The Amish Refuse Flu Manchu Foolishness

October 12th, 2021

The Amish are having none of your Flu Manchu panic:

[Amish Mennonite Calvin Lapp]: There’s three things the Amish don’t like. And that’s government— they won’t get involved in the government, they don’t like the public education system— they won’t send their children to education, and they also don’t like the health system. They rip us off. Those are three things that we feel like we’re fighting against all the time. Well, those three things are all part of what Covid is.

After a short shutdown last year, the Amish chose a unique path that led to Covid-19 tearing through at warp speed. It began with an important religious holiday in May.

Lapp: When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup and they take turns to drink out of that cup. So, you go the whole way down the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup, if one person has coronavirus, the rest of church is going to get coronavirus. The first time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.

Lapp says they weren’t denying coronavirus, they were facing it head on.

Lapp: It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying. Working is more important than dying. But to shut down and say that we can’t go to church, we can’t get together with family, we can’t see our old people in the hospital, we got to quit working? It’s going completely against everything that we believe. You’re changing our culture completely to try to act like they wanted us to act the last year, and we’re not going to do it.

Steve Nolt is a scholar on Amish and Mennonite culture, and Mennonite himself. He’s studying Amish news publications to analyze community-wide trends.

Sharyl: So, are you saying, as of about May of 2020, things kind of went back to normal in the Amish community?

Steve Nolt: For the most part, yeah, by the middle of May, it’s sort of like back to a typical behavior again.

That also meant avoiding hospitals.

Nolt: I know of some cases in which Amish people refused to go to the hospital, even when they were very sick because if they went there, they wouldn’t be able to have visitors. And it was more important to be sick, even very sick at home and have the ability to have some people around you than to go to the hospital and be isolated.

Then, last March, remarkable news. The Lancaster County Amish were reported to be the first community to achieve “herd immunity,” meaning a large part of a population had been infected with Covid-19 and became immune.

Nolt: Even those who believed that they had Covid tended not to get tested. Their approach tended to be, “I’m sick. I know I’m sick. I don’t have to have someone else telling me I’m sick.” Or a concern that if they got a positive test, they would then be asked to really dramatically limit what they were doing in a way that might be uncomfortable for them. So, we don’t have that testing number.

Lapp: We didn’t want the numbers to go up, because then they would shut things more. What’s the advantage of getting a test?

One thing’s clear: there’s no evidence of any more deaths among the Amish than in places that shut down tight— some claim there were fewer here. That’s without masking, staying at home, or another important measure.

No lockdowns.

No isolation.

No vaccine.

No mandates.

The Amish did everything the Democratic Media Complex said was anathema and came through just fine, with no notable excess deaths, and got on with living their lives. Also: “We made more money in the last year than we ever did. It was our best year ever.”

(Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who restored the comments sections to her blog posts.)

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Posted in Regulation | 7 Comments »

Supply Chain Disruption Update for October 11, 2021

October 11th, 2021

Supply chain problems have gotten so bad that Derek Thompson at The Atlantic deigns to notice them:

The coronavirus pandemic has snarled global supply chains in several ways. Pandemic checks sent hundreds of billions of dollars to cabin-fevered Americans during a fallow period in the service sector. A lot of that cash has flowed to hard goods, especially home goods such as furniture and home-improvement materials. Many of these materials have to be imported from or travel through East Asia. But that region is dealing with the Delta variant, which has been considerably more deadly than previous iterations of the virus. Delta has caused several shutdowns at semiconductor factories across Asia just as demand for cars and electronics has started to pick up. As a result, these stops along the supply chain are slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that they work in overdrive.

The most dramatic expression of this snarl is the purgatory of loaded cargo containers stacked on ships bobbing off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Just as a normal traffic jam consists of too many drivers trying to use too few lanes, the traffic jam at California ports has been exacerbated by extravagant consumer demand slamming into a shortage of trucks, truckers, and port workers. Because ships can’t be unloaded, not enough empty containers are in transit to carry all of the stuff that consumers are trying to buy. So the world is getting a lesson in Econ 101: High demand plus limited supply equals prices spiraling to the moon. Before the pandemic, reserving a container that holds roughly 35,000 books cost $2,500. Now it costs $25,000.

The container situation is even weirder than it looks. With demand surging in the United States, shipping a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles is currently six times more expensive than shipping one from L.A. to Shanghai. J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest wrote that this has created strong incentives for container owners to ship containers to China—even if they are mostly empty—to expedite the packing and shipping of freights in Shanghai to travel east. But when containers leave Los Angeles and Long Beach empty, American-made goods that were supposed to be sent across the Pacific Ocean end up sitting around in railcars parked at West Coast ports. Since the packed railcars can’t unload their goods, they can’t go back and collect more stuff from filled warehouses in the American interior.

And what about the truckers who are needed to drive materials between warehouses, ports, stores, and houses? They’re dealing with a multidimensional shortage too. Supply-chain woes have backed up orders for parts, such as resin for roof caps and vinyl for seats. But there’s also a crucial lack of people to actually drive the rigs. The Minnesota Trucking Association estimates that the country has a shortage of about 60,000 drivers, due to longtime recruitment issues, early retirements, and COVID-canceled driving-school classes.

In short, supply chains depend on containers, ports, railroads, warehouses, and trucks. Every stage of this international assembly line is breaking down in its own unique way. When the global supply chain works, it’s like a beautifully invisible system of dominoes clicking forward. Today’s omnishambles is a reminder that dominoes can fall backwards too.

However, there are two important words missing from Thompson’s analysis: “vaccine” and “mandate.”


  • The latest industry to suffer shortages: paints and plastics.

    Like other manufacturers, petrochemical companies have been shaken by the pandemic and by how consumers and businesses responded to it. Yet petrochemicals, which are made from oil, have also run into problems all their own, one after another: A freak winter freeze in Texas. A lightning strike in Louisiana. Hurricanes along the Gulf Coast.

    All have conspired to disrupt production and raise prices.

    “There isn’t one thing wrong,” said Jeremy Pafford, managing editor for the Americas at Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), which analyzes energy and chemical markets. “It’s kind of whack-a-mole — something goes wrong, it gets sorted out, then something else happens. And it’s been that way since the pandemic began.’’

    The price of polyvinyl chloride or PVC, used for pipes, medical devices, credit cards, vinyl records and more, has rocketed 70%. The price of epoxy resins, used for coatings, adhesives and paints, has soared 170%. Ethylene — arguably the world’s most important chemical, used in everything from food packaging to antifreeze to polyester — has surged 43%, according to ICIS figures.

    The root of the problem has become a familiar one in the 18 months since the pandemic ignited a brief but brutal recession: As the economy sank into near-paralysis, petrochemical producers, like manufacturers of all types, slashed production. So they were caught flat-footed when the unexpected happened: The economy swiftly bounced back, and consumers, flush with cash from government relief aid and stockpiles of savings, resumed spending with astonishing speed and vigor.

    Suddenly, companies were scrambling to acquire raw materials and parts to meet surging orders. Panic buying worsened the shortages as companies rushed to stock up while they could.

  • Expecting these problems to be transitory? Dubai’s largest port operator says to expect supply chain problems to extend in 2023.
  • Adding to shipping woes: Marine fuel is at a seven year high.
  • India institutes rolling blackouts over a coal shortage.
  • Brazil is also having to import more natural gas.
  • Energy problems are only expected to get worse:

    A global energy crunch caused by weather and a resurgence in demand is getting worse, stirring alarm ahead of the winter, when more energy is needed to light and heat homes. Governments around the world are trying to limit the impact on consumers, but acknowledge they may not be able to prevent bills spiking.

    Further complicating the picture is mounting pressure on governments to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in November.

    Translation: Green energy mandates = blackouts.

    In China, rolling blackouts for residents have already begun, while in India power stations are scrambling for coal. Consumer advocates in Europe are calling for a ban on disconnections if customers can’t promptly settle what they owe.

    “This price shock is an unexpected crisis at a critical juncture,” EU energy chief Kadri Simson said Wednesday, confirming the bloc will outline its longer-term policy response next week. “The immediate priority should be to mitigate social impacts and protect vulnerable households.”

    In Europe, natural gas is now trading at the equivalent of $230 per barrel, in oil terms — up more than 130% since the beginning of September and more than eight times higher than the same point last year, according to data from Independent Commodity Intelligence Services.

    In East Asia, the cost of natural gas is up 85% since the start of September, hitting roughly $204 per barrel in oil terms. Prices remain much lower in the United States, a net exporter of natural gas, but still have shot up to their highest levels in 13 years.

    Wait, you mean relying on Russian benevolence wasn’t an optimal strategy? Do tell.

  • There’s also panic buying to secure winter supplies, especially in China, where “the central government there has given state-owned energy companies a directive to secure winter energy supplies at any and all costs.”
  • Steel and roofing supplies are also facing shortages.

    Steel, roofing and insulation materials are some of the most difficult products to get right now, said Ken Simonson, chief economist at the Associated General Contractors of America. Bar joists, which are used to frame roofs, can have lead times of anywhere from 10 months to 14 months.

    Costs have also soared, with the index for steel mill products rising 123% YoY in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index. Copper and brass mill shapes jumped 45.3% YoY, while plastic construction products saw increases of just under 30% YoY.

  • Also in short supply: HVAC parts:

    A few weeks ago I spoke with several people intimately involved with large companies in my industry and they all agree that we have probably another year of supply chain disruptions and problems. That wasn’t exactly music to my ears as the last year and a half has been an intense marathon trying to keep my buildings full of product that my dealers need. The reasons are everything that you have heard before here and on other media outlets – labor shortages, raw material issues and now, chip problems.

    The chip problem could be a really big issue as those chips go into printed circuit boards that control furnaces – and we need furnaces now for Fall.

    My one large exception mentioned above is that my inventory levels are absolutely enormous and we are setting new records daily. This is killing my turns and as a result cash, but this is the new model. We simply can’t predict when things will come in so we have to pile in sometimes a full years worth of a widget. We are absolutely bursting at the seams and it is extremely stressful trying to keep everyone happy. We don’t dare cancel any orders as we would go to the back of the line, so it is what it is.

    Freight is a major issue right now. We get damage all the time and the LTL lines are all extremely slow and sloppy. Hardly a day goes by where we don’t have a freight problem.

    Parts don’t really seem to be an issue. Sure, there are certain things that we have problems with, but in general the parts world is OK so there is that silver lining.

  • Even oats, the lowly horse and breakfast food, is hitting all-time highs.

    This year, a devastating drought in North American oat fields has resulted in the lowest harvest for the cereal grain in years, pushing prices to record highs, a warning sign that breakfast inflation is imminent.

    Scorching heat waves in Candian oat fields slashed production to an 11-year low. Canada, the world’s biggest exporter, ships most of its oats to the US, its largest consumer.

    The result so far has been a new record high in oats futures trading on the CME. The sudden spike in prices has yet to ripple through supply chains to affect consumers, though that will be coming.

    According to Bloomberg, “the situation for North American farmers was so dire in the summer that many cut their losses and harvested damaged plants to be sold as feed for animals.”

    What this means for consumers is that dwindling supplies and record-high prices will soon affect foods like cereals, oatmeal, and granola bars, all popular breakfast items.

    Randy Strychar, president of Ag Commodity Research and Oatinformation.com, said Cheerios, the US’ most popular cereal, is made entirely of oats. He said there’s no substitute for the ingredient: “You can’t make a Cheerio out of barley.”

    General Mills, the maker of Cheerios and Nature Valley granola bars, nor Quaker Oats Company, the maker of oatmeal, among others, have yet to announce price increase of their oat products, but that could be imminent or at least create an illusion of stable prices through shrinkflation.

  • Retailers say they’re getting ready for a lot of bare shelves.

    Before retailers can make their sales, they need stuff to sell. That’s where the trouble is this year. Container ships are packed, ports are clogged, contracts with carriers are falling to the wayside. And the rush to ship goods for the holidays is only adding traffic to what was already intense congestion.

    “There aren’t enough containers. There aren’t enough ships. There aren’t enough trucks or trains. There is more volume now than any part of the supply chain pipe can adequately handle,” Burlington Stores Chief Financial Officer John Crimmins told analysts in late August. Trying to accelerate and pull forward orders “even further increased the pressure on the supply chain, helping to drive even higher rates,” the executive added.

    So not only are retailers competing with each other for sales, they are competing just to get cargo space to ship goods into the country. Freight has skyrocketed as a result, and shipments still lag or even fail to materialize. Many of the bottlenecks are tied to the unexpectedly swift surge in consumer demand in the U.S. this year, combined with capacity shortfalls at numerous points along the supply chain.

  • That’s one reason big retailers like Walmart are chartering their own vessels. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • There’s even a backup for ships to unload at the Port of Houston:

  • Why does UK have a truck driver shortage? Evidently they get treated like garbage compared to European drivers.

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    Posted in Economics | 8 Comments »

    Are Biden’s Vaccine Mandates About To Destroy The Airline Industry?

    October 10th, 2021

    It appears that the Biden Administration vaccine mandate (for which no written rule actual exists) is doing for the American airline industry what it and other Flu Manchu restrictions have already done for the global supply chain.

  • I’m seeing multiple reports that a walkout by air traffic controllers in Jacksonsville have caused hundreds of flight cancellations:

  • It looks like Southwest Airlines pilots are having a massive sickout over the vaccine mandate.

  • Their union is suing the federal government over it:

    In what appears to be one of the first cases of a union pushing back against the new COVID vaccination requirements handed down by the Biden Administration, a union representing pilots at Southwest Airlines is suing to stop the vaccine requirement from being forced until a lawsuit is resolved.

    Bloomberg reports that the union representing Southwest’s pilots has asked a court to grant a temporary stay against the federal vaccination rules until an ongoing lawsuit over what they allege are violations of US labor laws is resolved.

    In a court filing on Friday, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association also asked for an immediate hearing on the request before a federal court in Dallas, claiming the carrier has continued to take unilateral actions that violate terms of the Railway Labor Act, which governs relations between airlines and employee unions. The “unilateral action” in question is the company’s attempt (at the Biden Administration’s direction) to force workers to either get the jab, or be fired or sent on unpaid leave, Bloomberg reports.

    “The new vaccine mandate unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment and the new policy threatens termination of any pilot not fully vaccinated by December 8, 2021,” the legal filing said. “Southwest Airlines’ additional new and unilateral modification of the parties’ collective bargaining agreement is in clear violation of the RLA.”

    According to the guidelines set out by President Biden (and “voluntarily” embraced by most of the major airlines), Southwest has a deadline of Oct. 4 under the federal mandate for employees to get jabbed or have an approved medical or religious exemption. SW is affected by the mandate because it has contracts with the federal government (like many large businesses).

    The union represents 9,000 pilots at the airline, and a strike could easily disrupt American air travel (remember the air traffic controllers strike in the 1980s?)

  • Keep in mind that almost all the airlines are set to fire pilots that don’t comply. What happens when just about all the airlines are grounded because of employee strikes and sickouts? If you think Biden’s poll numbers are bad now, just wait.
  • It’s not just pilots and air traffic controllers. All sorts of professions, from bus drivers to police officers to ferry operators, are staging sickouts over vaccine mandates in various parts of the country.

    • There’s something about vaccine mandates that are so holy to our leftwing ruling class that they’re willing to tear the country apart to impose them. Some have said money from drug companies, but that explanation seems too simple for how hard they’re fighting to impose them no matter the cost, and the lengths to which the Democratic Media Complex is willing to go to suppress any mention of disagreement with The Holy Narrative.

    This is about control.

    It must be resisted.

    Update: Southwest just cancelled 1,000 more flights. And I’m seeing rumors on Twitter that other airlines crews are joining in:

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, unions | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 9, 2021

    October 9th, 2021

    Biden sinking, China stinking, Facebook’s fake whistleblower, and more border woes. Enjoy a special Saturday LinkSwarm!

  • Of course the Biden Administration tucked a multibillion dollar handout to illegal aliens into the reconciliation bill. It’s what they do. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Does this border look controlled to you?

    

  • Related: “69 Percent of Hispanics Disapprove of Biden’s Handling of Immigration.”
  • Indeed, Biden’s poll numbers are so low that even CNN has noticed. “Just 32% of independents approved of how Biden is handling his job while 60% disapprove in a new Quinnipiac University national poll… In 2010, the Republicans picked up 63 seat, with being up 19 points among independents.”
  • Short-term debt limit extension bill passes. Tastes like chicken…
  • The reconciliation bill is deeply hostile to marriage. Well, it’s no surprise, since happily married couples with children are increasingly an obstacle to Democratic Party control…
  • This explains a lot:

    U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland. In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner. Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. Panorama Education is the ‘social learning’ resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.

  • Remember Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate? It doesn’t exist.

    So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.

    That’s why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate haven’t yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.

    According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements.

    Let the lawsuits against private companies firing people for refusing the vaccine for which no mandate exists begin!

  • “Ontario doctor resigns over forced vaccines, says 80% of ER patients with mysterious issues had both shots.”
  • Holy crap: “Wuhan and US scientists planned to create new coronaviruses.”

    Scientists from Wuhan and the US were planning to create new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic codes of other viruses, proposals show.

    Documents of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), leaked last month, reveal that the international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data of closely related strains and grow completely new viruses.

    A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.

    Here’s a novel thought: How about you not do that?

  • Did I mention that Wuhan scientists also wanted to genetically engineer coronaviruses that were more infectious to humans and release aerosols containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” among cave bats in Yunnan, China? And they also applied DARPA grant! Who the hell was asleep at the grant proposal switch while Chinese biological warfare scientists were going full Frankenstein?
  • Also: China started ordering more testing kits six months before we started hearing about the Flu Manchu outbreak.
  • Truth:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another Chinese real estate developer defaults, this one an Evergrande-linked firm called “Jumbo Fortune Enterprises.”
  • Facebook’s fake “Whistleblower” Frances Haugen was part of the election meddling team that suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. Also: “She’s receiving ‘strategic communication guidance’ from former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm Bryson Gillette, which is run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there until September 2020.” Basically she’s a pawn to let Facebook suppress even more conservative stories.
  • Another day, another hate crime hoax.
  • Amtrak! Come for the crappy service, stay for the routine drug sweeps! (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Australian cop resigns over enforcing tyranny:

  • Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan are all scheduled to lose out on Texas government bond underwriting due to their refusal to deal with companies that make modern sporting rifles.
  • Citizens sues five members of the Round Rock ISD school board for violation of the Texas Open records Act.
  • Another day, another shootout on Sixth Street. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.” Given how crappy California’s business climate has become, this was pretty much a forgone conclusion. Come on down, Elon.
  • And here’s the supercondensed backstory:

    If you’re wondering who Lorena Gonzalez, she’s a Democratic California assemblywoman…

  • “Gavin Newsom Named U-Haul Salesperson Of The Year.”
  • Amazon is looking at leaving Seattle. “After years of deteriorating relations with their home city of Seattle and its ultra-progressive city council, Amazon’s CEO [Andy Jassy] made it known that the online giant may look for greener pastures. Citing the city’s hostility toward their presence, Jassy suggested that the suburbs are looking better and better for a new home to its 50,000-employee home base.”
  • Speaking of Seattle, over 400 police officers may be facing termination over refusal to get vaccinated. Good thing Seattle is a peaceful utopia where there are never any antifa riots…
  • Venezuela subtracts six zeros from its currency. This is your economy on socialism.
  • “Afghanistan is literally about to go back to the Dark Ages since the Taliban didn’t realize they have to pay their electric bills.”
  • The China/India border is getting frisky again. “Sources mentioned that patrol parties of both the countries came face-to-face in Arunachal Pradesh, which led to some jostling before they disengaged. The incident took place last week near Yangtse in the Tawang sector.” Arunachal Pradesh is basically the complete opposite end of northern India from where most of last year’s clashes occurred.
  • Did China lose coal shipments waiting for docks to open up to India? Source is a little “rah-rah India,” so grains of salt are probably in order.
  • Are you using the wrong plunger? This plumber seems to think that this one is the new hotness for clearing toilets.
  • Heh:

  • How to tell a prison from a public school.
  • “Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook.”
  • Let’s ride!

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Internet Outage

    October 8th, 2021

    Spectrum is out right now, so the LinkSwarm is going to be extra late.

    I mean, it was already going to be extra late, but now I have an excuse…

    As Jerry Pournelle used to say “This day eaten by locusts.”

    So: Open thread!

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    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

    Is The Great Gun Buying Boom Over?

    October 7th, 2021

    Background statistics suggest so:

    September background checks for firearms conducted by the FBI were at the lowest in 22 months, suggesting the year and a half of panic buying guns has lost momentum.

    FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data shows background checks slumped 9.2% in September from a year ago. Unadjusted checks dropped to 2.63 million when compared with last September.

    I sure hope so, because I would like to buy me some more guns. In particular, I’ve held off buying an AR-pattern rifle because prices got way crazy last year. Maybe I can finally pick up Smith & Wesson M&P15 in 5.56 NATO/.223 if they drop back to the $550-600 price range. (And not one of the crappy “legal for California” versions with the fixed magazine.)

    Then again, maybe people have stopped buying guns because they need that money to buy food and gas thanks to the magic of Bidenomics.

    Have readers noticed a drop in price and greater availability of popular models in their neck of the woods?

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    Posted in Guns | 12 Comments »

    Austin Police/Jose Garza Roundup for October 6, 2021

    October 6th, 2021

    There’s been a lot of news on the Austin Police Department and Soros-backed Travis County DA Jose Garza popping up, so let’s dig in:

  • In case you missed it, Austin police staffing levels have fallen so low that police will no longer respond to “non-emergency” calls. “Collisions with no injury or burglaries no longer in progress or where the suspect has left, would not warrant a 911 call. Austin residents in these situations and others like it will have to call 311 and file a non-emergency report.”
  • “Austin Homicide Investigator Accuses Travis County District Attorney of Criminal Witness Tampering“:

    In an affidavit filed Tuesday, Austin Police Department (APD) Detective David Fugitt went to blows with Travis County District Attorney José Garza over his alleged tampering with Fugitt’s testimony in the prosecution of Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.

    Last month, a grand jury indicted Perry for charges including murder, aggravated assault, and deadly conduct after he shot and killed Garrett Foster, a former Air Force mechanic who was protesting in downtown Austin at a Black Lives Matter demonstration on July 25, 2020.

    Fugitt, who is spearheading the investigation into the incident in question, insisted that Garza quashed exculpatory evidence he planned to provide to the grand jury. He indicated that witness statements gathered by Foster’s relatives and their lawyers “were inconsistent with prior interviews” and video of portions of the incident.

    With respect to a charge of threatening imminent bodily injury, Fugitt had also planned to say that the complaining witness “never once suggested that Daniel Perry” had threatened her by purposefully driving his vehicle in her direction.

    According to the affidavit, Fugitt described an interaction he had with Assistant District Attorney Guillermo Gonzalez in which the detective had asked Gonzalez what “ramifications” there would be if he did not abide by the DA’s request to exclude the evidence favorable to Perry. Fugitt says the office merely told him again which evidence he was not to discuss in front of the grand jury.

    “In my mind, after this directive from José Garza, is when the conduct of the District Attorney’s Office [went] from highly unethical behavior to criminal behavior,” Fugitt deposed.

    “I firmly believe the District Attorney’s Office, acting under the authority of José P. Garza, tampered with me as a witness.”

  • More on the same subject:

    When Fugitt refused and stood by his finding of justified homicide, Garza retaliated. That retaliation implicates Austin PD acting Police Chief Joseph Chacon and Assistant Chief Ricardo Guajardo, according to the filing and several others in the case which PJ Media has obtained.

    Snip.

    The documents call for an evidentiary hearing to determine the facts surrounding Det. Fugitt’s direct accusations against Garza, which include new evidence and also implicate the two leaders of APD. The documents also note that Garza opposes such a hearing, which Sgt. Perry’s defense attorneys interpret as evidence of Garza’s guilt.

    The document accuses District Attorney Garza of felony criminal conduct under the Texas Penal Code 36.06(a)(1)(A), unethical conduct, and violation of Sgt. Perry’s right to a fair trial under the law as a defendant.

    You may start to understand why rank-and-file APD officers were less than wild about Chacon being made police chief…

  • It’s no surprise that Garza has tried to seal the evidence against him.

  • That’s not the only thing Garza doesn’t want you to see:

  • “Austin Office Of Police Oversight Director Farah Muscadin Investigated For Spending Enormous Taxpayer Money To Push Critical Race Theory Training.”

    Farah Muscadin, Director of the Austin Office of Police Oversight, has once again pushed to offer bribes to people in the community to take Critical Race Theory (CRT) training. For completing a 22-hour course, people are cashing in with $550 gift (read grift) cards. $55,000 was defunded from the Austin Police Department to fund this radical training course. Guess who is paying for this ridiculous CRT propaganda?

    It is well past time for Austin citizens to demand their own Office of Government Oversight Committee to watch over how these people continue to waste taxpayer funds on pushing this Marxist-influenced indoctrination that is inherently racially divisive.

    The influential driving force behind these shenanigans is Muscadin. Muscadin was ousted from a similar position at Chicago State University for employing the same shady tactics she is pulling here in Austin.
    Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday said they investigated Farah Muscadin, the director of the Office of Police Oversight, and found some disturbing information about her past career at Chicago State University. Casaday sent a letter to Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk noting Muscadin’s name was mentioned in a lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to falsely accuse a professor of sexual harassment while she was working as Dean of Students at Chicago State University. He also provided board of trustee meeting minutes mentioning Muscadin had been “terminated.”

    This blatant waste of money simply boils down to further defunding of the police. The goal of Muscadin and her ilk is to strip the Austin Police Department of every resource possible.

    Indeed, Muscadin’s name appears in that lunatic Reimagining Public Safety Task Force document, the entire purpose of which was to transfer money from APD to various leftwing activist groups.

    While Austin crime and homicide numbers continue to exponentially increase, these extreme-left radical groups keep chipping away at morale and funding to continue the downward spiral Austin is on in terms of law enforcement and public safety. While the excuses and denial are endless, accountability is in short supply. If you want to address the record breaking murder numbers, look no further than these anti-police radicals’ war with the police.

  • Three former Austin mayors come out for Proposition A:

    • Prop A is a necessary start, but crime will not fully come under control as long as Garza is DA and the current hard-left City Council is in power.

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

    Is China Getting Ready To Invade Taiwan?

    October 5th, 2021

    When I previously covered the possibility of China invading Taiwan, I quoted:

    The invasion will happen in April or October. Because of the challenges posed by the strait’s weather, a transport fleet can only make it across the strait in one of these two four-week windows. The scale of the invasion will be so large that strategic surprise will not be possible, especially given the extensive mutual penetration of each side by the other’s intelligence agencies.

    Well, guess what month it is?

    Over the past few days, over 150 Chinese aircraft have violated Taiwan’s airspace. The sabre-rattling has been serious enough that Taiwan has asked for Australia’s help.

    In some way the timing is right for Beijing to go to war. Their economy is faltering, the Biden White House has proved its weakness in Afghanistan (and may be compromised by CCP ties), and a “Great Patriotic War” to bring a “renegade province” in line may be just what the doctor ordered to distract the nation.

    In another way, this is exactly the wrong time to launch an attack, with global supply chains snarled and ports clogged up, how is China supposed to transport troops across the Taiwanese Strait, especially since they need civilian transports to carry troops.

    The Chinese navy now has access to 1.5 million tons of shipping that could carry an assault force across the Taiwan Strait and initiate an invasion of Taiwan.

    For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a transport fleet equal in displacement to U.S. Military Sealift Command’s own quasi-civilian fleet.

    In other words, a lot of ships.

    To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might need to transport as many as 2 million troops across the rough 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait and land them under fire at the island’s 14 potential invasion beaches or 10 major ports.

    That’s a lot of people—far, far more than the People’s Liberation Army Navy can haul in its 11 new amphibious ships, together displacing around 370,000 tons. To transport the bulk of the invasion force, Beijing almost certainly would take up into naval service thousands of civilian ships.

    The National Defense Transportation Law of 2017 mandates that all of China’s transport infrastructure, including ships, be available for military use. Naval engineers have begun modifying key vessels to make them better assault ships—in particular adding heavy-duty ramps that can support the weight of armored vehicles.

    If I was of conspiratorial cast, I might suspect that the shipping snarl was designed to hide the presence of troops ships in the Taiwanese strait.

    Taiwan is taking the threat seriously enough to prepare for war:

    Taiwan is preparing for potential war with China following a series of increasingly aggressive military activity from Beijing, with Taipei’s foreign minister warning that should the nation attack, it would “suffer tremendously.”

    China on Monday sent 52 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the largest military provocation seen yet.

    In anticipation of further aggression, the self-ruled island is preparing to repel any strike and has asked Australia to increase intelligence sharing and security cooperation, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s “China Tonight.”

    “The defense of Taiwan is in our own hands, and we are absolutely committed to that,” Wu told ABC’s Stan Grant in an interview to be broadcast Monday.

    “I’m sure that if China is going to launch an attack against Taiwan, I think they are going to suffer tremendously as well.”

    China, which claims that Taiwan is part of its territory, in the past week has stepped up its saber rattling against the island to press it to back down and accept Chinese rule. Taipei, meanwhile, maintains it is a sovereign country separate from Beijing.

    Is China getting ready to invade? I have no way of reading Xi Jinping’s mind, but I think if a real war were in the offering, we’d see less saber-rattling tests of airspace and more signs of troop mobilization. I looked for any evidence that this was happening, but I haven’t seen in.

    That said, we should still be doing our best to arm Taiwan to the teeth:

    It’s been completely obvious for a long time that China has been preparing, if it so chooses, to take Taiwan by force of arms and keep us from being able to do anything about it.

    It has massively increased its force of ballistic missiles, better to target a wide array of ships and hold at risk U.S. ground units. Prior to the latest, more serious iteration of the missile threat, Tom Shugart of the Center for New American Security estimated that a preemptive Chinese strike on our bases in the region “could crater every runway and runway-length taxiway at every major U.S. base in Japan, and destroy more than 200 aircraft on the ground.”

    China has been churning out long-range strike aircraft and engaged in a historic naval buildup. It now has the largest navy in the world.

    Nonetheless, invading and occupying Taiwan after launching a gigantic, logistically taxing amphibious operation across a 110-mile strait would be no small feat, to put it mildly.

    It should be our objective to keep China at bay, toward the goal of keeping it from establishing its dominance over Asia, as former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby argues in his compelling new book The Strategy of Denial.

    But the Taiwanese haven’t exhibited the urgency one would expect of an island of 24 million people coveted by a nearby nation of 1.4 billion people that makes no secret of its compulsion to try to swallow it whole.

    Until a few years ago, Taiwan’s defense budget was shockingly inadequate. Its military reserves are lackluster. Its frontline units tend not to operate at full strength. It has often been seduced by the allure of so-called prestige weapons, such as top-end fighter aircraft that are irrelevant to its predicament.

    We should be fortifying Taiwan and making it as difficult as possible for China to take. That means stockpiling food, energy, and munitions against a Chinese blockade. It means making its infrastructure more resilient and enhancing its cyber capabilities. It means increasing its capability to detect an early mustering of Chinese forces. It means more mines, anti-ship missiles, air-defense capabilities, and unmanned systems to frustrate a cross-strait invasion.

    Speaking of arming countries against China, Japan is now testing flying F-35Bs off an aircraft carrier. If adopted, F-35s would be Japan’s first carrier aircraft since World War II.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military | 9 Comments »

    The System is Down…The System Is Down…

    October 4th, 2021

    Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down right now. Botched upgrade? Misconfigured router? Expired signing certificate? Who knows? I’m just going to assume its a problem with their latest SuppressAllPostsQuestioningTheHolyVaccineMarrative.yml file. But it’s a reminder of how deeply interconnected all online systems are these days, and how many different things can go wrong at different layers.

    Expect a sudden burst of productivity from American companies.

    And just in case you didn’t get the reference:

    Edited to add: Additional detail:

    Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook…

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    Speculation is that Facebook engineers have locked themselves out of their own network, meaning someone with physical access to the servers will have to fix things…

    Edited to add 2: Krebs offers more details:

    Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

    Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

    In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

    In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

    “Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

    Developing…

    Edited to add 3: Seeing reports that Gmail is down for some people. It’s not down for me. I just tested and it’s working fine.

    Updated to add 4: Facebook appears to be back up, but is way wonky…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Uncategorized, video | 3 Comments »

    Profane Meditations On Current Vexations

    October 3rd, 2021

    People are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. And they’re being increasingly vocal in their displeasure.

    Here’s rapper Samson on the many discontents of the Biden era:

    And here’s J. Random Australian on the country’s lockdown:

    And then there’s the now-ubiquitous “Fuck Joe Biden” chant:

    We are fated to live in interesting times…

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns, video | 5 Comments »

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