“Agonizing Penis Pain”

January 19th, 2022

Hey folks, there’s an exciting new Flu Manchu side effect: “agonizing penis pain“:

A man’s agonising penis pain was blamed on Covid infection, as docs warned of the rare side effect.

Writing in a medical journal, the Iranian team described how the virus led to blood clotting in the poor man’s shaft.

For most men (outside of an extremely narrow band of S&M fetishists) “agonizing penis pain” is generally considered “undesirable.” Mao Tze Lung is just the gift that keeps giving.

So I guess guys should take the vaccine to avoid this rare side effect?

Not so fast, bucko! When it comes to rare adverse effects in the male groinological area, searching the VAERS database for COVID-19 and “penis” brings up 11 records, including such phrases as “Penile pain,” “Penile vein thrombosis” and “penile haemorrhage.” A veritable buffet of “Do Not Want!”

It’s like a Monty Python skit.

John Cleese: All right, time for your vaccine!
Eric Idle: Is it safe.
John Cleese: Oh, totally safe, totally safe. (under his breath) Except for the horrifying side effects…
Eric Idle: What?!
John Cleese: Nothing!
Eric Idle: What side effects?
John Cleese: Nothing to worry about! Just a tiny number of cases of agonizing penis pain.
Eric Idle: What?!
John Cleese: Really, it’s only very small number of cases of profuse bleeding and absolutely excruciating pain in your standing hampton! Now roll up your sleeve!
Eric Idle: But I don’t want to experience agonizing penis pain!
John Cleese: Well, I don’t want to be allergic to soft cheese, but there’s just nothing to be done about it! It’s science! Now roll up your sleeve!

You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

(Hat tip: Stephen L. Miller on Twitter.)

Electric Van, Electric Van/Can You Find One? No One Can/Loses A Fight With Petroleum Van/Electric Van

January 18th, 2022

Everyone in the Democratic Media Complex wants us to know that electric vans are THE FUTURE of delivery. That remains to be seen, but they sure seem to have a lot of trouble being the present of delivery.

In the fall, Jeff Bezos tweeted praise for Rivian, a start-up under contract to make 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon, and its founder, R.J. Scaringe, calling him “one of the greatest entrepreneurs I’ve ever met.”

Then, Mr. Bezos worked in a jab: “Now, RJ, where are our vans?!”

The comment may have been in jest, but the problem he raised is a serious one.

Amazon has an insatiable appetite for electric vans, thanks to a ballooning logistics operation and a pledge that half of its deliveries will be carbon-neutral by 2030. But that hunger is running into the reality that the auto industry barely produces any of the vehicles yet.

While consumer electric cars are finally hitting their stride — Tesla delivered almost a million cars last year — the market for commercial electric vehicles is still nascent, with their heavier loads multiplying the technology challenges. Amazon would not say if Rivian delivered the first 10 production vans in December, as was expected, and other automakers are not manufacturing at scale yet, either.

Even though Amazon owns nearly 20 percent of Rivian, it has also put in orders with other automakers, to lay claim to as many vans as it can before they are even under production.

This month Amazon said it would buy “thousands” of electric Ram vans from Stellantis, the company formed last year after the merger of Fiat Chrysler and the French automaker Peugeot.

I too stumbled over “Stellantis” the first time I saw it, a company formed from the merger of three car companies, none of whose quality screamed “reliable.” (Or, indeed, even whispered it.) But I digress.

It has also ordered 1,800 electric vans from Daimler in Europe. And it has formed a partnership with Mahindra, the Indian automaker, as part of its goal to have 10,000 electric three-wheeled vehicles on the road by 2025.

“The scale and speed at which we’re trying to do this requires a lot of invention, testing and learning, and a completely new playbook,” Ross Rachey, who oversees Amazon’s global fleet, said in a statement.

Amazon expected to have roughly 175,000 of its vans on the road by the end of 2021, according to an internal document from late 2020, nearly all of which burned fossil fuels.

That number is growing quickly. Amazon is several years — and tens of billions of dollars — into a huge push to deliver packages, shifting away from relying on large carriers like UPS. To begin the expansion, Amazon ordered 20,000 diesel Sprinter vans from Mercedes-Benz.

You saw very few of those Mercedes vans on the road before Amazon started buying them, but now they’re everywhere. But, again: gas-powered.

Through its network of contractors, Amazon now delivers more than half of its orders globally, and far more in the United States. Amazon has six times as many delivery depots now as it did in 2017, with at least 50 percent more new facilities set to open this year, according to data from MWPVL, a logistics consultancy.

That logistics boom, accelerated by the pandemic’s shift to online shopping, multiplies the challenges the company faces in meeting its pledge to reduce its climate impact. Its vow to make half of its deliveries carbon-neutral by 2030 is part of the company’s broader pledge to be net-carbon-neutral by 2040.

Conveniently far in the future that deadlines can slip long after the people making such promises are retired.

“Electrification of their delivery fleet is a really important part of that strategy,” said Anne Goodchild, who leads the University of Washington’s work on supply chain, logistics and freight transportation.

Delivery vans are well suited to electric propulsion because they usually travel 100 miles or under in a day, which means they don’t need large battery packs that add to the cost of electric cars. Delivery trucks are often used during the day and can be recharged overnight, and usually require less maintenance than gasoline trucks. Electric vehicles don’t have transmissions and certain other mechanical components that wear out quickly in the heavy stop-and-go typical in delivery routes.

This isn’t strictly true. Some electric vehicles have two-speed transmission, and they still need gears to change drive-speed ratio.

In September 2019, when Mr. Bezos announced Amazon’s huge Rivian order — the largest ever order of electric vehicles — he positioned it as central to Amazon’s commitment to reduce its carbon footprint. At the time, he said he expected the 100,000 vans to be on the road “by 2024.”

Amazon invested at least $1.3 billion in Rivian, which Amazon says is supposed to make 10,000 vans as early as this year. Amazon also locked up exclusive rights to Rivian’s commercial vans for four years, with the right of first refusal for two years after that. The companies have been testing the vans for almost a year.

In regulatory disclosures in November, Rivian said it would make the full delivery to Amazon “by 2025.” Last week, Mr. Rachey said Amazon expected to have the vehicles on the road “no later than 2030.”

Rivian declined to comment.

Yeah, I bet.

There’s nothing impossible about making an all-electric fleet. With enough money (and assuming certain Biden-era supply chain disruptions don’t get worse), it could be done by the end of next year. But whether it could be done cost-effectively is another question. Battery capacity is constantly improving, but not by Moore’s Law-esque leaps and bounds. Lots more can go wrong on a gasoline-powered car, but the technology is mature and many individual engine parts are relatively affordable. By contrast, as the man who blew up his Tesla showed, replacing current lithium ion batteries for an entire car is hideously expensive right now. That will probably come down, but no one knows by how much or how quickly. There’s a case to be made that those batteries are so expensive that electric cars are actually worse for the environment than modern gas-powered automobiles. But pointing that out commits heresy against The Holy Global Warming Narrative.

By the way, it’s not just Amazon that’s having trouble. The Postal Service is finding electric vehicles a lot more expensive than they expected.

After the USPS was criticized on Capitol Hill for its $9.3 billion plan to replace 165,000 trucks—specifically because 90 percent of them would be powered by gas combustion engines—the government-operated service went back and crunched the numbers again. In its recently released Final Environmental Impact Statement, the USPS estimates that the cost of an all-electric fleet would be $11.6B. That’s an additional $3.3B.

If that price tag seems a bit steep, the USPS estimates that it could electrify 75,000 of its vehicles—less than half of the proposed total—for an additional $2.3B ($10.3B total). Still too high? That figure is a mere fraction of the financial losses the USPS has experienced in the last 15 years. According to a report published by the Government Accountability Office in September 2021, the USPS has lost more than $87 billion since 2007 as the volume of mail it delivers has dropped.

A billion here, a billion, and pretty soon you’re talking real money…

Winter of Discontent II: Biden Boogaloo

January 17th, 2022

If you’re below a certain age, or didn’t keep track of UK politics, you may not remember the Winter of Discontent. In late 1978 and early 1979, the combination of inflation, harsh winter weather, Labour government dysfunction and trade union strikes brought the UK economy to its knees and ordinary citizens to a boiling point. Rail and lorry strikes led to spot shortages, and a haulers strike left mounds of garbage littering London strikes. The end result was an upheavel that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power as prime minister, and the new Tory government would swiftly move to crush the power of the unions to disrupt public order. Labour would not regain power for nearly 18 years.

Now Joe Biden has his own winter of discontent brewing, this one engendered not by unions strikes, but by vaccine-mandate driven supply disruptions, soft on crime policies, and ruinous “green” energy policies.

First, #BareShelvesBiden still seems to be plaguing much of the country:

There appear to be shortages from Boston to Arkansas. (Again, for the record, I’m not seeing such shortages in my neck of Central Texas, where there are bare shelves for only a few items.)

Now a big winter storm has hit the Northeast, which is expected to make everything worse. That region is usually prepared for heavy snow and ice, but that was before vaccine mandates worsened the trucker shortages. Now with record numbers of people quitting their jobs, I suspect both truckers and road maintenance crews are in shorter supply than ever. Plus New England’s reliance on “green energy” and rejection of natural gas pipelines has made everything worse.

One thing that’s making shortages of all goods worse: soft on crime policies in locales with George Soros-backed DAs has encouraged widespread train robbery.

Medical equipment, designer handbags, luggage, throw pillows, airline parts, children’s artwork, even a new wine fridge – all those items and more have been found stolen off Union Pacific trains and discarded alongside the tracks in East LA.

Images of thousands of stolen and discarded packages alongside the Union Pacific train tracks near Union Station have people around the world asking – how does this happen? Apparently, it’s a near perfect storm of an ongoing train robbery problem, the pandemic, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s policy of no-cash bail arrests.

“I have been with Union Pacific for 16 years, and I have never, ever seen this situation to this degree,” said Lupe Valdez, the company’s senior director of public affairs.

Valdez says, on average, 90 of their containers are compromised each day. But between October 2020 and October 2021, train robberies have picked up exponentially by a whopping 356%. Union Pacific has increased its enforcement and patrols, and has put drones to work, but now they are looking into diverting trains so they don’t pass through Los Angeles County at all.

“We are making arrests, but what our officers are seeing on the ground is that people are basically being arrested, there is no bail, they come out the next day and come back to rob our trains,” Valdez said.

Union Pacific’s chief has a meeting with the LAPD next week, and last month, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, calling this a “spiraling crisis” and imploring his office to hold criminals accountable.

“Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals,” the letter says. “In fact criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequences.”

All of this bodes ill for ordinary Americans who just want to buy groceries, heat their homes, and not have their Amazon orders mysteriously disappear due to repeat offenders put back on the streets by radical Soros-backed social justice warrior DAs.

All these problems (save the weather) are ones democrats have either created or made worse.

NSBA Near “Total Collapse.” Good.

January 16th, 2022

What happens when ostensibly non-partisan institutions enter the culture wars on the side of radical leftwing social justice? They destroy themselves.

Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group.

Note the lie right off the bat. Obviously the NSBA was corrupted and infected with social justice before, but this fall was when they were caught.

Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter. It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of “domestic terrorism” and asked for federal law enforcement intervention.

Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.

In between, conservative think tanks, media, intellectuals, lawmakers, researchers and activists turned what might have been a forgotten mistake into a potentially fatal blow to a group that has for eight decades been a national advocate for public education.

Calling for the federal government to arrest and imprison parents who disagree with your radical leftwing ideology a “forgotten mistake” is some world-class gaslighting, Washington Post.

Note the omission of the word “parents” from that list of critics. Also note omission of the phrase “Critical Race Theory.” It was the attempt to indoctrinate children with CRT and transexual ideology that turned “parents” into “activists.”

It is a perfect illustration of how polarized education has become in the past year — a case study in how activists can shape not just big public policy debates, but also obscure interest groups that most Americans had never given a moment’s consideration.

Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this year’s membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.

“I hope they’ll give us a chance,” John Heim, the newly installed executive director, said in an interview. His goal, he said, is to “rebuild trust” in the association, which critics believe took sides in a partisan debate.

No, they shouldn’t be given another chance. Only an organization that has already been infected with social justice across multiple levels of the organization would think that getting the federal government to label ordinary parents who object to their radical indoctrination as “domestic terrorists” was a remotely acceptable idea, or even a conceivable idea.

In October, the association apologized and promised to conduct a “formal review” of its procedures and said it would announce “specific improvements” to ensure better coordination and consultation with its members, but nothing has been announced and a spokesperson would not say where the group is in this process.

No, vague, sheepish mea culpas are not enough. Everyone involved in the organization from top to bottom needs to lose their jobs and the institution shut down forever and replaced with one that will never make that mistake again. Everyone needs a pink slip.

The leftwing establishment would love if the NSBA were “reformed,” with a few insincere apologizes and a few token changes high in the organization, but their hard-left cadres still in control of the machinery deep in the bowels of the organization.

That’s why the NSBA needs to be completely destroyed. Only when backing social justice over the wishes of parents earns educators a pink slip will the fellow-travelers and weak-clingers fall away so that the real work of eliminating indoctrination and restoring education can begin.

Clean sweep.

Hard reboot.

No quarter.

(Hat tip: PrairiePundit.)

Breaking: Jihad Hostage Situation In Texas (Update: Hostages Rescued, Jihadi Dead)

January 15th, 2022

“Police in Colleyville, Texas, involved in standoff at synagogue.

Authorities are negotiating with a man who has reportedly taken people hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during services on Saturday that were being streamed live, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The Colleyville Police Department posted on Twitter earlier on Saturday that it was conducting SWAT operations on the block where Congregation Beth Israel is located and said that all residents in the immediate area were being evacuated.

Evidently a jihadist mad that his jihadist sister was jailed:

Updates as they occur…

Update: One hostage released.

Update 2: All hostages rescued alive and well.

Not word yet on the hostage-taker.

Update 3: Hostage-taker reported dead.

Update 4: Dead hostage-taker identified as UK citizen Malik Faisal Akram.

Here’s a profile Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who was praised for remaining cool during the entire hostage event.

Update 5: NRO has an interview with the rabbi.

The terrorist, who the FBI named as 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, reportedly knocked on the door of the synagogue before Cytron-Walker welcomed him in and made him a cup of tea. Struggling to speak on air, the rabbi said that he didn’t notice anything suspicious about the character until they prayed together.

The rabbi said he realized something was amiss when, during prayer, as his back was turned away from the man, he heard a click and “it was his gun.” The man then revealed himself and started ranting for hours about his family and Islam, according to a Facebook livestream broadcast from inside the house of worship.

“If anyone tries to enter this building, I’m telling you . . . everyone will die,” he said during the livestream. He demanded the prison release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted of attempting to murder U.S. soldiers while Siddiqui was in their custody in Afghanistan in 2010.

Snip.

“During the last hour of the standoff, he wasn’t getting what he wanted. It didn’t look good, it didn’t sound good. We were terrified. And when I saw an opportunity where he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure that the two gentlemen who were with me, that they were ready to go. The exit wasn’t too far away,” he explained. “I told them to go, I threw a chair at the gunman, and I headed for the door, and all three of us were able to get out without a shot being fired.”

Virginia’s Republican AG Gets Down To Business

January 15th, 2022

Virginia’s incoming Attorney General Jason Miyares was sworn in today and he hit the ground running, letting go at least 30 AG staff members. “While it’s routine for lawyers at the top of the office to be replaced when one political party loses control, the number of lawyers fired surprised the outgoing Herring administration.”

Good. Newly inaugurated Republicans Governor Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Governor Winsome Sears and AG Miyares were elected in large measure because of the widespread revulsion at imposition of radical, racist Social Justice Warrior policies in schools and elsewhere. The only way to start curing these policies to is issue pink slips to the people promulgating them. Wokeness must be burned out of government and academia.

Let the purges begin.

Updated to add: BOOM!

“Gov. Youngkin to sign executive actions banning critical race theory, ending school mask mandate and rescinding vaccine mandate for state employees.”

LinkSwarm for January 14, 2022

January 14th, 2022

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.



  • After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin declares for the zillionth time “Nah, I’m good.” And…
  • Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
  • But don’t let the focus on Manchin and Sinema fool you. Several other Democratic senators secretly opposed ending the filibuster as well.
  • Indeed, it sets up a no win scenario for some of them.

    If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

  • Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:

  • Baltimore Democratic State’s Attorney and Soros-tool Marilyn Mosby, “the city’s top prosecutor, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of perjury and filing false mortgage applications related to her purchase of two Florida vacation homes.” You may remember Mosby from such previous hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law” and “I want the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson.”
  • Think the supply chain is screwed now? China just locked down several big ports over Flu Manchu.
  • “To staff, Kamala Harris is a clueless bully who refuses to do her homework.”

    Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.

    She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.

    “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.

    One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Google, Twitter employees flood Democrats with donations as companies are accused of censoring conservatives.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Dr. Malone on Gettr.)
  • “J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election.”

    The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

    Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

    Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

    Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

    It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.

    With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

  • Why Democrats must make a mountain out of the molehill of January 6.

    The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

    That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

    Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

    Snip.

    That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

    Snip.

    Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.

    The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

    CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.

    The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • EU to exempt luxury yachts from carbon taxes because of course they are.
  • Hollywood’s new rules.

    A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.

    The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.

    Snipped.

    So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)

    The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.

    Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)

    Snip.

    The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.

    “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”

    Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”

    Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”

    It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”

    That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.

    “Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.

    Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…

  • Steve Harvey says that wokeness has killed comedy.
  • Biden’s approval ratings hit new lows. Again.
  • Speaking of Biden, I wonder if this is what it’s like inside Biden’s head: A myriad of voices, and no independent will at the center.

  • Speaking again of Biden, remember that he backed a lot of economic turkeys other than Theranos.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:

  • “Senate Democrats Block Cruz’s Effort to Sanction Russian Pipeline.”
  • Mike Rowe discusses why 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs, and the coming severe shortage in trades workers.
  • Speaking of Rowe, here he discusses why the nonstop panic porn has desensitized Americans.

  • And speaking of healthcare worker shortages:

  • For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
  • Dwight has a good, deep dive on the course he took on how to survive a gunfight out at KR Training.
  • The Young Conservatives of Texas have their ranking of legislators out.
  • TPPF’s Joshua Trevino has a pretty swell essay about Midland-Odessa.

    What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.

    All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.

    Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Heh:

  • Lunatic stabs police dog to death. Lunatic gets dirtnapped. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
  • So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
  • A list of Austin restaurants that closed in 2021.
  • Bill Burr remembers his friend Bob Saget.
  • Impressive!

  • Richard Hammond makes the case for classic cars.

    They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.

    I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.

  • “Supreme Court Sets Dangerous Precedent Of Letting The American People Make Medical Decisions For Themselves.”
  • “FBI Promises To Make Hoaxes Less Obvious This Year.”
  • Dog stolen from man on Christmas Day found and returned. Man, these winter allergies are real killers…
  • BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Biden Business Vaccine Mandate

    January 13th, 2022

    BOOM:

    The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its sweeping vaccine-or-test requirements for large private companies, but allowed similar requirements to stand for medical facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid payments.

    The rulings came three days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s emergency measure started to take effect.

    That mandate required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees must get vaccinated or submit a negative Covid test weekly to enter the workplace. It also required unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors at work.

    “Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.

    “Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category,” the court wrote.

    This was obviously the right decision.

    Given that we know vaccines don’t prevent people from getting Flu Manchu, or prevent transmission, one wonders if the Biden Administration and their enablers will give up on their vaccine power grab. Probably not, as there’s clearly another agenda at work behind the global push for vaccine mandates and passports.

    Austin News Roundup For January 13, 2022

    January 13th, 2022

    Here’s a roundup of Austin news that’s been clogging the chute:

  • Alder aide pleads guilty to federal charges:

    A former Austin city staffer has pleaded guilty to taking payments from a nonprofit that won a federal contract he promoted while working as Mayor Steve Adler’s aide.

    Frank Rodriguez, 71, who left his job as a senior policy adviser to the mayor after the American-Statesman investigated his actions in 2017, pleaded guilty this month to conspiring to misapply federal funds and to falsifying records. He faces up to five years in prison and will be sentenced March 24 in federal court.

    Snip.

    Latino HealthCare Forum, a nonprofit that Rodriguez co-founded and once ran, reaped $1 million in public money for programs Rodriguez helped create, the Statesman uncovered in its investigation.

    Rodriguez stepped down from the nonprofit to join the mayor’s office in 2015. However, he still applied for federal Affordable Care Act grant funding on behalf of the nonprofit, calling himself the organization’s chief development officer who would work full time as the project’s director, investigators said.

    FBI investigators confirmed Statesman reporting that Rodriguez used his city job to influence the success of his own application, then benefited financially from the application’s success.

    It’s all about the Benjamins.

    In January 2017, while Rodriguez was still a city employee, he emailed other city staffers a document entitled “Crisis.docx,” after learning about the Statesman’s investigation.

    Pro-tip: Never leave an email trail for your graft and fraud, especially if you’re using or interacting with government email systems…

  • Austin returns to Stage 5 of Covid Theater.
  • With lunatic socialist Austin City Councilman Greg Casar running for congress, there’s a a special election to replace him on January 25.
  • Police catch wanted sex offender in the act of raping a 7 year old boy, only for Associate Judge Christyne Harris Schultz to set bond at a paltry $50,000 rather than $1 million.
  • Austin Network looks at the Homeless Industrial Complex.

    Homeless normativity is not a known term as it is something I made up, meaning that politicians and local authorities have allowed for a normalizing of homelessness through telling the cops to no longer enforce laws [AKA decriminalization] like illegal camping, littering, panhandling, or public defecation. This has gone on in coastal state big cities for the last several years and has allowed for the initial shock of homelessness, that “I need to do something” mindset of volunteering to hand out food or donate the clothes you never wear, to an acceptance that clothing and food will not help and that the sympathetic hobo-like bums of yore are now a more zombified set and not to be approached. It’s as if homelessness has become mainstream, no longer an outlier underground element of society. In this acceptance by local government–but not necessarily you–there is the phenomenon that if you speak ill of these folks that you are a bigot and discriminating against a group that needs your unlimited patience and big hearted compassion. There is an added narrative of urban camping and a nostalgia for bucking the trend of 9 to 5 and being off the grid, resulting in a romanticized bent to it regardless of the apocalyptic conditions.

    The mystery of this apathy can be explained in an invisible threat to America’s democracy, the Homeless Industrial Complex. The term, co-opted from Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex, may prove to be more difficult to unravel than its military version.

    The HIC (Homeless Industrial Complex) has proven to perpetuate homelessness through an alliance of special interest groups, local bureaucracies, advocacy groups, even construction developers. The most formidable and largest of scale example of this is when politicians use public money to build, via private developer, some form of housing, like apartment complexes or renovating an inner-city building into SRO (single room occupancy). Local agencies collect development fees, and a non-profit is contracted to run the property for the undetermined remaining life of the property. The problem, of course, is the exorbitant costs for this process. The product ends up being well over the price of any private, competitive construction endeavor. Then the people hired to run the properties operate under an extensive system of bureaucratic costs of high salaries, outreach campaigns, catered lunch meetings, and, yes, corruption.

  • Speaking of which: Just how did Austin spend federal dollars to fight homelessness?

    So when we look at direct assistance to families, here’s how some of that money was spent: take the community services block grant for $1.2 million designed to provide direct financial assistance to families.

    As of February, $244,277.99 had been given to 367 people in 131 households. The KVUE Defenders asked for an update and did not get a response.

    A little more than $1 million ($1,041,851) was set aside to help people experiencing homelessness and impacted by COVID-19. That money went to pay the leases for five hotels that were used as pro-lodges, which according to the City, helped provide temporary shelter to 615 people.

    Another $1 million went to emergency rental assistance that money ended up helping 147 people. The City goal was to help 143 people over 12 months. That goal was surpassed within seven months.

    Snip.

    In a recent city council meeting, the City’s homeless officer, Dianna Grey, said the City really needs $515 million more.

    “That plan is to house 3,000 people … hundreds of them getting houses this year and 3,000 people over the course of the next three years. And that would be drastic,” said Casar.

    For the math challenged, that’s $171,666 per homeless person housed. I bought my own house for slightly less in 2004. Seems like there’s an awful lot of graft going on there…

  • Is Facebook moving its headquarters to Austin? Maybe.

    Facebook’s parent company Meta has become the latest California corporation to at least partly move to Texas as it has signed a massive lease called “the largest ever in downtown Austin.”

    “The lease is the largest ever in Downtown Austin and larger than the entire Frost Bank Tower in terms of square feet,” KVUE reported.

    The Austin Business Journal reported the lease includes all office space in the city’s tallest tower. The skyscraper is still under development.

    “Months of speculation have come to an end as California-based Meta Platforms Inc. — the parent company of Facebook — recently leased the entire commercial half of Sixth and Guadalupe, the 66-story high-rise under construction downtown that will be Austin’s tallest building when finished. The social media company has also pledged hundreds more jobs in the Texas capital,” the report said.

    The lease includes 589,000 square feet across 33 floors of the skyscraper.

    “We first came to Austin over 10 years ago with just seven employees, now over 2,000 of us are proud to call Austin home. We’re committed to Austin and look forward to growing here together,” Katherine Shappley, head of Meta’s Austin office and vice president for commerce customer success, told the outlet.

    Facebook announced in July that it would be embarking on a “metaverse” initiative, changing the company’s new name to “Meta.”

    That’s probably good for Austin jobseekers with technical skills, but bad for people trying to afford housing downtown. Speaking of which:

  • “New data shows a continued increase in rent prices for Austinites.” “New numbers from ApartmentData.com show apartment rents in the Austin area went up about 25% between December 2020 and December 2021.”
  • An End To Chinese Skyscrapers?

    January 12th, 2022

    Last year, China banned skycrapers of more than 500 meters high, and put considerable restrictions on those more than 250 meters high.

    Now comes word that they’re banning buildings over 150 meters high as well.

    Larger cities will be limited to 250 metres — less than half the height of China’s tallest buildings.

    Now, special exemptions may still be given if a small city really needs a new skyscraper, but they absolutely, definitely cannot go above 250-metres.

    Likewise, a bigger city could go higher than that if it has a convincing case, but if it wants to go over 500-metres then forget it. No more Shanghai Towers or Ping An Finance Centers — and that’s final.

    There are even new rules to follow past the 100-metre mark. To go higher than that a building will need to meet certain seismic performance and fire safety requirements.

    Which sort of suggests that they didn’t have seismic performance and fire safety requirements before. Or maybe not adequate requirements. (Previously.)

    Here’s the article in video form:

    The usual subjects are touched on: The real estate market collapse, buildings so large there was no way all the space in them would ever be rented, Ghost Cities, etc. But the fact that the skyscraper boom got so far out of whack with economic reality is just another indication of how much of China’s “economic miracle” is a complete mirage.