 2008 California Statewide Truck and Bus Rule, which has incentivized many nationwide fleets to adopt them. The problem with DPFs is the filter system clogs. A lot.

    When DPFs go down, trucks roll to a stop. Truckers report having to have a DPF serviced as often as every 5,000 miles, which means lots of lost productivity and stranded cargo. I’ve had four breakdowns over the past two years, and three were due to my DPF. A tow truck driver I spoke to on one of those occasions told me half of his business comes from malfunctioning DPFs. Repairs are a specialized affair, and replacements can cost up to $2,000. When my truck isn’t moving, I’m not earning. And these regulators have required that my truck stand still far too often.

    Next up on the government’s list of ways to make truckers’ lives miserable are proposed speed limiters. Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, wants to limit all tractor-trailers to the same speed. Imagine being stuck behind a pair of tractor trailers side by side, who can’t speed up to pass each other. It’s relatively rare right now, but it will become the norm. Every single interstate nationwide will be populated by moving roadblocks, inspiring road rage and blocking critical services. What happens when the fire truck or ambulance is stuck behind these unbreakable pairs?

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Gavin Newsom throws in the towel, lifts ban on travel to states passing anti-transexual and antigroomer laws.
  • Also in the California “Hall of Ls,” after ruing its own police department through defunding, San Francisco is trying to hire cops in Texas.

    San Francisco slashed its police department’s budget by $120 million in 2020. Almost immediately, crime rose in the city. Crime has gotten so bad in San Francisco, that residents are reportedly leaving their car doors unlocked, so crooks won’t smash their windows.

    Mayor London Breed promised to reverse her “defund” policy by restoring and increasing the police budget. However, the city is struggling to recruit qualified officers. Recently, the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff’s Association accused the mayor of continuing to make cuts to the sheriff’s department.

    Despite this, the city went to four universities in Texas to recruit police officers. This appears to be the first time San Francisco looked for candidates outside of California.

    Those four universities are Texas Southern University, Sam Houston State University, Prairie View A&M University, and Texas A&M University.

  • Murder suspect who broke into a Georgia home find out that gun beats knife. “Once he is released from the hospital, he will be confronted with charges including burglary, home invasion, and theft by receiving in Georgia, as well as murder charges in Ohio.”
  • Cisco to Buy Splunk for $28 Billion.
  • Bill Burr has a new film called Old Dads coming to Netflix next month. Looks promising. “Just go on Twitter and share the story where you’re the hero.” Knowing Burr, there will be something here to offend everyone…
  • “Auto CEOs Struggling With Whether To Replace Striking Workers With Robots Or Mexicans.”
  • Now that’s a memorable wedding:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Republicans, Texas, unions | 2 Comments »

    Race Hustler Ibram X. Kendi’s Woke Center Lays Off Most Staff

    September 21st, 2023

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Woke black Social Justice Warrior activist turns out to use organization to scam white liberals out of money. It happened with #BlackLivesMatter head Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her house-buying spree, and now it’s “anti-racist” Ibram X. Kendi, whose Boston University Center for Antiracist Research just had a massive layoff.

    Boston University hired Ibram X. Kendi to lead its new Center for Antiracist Research in 2020, a year marked by a global pandemic and nationwide racial tension.

    For “nationwide racial tension,” read “#BlackLivesMatter/Antifa rioting.”

    Three years later, after at least $43 million in grants and gifts and what sources say has been an underwhelming output of research, the Center for Antiracist Research laid off almost all of its staff last week.

    Multiple former staff members allege that a mismanagement of funds, high turnover rate and general disorganization have plagued the Center since its inception.

    [Insert shocked face here.]

    The $43 million, according to 2021 budget records obtained by The Daily Free Press, includes general support, such as the $10 million from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as donations for specific projects.

    The document, which is not an all-inclusive list of donors, also lists TJ Maxx’s foundation, Stop & Shop and Peloton as donating over a million dollars.

    Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a history professor at BU, founded the Center three years after he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.

    Kendi talked to BU Today when BU’s Center first launched in 2020.
    “My hope is that it becomes a premier research center for researchers and for practitioners to really solve these intractable racial problems of our time,” Kendi said to BU Today. “Not only will the center seek to make that level of impact, but also work to transform how racial research is done.”

    Social Justice and Critical Race Theory aren’t designed to solve racial problems, they’re designed to make them worse, profit off white guilt, and produce the occasional riot sprees necessary to keep black Americans pulling the (D) lever.

    A week after the layoffs, BU announced Wednesday that they received complaints “focused on the center’s culture and its grant management practices.”

    “We are expanding our inquiry to include the Center’s management culture and the faculty and staff’s experience with it,” BU spokesperson Colin Riley said. “Boston University and Dr. Kendi believe strongly in the Center’s mission, and … he takes strong exception to the allegations made in recent complaints and media reports.”

    The Compliance Services Office received an anonymous complaint in 2021 about the Center from Saida Grundy, an associate professor of sociology at BU and former CAR employee.

    The complaint detailed multiple high-level employees leaving suddenly and allegations of a workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination.

    After submitting the complaint, Grundy then personally went to then-Provost Jean Morrison in 2021 to discuss the alleged toxic work culture and grant mismanagement, among other significant concerns. Grundy said she sent a follow-up email after the meeting, and Morrison did not reply.

    Discrimination, toxic work culture: Why, it’s as if social justice makes all the problems it claims to solve worse.

    As Provost, Morrison was instrumental in Kendi’s hiring, according to Grundy and BU Today.

    “The pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated to them continues to be standard operating procedure at CAR,” Grundy wrote to Morrison. “This is not a matter of slow launch. To the best of my knowledge, there is no good faith commitment to fulfilling funded research projects at CAR.”

    I’m sure there’s a good faith commitment to cashing the checks.

    Grundy said the Center ceased communication when her year-long contract came to an end in June 2021, which she said was retaliation for speaking up about the Center’s underwhelming work and impact on campus.

    BU notes an 8% increase in Black enrollment over the past five years as of 2020-2021. The Boston Globe reported in 2021 that out of BU’s 3,030 faculty members, there were 71 Black female instructors, including seven tenured instructors in 2019.

    The University reported the Black undergraduate student population as about 4.8% in the 2021-2022 academic year. Kendi’s hiring and the founding of the Center were BU’s way to address their “race problem,” Grundy said.

    “They don’t want to address Black enrollment because they don’t want to be seen as a school that’s getting Blacker, because they want to raise their prestige,” Grundy said. “That’s the real racism.”

    There’s probably some truth in that. I bet BU is far more interested in giving the appearance of doing something about America’s education system failing black students that actually doing the hard work of doing something about it.

    In a way, diverting money from rich white liberal pockets to the bank accounts of race hustling poverty pimps while producing little-to-no “research” is the ideal outcome for the rest of America, as the money probably does far less harm that way…

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 3 Comments »

    Bad Guy Beatdown Roundup

    September 20th, 2023

    Time for a roundup of criminals who had critical failures in their Victim Selection Process rolls.

  • Out in El Monte, California, a would be thief armed with bear spray and a hammer got a righteous beatdown trying to rob a family jewelry store.

  • In Texas news, a convicted murderer who preyed on the elderly got his ticket to Hell punched by his cellmate, who also happened to be a convicted murderer.

    Convicted North Texas killer Billy Chemirmir, who was suspected in over 20 murders, was killed in a state prison Tuesday morning, officials confirmed to WFAA.

    Chemirmir, 50, was serving life in prison without parole after he was twice found guilty of capital murder by Dallas County juries. He was accused of killing 20 other women in Dallas and Collin counties and still faced charges in those cases.

    The Dallas County District Attorney’s office confirmed they were notified by Texas prison officials that Chemirmir was killed Tuesday morning. State prison officials confirmed that Chemirmir was found dead in his cell early Tuesday and his cellmate, who was serving on a murder charge out of Harris County, was “identified as the assailant.”

    What caused Mr. Chemirmir’s cellmate to extinguish him?

    Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told WFAA that Chemirmir was killed after apparently making inappropriate comments sexual in nature towards his cellmate’s children. According to Creuzot, the cellmate allegedly beat Chemirmir, dragged him out of his cell and killed him while other inmates watched. No one intervened and Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen, Creuzot said.

    It does indeed sound like the “He needed killin'” defense applies here, though the prison guards have some splain’ to do. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Pro-tip: If you go around breaking down doors and beating people in a Chicago high rise, don’t be surprised if you get shot.

    A resident who fatally shot Abnerd Joseph during a disturbance in their Loop high-rise building was released without being charged following the shooting, according to Chicago police.

    Family of the assistant school principal said Friday they are “left with questions and looking for closure.”

    “We can’t make sense of it,” said his sister Jeanna Joseph, who last spoke to her brother Wednesday, the day before the shooting. “We don’t really know what’s going on. … We have questions and we don’t have answers to those questions.”

    The shooting happened about 7:30 p.m. Thursday on the 48th floor of the building at 60 E. Monroe St. as Abnerd Joseph was “wildly” knocking on residents’ doors, attempting to enter apartments and “yelling incoherently,” according to a police report.

    When the doorman and four tenants went to check, he allegedly struck the doorman several times. A tenant then tried to calm him down and was also hit and fell down, the report said.

    Sounds like he was as high as an SR-71.

    Another tenant warned Joseph that he was armed and told him to stop hitting people. The police report said Joseph “turned and charged” at the tenant, who opened fire, hitting him several times.

    Joseph, 32, was shot in the chest, abdomen, flank, an armpit and a ring finger, according to the report. He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Friday determined he died of multiple gunshot wounds and his death was ruled a homicide, the office said.

    (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)

    • Remember kids:

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    Posted in Crime, Guns, Texas, video | 6 Comments »

    Texas Helps Solve Ukraine’s Shell Problem

    September 19th, 2023

    Many observers have been shocked at the furious rate of ordinance expenditure seen in Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine. Much attention has been focused on smart munitions like Stingers and HIMARS, but plain old dumb artillery shells are also being used up at a furious rate.

  • “Recently, the COO of Lockheed Martin said that Ukraine consumes a year’s worth of production for some munitions in just one month.”
  • “In March 2023, the Ukrainian minister of Defence Oleksiy Reznikov said that Ukraine uses on average 110,000 units of 155mm caliber shells per month. But he stressed that Ukraine can fire 594,000 shells per month, if the ammunition was available.”
  • “This discrepancy between what is actually fired and what could be fired means that over 300 western artillery systems that Ukraine has are sitting unused 80% of the time. That’s why Ukraine wants 250,000 artillery shells per month from the European Union alone.”
  • “According to the Ukrainians, in order to achieve their battlefield objectives, they need at least 60% of the full ammunition set, or 356,000 shells per month. If the EU were to provide 250,000 shells, the other 106,000 would have to be supplied by other western partners, primarily the United States.”
  • “But there’s a problem. The United States is currently producing only 24,000 155mm artillery shells which is up from 16,000 shells produced in February 2022, prior to the Russian invasion.”
  • America isn’t into grinding artillery duels, we’re into speed, precision munitions and air superiority.
  • “The unguided shells have been the cornerstone of the 18-month old conflict, since each day, thousands of shells are fired from both sides.”
  • “Since the Russian invasion began, the Pentagon has invested billions of dollars to produce record levels of artillery shells, not seen since the Korean War in the early 1950s. By 2024, the United States wants to produce 80,000 shells per month. That would be a 500% increase from prior to the invasion.”

    • Part of the solution to that problem is coming from Mesquite, Texas. (For those outside Texas, Mesquite is part of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, and is east of Dallas and south of Garland.)

    Earlier this year, the Mesquite City Council approved the construction of a manufacturing facility for military manufacturer General Dynamics and Tactical Systems.

    The 240,011-square-foot building is expected to employ 50 salaried and 75 to 100 hourly employees after the city approved the new $60 million industrial campus in 2021.

    “This unique opportunity is a direct result of our strong partnership with the U.S. Army and a very responsive and collaborative Mesquite, Texas, community,” said Steven Black, vice president and general manager at General Dynamics. “We are very excited to grow our company in this region.”

    Mesquite City Manager Cliff Keheley echoed similar sentiments, saying he is “excited” to have Mesquite become a “robust commercial center” so that residents “no longer have to leave” the city to work.

    “Once the installation is complete, the manufacturing facility will effectively produce 20,000 units per month for the Department of Defense, which will contribute to the inherently necessary defense capabilities of the United States and our allies abroad,” General Dynamics said in a letter to the city.

    According to The New York Times, those “20,000 units” refer to 155-millimeter artillery shells for howitzers. The U.S. government is planning to increase its production of 155-millimeter shells from 15,000 to 90,000 per month to keep up with the need in Ukraine.

    “We don’t want to say we’re profiting off of a conflict like that — we’re not feeling any of the effects of war,” Mesquite City Manager Cliff Keheley told the Times regarding the war in Ukraine. “But at the same time, it’s a global scale of the economy, and that generates a need.”

    My guess is that the shells manufactured in Mesquite will be used to backfill U.S. shell stock sent to Ukraine.

    It’s not complete solution to Ukraine’s shell problem, but it’s a start. But Ukraine is going to need a lot more help than that to supercharge its current grinding counteroffensive.

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    Posted in Military, video | 21 Comments »

    Japan’s Bigmotor Collapses Because It Was Fraud All The Way Down

    September 18th, 2023

    The largest used car/car repair chain in Japan collapsed last month over fraud. And not just fraud, but an amazing panoply of varigated fraud.

  • After the founder hired his son to run things (big red flag), Bigmotor started earning record profits and rapidly expanded across Japan. Turns out the growth came not only through fraud, but particularly naked and egregious fraud.
  • They would damage customers tires, and then tell them they needed four new ones. And a trainee captured fraud instructions on video. They even had quotas for how much they had to git out of everyone who came in for a repair.
  • But why just rip off customers when you can also ripoff the insurance company? “When the customer had insurance, Big Motor always milked the job for as much as they could. They knew the most expensive things to damage to jack up the bill.” They made damage worse, used tricks to make claim photos look worse, and even bashed car panels with socks full of golf balls.
  • Alerted to the fraud, they let Bigmotor investigate themselves.
  • Another reason insurance companies didn’t rock the boat: Bigmotor was once of the biggest sellers of car insurance in Japan. And Sompo Japan, one of the big three, was one of the biggest stockholders in Bigmotor.
  • Everywhere a tree along a public road blocked a Bigmotor sign, they poisoned the tree.
  • They also treated their employees like shit, setting impossible quotas and threatening to fire employees who didn’t buy a used car.

    • All of it finally caught up with them. “61 workers, or nearly 60% of 104 surveyed employees, said they had been ordered by their supervisors to pad car repair charges to receive bigger insurance payouts…Bigmotor has so far found 1,275 cases of such fraudulent practices and that ¥6.62 million in insurance benefits for 177 of the cases have been repaid, the company said.” The heads at Bigmotor (and his crooked son) resigned, and the head of Sompo Japan stepped down as well.

    It used to be that this sort of institutional corporate fraud was all but unthinkable in Japan. But recently several high profile fraud cases have hit companies like Olympus, Nissan and Kobe Steel.

    Still, those involved various accounting shenanigans rather gross fraud against customers. I would expect some prison sentences at Bigmotor are in order…

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    Posted in unions, video, Waste and Fraud | 5 Comments »

    More Tech Companies Cancelling San Francisco Conferences

    September 17th, 2023

    As a hilly, historical, picturesque city on the coast, San Francisco used to be tourist hot-spot and convention destination. But with social justice turning San Francisco into a crime and feces ridden hellhole, even local tech giants have decided it’s time to hold their conferences elsewhere.

    First Red Hat and Meta (AKA Facebook) have cancelled San Francisco conventions.

    Two major tech companies decided to cancel their San Francisco Moscone Center conferences. Software company Red Hat and Bay Area’s Meta are no longer coming to the city in 2024.

    “It’s not something we are going to turn around quickly. There are certainly companies, organizations that are deciding not to hold their events in San Francisco. We will probably see more of that,” said Rufus Jeffris, Bay Area Council spokesperson.

    A financial hit that is no surprise for the San Francisco Travel Association. According to their projections:

    “2024 continues to be a particularly challenging year for conventions in San Francisco. Although 2023 is a robust convention year, 2024 is estimated to actualize about 60% of the average,” said Jeffris.

    Snip.

    We contacted Meta and Red Hat and have not gotten a response. Yet, the Bay Area Council says safety challenges don’t help San Francisco.

    “Some of the issues in San Francisco is working hard to address. Obviously some issues of safety or cleanliness in the streets. Social problems that we are seeing on the streets are frankly a result of not only the pandemic and the after effects of that but many decades of failed policies,” said Jeffris.

    You don’t say. Reminder: The last Republican mayor of San Francisco left office in 1964. Since then an unending stream of Democrats like Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom have lead the city.

    Now Google has joined Red Hat and Meta in pulling their conference out of the city.

    Google is moving a technology conference out of San Francisco, as the city struggles with high crime and rampant drug use.

    The company will host its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas next year, SFGATE reported. Google held the conference at the city’s Moscone Center last week, as it had from 2017-2019, for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It had planned to host the 2024 iteration of the conference in San Francisco as well, but it canceled the booking in July. Google declined to give SFGATE a specific reason for pulling the conference out of San Francisco.

    The $1.7 trillion company’s decision comes as dozens of other businesses have scaled back their operations in San Francisco as the city deals with widespread crime, homelessness, and drug use. Between 2020 and 2022, homicides increased 40 percent, and fentanyl deaths have also spiked, resulting in a number of companies pulling events, headquarters, and office space out of San Francisco.

    Salesforce may be next: “Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said his company may pull its massive “Dreamforce” conference out of the city next year, citing public safety concerns. Benioff said this year’s conference will inject $57 million into the downtown economy.”

    Social Justice Warriors seem less concerned about injecting money into the city than into their own bank accounts, or about enabling the city’s growing population of mentally ill transients to continue injecting drugs into their veins. San Francisco will continue to wither and die as long as they’re in charge.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 5 Comments »

    BREAKING: Paxton Acquitted

    September 16th, 2023

    This just in: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been acquitted on all 16 articles of impeachment.

    In a dramatic loss for the Texas House of Representatives, the Texas Senate did not sustain any of the articles of impeachment against Attorney General Ken Paxton, triggering his reinstatement to office after nearly a four-month suspension.

    The House Board of Managers needed to convince 21 senators to sustain at least one of the charges. The Senate’s court of impeachment sustained none of the charges, granting a full acquittal to Paxton to resume his position as the duly elected attorney general.

    Most of the charges were dismissed by a vote of 14 to 16.

    After the vote concluded, Sen. Brian Birdwell (R-Granbury) made a motion to dismiss the four articles of impeachment that had been held in abeyance and were not considered in the Senate’s impeachment trial proceedings. The motion passed by a vote of 19 to 11.

    Paxton slammed the Texas House and Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) in a statement celebrating the acquittals.

    “The weaponization of the impeachment process to settle political differences is not only wrong, it is immoral and corrupt,” Paxton said.

    “Now that this shameful process is over, my work to defend our constitutional rights will resume. Thank you to everyone who has stood with us during this time.”

    The attorney general thanked his wife, Sen. Angela Paxton (R-McKinney), and his other supporters.

    Patrick had his own criticisms of Phelan and the House after the acquittals were announced.

    “Millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on this impeachment!” Patrick exclaimed from the dais.

    The lieutenant governor called for amendments to the Texas Constitution to prevent the hasty impeachment of an elected official based on unsworn testimony, among other recommendations.

    A few moments later, Patrick signed the documents reinstating Paxton as attorney general and dissolved the Senate’s court of impeachment.

    It became apparent in the trial that the allegations against Paxton were unsupported.

    The next step should be that every Republican who voted to impeach Paxton in the House or Senate needs to be primaried.

    And Dade Phelan should be at the top of that list.

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    Posted in Regulation, Texas | 16 Comments »

    Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes.

    September 16th, 2023

    How bad an idea was it buying a car made in a communist country? Two guys from Donut Media pick up a used Yugo to see if it lives down to its reputation.

  • “Journalists have been crapping on it for decades, but is it really that bad?” Spoiler: Yes.
  • Their Yugo has 20,593 miles on it, and the build quality is obviously crap. “The needle for the speedometer is broken off, which is annoying, and it has a very optimistic high number of 110 miles per hour.”
  • One reason the car has such poor quality is the cost: The Yugo was $4,000 brand new back in the mid-1980s.
  • “This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a company called Corvina Zastava, which literally means red flag. You think the people that bought these would have seen the huge red flag.”
  • “In reality the Yugo is a clone of the Fiat 127. Corvina Zastava licensed the design from Fiat and built their version in the motherland.”
  • “One thing that communist Yugoslavia didn’t have access to that Fiat did was purpose-built machinery. And that’s how you get panel gaps.”
  • “Zastava literally spared every expense they possibly could when making this thing, from the metal stamping to the interior.”
  • You really have to watch the entire video to enjoy the diverse panoply of mystery noises and bumps they experience.
  • “Americans ended up hating the Yugo, but here’s the thing: It was never meant for the U.S market. It was a complete fluke that had ever made it to our shores in the first place.”
  • It was strictly meant as a utilitarian vehicle for Yugoslavians.
  • “As Edmunds said when they reviewed an 89 Yugo, ‘the Yugo is slow, low grip and high effort.’ Sure, it’s got a rack and pinion, but the Yugo doesn’t even have power steering. You have to throw your entire body weight into most of your turns.”
  • “This is not good. Dude, having a car change direction depending on what the throttle is doing? I’m gonna give that a fail.”
  • The transmission is awful, the shifter is floppy and the throttle is sticky.
  • It idles at 3,000 RPM. (A Honda Accord idles around 750.)
  • Car entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin (who formed Subaru of America to import those cars) was looking to import low-cost cars in America. Not in the video is this weird passage in Bricklin’s Wikipedia entry: “Bricklin, senior advisor Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Under-Secretary of State and Yugo board member Lawrence Eagleburger, and Global Motors executives met with Zastava. Bricklin agreed to import the Zastava Koral, marketing it as the Yugo.” Because who knows about cars better than Secretaries of State?
  • “The kids were calling it Yugomania, and people were legitimately psyched about the Yugo.” Having been alive at that time, I can assure you that never happened. The only marketing I remember from the time was a radio spot that focused on the cheapness and the “new car smell” and had an insipid little jingle: “Me and my Yugo/Wherever we go.”
  • “140,000 Yugos were sold in the U.S.”
  • The reason it got imported over here was that Yugoslavia had broken away from the Soviet Union and enjoyed pretty good relations with Reagan’s America, and Fiat had pulled out of the American market, meaning Zastava had no contractual bar to exporting the Fiat clone into the U.S.
  • “The manufacturer claimed it could go 0-60 and 14.3 seconds, which is horrible for even then but some reviewers clocked in at more like 18 seconds.” How long did it take the Donut guys to hit 60? 35.3 seconds. At full throttle.
  • “Carbureted engines can be very reliable, but probably not ones built in a communist country on the brink of collapse.”
  • Their Yugo broke down 10 minutes into filming a mile down the freeway.
  • “Factories in communist countries had terrible working conditions and very little oversight. Consistency also wasn’t their top priority, either. That’s all to say that the high tolerances they had while manufacturing these cars led to some very unreliable parts.”
  • At the time Yugos were being sold, Honda Civics started at $5,800. And the stock Civic engine makes more power than two Yugo engines!
  • “Yugo did not make a good car.”

    • Sales peaked at 48,812 in the U.S. in 1987, but had declined to 3,092 in 1991, when the Yugoslavian Civil War got underway, then less than half that in 1992, when UN sanctions came down, and that was the end of the Yugo in America. Supposedly later Yugos were somewhat more reliable.

    The lesson here: Never buy a car made in a communist country, unless you’re building a Museum of Failure.

    As a bonus, enjoy this hilariously dishonest Yugo TV ad.

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    Posted in Communism, video | 25 Comments »

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