Waltzes With Wokeness

August 6th, 2024

Anointed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has selected (or had selected for her) woke leftist Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.

ice President Kamala Harris selected progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz on Tuesday to be her running mate for her 2024 presidential campaign, a move meant to placate the far-left faction of her party and appeal to the midwesterners Harris needs to win in November.

“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked @Tim_Walz to be my running mate,” Harris said on X, with a link to donate to the Harris-Walz campaign.

“As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his,” she added.

“It’s great to have him on the team.”

Snip.

A military veteran and former teacher, Walz began his political career with a narrow victory over a Republican incumbent in a 2006 congressional race. He won reelection five times and became a reliably liberal Democratic member.

In 2018, Walz won the Minnesota gubernatorial election, and four years later comfortably held the seat after presiding over the race riots sparked by the death of George Floyd. Minnesota Democrats secured a legislative trifecta in 2022, and Walz subsequently signed progressive legislation on issues ranging from abortion and guns to school lunches and noncompete agreements.

Republicans will likely highlight Walz’s progressive record and the fraud scandals the Minnesota government has suffered under his watch. They will also point out that, as Minnesota governor, Walz failed to stop the 2020 riots, allowing widespread looting and property damage, including the ransacking of a police precinct.

“It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

“From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide.”

By selecting Walz over Shapiro, Harris is hoping the progressive wing of the Democratic party will continue backing her candidacy as she quietly walks back the radical stances she took four years ago, when she lurched to the left for a short-lived presidential run.

Shapiro, a Jew, would have received major backlash from progressives for his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. While his position on the war itself is mainstream among establishment Democrats, he did condemn antisemitic protests on college campuses and volunteered for a non-combat role with the IDF when he was in college.

Walz, by contrast, has spoken sympathetically about the left-wing anti-Israel protests that have become a fixture across America since Hamas slaughtered 1,200 civilians and took 25o hostages on October 7th.

My reading of the tea leaves led me to believe that Josh Shapiro would be the pick, but it seems that in the 24 years since Al Gore picked Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, the increasing pro-Jihad radicalization of the Democratic Party base has made it impossible to pick a Jewish running mate.

Using old-fashioned “first to 270 wins” reasoning, picking Walz over Shapiro doesn’t make much sense. Nailing down Pennsylvania (which the Shapiro pick wouldn’t guarantee, but which would at least give the Democrats a better chance at) would be a big help in getting to 270. Democrats also need Minnesota to win, but if they actually need Walz to secure blue-leaning Minnesota, the last midwestern “blue wall” state still standing in 2016, then the ticket has already lost.

No, the Walz pick indicates that the powers behind the throne in the Democratic Party are all-in on wokeness and social justice, even if it means losing the 2024 election to Trump. Because Walz has relentlessly pursued a woke agenda as governor.

For starters, Walz is all in on stealing children from parents who refuse to allow them to be mutilated.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly announced running mate — Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — signed a bill in April of 2023 allowing the state to make custody determinations if a child is denied access to sex-change procedures.

The “Trans Refuge Bill” allows for “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a parent denies their child sex-change procedures, according to the bill’s text. The bill defines the interventions, which include sex-changes, hormone replacement and cosmetic surgeries, as “medically necessary” so long as it “respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined” by the child.

Snip.

The bill amends “child custody and child welfare provisions” pertaining to out-of-state laws that would interfere with Minnesota’s “gender-affirming health care” laws.

Minnesota’s bill provided a loophole allowing individuals, including children, from other states to receive transgender treatments and asserted that out-of-state provisions “interfering” with access to these procedures “must not be enforced or applied within the state.” At the same time, Minnesota law gives the state “temporary emergency jurisdiction” to make a custody determination if the child “has been unable to obtain” these transgender treatments.

The bill defined transgender treatments for children as “medically necessary” physical health care or mental health care that “respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient.” This includes interventions that “suppress” the development of their biological sex like hormone therapy, procedures that “align” the patient’s physical body with their “gender identity” through cosmetic surgeries and sex-change surgeries.

Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit comes news that the Trump campaign has already unleashed a video targeting Walz’s pro-child-mutilation stance:

Walz is also all in on flooding the country with illegal aliens and laying the groundwork for a mass amnesty.

President Biden’s “border czar,” Veep Kamala Harris, has chosen a fellow soft-on-illegal-immigration politician as her running mate.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, 60, who was named Harris’ vice-presidential pick Tuesday, has supported efforts to turn his home state into a sanctuary state while also backing other stances that cater to undocumented migrants.

“My position on Minnesota becoming a sanctuary state boils down to who has the responsibility for enforcing immigration laws,” Walz told CBS News in 2018.

“Here’s what I believe: Congress has given federal agencies the authority to enforce immigration laws in Minnesota, and I support their doing so,” he said. “Congress has not given local law enforcement that same authority. The role of law enforcement is to enforce state and local laws, not federal immigration laws, and I strongly believe that they should not do so.”

Translation: Democrats love illegal aliens a whole lot more than natives, and want to keep as many here as possible.

“Sanctuary state” is an unofficial term that refers to states that limit or deny local law-enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

As governor, Walz also has signed several pieces of legislation to provide state-funded health care, driver’s licenses and free college tuition to illegal migrants.

“Ensuring drivers in our state are licensed and carry insurance makes the roads safer for all Minnesotans,” Walz said in 2023 after signing the bill to allow thousands of illegal migrants in his state with driver’s licenses.

Walz is also all in on supressing the speech of his political enemies.

The plan for what some have deemed a “bias registry” was first hatched in January, in the 2024-25 budget request by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. Department leaders requested $395,000 in fiscal 2024 and $250,000 every year after to add two full-time staffers and to upgrade the department’s “data tracking capabilities.”

There is “currently a void,” they wrote, “with respect to tracking and reporting on both criminal and non-criminal discrimination and hate incidents in Minnesota.” They believed it was critical to collect more information about allegations of hate that weren’t technically criminal or likely to be investigated by law enforcement — someone in a car yelling a derogatory comment at a passerby was one hypothetical example cited by supporters of the plan.

Snip.

No longer would the human-rights department be tasked to “solicit, receive, and compile” information about allegations of discrimination or bias. The new language said the human-rights department would instead:

Analyze civil rights trends pursuant to this chapter, including information compiled from community organizations that work directly with historically marginalized communities, and prepare a report each biennium that recommends policy and system changes to reduce and prevent further civil rights incidents across Minnesota.

Translation: We’re going to give social justice warriors a way to use the power of the state to suppress conservative speech.

And of course, Walz notoriously let his state burn rather than confront #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa rioters in 2020:

It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed.

Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard.

Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities.

Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement. At least three people died during the riots.

Faced with one of the most serious public emergencies in Minnesota history, Walz froze.

“He did not say yes,” Frey said of his request to Walz. “He said he would consider it.”

The far-left governor did not agree to call in the Guard until late the next day, according to a blistering postmortem, the Review of Lawlessness and Government Responses to Minnesota’s 2020 Riots, released in October 2020 by the Minnesota senate.

Instead of sending in the 600 guardsmen that Minneapolis had requested, Walz sent in only 100 late that Thursday. The Guard wasn’t fully mobilized until Saturday, four days after the first building burned, according to the senate review.

Walz claims that he thought the riots would “die down organically,” but I think that’s a lie. The same far left social justice cabal that’s trying to foist Harris and Walz off on America without a primary is the same one that helped pay for, plan and execute those riots for their own purposes.

But Jim Geraghty would like you to remember that Walz isn’t just woke, he’s also manifestly incompetent, with many vast fraud schemes occurring on his watch.

The dirty, not-so-little not-so-secret about Walz is that he’s not a good manager. On his watch, the Minnesota government has endured one embarrassing scandal after another entailing mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse….

Let’s start with the state’s handing hundreds of millions of dollars to Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future, the largest Covid-aid fraud scheme in the country.

The Feeding Our Future fraud scandal. Announcing the federal fraud indictment against the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, FBI director Christopher Wray called it “an egregious plot to steal public funds meant to care for children in need in what amounts to the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme yet. The defendants went to great lengths to exploit a program designed to feed underserved children in Minnesota amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, fraudulently diverting millions of dollars designated for the program for their own personal gain.” The nonprofit reportedly used a quarter of a billion dollars in federal funds to purchase luxury cars, houses, jewelry, and coastal resort property abroad.

What does this have to do with Governor Tim Walz, you ask? Well, a state legislative audit concluded that the Minnesota Department of Education was asleep at the wheel and for years had ignored red flags concerning the nonprofit.

From those noted right-wingers at, er, the local CBS News affiliate:

The report from the legislative auditor found that the Minnesota Department of Education’s last review of Feeding Our Future was in 2018, and while it found serious issues with the nonprofit’s operations — including that it did not collect enrollment information from sites — it failed to follow up. . . .

Over the course of several reviews, the department found that Feeding Our Future lacked financial resources and dedicated accounting staff, and noted that staff salaries were above average.

Still, the report said that by 2019, the nonprofit managed more than six times the number of sites than the average multi-site sponsor participating in the program. The department’s payments to Feeding Our Future also increased by 2,800% between 2020 and 2021.

“Time and time again over the four years it participated in the federal nutrition programs, MDE missed opportunities to hold Feeding Our Future accountable,” Legislative Auditor Judy Randall told the Legislative Audit Commission Thursday.

Between June 2018 and December 2021, the department received more than 30 complaints about the organization — ranging from unethical practices to demanding kickbacks from vendors — which must be investigated by law.

But the department’s investigation procedures were “of limited usefulness” in the context of alleged fraud, the auditor found. At one point, the education department asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.

Some of the complaints weren’t looked into at all, “despite their frequency and seriousness.”

Every state government deals with waste, fraud, and abuse. But no other state has ever gotten taken to the cleaners to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.

But we’re just getting started.

“Hero pay” wasted on dead people. In 2022, Walz signed into law a plan to pay Minnesota’s frontline workers “hero pay” for their hard work during the pandemic. The state’s initial estimate was that roughly 667,000 people were eligible for hero pay, meaning they would receive $750 each. But within a few months, the state announced that more than a million Minnesotans had qualified, reducing the payment to $487.45.

If an estimate that’s off by roughly 333,000 people raises your eyebrow, you have good instincts.

Not only were a significant portion of recipients ineligible, some of them didn’t have a pulse.

Alas, the “Department of Labor and Industry, the agency tasked with overseeing and implementing the Minnesota Frontline Worker Pay Program, did not comply with requirements for the program,” according to a state auditor. The auditor’s report concluded that less than 60 percent of recipients of the bonuses were eligible, the eligibility of 32 percent of recipients could not be verified, and 9 percent were definitely ineligible, including some who were deceased.

The full report can be read here. Notable detail: “Based on our initial data analysis, one individual was deceased for more than two years prior to the application submission date.”

Look at the bright side. Tim Walz isn’t going to let Minnesota’s hardworking frontline zombies go unrewarded.

“Didn’t follow procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest.” The same pattern is evident in the Minnesota state government’s handing out of grants for arts and behavioral health:

Minnesota Department of Human Services Behavioral Health Division did not comply with certain grants management policies, matching similar findings of a 2021 audit.

The audit, released Thursday, found the agency didn’t follow procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest and gauging whether nonprofits were financially stable enough before awarding grants. . . .

The audit found the DHS Behavioral Health Division failed to complete financial assessments for more than 40 percent of grants reviewed. The grants ranged from $49,000 to nearly $1 million, and totaled $11.5 million. A 2021 audit had a similar finding.

Wait, there’s more.

State agencies have not resolved inaccurate retroactive payments for 30 percent of employees tested by the Office of the Legislative Auditor. The Minnesota Board of Firefighter Training and Education and the Department of Public Safety didn’t retain documentation for overtime paid during Covid-19 leave and didn’t comply with state policy for using state-issued credit cards or reimbursing employee expenses.

Back in 2019, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services admitted that it paid $29 million over a period of five years for opioid treatments that were never administered. The payments involved federal money that the state agency distributed.

In another oddity, Walz’s text messages mysteriously disappeared despite public-records laws, his appointed state cannabis director was selling products that violated state law, and one of his appointments to the gubernatorial Task Force on Broadband stepped down after allegations of domestic abuse came to light.

Walz is terrible. And we haven’t even gotten to his ideology, which has pushed the state’s policies hard to the left.

It’s not just that he’s a leftist. He’s an incompetent leftist.

Of course one man’s incompetence is a Democrat’s “tasty trough of graft.” From Pigford on, Democrats have demonstrated that they’re happy for ineligible people to feed at the trough as long as they check the right social justice boxes.

Together, Harris and Walz represent the worst of the modern Democratic Party’s radical far left agenda and endemic corruption.

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How Are So Many Democrat Leaders The Spawn Of Marxist Professors?

August 5th, 2024

Anointed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t just the daughter of a Jamacian, she’s the daughter of a Marxist professor.

If Kamala’s origin stories are truly critical in understanding who she is today, we ought to consider briefly the role of her father, Donald J. Harris, a Marxist economist and Stanford professor emeritus.

Donald’s interesting take on economic theory is best laid out in his early foreword to a 1972 reprint of Nikolai Bukharin’s Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. It’s a kind of beginner’s guide to the orthodox left view of “bourgeois economics” as contrasted with the “science” of Marxist analysis.

If the Jeopardy answer is “This thinker greatly influenced modern western economic thinking,” then “Who is Nikolai Bukharin?” is not going to put any points on the board.

Bukharin’s Economic Theory is a classic of the oeuvre, in this instance, a Marxian angels-dancing-on-pinheads critique of the then-emerging economic notion of “marginal theory.” In classical (what Donald sometimes also calls “bourgeois”) economics, marginal theory examines how the addition or reduction of a single unit of a good or service affects consumer decisions: To a man dying of thirst, the first bottle of water is likely worth more than the second — and in that moment, to that man, both may be worth everything else he owns.

But don’t worry overmuch about the details of marginal theory, Donald tells us: “They are matters of lesser importance. What is crucial is [and here he begins quoting Bukharin] ‘the point of departure of the . . . theory, its ignoring the social-historical character of economic phenomena.’”

See, to your typical Marxist, free-market economic theory always obscures — it “ignores” — what’s really real, which is class conflict, Donald says.

It wasn’t always this way with the bourgeois theorists, he says:

In the early phase of capitalist development, bourgeois political economy, by championing the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie in its struggle against the pre-existing dominant class, performs a radical scientific role in exposing the nature of commodity-producing precapitalist society. In the later phase of capitalism, however, bourgeois political economy turns to justification of the system in which the bourgeoisie has become ascendant and is threatened by the growing workers’ movement. It thereby loses its scientific role, a role which is to be taken by Marxian political economy rooted in the interests of the working class.

In that single passage, you’ve got a brief overview of Marxism — its sense that free-market theory, however right it was as a critique of feudalism, is mere propaganda designed not to clarify but to mask the oppression of working people. That free-market economic theory therefore helps justify the persistence of a vestigial/parasitic bourgeoisie, which, having created the industrial system that produces so much abundance, has generated a new problem — the “crisis of overproduction,” Marx and Engels called it — a problem that can be solved only by identifying new foreign markets, juicing consumer demand through advertising, and smoke-and-mirrors ideas like “marginal theory” that help in “the formation of demand.”

You also get a sense of what Marxists mean by “science”: Not a system by which theories are tested to determine verifiable truths about the world, but a word that means “anything that furthers the goal of Marxist revolution.” Remember this anytime someone on the left declares that “the science is settled.”

In a biographical note in the concluding paragraphs, Harris mentions briefly where Bukharin’s work led the once-prominent Soviet thinker: He worked closely with Lenin during the October Revolution, was a member of the Politburo by 1919, “assumed many high-profile offices in the Party,” and “came to exercise great influence within the Party and the Comintern,” Donald writes. Then, in a single, dry sentence, he accounts for Bukharin’s end. There’s no sense of irony here, no sense even that he shares the likely confusion of his readers: “Under Stalin’s regime, . . . he was among those who were arrested and brought to trial on charges of treason and he was executed on March 15, 1938.” Bukharin, 49 at the time of his murder, may have seemed old enough to Donald, just 34 at the time of his writing.

Bukharin shared the same fate as fellow “old Bolshevik” comrades Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev: Confessing his sins in a show trial, then being lined up against a wall as a potential threat to Stalin. As Wikipedia puts it: “Before the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted, stating ‘that goes without saying’. A few hours after their conviction, Stalin ordered their execution that night” in 1936. The wages of communism are a bullet in the head.

Donald Harris’s entire opus innocently ascribes to Marxian economics a success it would never achieve and is blind to the terror his work implied. In 1966, even as he was wrapping up his dissertation, he made time to review a University of California Press book on Brazil’s 1960s troubles with central planning. It’s a book that “deserves far greater attention than it has apparently received to date,” he writes, and it’s good because it brings “to the problem a perspective sufficiently broad to include its sociopolitical and historical as well as economic dimensions” — which is to say that he approves of the author’s method of inquiry — “its Hegelian origins, and the relevance of its Marxian adaptation to the analysis of development in advanced as well as in underdeveloped economies.” It’s “a useful ‘simplifying hypothesis,’” he calls it, “useful” presumably because it helps explain away the failure of central planners as a feature of the international revolutionary class struggle. Let’s underscore “simplifying” as a theme running through the rest of his life’s work. In his 1972 essay “Feasible Growth with Specificity of Capital and Surplus Labor,” Donald promises (no kidding) to help central planners in emerging economies draw best practices from “certain aspects of Soviet experience during the period of the First Five-Year Plan”). He’s like this all the way through 2022’s “Capital, Technology, and Time” — committed to a fantasy and, even here, just two years ago, at age 82, still celebrating the superpower that allows him to (in his words) “expose a fundamental lacuna in the traditional neoclassical narrative and supporting theory related to the dual problems of agency and dynamics of the transition process involved in analysis of capital accumulation and technological change.”

* * *

Donald’s ability to turn this theology into a marketable product — a Stanford career! — is a fascinating feature of postmodern capitalism as it applies to academia. Born in Jamaica in 1938, Donald earned his bachelor’s degree from London University in 1960 and went immediately to work on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There, at a civil-rights protest, he met Indian-born Shyamala Gopalan, a graduate student of nutrition and endocrinology. They married in 1963, and Kamala was born the next year.

This radical couple’s acting out bourgeois rituals — marriage, housekeeping, a child, graduate degrees — might seem remarkably ironic. But Berkeley was just warming to its reputation for campus chaos. The year of Kamala’s birth was also the year of Mario Savio’s stirring, brief address to protesters gathered outside Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. That speech now is rightly considered pivotal to the campus radicalism that would follow. And it remains timely: In just a few words, Savio characterized the academic project in ways that anyone today might instantly grasp with both hands. A university is a kind of factory, Savio declared, a mass-production system in which “the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material!”

But we’re a bunch of raw material that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

And then came the lines remembered by some of us who grew up with Savio’s voice still echoing across our California campuses more than a decade later:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

That’s where Kamala Harris was born.

For Marxists, the real crime isn’t the operation of the machine, but the fact that they’re not the ones controlling the gears and levers of the machine.

But remember that Kamala Harris isn’t the only 2020 Democratic presidential contender/high profile member of the Biden Administration whose father delved into the intellectual arcania of prominent 20th century communist theorists: The father of incompetent Biden Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was America’s foremost scholar of Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci.

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.

Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel’s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.

In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach of Human Rights Watch, Buttigieg, along with two other authors, refers to “the Marxist project to which we subscribe.”

In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He also participated in the event.

“If The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism’s narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed,” he wrote.

“After a musical interlude, seven people read different portions of the Manifesto. Listening to it read, one could not help but be struck by the poignancy of its prose,” he wrote. The readers “had implicitly warned even us faithful to guard against conferring upon it the status of Scripture, a repository of doctrinal verities.”

“Equity, environmental consciousness, and racial justice are surely some of the ingredients of a healthy Marxism. Indeed, Marxism’s greatest appeal — undiminished by the collapse of Communist edifices — is the imbalances produced by other sociopolitical governing structures,” Buttigieg wrote.

Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism, said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting Marxism into the wider culture.

“They’re part of a wider international community of Marxist theorists and academicians with a particular devotion to the writings of the late Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who died over 80 years ago. Gramsci was all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often referred to as a ‘long march through the institutions,’ such as film, media, and especially education,” Kengor told the Washington Examiner.

Pete Buttigieg, an only child, shared a close relationship with his father.

Snip

The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci.

Gramsci thought cultural change was critical to dismantling capitalism. Nevertheless, although critical of certain aspects of Bolshevism, Gramsci endorsed Vladimir Lenin’s “maximalist” politics and identified within the Leninist faction of the Italian communists. He went to Moscow in 1922 as the official representative of the Italian Communist Party and returned home to lead the resistance against Italy’s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, on the orders of Lenin, while his new wife and children stayed in the USSR.

Those efforts landed Gramsci in an Italian prison, where he lived much of his brief life, which ended in 1937 at the age of 46. Yet his time behind bars was also some of his most prolific, leading to a collection of essays called the Prison Notebooks. Buttigieg completed the authoritative English translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and his articles on Gramsci have been translated into five languages.

Buttigieg was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, an organization that aims to “facilitate communication and the exchange of information among the very large number of individuals from all over the world who are interested in Antonio Gramsci’s life and work and in the presence of his thought in contemporary culture.”

Democrats swear up and down they’re not communists, yet the odds against two high members of the Biden Administration both being red diaper babies sired by communist professors who dedicated their life to prominent 20th century communist theorists seems astronomically high. How many hardcore Marxist professors can there be at American universities? How do two of their offspring get serious financial backing as presidential candidates and end up in the same Administration?

Of course, the odds seem a lot more understandable when you remember the “dreams” Barack Obama inherited from his father. “In 1965, Obama [Sr.] published a paper entitled ‘Problems Facing Our Socialism’ in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticizing the blueprint for national planning, ‘African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya’, developed by Tom Mboya’s Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. Obama considered the document to be not adequately socialist and African.”

Indeed.

Clearly the modern, social justice-infected, race-conscious, socialist friendly Democratic Party has been recast in Barack Obama (Jr.)’s image.

The engineered ascension of red diaper baby Kamala Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States of America without a single vote being cast in her favor is no accident.

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Anarchy In The UK

August 4th, 2024

There seem to be widespread protests (and some riots) against the UK’s government’s mass importation of unassimilated immigration into the country going on right now, which are, predictably, being spun by the media as “far right.”

British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has vowed that police have his full support in taking on “extremists” as anti-mass migration protests and riots have broken out across the United Kingdom following the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport earlier this week.

Facing a full-blown crisis less than one month into office, recently elected leftist Prime Minister Starmer gathered top cabinet ministers on Saturday as unrest erupted in dozens of towns and cities throughout the UK, in many cases in typical Labour Party strongholds in the north of England, in response to the slaying of three young girls and the stabbing of eight others, including children, allegedly by a 17-year-old Rwandan-heritage second-generation immigrant on Monday.

The Guardian, citing the far-left Hope Not Hate organisation, reported that an estimated 35 locations had been scheduled to see protests on Saturday, some of which saw violent clashes between participants and the police, as well as attacks on businesses, particularly in Belfast, Hull, Liverpool, and Manchester. According to The Telegraph, at least 90 arrests were made throughout the country on Sunday.

Snip.

The prime minister’s response to his first crisis of his expected five-year term has been heavily criticised by the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, who accused Starmer of failing to address the root cause of the anger, which is mass migration.

On Friday, Farage’s deputy, Boston and Skegness MP Richard Tice, said: “Many millions of concerned British citizens are furious at lawless Britain. Children being slaughtered. Machete mobs abound. Soldiers being stabbed. Police violently attacked in airport.

“Instead of empathy, Keir Starmer labelled folk as “far-right”. Out of touch, clueless.”

As Farage put it a month ago, “Something is going very, very wrong with the country.”

He rails against the social justice push to paint the history of the UK as a merely a long story of oppression (sound familiar?), and the radical increase in crime that recent immigration policies (including those under ostensible “conservative” governments) have brought to the UK, and notes that crime used to be concern of the middle class and elderly, but now is a worry of the young as well, who get assaulted when going out to concerts and events at night. “The answer, of course, to that is a completely different, less woke approach to policing.”

We’ve accepted absolutely, since the late 1940s, that immigration into Britain can be a good thing. Certainly the choice of food in most of our towns is rather better as a result of it. But what has happened over the course of the last 25 years is something entirely different. It is mass migration on a level that in fact begins not just to divide and damage communities, and potentially to set people apart from each other, which is dangerous. But also, I think, a feeling that perhaps something about our culture is directly under threat. That sense of who we are. and that this is a problem. Just think about the numbers. You know Tony Blair came to power…Teddy Blair comes to power and opens the door, and bear in mind for the previous 50 years, net migration had been 30—40,000 a year, that’s what it had been for 50 years. Tony Blair comes to power and opens the door, and net over his premiership 2.7 million people come. And the conservatives accelerate it, because now nearly 4 and a half million have come since they came to power.

Just as in the United States, UK residents have been subjected to boiling the frog, using high immigration levels to change the character of the country.

Much like our froggy friends, the British people are being gradually induced into a dangerous “new normal”, in which criminality, disorder, and personal tragedy are part and parcel of life in this country. As a result of our failed policies on crime, immigration, and integration over the past thirty years, we have gradually transitioned from one of the world’s safest societies to a country in which criminality is the norm. There is a risk that the public becomes used to this new reality, and stops expecting politicians to address the root causes of disorder.

Rather than reacting to the slow drip-feed of news stories on an individual basis, it can be informative to step back and take a holistic view. In just the past few weeks, the headlines have been dominated by events which, in the aggregate, point to a precipitous decline in public order.

On July 11th, the new Labour government announced that 5,000 prisoners would be released early, in order to ease prison overcrowding. On July 15th, reports emerged that London’s once-great Metropolitan Police had failed to solve a single burglary, phone theft, or car theft in 166 London neighbourhoods over the past three years. On July 17th, a Jordanian refugee who attacked a female police officer in Bournemouth was spared community service on the grounds that he could not speak English — and on July 18th, two asylum seekers from Egypt who stole a watch worth £25,000 in London’s West End were spared jail.

That same day saw two separate cases of rioting. In the Harehills area of Leeds, police were attacked and a double-decker bus was set on fire by local residents after four Romani children were taken into care by social services. In East London’s plurality-Bangladeshi borough of Tower Hamlets, rioting broke out in response to political unrest in Bangladesh.

Let me stress this again — all of these incidents took place within the space of a single week. In years gone by, each of these high-profile incidents would have dominated national attention, and provoked a conversation about the state of law and order in this country. Today, they’re little more than fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, as fleeting as stories about vapid celebrity drama or tiresome political rigmarole.

The list goes on. July 23rd, Anjem Choudhary is charged with directing an Islamic terrorist group. July 24th, British cadets at an Army Barracks in Gillingham are told not to wear uniforms in public after an officer is targeted and stabbed. July 26th, protests break out after police in Greater Manchester are recorded restraining two brothers seen fighting passengers at Manchester Airport. July 27th, six people arrested after a drive-by shooting in Watford. July 29th, one man dead and two others injured after a knife fight in East London. July 30th, a machete fight breaks out in Southend and protestors take to the streets in Southport following a brutal knife attack at a ballet school, which killed three girls and injured eight others.

As anybody familiar with the sorry decline of South Africa will be able to attest, decline is a process, not a moment. It consists of thousands of individual incidents, system failures, and personal tragedies. When ordinary citizens become accustomed to high levels of violence and criminality, it becomes harder to address the underlying causes of those issues. Adaptation, rather than prevention, becomes the name of the game — gated communities and private security for those who can afford it, atrophying police capacity for those who can’t.

Restoring the kind of high-trust, stable society that we once enjoyed will be a slow, long process — but it is a process which begins with a restoration of law and order. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele demonstrates that, even while implementing misguided policies such as price controls, a country can still achieve stability and growth if it can maintain law and order. This simple principle gives businesses the confidence to prosper, ensures a harmonious public realm, and gives ordinary citizens — particularly women — peace of mind as they walk the streets.

The Muslim child rape gangs in Rotherham and Oxfordshire should have been huge warnings to how unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration into the UK was dangerously destroying the rule of law and social cohesion, but evidently not.

America may not (yet) have Muslim rape ranges, but we certainly have high levels of unassimilated immigration destroying law and order and social cohesion. A course correction to secure the border is badly needed.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

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Posted in Border Control, Crime, Social Justice Warriors, video | 12 Comments »

Texas Declares Victory In Border Wall Lawsuit

August 3rd, 2024

Texas won another victory over the Biden Administration, this time simply because the feds failed to file an appeal.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a court order for President Kamala Harris Joe Biden’s administration to finish the border wall.

Biden issued an executive order to stop the border wall and told DHS to find a way to redirect the $1.4 billion Congress allotted for the wall.

Paxton sued the administration “under the Administrative Procedure Act, arguing that Biden violated the Consolidated Appropriations Act.”

In May, Paxton received a final injunction from Judge Drew Tipton of the United States District Court Southern District of Texas McAllen Division.

Biden’s administration had 60 days to appeal, which it never did, securing the victory for Texas.

“For the reasons stated in this Court’s Memorandum Opinion and Order granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction in part, (Dkt. No. 128), the Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated success on the merits of their claims brought under the Administrative Procedure Act for violation of the Consolidated Appropriations Act,” Judge Drew Tipton wrote. “Accordingly, the Court concludes that entry of a permanent injunction is appropriate.”

The order told the administration it could not implement any plan to divert funds from their original purpose.

The funds must go to “construction of physical barriers, such as additional walls, fencing, buoys, etc.”

Paxton said: “This is a final victory against Biden’s attempt to defund the border wall. His Administration illegally sought to prevent the construction of the border wall and illegally attempted to repurpose the money allocated for American safety and sovereignty, working instead to keep the border open. I sued and won to stop their unlawful scheme. Now, the Administration has thrown in the towel by declining to appeal their defeat and will be legally required to build the wall.”

There’s a saying that half of life is simply showing up, but the Biden Administration couldn’t even do that. Maybe everyone was distracted by the soft coup against the administration’s titular figure head. Or maybe the plain language of the statute made them realize that the case was hopeless.

This is another in an increasingly long string of victories Paxton has secured over the Biden Administration, which is probably the real reason Dade Phelan’s backers tried to hard to engineer his impeachment.

At the very least this should mean an end to federal agents actively attempting to dismantle border security barriers erected by the state of Texas.

Now it remains to be seen if the Biden Administration will actually resume border wall construction, or if they’ll merely try to stall and run out the clock. I suspect the latter, given that open borders have become a central goal for the social justice-infected Democratic Party. The courts have ways to enjoin government action, but it is much harder to compel an Administration to do what it doesn’t want to do, as there are simply too many ways for a bureaucracy to wage passive resistance.

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Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 6 Comments »

LinkSwarm For August 3, 2024

August 2nd, 2024

More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.

  • Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “US Manufacturing Surveys Collapsed In July”

    The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.

    This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.

    • S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
    • ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
  • The FBI announces that they’re willing to resume their censorship of conservatives in an attempt to drag Karmala’s cackling husk over the finish line. Though the words they used were slightly different.

    The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.

    According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”

    By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”

    The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.

    Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.

    The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.

    I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…

  • Speaking of public agencies trying to destroy Trump:

    Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.

    Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.

    It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.

  • Criminal negligence all the way down:

  • The FBI: The Trump shooter’s social media accounts show he was an anti-immigrant extremist. Actual social media company: You’re lying out your ass.
  • “The Bloodless Coup of Joe Biden Will Not Work Out Well for Democrats.”

    The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.

    Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?

    The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.

    Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.

    Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.

    Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.

    Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”

    Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?

  • Harris officially anointed Democrat nominee.
  • “Astronaut Mark Kelly, one of the favorites to be Kamala’s VP pick, literally owns a spy balloon company funded by a Chinese venture capitalist.”

    Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….

    Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?

  • Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
  • Trump notes that Kamala Harris only used to promote her Indian heritage. “I didn’t know she was black.”
  • Indeed, “Kamala Harris’s Indian Background Was Once a More Prominent Part of Her Curated Image.” You don’t say. (Hat tip: Instapundit.”
  • More on that theme:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • FBI raids home of New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s aide.

    Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.

    That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.

  • Never forget that Kamala Harris is a radical.

    While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.

    For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.

    Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”

    She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.

    And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’

    As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:

    • She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
      Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.

    • She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
      Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”

    • She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
      Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.

    • She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
      As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

    • She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
      As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
  • Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.

    In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.

    According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”

    “The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”

    To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.

    Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.

    On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.

    She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT

    Packing the Court? Nah…

    On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.

    According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).

    “There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”

    Sure Matt.

    The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.

    …during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.

    She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.

    She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.

  • “Harris VP Short-Lister Comes Loaded with Baggage.”

    Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.

  • “Segregation now, segregation forever!” “White Dudes for Harris” was born cringe…
  • More on that cringe: “Only Democrats can gather in whites-only affinity groups with matching hats.”

  • Another poll oversamples Democrats by a lot…and Trump still wins 48-45.
  • “J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
  • “Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
  • First F-16s sent to Ukraine.
  • Ukraine hits Olenya Air Base near Finland with drones some 1,800KM away from Ukraine. Tu-22M reported hit.
  • Ukraine also hit another Russian airbase…in Syria.
  • Ukrainian drones hit Russian oil depot in Polevaya, Kursk.
  • Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan threatens to send troops if Israel enters Lebanon to fight Hezbollah. You would think having some three regional wars happening on its periphery would be enough for Turkey…
  • “Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
  • “Dan Patrick Says Dade Phelan Intends to Kill School Choice Legislation Again. Patrick says Phelan refused to join him and Gov. Greg Abbott in a budget letter prioritizing school choice.” Leopard, meet spots.
  • But Texas House Republicans simply aren’t that into him any more.

    Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.

    Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.

    Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.

    But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.

  • “DEA’s Most Wanted Sinaloa Drug Cartel Leader ‘El Mayo’ Arrested Near El Paso. Federal authorities arrested the notorious drug lord Ismael Zambada-Garcia, who is already under indictment for his role in leading a multi-billion dollar narcotics empire.”
  • The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
  • “Organization Fighting Radical Gender Ideology in California Sues School District for Withholding Public Records.”
  • Female boxer quits after 46 seconds into a match against a biological man at the Olympics.
  • NRA’s New York trial “Ends With A Whimper And Not A Bang.” Severe negligence on the NRA’s part, but no special monitor.
  • Some interesting charts that break down how U.S. sports teams make money.
  • Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
  • “A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
  • Chevron moves its headquarters from California to Houston. Wonder what took them so long…
  • Texas oil pipelines nearing capacity, could reach 94% or 95% of capacity next year.
  • Boar’s Head recalls $7 million pounds of meat over Listeria.
  • Ford lost $47,585 for every electric car sold in Q2. (Hat tip: TPPF.)
  • Comedian wins court case brought by Australian government over offensive joke.
  • Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
  • GreensPoint Mall, RIP.
  • Congratulations to Dwight for fifteen years of blogging.
  • The worst safety video ever. Actually, only the second worst, behind Staplefahrer Klaus…
  • “FBI Director Suggests Trump’s Ear Just Spontaneously Exploded.”
  • “Democrats Continue Long-Standing Tradition Of Large Whites-Only Gatherings.”
  • “Kamala Admits She Can’t Remember If She Was In Charge Of Border As She Was Pretty Drunk These Last 4 Years And Honestly It’s All A Bit Hazy.”
  • “Exhausted Journalist Finally Gets To Bed After Long Day Of Copying And Pasting Democrat Talking Points.”
  • “Behavioral Scientists Now Believe Feminists Are Always Angry Because They Don’t Have A Man To Tell Them To Calm Down.”
  • “Imane Khelif Wins First-Ever Gold Medal In Freestyle Domestic Violence.”
  • “Sodom And Gomorrah Set To Host 2028 Olympics.”
  • “The dog just wants to be a dog, and they are trying to turn it into a Social Justice Warrior.”

    • I’m still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    Border Invasion Validation

    August 1st, 2024

    Texas’ theory that the state is undergoing an illegal alien invasion, as per Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution of the United States of America, due to the Biden Administrations willfully ignoring border control laws, just got some validation from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit permitted the State of Texas’ buoy barrier in the Rio Grande to remain in an en banc ruling Tuesday night, but an ancillary opinion from Judge James Ho endorses one of Gov. Greg Abbott’s main border contentions: that the state is being “invaded” by illegal immigrants.

    Overall, the court’s ruling was more procedural than substantive on the case’s full scope — that the U.S. government’s argument that the 1,000-foot stretch of water constitutes a “navigable water” under federal law is “unlikely to succeed” on its merits.

    But Ho’s part-concurrence, part-dissent opinion takes a different route, fully endorsing the State of Texas’ invocation of the much-debated “invasion clause.”

    Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution reads: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

    After shrugging off, then toying with the suggestion that an invasion be declared to expand Texas’ border enforcement capabilities, Abbott gave it his full-throated backing in January.

    “President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants. The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense,” he stated.

    Dozens of counties in Texas had already invoked the invasion clause, currently at least 55.

    It then became one of the central contentions in the state’s legal strategy related to border security and illegal immigration.

    The case for such a declaration has been made slowly over the last couple of years, including by such center-right political figures as Ken Cuccinelli, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump, and his new employer the Center for Renewing America.

    Cuccinnelli touted the ruling, saying on social media, “This is a complete victory for the Center for Renewing America’s position that [the invasion clause] of the US Constitution provides states with a complete and unreviewable right to self-defense (called ‘non-justiciability’).”

    In the 2022 gubernatorial race, former state Sen. Don Huffines and former Texas GOP chair Allen West both hit Abbott on the issue, who to that point had not endorsed the idea. Like Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton expressed skepticism of the concept in 2022 before becoming one of its biggest proponents.

    Now, its proponents have written legal backing from the bench — implicit from the majority opinion and explicit from Ho’s.

    “It is of course true that the invocation of Article I, § 10, clause 3 constitutes a non-justiciable political question; the parties agree on that, as does every member of our en banc court,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in his concurring opinion.

    Right off the bat, the court is agreeing wholesale that it cannot determine what constitutes an invasion — throwing that jurisprudential ball back into the state’s and federal government’s court.

    Legal barrier presented, meet legal barrier removed.

    Then Ho goes much further, actually opining on the merits of Abbott’s invocation.

    “A sovereign isn’t a sovereign if it can’t defend itself against invasion. … States did not forfeit this sovereign prerogative when they joined the Union,” Ho wrote.

    “Indeed, the Constitution is even more explicit when it comes to the States. Presidents routinely insist that their power to repel invasion is implied by certain clauses. But Article I, section 10 is explicit that States have the right to ‘engage in War’ if ‘actually invaded,’ ‘without the Consent of Congress.’”

    Ho cited multiple historical examples of states engaging in military action to repel foreign actors, including deploying state soldiers to the border in the 19th century to beat back bandits who’d crossed the southern border from Mexico.

    An important distinction made there and applicable to today’s situation is that those bandits were not agents working on behalf of a foreign nation but were foreign individuals, just as illegal border crossers are today.

    In Ho’s assessment, the distinction between a cartel actor and a run-of-the-mill immigrant matters not when evaluating the invasion clause’s application; it still counts as a state protecting itself from a foreign actor.

    He also cited the U.S.’s pursuit of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and airstrikes against Middle Eastern terrorist groups both before and after 9/11.

    Few in 2020 would have thought that Democrats were so determined to open the border to an invasion of illegal aliens that federal courts would be referencing Pancho Villa’s raids in comparison, yet here we are.

    “The use of military force in these contexts continues to be a matter of great controversy,” Ho continued.

    “It was controversial before September 11, and it remains controversial after September 11. But that’s the point. These are political controversies, not judicial ones. Which private acts warrant military action are questions for the political branches, not the courts.”

    Ho then wrote, “Supreme Court precedent and longstanding Executive Branch practice confirm that, when a President decides to use military force, that’s a nonjusticiable political question not susceptible to judicial reversal. I see no principled basis for treating such authority differently when it’s invoked by a Governor rather than by a President.”

    “If anything, a State’s authority to ‘engage in War’ in response to invasion ‘without the Consent of Congress’ is even more textually explicit than the President’s.”

    June border apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol agents showed a 29 percent dip, but the monthly encounters are still in the six figures and approaching two million total for the Fiscal Year 2024. And that doesn’t include the number of “got-aways” that evaded state and federal police.

    Ho continues, “To begin with, ‘there are no manageable standards to ascertain whether or when an influx of illegal immigrants should be said to constitute an invasion.’”

    “It’s hard to imagine that anyone would conclude that a few border crossings would suffice to justify a military response. On the other hand, numerous officials have concluded that military action was warranted in response to bands of Mexican criminals in the 19th century and terrorist attacks in the 20th and 21st centuries. Determining where the present illegal immigration crisis falls along this spectrum is not a legal question for judges, but a political determination for the other branches of government.”

    The founders crafted the constitution not just to balance the power of the three branches of government, but also to balance the power of the federal government with the states (which they intended to have more power than the federal government), and the power of individuals to oppose the state, and thus by distribution of power to different entities thwart tyranny. But I suspect even at their most cynical, the founders would never imagine that a political party would deliberately engineer the invasion of America by millions of foreigners merely for political gain…

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Texas | 10 Comments »

    Paxton Wrings $1.4 Billion Settlement From Facebook

    July 31st, 2024

    Did you know that Facebook was extracting biometric data from your images? That be because they never asked your permission. Which is why Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just extracted a $1.4 billion settlement from them.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the largest settlement ever obtained by a single state after he alleged that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, collected Texans’ biometric identifiers without their consent.

    The $1.4 billion settlement announced Tuesday stemmed from the first lawsuit ever brought under the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, which prohibits the capturing of an individual’s biometric identification such as retina, fingerprints, or hand geometry for a commercial purpose unless the the individual is informed and provides consent prior to capture.

    “After vigorously pursuing justice for our citizens whose privacy rights were violated by Meta’s use of facial recognition software, I’m proud to announce that we have reached the largest settlement ever obtained from an action brought by a single State,” said Paxton.

    “This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights. Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”

    In a statement to The Texan, Meta said, “We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers.”

    The Meta spokesperson also noted that there is no admission of wrongdoing in the settlement agreement.

    Paxton sued Meta in 2022 alleging that “Facebook engaged in false, misleading, and deceptive acts and practices in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act.”

    Moreover, the lawsuit explains that Facebook has “built an Artificial Intelligence empire on the backs of Texans by deceiving them while capturing their most intimate data, thereby putting their well-being, safety, and security at risk.”

    In 2011, Facebook introduced “Tag Suggestions,” a facial recognition feature that automatically tagged people in uploaded photos without informing Texans how it worked. The “tag” feature captured “the facial geometry of the people depicted” and led to Paxton alleging this action violated Texas law, thus leading to the state suing Meta for capturing facial data without consent and the $1.4 billion settlement.

    Illegally stealing information to train AI seems to be a habit with Meta, which is why they’re being sued for using pirated books to train their AI.

    $1.4 billion is a lot of cheddar, even to Meta. But will it change their ways about feeding every possible scrap of information to train an AI engine deep in the bowels of some giant data center? Probably not. Just about every software tech giant has decided that AI is The Next Big Thing, and seem to be pouring more money and resources into it rather than their ostensible “core” businesses.

    Of course, Facebook’s core business is selling your data to other companies, so nothing new there. And AI is probably less of a money-losing boondoggle than their crappy Metaverse VR project, which they’ve lost (at least) $21 billion on despite nobody using the damn thing.

    Knowing Facebook, this time next year we’ll probably be complaining about some completely different nefarious, illegal activity they’ll be undertaking…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Texas | 3 Comments »

    Did Amazon Try To Ban A 2020 Book Critical Of Kamala Harris?

    July 30th, 2024

    It seems you can add “Amazon” to the list of companies censoring information critical of anointed Democrats.

    Caleb Maupin published a book in September of 2020: Kamala Harris & The Future of America – An Essay in 3 Parts. It sold some copies and then dropped back into that vast long tail of Amazon backstock.

    Until Kamala Harris was selected as the Democratic presidential candidate. Then suddenly, Amazon banned the book for spurious reasons and refused to let it be sold.

  • It originally sold a few hundred copies.
  • Last Monday Maupin got an email from Amazon. “They said there was something with the cover that was not correct, and they said I had multiple options, one of which was to just change the cover. And so I thought, well, jeez, I don’t want to miss this moment where everyone’s talking about Kamala. So I adjusted the cover put a completely generic Bland cover and re-uploaded to Amazon. Denied. Tried it again. Denied. Tried it again. Denied.”
  • “It’s pretty clear this has been removed from Amazon. It is not allowed to be on amazon.com, despite being on there for four years. And so it appears that my book is not permitted to be on the world’s largest bookseller.”
  • “It just happens to come on the day Kamala Harris is named the presumptive nominee, and it looks like censorship to the world.”
  • When you went to the Amazon page for it, you got not the usual “out of stock” page, but a “Sorry we can’t find anything” page.
  • It covers some of Harris’ attitudes and activities as California Attorney General that are now verbotten in the Democratic Party, like building more prisons, keeping prisoners past their release date so California could enjoy using their near-slave labor, how she knew about the drug lab scandal and continued to cover it up, etc. “Over about a thousand cases are thrown out people are released from jail because Kamala Harris was caught concealing false positive drug test results.”
  • “The fact that she’s tried to reinvent herself as Miss Black Lives Matter, the spokesperson for the downtrodden and all of this, it is the most phony thing. She rose up the ranks of California’s criminal justice system in the late 1990s, early 2000s, when they were locking up people at astronomical rates.”
  • Jimmy Dore says that #BlackLivesMatter’s just came out against anointing Harris the nominee, which appears to be the case, saying the process was undemocratic. Broken clock, twice a day.

    • When leftists self-righteously denounces censorship, they only mean censorship against the left. The Twitter Files prove that the left is happy to censor dissenting voices when it suits their ends, and this is just the latest example.

    The book can be found here in digital form and here in trade paperback.

    Just before I hit publish, I checked to see what message Amazon now gives you for the book…and it appears to be available again, at least for now. So it appears they just reversed course after having gotten caught…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, video | 1 Comment »

    Austin Electric Busses Busted

    July 29th, 2024

    Austin’s leftwing political class always wants to be at the forefront of any trendy ecofriendly or green initiative. That includes transitioning to an all-electric bus fleet. How well is that working out for them? According to this piece Dwight sent over, not so hot.

    Capital Metro is slamming the brakes on an ambitious goal of transitioning to an all-electric bus fleet, citing problems with the range of battery-electric buses.

    Austin voters were promised a transit system with exclusively electric vehicles when they authorized a tax increase in 2020 to fund Project Connect, the largest transit expansion in the city’s history. Zero-emissions buses are quieter and don’t blast hot exhaust in the faces of people on the sidewalk.

    “Honestly, we thought and hoped that the technology would progress a little faster than it has,” CapMetro CEO Dottie Watkins told KUT. “The biggest downside of a battery-electric bus today is its range.”

    Diesel buses can run from early in the morning until past midnight. A battery bus only runs about 8 to 10 hours before it needs to be recharged, creating tough logistical hurdles in scheduling routes.

    An analysis by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) — a state-funded research agency at Texas A&M University — found battery-electric buses could only cover 36% of Capital Metro’s bus schedules.

    “If [the route] is too long, it won’t make it,” said John Overman, a research scientist with TTI. “You’re going to have to charge them mid-route or wherever it is.” Austin’s hills drain batteries faster. So does trying to cool buses in the city’s oppressive heat.

    Why rely on the opinions of experts when they’re at odds with your green fantasies?

    But range shortcomings are only part of the problem.

    Data obtained by KUT through the Texas Public Information Act revealed CapMetro’s battery-electric buses are far less reliable than their diesel counterparts. E-buses had mechanical failures on average every 1,623 miles over the last year — less than half the typical distance between failures for the fleet as a whole.

    Mechanical problems should be an area where electrical vehicles shine, as there’s so many things that can go wrong in a diesel engine. The fact they’re less reliable is a big red flag.

    Mechanical problems, coupled with challenges in procuring parts and doing repairs, mean battery-electric buses are often unavailable for service. In 2022, almost 52% of e-buses were down, on average. In 2023, the number of vehicles out for repair improved slightly to an average of just under 50%.

    “Getting the expertise up and being able to have those vehicles be as reliable as our old workhorse diesel buses have been is a challenge,” Watkins said. “It’s something that we are up to.”

    On top of range and reliability issues, both companies Capital Metro hired to build its battery-electric buses faced major financial challenges. Proterra and New Flyer blamed the problems on pandemic-related supply chain issues and inflation that drove up manufacturing costs after major contracts were signed.

    One of the two bus builders didn’t survive.

    Proterra, a company from the San Francisco Bay area, went bankrupt last year and sold off the firm in pieces to pay back debtors. The new owner of Proterra’s e-bus business — Anaheim, California-based Phoenix Motorcar — still has no battery provider or vehicle software ready to deploy, TTI’s Overman said.

    Remember Proterra? They’re the company that Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owned millions of dollars of stock in at the same time that same Department of Energy was boosting them.

    The other supplier — New Flyer — bled almost $300 million after the pandemic but appears to have staunched the wound. The Winnipeg, Canada company reported a smaller loss of $9 million in the first quarter of 2024 thanks to record-breaking order numbers.

    CapMetro is operating 23 battery-electric buses among a fleet of 402 buses, not including commuter buses or shuttle buses. Another 87 e-buses already ordered are expected to be delivered by the end of the year. Some will replace aging diesel vehicles.

    Once all the e-buses arrive, Watkins says, about a quarter of CapMetro’s fleet will be battery-powered. The agency will then “sit for a minute while we wait for the battery technology to catch up.”

    By most measures, CapMetro is a leader in the shift to an all-electric fleet. With 25% electric buses, the transit agency’s adoption rate would exceed that of countries with far more political and financial support for zero-emissions vehicles like Belgium, Norway and Switzerland.

    “China is a leader in electric bus sales, and about a quarter of the bus fleet in China is electric today,” said Elizabeth Connelly, a transportation electrification researcher at the Paris-based International Energy Agency. “So if Austin’s reaching that same level, I think it’s nothing to scoff at. I think it’s pretty impressive.”

    Knowing Chinese quality, their electric busses are probably just as unreliable.

    Santiago, Chile — considered a world leader in electric bus adoption — has 30% of its fleet running on batteries, Connelly said.

    “Reaching the 100% level can be fairly tricky,” she said. “It’s not as easy as it seems.”

    New buses ordered by Capital Metro over the next two to three years will be hybrid diesel vehicles, which are electric buses powered by an on-board diesel generator. The transit agency also wants to use federal grants to buy a small number of hydrogen fuel cell buses, an even more cutting-edge and untested technology than battery-electric buses.

    The hybrid and hydrogen vehicles would have a similar range to a diesel bus, Watkins said.

    Capital Metro announced the shift to an all-electric fleet in 2018 under then-CEO Randy Clarke. The next year, Clarke invited TV cameras to watch a demolition crew smash down an old mattress factory to make way for a bus charging yard in North Austin.

    “This is it!” Clarke exclaimed to reporters. “We’re knocking down an old facility … to build the bus fleet facility of the future.”

    Later that day, the CapMetro board followed suit, authorizing the agency’s largest electric bus purchase ever at the time: 10 vehicles from Proterra. Each bus cost more than a million dollars, almost twice as much as the diesel buses approved for purchase the same day.

    “We’re going to be able to save money, provide a better customer service and deal with climate change issues,” Clarke pledged to the board. In 2022, Clarke left Austin to lead the transit system in the Washington, D.C. area.

    Some were hesitant about betting big on emerging technology. Eric Stratton, a Williamson County representative then just four months into his tenure on the CapMetro board, wondered if Proterra would be able to stand by its relatively new product.

    “So that five years in, six years in, eight years in, [if] things start happening, we’ve got the support behind it so we can continue to maintain it. Do you all feel comfortable this is the case?” Stratton grilled Watkins, then vice president in charge of bus services.

    “Yes, that is indeed the case,” said Watkins, enthusiastic about the future of electric propulsion. “Proterra’s a very strong partner and I have no concerns at all that they won’t be able to support the bus for the full life of the bus.”

    The board gave unanimous approval to the $11 million contract. But that was just the beginning.

    In 2021, the board shoved its stack of chips on the table. Capital Metro would plop down up to $255 million for 197 electric buses. This time, the deal would be split between two manufacturers: Canada’s New Flyer and Proterra, the politically connected California firm that hosted President Biden for a virtual tour earlier that year.

    Long before CapMetro received all its electric buses, Proterra would be in a Delaware bankruptcy court chopping up the company and selling it off in pieces. Transit agencies across North America revealed private concerns in public court fillings, alleging the buses were mechanically unreliable, lost range in adverse weather and in rare cases would burst into flames.

    That surefire Biden touch at work again.

    Capital Metro admitted at the time of the bankruptcy proceedings that the shift to an all-electric fleet was hitting speed bumps.

    “The reliability of electric buses no matter the manufacturer is less than a diesel bus. I’m not going to tell you they operate as well as diesel bus,” CapMetro chief operating officer Andy Skabowski told KUT last December. “We’re going to see some vehicles that are down a little bit longer than a diesel bus.”

    In many ways, busses are a better fit for electrification than cars: Regular routes plus nighttime storage at a bus yard than can be equipped with industrial strength chargers should theoretically eliminate the range and recharging anxiety still common for many electric car owners. But poor range and lousy quality show that electric busses (at least the ones Austin bought) aren’t ready for prime time. The high environmental costs of lithium battery production means they don’t reduce those dreaded “carbon emissions” when considering the whole lifecycle of the product. And given newer clean diesel technologies, improvements in day-to-day emissions are probably pretty marginal as well.

    From light rail to electric busses, when it comes to “green” transportation initiatives, Austin seems to have a real knack for picking losers.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 8 Comments »

    Wagner Group Column Mangled In Mali

    July 28th, 2024

    The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin August of last year didn’t end the Wagner Group. The mercenary enterprise is now run by Yevgeny’s son Pavel Prigozhin, and is heavily involved in fighting for Russia’s client states in Africa.

    Remember Africa’s League of Assholes, the three Sahel nations (Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso) run by military regimes backed by Moscow mentioned in a LinkSwarm a week back? Yeah, Wagner’s fighting for them. And in Mali, a column of them using the same naked convoy tactics that have gotten so many Russians killed in Ukraine just got a bunch of them killed in Mali.

    Mali’s army and its Russian allies suffered a major setback and significant losses on Saturday while fighting separatists in the country’s north, a spokesman for the rebels told AFP.

    The West African nation’s military leaders, who took power in a 2020 coup, have made it a priority to retake all of the country from separatist and jihadi forces, particularly in Kidal, a pro-independence northern bastion.

    Wait, weren’t the French fighting Jihadis in those countries as well? Yep. It’s Africa. Jihadis tend to fight whichever government is in power if it’s not their government, and the French were fighting less as a noble western anti-Jihad enterprise than to protect their own business interests in “former” colonies. In a proxy fight between France and Russia, the French are still marginally the good guys.

    Plus: It’s Africa. There are factions within factions, and sometimes Jihadis on both sides of a conflict.

    “Azawad fighters are in control in Tinzaouaten and further south in the Kidal region,” said Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane, a spokesman for an alliance of predominantly Tuareg separatist armed groups called CSP-DPA.

    “Russian mercenaries and Malian armed forces have fled,” he added. “Others have surrendered.”

    He also shared videos of numerous corpses of soldiers and their allies.

    Here’s one showing the aftermath of the attack on the Wagner column.

    I started working on this piece late last night, and when I woke, up I found Suchomimus just up out a video on the same subject:

    He says the vehicle shown seems to be a Chinese-made MRAP. Supposedly they also took out an Mi-24 Hind helicopter, and will be transferring Wagner prisoners to Ukraine’s control.

    Back to the story:

    “The Malian army has retreated,” a local politician told AFP, citing at least 17 dead in a provisional toll.

    “The CSP people are still in Tinzaouaten. The army and Wagner are no longer there,” he said, referring to the Russian mercenary group.

    Fighting also took place further south toward Abeibara, the politician said.

    A former United Nations mission worker in Kidal said: “At least 15 Wagner fighters were killed and arrested after three days of fighting” adding that “the CSP rebels have taken the lead in what happened in Tinzaouaten.”

    Mossa Ag Inzoma, a member of the separatist movement, claimed that “dozens and dozens” of Wagner fighters and soldiers had been killed and taken prisoner.

    Fighting on a scale not seen in months broke out Thursday between the army and separatists in the town of Tinzaouaten, near the border with Algeria, after the army announced it had taken control of In-Afarak, a commercial crossroads in Kidal.

    It’s tough to say what Russia hopes to accomplish in the Sahel, other than tit-for-tat revenge against France for backing Ukraine. Knowing the French, this is just going to piss them off and make them more determined than ever to keep backing Ukraine.

    As shown throughout history, and especially from the Reagan Doctrine up through Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgencies are easy and cheap to fund, but counterinsurgencies are time-consuming, expensive, and difficult. Thus far, Russia has proven itself absolutely incapable of winning the one major war it’s embroiled in on its own borders, and all its ill-advised troop support of various African client states seems to be accomplishing is wasting time, efforts and resources it can ill afford to squander.

    Update: Geolocation in a new Suchomimus video show the Wagner column was hit 70km south of Tinzaouaten, heading south:

    He suggests the column was hit twice, in two separate ambushes, one that cause it to retreat, and the second that finished it off after they retreated.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 7 Comments »

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