It appears that the Biden Administration vaccine mandate (for which no written rule actual exists) is doing for the American airline industry what it and other Flu Manchu restrictions have already done for the global supply chain.
I’m seeing multiple reports that a walkout by air traffic controllers in Jacksonsville have caused hundreds of flight cancellations:
BREAKING: Air Traffic Controllers In Jacksonville, FL Staged A Walkout Yesterday In Response To The Vaccine Mandate
It’s Being Reported That All Flights In & Out Of FL Were Cancelled As A Result
This is all untrue info. This is not due to weather… All of our flights have been cancelled because employees are walking out due to the vaccine mandate. We were notified at midnight our second flight was cancelled and they won’t allow me to cancel the first leg. On hold 3.5 hrs
In what appears to be one of the first cases of a union pushing back against the new COVID vaccination requirements handed down by the Biden Administration, a union representing pilots at Southwest Airlines is suing to stop the vaccine requirement from being forced until a lawsuit is resolved.
Bloomberg reports that the union representing Southwest’s pilots has asked a court to grant a temporary stay against the federal vaccination rules until an ongoing lawsuit over what they allege are violations of US labor laws is resolved.
In a court filing on Friday, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association also asked for an immediate hearing on the request before a federal court in Dallas, claiming the carrier has continued to take unilateral actions that violate terms of the Railway Labor Act, which governs relations between airlines and employee unions. The “unilateral action” in question is the company’s attempt (at the Biden Administration’s direction) to force workers to either get the jab, or be fired or sent on unpaid leave, Bloomberg reports.
“The new vaccine mandate unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment and the new policy threatens termination of any pilot not fully vaccinated by December 8, 2021,” the legal filing said. “Southwest Airlines’ additional new and unilateral modification of the parties’ collective bargaining agreement is in clear violation of the RLA.”
According to the guidelines set out by President Biden (and “voluntarily” embraced by most of the major airlines), Southwest has a deadline of Oct. 4 under the federal mandate for employees to get jabbed or have an approved medical or religious exemption. SW is affected by the mandate because it has contracts with the federal government (like many large businesses).
The union represents 9,000 pilots at the airline, and a strike could easily disrupt American air travel (remember the air traffic controllers strike in the 1980s?)
Keep in mind that almost all the airlines are set to fire pilots that don’t comply. What happens when just about all the airlines are grounded because of employee strikes and sickouts? If you think Biden’s poll numbers are bad now, just wait.
It’s not just pilots and air traffic controllers. All sorts of professions, from bus drivers to police officers to ferry operators, are staging sickouts over vaccine mandates in various parts of the country.
There’s something about vaccine mandates that are so holy to our leftwing ruling class that they’re willing to tear the country apart to impose them. Some have said money from drug companies, but that explanation seems too simple for how hard they’re fighting to impose them no matter the cost, and the lengths to which the Democratic Media Complex is willing to go to suppress any mention of disagreement with The Holy Narrative.
This is about control.
It must be resisted.
Whether you’re consumers or employees – you have the power to bankrupt any company.
Southwest Airlines is about to be first of many to learn this lesson.
Residents in three north-east Chinese provinces experienced unannounced power cuts as the electricity shortage which initially hit factories spreads to homes.
People living in Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces complained on social media about the lack of heating, and lifts and traffic lights not working.
Local media in China – which is highly dependent on coal for power – said the cause was a surge in coal prices leading to short supply. As shown in the chart below, Chinese thermal coal futures have more than doubled in price in the past year.
There are several reasons for the surge in thermal coal, among them already extremely tight energy supply globally (that’s already seen chaos engulf markets in Europe); the sharp economic rebound from COVID lockdowns that has boosted demand from households and businesses; a warm summer which led to extreme air condition consumption across China; the escalating trade spat with Australia which had depressed the coal trade and Chinese power companies ramping up power purchases to ensure winter coal supply.
Then there is Beijing’s pursuit of curbing carbon emissions – Xi Jinping wants to ensure blue skies at the Winter Olympics in Beijing next February, showing the international community that he’s serious about de-carbonizing the economy – that has led to artificial bottlenecks in the coal supply chain.
There are over 60 container ships full of import cargo stuck offshore of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but there are more than double that — 154 as of Friday — waiting to load export cargo off Shanghai and Ningbo in China, according to eeSea, a company that analyzes carrier schedules.
The number of container ships anchored off Shanghai and Ningbo has surged over recent weeks. There are now 242 container ships waiting for berths countrywide. Whether it’s due to heavy export volumes, Typhoon Chanthu or COVID, rising congestion in China is yet another wild card for the trans-Pacific trade.
Snip.
A major driver of congestion on both sides of the Pacific Ocean: Landside capacity (terminals, trucking, rail, warehousing) is limited, but the vessel capacity of a single ocean trade lane is highly flexible.
While the number of ships in the world is finite, operators can shift ships to wherever they make the most money. And the trans-Pacific is now a particularly lucrative trade: Spot rates including premiums can top $20,000 per forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU).
“These assets [ships] are super-mobile,” said Sundboell. “What’s happening now is the opposite of what dogged the industry for the past 20 years. Five years ago, people were asking: How can the trans-Pacific rate drop from $2,000 to $1,500 [per FEU] in the space of just six days? It was because you could take a vessel from one place and sail it someplace else, and suddenly there were more ships and a price war and rates dropped.
“Now we’re seeing the opposite,” he said. As ship operators pile more capacity into the trans-Pacific, congestion rises, delays mount, the incentive for shippers to pay premiums is supported, and all-in rates remain at record highs.
Despite the backlog, the busiest U.S. port still shuts down for hours on most days and is closed on Sundays, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Tens of thousands” of containers remain stuck at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. More than 60 ships are lined up to dock, the report says.
More than 25% of all American imports pass through one of the two ports. LA and Long Beach collectively manage 13 private container terminals. Long Beach officials finally said last week they would try operating 24 hours a day between Monday and Thursday. LA says it’s going to keep existing hours and wait for the rest of the supply chain to extend their hours first.
More data points:
The Global Supply Chain is a &#$*ing Mess—in 4 JPM graphs
1. Dozens of containerships stacked up outside LA 2. Shipping rates to the moon 3. Global delivery times at 25-yr highs 4. Our surging demand for WFH and home improvements imports —> wild surge in eastbound freight rates pic.twitter.com/feeEzZKz7U
Finally, the Biden’s Administration’s vaccine mandate is about to make things much worse. “The looming federal mandate on COVID-19 vaccines for large employers could make hiring goals more difficult to reach for warehousing and distribution operations, which are already short on employees, some supply chain experts say.”
Keep in mind: None of the supply chain issues are the result of Flu Manchu, but almost all are the result of government overreaction to it.
Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Jason Isaac has a Prager U video analysis of the reasons behind the great Texas ice storm blackouts.
The analysis will be familiar to regular readers: Over-investment in unreliable, subsidized renewable energy meant under-investment in reliable fossil fuel and nuclear necessary for base load reliability.
It’s not enough to break through police lines. Mobs need to track the politicians that imposed these lockdowns to their homes, bust down their doors, drag them forcibly into the street, and then tar and feather them.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Chaos at the border and buying American military tech to oppose China are two of the themes this week:
8,000 illegal aliens await processing underneath the Del Rio bridge on the U.S./Mexican border.
Here’s a drone shot:
BREAKING: Our drone is back over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX. Per source, the number of migrants waiting to be processed has now swelled to approx 8,200. It was 4,000 yesterday AM. Doubled in one day. BP overwhelmed, & I’m told situation is “out of control” @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/ThJJJ0JWCT
Those illegal aliens are there because Democrats and the Biden Administration want them there, so they can turn those illegal aliens into Democratic Party voters via amnesty.
So damaging is that drone footage that the FAA has closed airspace over the bridge to prevent it:
NEW: We’ve learned that the FAA just implemented a two week TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, meaning we can no longer fly our FOX drone over it to show images of the thousands of migrants. FAA says “special security reason”. pic.twitter.com/aJrjAPO2Pz
This effort is just one part of a new partnership between the three countries, dubbed AUKUS, which is short for Australia-United Kingdom-United States, that also includes cooperation in other areas, including long-range strike capabilities, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. President Biden said AUKUS would help all three countries work more closely together to help ensure peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region in the long-term.
On the whole, this is probably a good move to counter China, and I hear that Canberra was the driving force behind the agreement. All that said, the United States was already in formal alliances with the UK and Australia through other treaties, so it’s not anything like a tectonic shift.
Another sign of the new alliance: The UK is going to station new vessels in the Indo-Pacific. [Senior Royal Navy admiral Tony Radakin] “said that the Taiwan Strait is clearly ‘part of the free and open Indo-Pacific.'”
Naturally France pitched a snit fit over the deal because Australia cancelled a contract with French shipbuilder Naval Group. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do,” Le Drian told franceinfo radio. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.” Cry some more, Jean-Claude. But it isn’t like France was ever going to come to Australia’s aid in a dust-up with China, so the deal makes sense as drawing Australia closer to the regions remaining nuclear naval powers. (Russia can barely keep its own navy running these days.)
Speaking of possible China opponents buying American technology, Japan is buying more F-35s.
John Durham finally files an indictment over the Russian collusion hoax investigation. “Special counsel John Durham reportedly seeks a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at a Democratic-allied law firm closely linked to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.” That firm, of course, would be Perkins Coie, who you may remember from regular appearances in the Clinton corruption updates.
The Democrats of Texas have long, as in 30 years or more, believed that the Hispanic vote would eventually hand them total control of Texas forever. They believe they need not adjust their policies on faith, family, life, the Second Amendment, taxes — anything — because the party brand itself was enough. If it wasn’t, then they would resort to bullying. They could go all the way left to Wendy Davis and Karl Marx if they wanted to — and they have — and the Hispanic vote would save them.
But a funny thing happened along the way. People like state Rep. Aaron Peña switched parties on principle and others followed them. And more are following them. His daughter, Adrienne Peña-Garza, is quoted in this Texas Monthly story regarding how the Democrats operate when it comes to independent-minded folks like her father and herself.
Peña-Garza, the Hidalgo County Republican chair, said Hispanic South Texans, who have long been conservative, “have become liberated” to vote on their long-held beliefs. “People have been bullied into voting Democrat. If you got involved [in conservative politics], people said, ‘I’m not going to give you this contract; I’m not going to give you this job.’ But I think the bullying has backfired. People are more empowered and courageous.”
When I was reporting on border issues in Hidalgo County during my first stint with PJ Media, I’d hear about the bullying she mentions but it wasn’t provable. Rampant and endemic, but hidden with no paper trails. Tejanos and Tejanas started standing up to it a decade ago, some by running for office, others by working courageously together underground and actually going after some of the political criminality. People noticed. Groups like Hispanic Republicans of Texas and the Conservative Hispanic Society rose up to answer the call outside any party structure. One of the most popular and successful talk radio hosts in the Lone Star State is my friend Chris Salcedo, the “liberty-loving Latino.” The conservative juggernaut is heard expounding on the joys of freedom and how Democrats would take it away on the air every day in Houston and Dallas and nationally on NewsmaxTV.
People are noticing how embarrassingly paternalistic and out-of-touch the Democrats are when it comes to South Texas. They really don’t know Texas at all and haven’t bothered to understand.
Snip.
That’s because they’re not immigrants. Treating them as immigrants cancels their ancestors and their heritage. Tejanos have been in Texas for generations, from the time when it was part of the Spanish Empire. Badly misunderstood and under-reported is the fact that Tejanos are and have been part of the culture of Texas long before we Anglos showed up. By the time my ancestors arrived in Texas in the 1850s and 1860s, Tejanos had been building Texas for more than a century. They’re not immigrants in any sense of the word. They’re Texans and American citizens. They resisted elitist dictator Santa Anna, fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto, they’ve served in every major war defending the United States, they’ve won Medals of Honor and have state veterans homes named after them — and their communities are the most directly affected by the chaos that out-of-state Democrats tend to unleash on the border. They serve in the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, and they work in the oil fields and own thriving businesses. Coyotes, cartels, drugs, and trafficking all affect Tejano communities first, while the rich Democrats who party at the Met are unaffected personally and weaponize the border as a racial cudgel. RGV citizens are not happy about that and they know whom to blame.
Gov. Greg Abbott visited Houston on Monday to sign new legislation he said would directly address lenient bail practices and rising crime in Harris County.
“Lives are being lost because the criminal justice system in Harris County is not working the way it should,” said Abbott.
Known as the Damon Allen Act, Senate Bill (SB) 6 is named after a state trooper who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop on Thanksgiving Day 2017. Despite having a history of assaulting a law enforcement officer, the shooter was out on a $15,000 felony bond at the time of the murder.
Allen’s widow, Casey Allen, who has become an advocate for the reforms implemented by SB 6, joined Abbott at the Safer Houston Emergency Summit held by a coalition of ministry groups.
Noting that her husband had been killed by a “violent, repeat offender,” Mrs. Allen added, “The murderer still went to jail, and my life and my kids’ lives were forever changed by actions that can’t be taken back.”
The new law will create an online public safety report for judges and magistrates to access more complete information about a suspect’s criminal history before setting bail. In addition, SB 6 requires additional training for judges and magistrates, and prohibits the release of certain violent suspects or repeat suspects on personal recognizance (PR) bonds.
“Same FBI That Chased Russia Collusion Hoax for Years Covered Up Sexual Abuse of USA Gymnasts.” Why did James Comey’s FBI fail to investigate charges against Larry Nassar?
Now that the Biden EPA has rolled back the conflict-of-interest standards imposed by the Trump EPA on the agency’s outside scientific peer review panels, it has gone back to its old practice of stocking its peer review boards with agency research grant-recipient cronies who can be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever EPA wants to do. The Biden EPA most recently announced the particulate matter (PM) subpanel for the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). As per below, 17 of the 22 members are current and/or former EPA grantees. The amounts associated with them as principal investigators are shown. Note the largest grantee (Lianne Sheppard, recipient of $60,032,782 in EPA grants) is, naturally, the chairman. Sheppard is also the chairman of the main CASAC panel as well as a member of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), a separate outside review panel. The Biden EPA needs a reliable multi-purpose rubber-stamper and that is Sheppard, an activist who sued the Trump EPA because it instituted conflict of interest rules under which she was ineligible to rubber-stamp agency wishes.
Here’s a UK funeral director who claims all the Flu Manchu deaths he’s seeing now are from vaccinations:
Take this with a grain of salt and in the interest of gathering data points.
What. The. Hell. “Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims.” What’s a little sexual slavery compared to all those likes?
Busted!
It appears as though @LanceNBCSD, the assignment editor for the San Diego NBC affiliate, forgot to switch to his anti-Trump burner account… pic.twitter.com/XfAAQX31Ex
Investigators call into hospital asking for the name of the people featured in a news broadcast only to find out they weren't admitted to the hospital!
The Biden administration is imposing new limits on states’ ability to access to Covid-19 antibody treatments amid rising demand from GOP governors who have relied on the drug as a primary weapon against the virus.
Federal health officials plan to allocate specific amounts to each state under the new approach, in an effort to more evenly distribute the 150,000 doses that the government makes available each week.
The approach is likely to cut into shipments to GOP-led states in the Southeast that have made the pricey antibody drug a central part of their pandemic strategy, while simultaneously spurning mask mandates and other restrictions. That threatens to heighten tensions between the Biden administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who have emerged as vocal opponents of the federal Covid-19 response.
“How dare they pay for treatments that work while ignoring the one true path of vaccine righteousness?”
Which states are the feds rationing?
Demand from a handful of southern states has exploded since then, state and federal officials said, raising concerns they were consuming a disproportionate amount of the national supply. Seven states — Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama — accounted for 70 percent of all orders in early September.
Huh, I wonder what those states might all have in common? Maybe…Republican governors? Well, we can’t have those upstarts showing up vaccine-pushing blue states, can we?
“President Joe Biden has sharply criticized DeSantis and others for resisting efforts to encourage mask wearing and ramp up vaccinations, vowing in a speech last week that if ‘governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.'”
Evidently this is code for “Stop fighting the holy narrative or I’ll make sure your citizens die!”
China has a new rule for the country’s hundreds of millions of young gamers: No online videogames during the school week, and one hour a day on Fridays, weekends and public holidays.
China on Monday issued strict new measures aimed at curbing what authorities describe as youth videogame addiction, which they blame for a host of societal ills, including distracting young people from school and family responsibilities.
The new regulation, unveiled by the National Press and Publication Administration, will ban minors, defined as those under 18 years of age, from playing online videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday. On the other three days of the week, and on public holidays, they will be only permitted to play between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.
The government announcement said all online videogames will be required to connect to an “anti-addiction” system operated by the National Press and Publication Administration. The regulation, which takes effect on Wednesday, will require all users to register using their real names and government-issued identification documents.
Other details of enforcement weren’t made public, and phone calls to the National Press and Publication Administration went unanswered after business hours on Monday.
Now I am very far indeed from Chinese teenagers, but if they’re anything like American teenagers, Japanese teenagers, British teenagers, South Korean teenagers, etc., Communist China has just promulgated a law destined to be the most widely violated in its history.
Banning video games for teenagers would be like banning rock and roll for teenagers in 1967, or banning TV for teenagers in 1976. You’re trying to eliminate an activity that pretty much every single one of their peers participates in to some degree or another. Moreover, it’s an activity available in every single device they own that accesses the Internet, be it computer, smart phone, tablet, etc. Anything that supports a browser has a built-in game platform.
It’s pretty hard to conceive of a Communist Party dictate so likely to be so widely ignored or breed discontent in the heart of young Chinese. Remember, the East German police cracking down on listeners of a 1987 rock concert in Berlin was widely viewed as a key catalysts for turning young East Germans actively against the Communist regime.
In a follow-up to this story, I emailed Dr. Dan Stock to ask him if he had references to the studies he mentioned in that video.
Today he replied and pointed me to this set of links up on his PureHealthMD website. And now I’m pointing them out to you.
Thus far I have only dipped my toe into them. I browsed the “N95 Respirators vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Among Health Care Personnel.” The disappointing conclusion was “Among outpatient HCP, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” So only do regular masks not work, even significantly better N95 masks don’t work…
I am far from an expert on Flu Manchu, but it’s obvious that a lot of the “official wisdom” about how to fight the virus is simply wrong. Lockdown states have not done any better (and frequently worse) than states which lifted their lockdowns earlier or never imposed them in the first place.
Here’s a doctor that says we’re doing everything wrong:
Coronavirus will not go away, because there are animal reservoirs.
“Why is a vaccine that is supposedly so effective having a breakout in the middle of the summer, when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that?”
“Antibody mediated viral enhancement.” I think Joe Rogan mentioned this.
“You cannot make these numbers better by doing any of the things you’re doing. Because that’s the nature of viral respiratory pathogens.”
“The CDC is giving you bad advice.”
How he’s been treating patients: “Vitamin D, ivermectin and Zinc.”
Previously infected get no benefit from vaccines, but suffer two to four times the side effects.
I’m not a doctor, but provide this as another data point for people to make up their own mind.
I tracked done an email address for Dr. Stock and asked if he had a handy list of the studies he references in the video above. I’ll let you know if I get a reply.
Dwight mentioned this story to me, and at first I thought it was a joke, but its apparently just another manifestation of The Crazy Years. “New Mexico Court Rules Gas Stations Liable for Selling Fuel to Drunk Drivers”:
Drunk driving is dangerous. The NHTSA says that someone is killed every 52 minutes due to a preventable crash where at least one party behind the wheel is intoxicated. Now, the New Mexico Supreme Court is looking to hold gas stations accountable for their role in knowingly allowing drunk drivers to hit the road.
Last week the court ruled 3-to-1 that gas stations have a “duty of care” to not allow individuals who are intoxicated to purchase fuel. In fact, the ruling goes as far as to edict that any gas station which knowingly permits drunk drivers to fuel up their vehicles can be held liable for any injuries caused by that person behind the wheel while they are intoxicated.
New Mexico is the second such state in the U.S. to publish a ruling which places the burden of responsibility on gas stations—Tennessee was the first. However, it’s important to note that there is no state law that explicitly prohibits the sale of gasoline to an intoxicated party in New Mexico. The court instead cited a fatal accident that occurred in 2011 where a gas station sold fuel to an intoxicated person who later got into an accident and killed the driver of the vehicle that was hit.
How are they going to prove the “knowingly” part when so many sales are pay-at-the-pump with a credit card these days?
This is part and parcel of the drive to disassociate people from blame for their own actions and failures and displace it to large faceless entities that the left must rail against (corporations, “white supremacy,” capitalism). The person responsible for a DUI is the person who drives drunk.