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.
Mass protests and anti-government violence have left dozens dead. Russia is deploying 3,000 paratroopers after Kazakh security forces were overrun. The largest city, Almaty, looks like a warzone. To appreciate why Russia is willing to deploy troops to Kazakhstan, it’s critical to understand the depth of Russia’s vital national interests inside the country. This isn’t just any former Soviet republic. It’s almost as important to Russia as Belarus or Ukraine.
First, Russia and Kazakhstan have the largest continuous land border on planet earth. If Kazakhstan destabilizes, a significant fraction of the country’s 19 million residents could become refugees streaming across the border. Russia is not willing to let that happen.
Second, roughly one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnic Russians. Kazakh nationalists are overwhelmingly Muslims, who resent the Orthodox-Christian Russian minority. Russia believes that civil war would entail a non-trivial risk of anti-Russian ethnic cleansing.
Third, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the heart of the Soviet space program. Russia still uses it as its primary space-launch facility. The Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East will lessen that dependence, but it still isn’t complete.
Fourth, Russia conducts its Anti-Ballistic Missile testing at the Sary-Shagan test site within Kazakhstan. This is where ongoing development of the S-550 ABM system is occurring, one of the foundations of Russia’s national security.
Fifth, Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle is intimately linked to Kazakhstan. Russian-backed Uranium mining operations are active in the country. Uranium from Kazakhstan is enriched in Novouralsk, Russia and then returned to Kazakhstan for use in Chinese nuclear-fuel assemblies.
Collectively, these security interests make Kazakhstan a region that Russia is willing to stabilize with force. The 3,000 troops it has already committed are not the maximum it is willing to deploy. If necessary, these will only be the first wave of RU forces in the country.
3,000 troops for a country roughly three times as large as Afghanistan is not going to pacify a country if the country doesn’t want to be pacified.
All that provides a thorny geopolitical problem for Kazakhstan’s neighbors (including China, where it borders Xinjiang, and for which it it would provide the ideal base for any Uigher insurgency), but isn’t why I’m writing about it. No, what caught my attention is The Hunter Biden connection:
Among the boldest and eye-brow raising political moves by embattled Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev within the past days that grabbed international headlines was his ordering the arrest of Kazakhstan’s powerful former intelligence chief, Karim Massimov, on the charge of high treason.
Indicating that amid widespread fuel price unrest which quickly became aimed squarely at toppling Tokayav’s rule there’s a simultaneous power struggle within the government, Massimov had headed the National Security Committee (KNB) up until his Thursday sudden removal and detention. Massimov had served as the prior longtime strongman ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev’s prime minister and has long been considered his “right hand man”.
Nazarbayev was essentially “president for life,” an Ex-Communist Party leader who transitioned to ruling the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union until resigning during a wave of protests in 2019.
Shortly after, a photo has resurfaced, currently subject of widespread speculation which shows Joe Biden and Hunter Biden posing with the now detained Kazakh security chief Karim Massimov, along with well-connected oligarch Kenes Rakishev.
With Hunter, it always seems to be oligarchs all the way down. I can only assume they have the best cocaine and teenage prostitutes.
Further an email and communications have surfaced, previously subject of extensive reporting in The Daily Mail, and related to prior extensive commentary and questions concerning Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ – that appears to confirm that Hunter Biden and Massimov were “close friends”. Reporting at the time indicated that “when Biden was vice president, Hunter worked as a go-between between for Rakishev from 2012 until 2014. And further the emails were from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing that Hunter made contact with Rakishev. And more: “Per the report, Hunter successfully got a $1million investment from Rakishev to a politically-connected filmmaker.”
According to a 2020 article in The New York Post written when the photo first began gaining attention among Western pundits, “The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.” Concerning his relationship with Kazakh oligarchs and power-brokers, the NYPost story had detailed further:
…Hunter Biden’s alleged work with Rakishev, claiming he dined regularly with the Kazakh businessman and attempted to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington, DC, and a Nevada mining company.
But Rakishev, who enjoys close ties to Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president, reportedly ran into trouble when Western business partners realized that the opaque origins of his reported $300 million fortune could become a “liability,” the Mail reported.
This brings up a slew of questions, starting with: What is the nature of the ties between the Biden family and Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president and his circle of oligarchs and powerful security officials?
Officials in Kazakhstan have denied that a controversial ‘military biological laboratory’ was seized in the recent unrest, which has so far claimed 160 lives since starting on January 2.
It is not clear if the 164 deaths refer only to civilians or if law enforcement deaths are included, but the number – provided by the health ministry to state news channel Khabar-24 – are a significant rise from previous tallies.
Kazakh authorities said earlier on Sunday that 16 police or national guard members had been killed.
Russian media highlighted claims that the US-funded facility near Almaty was compromised, resulting in a possible leak of dangerous pathogens.
The airport, mayor’s office and secret services buildings fell briefly into the hands of rioters during a wave of protests backed by shadowy armed cells.
The secret bio-laboratory funded by the US defence department – which has links to Russian and Chinese scientists – was also compromised in the disturbances, according to social media claims that it was seized.
‘This is not true. The facility is being guarded,’ said the health ministry which is responsible for the Central Reference Laboratory, in Almaty.
Official Russian news agency TASS had highlighted alleged social media reports that it was taken over by ‘unidentified people’ and ‘specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab so a leak of dangerous pathogens could have occurred’.
The laboratory’s existence has been controversial and in 2020 the country formally denied that it was being used to make biological weapons.
At the time, the Kazakh government stated: ‘No biological weapons development is underway in Kazakhstan – and no research is conducted against any other states.’
It was built in 2017 and is used for the study of outbreaks of particularly dangerous infections.
Dangerous pathogens are stored here, it is reported.
2017 date aside, there was already an ex-Soviet pathogens facility in the general vicinity (Almaty = Alma-Ata), so my suspicion is that it’s a more modern facility for an existing lab team.
Maybe it’s not a bio-weapons lab. Maybe it’s just studying pathogens to better fight them.
Just like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
So: It’s totally a bioweapons lab.
Both the United States and Kazakhstan are signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention, which outlaws “the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons.”
Is the CDC actually funding/working with a biological lab in Kazakhstan?
CDC strengthens clinical and laboratory capacity to minimize biosecurity threats in the Central Asia region through collaboration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its Cooperative Biological Engagement. CDC works with public health laboratories across Kazakhstan to build a robust and sustainable network of quality management systems, standard operating procedures, training requirements, disease surveillance and testing capacity, and necessary legal and regulatory framework. CDC and the Kazakhstan MOH also partner with hospitals to improve surveillance and testing of especially dangerous pathogens and antimicrobial drug-resistant pathogens.
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CDC assisted all 17 regional laboratories within the National Center for Expertise in Kazakhstan to achieve ISO 15189 standard certification for laboratory quality management.
That’s all from Infowars. Oh wait, did I say Infowars? I meant the CDC’s own website.
Maybe we owe Alex Jones an apology.
This is breaking story that sprawls out in dozens of directions, but I think Dr. Fauci has even more ‘splainin’ to do…
More Democrats behaving badly and Kazakhstan in flames. Enjoy the first LinkSwarm of 2022!
How Democrats running the New York City Department of Correction turned control over to the correctional officers union and they let the inmates run the jail.
For years, mayors and correction commissioners have allowed jail managers to place the least experienced officers in charge of detainee dorms and cells, posts that are critical for keeping order but viewed by many as the least desirable assignments in the system. The managers, who base staffing decisions on seniority, department custom and office politics, have also filled the jobs with guards who have fallen out of favor with administrators, reinforcing the idea that they are punishment posts to be avoided.
When those guards in the housing units have fallen ill, gotten injured or been barred from contact with incarcerated people for other reasons, other rules adopted by city leaders have made finding replacements unusually difficult.
Every mayoral administration since John Lindsay’s in the 1970s has signed union contracts granting unlimited sick leave to guards and the city’s other uniformed workers. And records and interviews suggest that abusing it can carry few consequences: It can take more than a year for the department to bring discipline charges against an officer who is caught abusing sick leave.
On a Thursday in October, one Rikers jail had 572 guards on its work schedule — more than enough to fill the 363 open posts.
But 17 guards were serving suspensions or had stopped showing up for work.
Another 117 guards were on vacation, long-term leave or off doing temporary duties.
Then there were those marked “indefinitely sick” — 136 guards who had been out for 30 days or more but were still on the payroll thanks to generous union benefits.
That tipped the balance, leaving just 302 guards to fill the 363 posts, and forcing double shifts across the jail.
When they have been told that such policies could lead to dangerous breakdowns, city leaders have not acted on the warnings. As recently as February 2018, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top criminal justice adviser presented the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, with a memo that stated that high rates of absenteeism among guards might be driving a rise in jail violence — and recommended steps to stabilize staffing and reduce violent incidents. The de Blasio administration took none of them, and the memo has not been made public.
And when conditions have spiraled out of control on Rikers in recent years, jail managers have favored quick fixes over deeper policy changes. Under scrutiny in 2014 amid reports of brutality by guards, the managers concentrated members of the Bloods gang in some units, the Crips in others, and still other gangs in other areas, hoping the practice would cut down on fights among rival groups. It did not work. Not only did incidents where guards used force rise, but some gangs were positioned to take over housing areas when the pandemic swept through and caused staffing problems.
The mismanagement over the years has left the people charged with running the jail system feeling powerless.
Putting criminals in charge of things does seem like the Democratic Party’s go-to move in a lot of areas…
For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.
The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.
It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population in that way, deciding what can open and what can’t, who must work and who must not, what we can and can’t do, all based on our station in life.
It now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.
That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they’re being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, haven’t protected against infection.
All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still, the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization, much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.
A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with COVID, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: Yes, and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it’s time we change our tune.
Snip.
The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That’s a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean, while the virus circulated season after season.
It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that didn’t happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.
Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it’s suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.
Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people—based on one pathogen—contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.
In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”
Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.
Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American Left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.
A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.
Trump has has taken up permanent rent-free residence in their heads: “MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House’ mentions Trump more than twice as often as Biden.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“I find some kind of sign every single day that someone has been on my ranch,” says Schuster. “Every time I leave my house, there’s some kind of indication that someone has been on my ranch.”
Law enforcement has been called to the Schuster property five times in the past year to respond to incidents where illegal border crossers have knocked on their door or approached their house.
Operation Lone Star, a state effort that has seen additional Texas DPS officers sent to border counties, has been a blessing to the county, according to Schuster, and a relief to the local sheriff and his small crew of deputies. Schuster believes that the DPS patrols on the highways have been a deterrent to the illegal border crossers who use the highways and then bail out to run onto private property.
However, Schuster says the problems will persist for as long as this open border policy continues.
“I don’t know all the politics of it and how all that works, but we’re gonna have to do something, because my parents worked hard to buy this land. People have said, ‘Well, if you’re scared on your own land, you just move.’ It doesn’t work that way,” said Schuster. “This is our land. And they worked hard, and they bought it, and you can’t give up on that land. It’s your legacy. It’s your legacy for your children. And so, it’s not like you just have a house in town, and you could just sell it and move to another community. When you have a ranch, you can’t do that.”
Schuster added, “In the last year, our life has been turned completely upside down. It is something that we just had never foreseen.”
She said that beginning last January, “the number of illegals coming through has been unbelievable. The group sizes are big. You know, growing up on a ranch, around ranching, we’ve always had illegals coming through. Never saw women before, or children. Men come through, maybe two or three; if you saw [a] group of five, that was a big group. We’ve got groups of like 45 coming through.”
The sizable groups are not the only issue with this increased traffic. “They’re very disruptive. We’ve never seen that before,” said Schuster. “The people that have come across primarily from Mexico for work, going from point A to point B looking for a job, did not intentionally tear up our water systems. The debris that they’re leaving behind is unbelievable. I’m picking up trash on my ranch daily, they’re leaving gates open, livestock is getting mixed up, or maybe water gaps between me and my neighbor.”
An incident over the summer left Schuster shocked when some of the illegal border crossers intentionally broke a water line. “I lost about 10,000 gallons of water this summer,” said Schuster. “It probably took me at least six weeks to gain that much water back.”
According to Schuster, “they could’ve reached over—it wasn’t enclosed—and gotten a drink. But they just took a rock and beat this line until they broke it. That’s mean. That’s just malicious.”
Security and safety have taken major precedence in the Schuster family’s life. Game cameras on the doors, rarely going out in the pre-dawn hours, working out of an enclosed truck instead of an open UTV on the ranch, and never leaving the house without a pistol have all become standard practice for the whole family.
Twitter user TimDCpolitico took Florida’s voter rolls from March 31 of 2020 and compared them to the latest figures. The results, he says, are “jaw-dropping,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe them.
Out of over 14 million registered voters, last year Democrats held the edge with 37.38% of registrations compared to the GOP’s 35.28%. (The remaining four million or so — around 26% — were independents or members of minor parties.)
Democrats held a two-point advantage, but higher Republican turnout has made the state safely red in the last two presidential elections.
Snip.
66 out of Florida’s 67 counties shifted towards the red. Three hardcore Democrat counties — Broward (!!!), Jefferson, and Madison — might in some races be considered additional battlegrounds Dems will have to defend.
A fourth, Calhoun, went from dark blue to light red.
That’s impressive.
What should have Democrats strapping on a pair of Extra Absorbent Depends (Endorsed by Presidentish Joe Biden!) is that they lost more than 50,000 registrations in the same time period — even as the state’s population has grown.
Republicans have gone all in on South Texas, but they’re not content for domination of state and congressional seats. They want local government, too.
One GOP group, Project Red Texas, spent the weeks before the December filing deadline to run in the March primary election traveling the region and recruiting candidates to run for county offices, offering to pay their filing fees. The group ended up helping get 125 candidates on the ballot across 25 counties, according to its leader, veteran party operative Wayne Hamilton. He said the group paid for “well over” half the filing fees.
The first step on the road to winning is actually showing up.
Investors may want to think twice about putting their money to work in China, contends DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach.
“China is uninvestible, in my opinion, at this point,” the bond king told Yahoo Finance in an interview at his California estate. “I’ve never invested in China long or short. Why is that? I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the relationship between the United States and China anymore. I think that investments in China could be confiscated. I think there’s a risk of that.”
Snip.
The ongoing crackdown on the operations of big Chinese internet companies such as Didi by the government has rocked investors in the space. The clamping down on the country’s biggest tech names has now led to a tightening of listing requirements by the Chinese government.
To that end, Didi plans to delist from the New York Stock Exchange later this year not too long after a disastrous IPO (in large part because of Chinese authorities).
Meanwhile, the long reach of China’s government also hammered after-school tutoring companies such as TAL Education Group — shares of the name plunged about 95% in 2021.
All of this is in addition to China’s ongoing fight against the rise of cryptocurrencies.
The investing headwinds in the country show up in how the country’s key indexes performed in 2021.
For instance, the Golden Dragon Index — which tracks the performance of mid- and large-cap Chinese stocks — plunged about 49% in 2021. The Wall Street Journal points out the total value of China’s onshore stocks rose 20% in 2021, underperforming the S&P 500’s advance.
And none of that touches the insanely overleveraged real estate market there…
Another day, another high-profile Kamala Harris staffer leaving. “Vincent Evans, the veep’s deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, has quit to take on a role on Capitol Hill.”
Austinites (and anyone who uses metered parking) beware:
🚨Scam Alert🚨 APD Financial Crimes detectives are investigating after fraudulent QR code stickers were discovered on City of Austin public parking meters. People attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and made a payment. pic.twitter.com/Gb8gytCYn7
PayPal just informed me that they have permanently banned my account. Without giving an explicit reason why, the supervisor was extremely rude and implied that it had everything to do with my politics.
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) January 5, 2022
Seeing Collins contorted in a wheeled chair, like Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House, while his two bandmates swayed on either side of him, painlessly upright in elegant, soft grey fashions like Farrow and Ball in human form, bordered on the grotesque. It resembled a satire on the ineradicable nature of privilege and class, rather than evidence of the dynamic tension every band needs to achieve creative synthesis. It was everything the NME said punk disdained. But I can’t imagine John Lydon taking any pleasure in this at all.
To say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions. And, frankly, I’m not qualified to offer much insight into either. But I suspect that he is at least more willing to let us see his human side now. His wife of over 40 years, Nora Forster, has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three and he has committed himself to her full-time care. In 2010, Forster’s daughter Ariane—better known as Ari Up, lead singer of female post-punk outfit The Slits—died of breast cancer aged just 48. Lydon knows something about human frailty, mortality, and loss.
I have the sense that after many years, not on the field of combat but behind the bare timber of the cheapest proscenium arch, the paint is wearing off both these Punch dolls. Both were iconic and pugnacious in their day, but human, all too human, too. Today, it is not prog, let alone Genesis, that attracts Lydon’s ire, but what he perceives to be the betrayal of his ex-bandmates, who have sold out the Pistols’ musical legacy to a TV show—people that do indeed, as he sneered in PiL, see it as nothing more than product.
Lydon was years ahead of his time, on everything from the Savile row to the shark-infested waters in which he was swimming, but I doubt he will take much pleasure in seeing a fellow grafter—and émigré—working through pain to give his fans a chance to say one last farewell, to him and to each other. He might even feel a twinge of grudging kinship. They may not have reached the churchyard quite yet, but their paths are beginning to converge, as all must in the end. And, meanwhile, as the years wear on, who can be sure Her Majesty—God Save Her—won’t bury the bloody lot of them?
Ted Cruz has had a weird week. After the braindead boner of calling January 6 riot participants “domestic terrorists,” he had to issue a huge Mea Culpa on Tucker Carlson. Oh, and he also issued this:
Due to popular demand from angry libs, in 2022 we’ll be putting out a swimsuit calendar. https://t.co/Lr1aDZIv3H
Over the past year, DeSantis has emerged as one of the most articulate political spokesmen for the anti–critical race theory movement. His new policy agenda builds on successful anti-CRT legislation in other states but goes two steps further. First, it provides parents with a “private right of action,” which allows them to sue offending institutions for violations, gain information through legal discovery, and, if they win in the courts, collect attorney’s fees. Second, it tackles critical race theory in corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training programs, which, DeSantis says, sometimes promote racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and harassment, in violation of state civil rights laws.
At heart, the battle against critical race theory is a fight against entrenched bureaucracies that have used public institutions to promote their own racialist ideology. “This is an elite-driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities, and elites in corporate America, and they’re trying to shove it down the throats of the American people,” DeSantis said. “You’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
Following his speech, DeSantis invited me to address the crowd. I explained that the reason critical race theory has upset so many Americans is that it speaks to two deep reservoirs of human sentiment: citizens’ desire for self-government and parents’ desire to shape the moral and educational development of their children. Elite institutions have attempted to step between parent and child.
DeSantis has deftly positioned himself as a protector of middle-American families. One of the guest speakers, Lacaysha Howell, a biracial mother from Sarasota, said that left-wing teachers tried to persuade her daughter that the white side of their family was oppressive. Another speaker, Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban-American mother from the Miami area, said that left-wing indoctrination in schools reminded her of her father’s warnings about Communism in his native Cuba. Both believed that critical race theory was poison to the American Dream.
As they begin their next session in January, Florida legislators have the opportunity to craft the gold standard for “culture war” policy. The governor’s team has worked with a range of interested parties, including the Manhattan Institute, which has crafted model language for prohibiting racialist indoctrination and providing curriculum transparency to parents. The battle is ultimately about shaping public policy in accord with public values. “I think we have an ability [to] just draw a line in the sand and say, ‘That’s not the type of society that we want here in the state of Florida,’” said DeSantis yesterday. The stakes are high—and all eyes are on Florida to deliver.
How the Democratic Media Complex managed to destroy what was left in the public’s trust in it:
That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient.
Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests. pic.twitter.com/DvOzIr5JX8
As usual, elite institutions — media, government, public health authorities — love to whine about the refusal of the public to trust their pronouncements, complaining people turn to other less credentialed and worthy sources.
Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted four men on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in a scheme to rip off the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by submitting over 80 false applications for forgivable loans and writing checks to relatives and fictional employees, among other fraudulent activities.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release on December 15 that 29-year-old Hamza Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Khalid Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Abdul Fatani of Richmond, and 53-year-old Syed Ali of Sugar Land could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each count of wire fraud.
The indictments against them are the most recent in an apparent scheme that prosecutors say involved 15 defendants from Texas and Illinois, all of whom are accused of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The DOJ stated that Khalid Abbas, Fatani, Ali, and another defendant, Houston resident Amir Aqeel, 53, have been charged with money laundering in the superseding indictment. The money laundering counts carry potential sentences of up to 10 years.
Last year, a grand jury also indicted Aqeel on a charge of aggravated identity theft. The government accuses Aqeel of using stolen identities to apply for the PPP loans.
According to the DOJ, several of the accused have already pleaded guilty for their involvement, including Siddiq Azeemuddin, 42, of Naperville, Illinois, Richard Reuth, 58, of Spring, and Raheel Malik, 41, of Sugar Land, all of whom entered their pleas in October. Houston residents Abdul Farahshah, 70, Jesus Perez, 31, and Bijan Rajabi, 68, pleaded guilty in late November.
Rifat Bajwa, 53, of Richmond, Pardeep Basra, 52, of Houston, Mayer Misak, 41, of Cypress, and Mauricio Navia, 42, of Katy were also indicted last year on charges of participating in the conspiracy and committing wire fraud.
Why, it’s almost like just about all the defendants share some characteristic in common. If only I could put my finger on it…
Speaking of criminals, did mentioned that a second CNN employee was being investigated for child sex allegations? “The allegations against Rick Saleeby, a former senior producer for Jake Tapper’s “The Lead,” appear to be connected to reporting by Project Veritas. Saleeby resigned from CNN this month.” It’s hard to keep the media pedophiles straight without a scorecard…
The City of Austin’s director of the Office of Police Oversight (OPO), Farah Muscadin, abused her authority, a third-party arbitrator decided this week.
In a 31-page decision, Lynn Gomez, the arbitrator, ruled that Muscadin and the OPO violated Article 16 of the Austin Police Department’s employment contract that was negotiated in 2018. Article 16 governs the parameters of civilian oversight of the department, which progressive groups lobbied hard for during the labor standoff.
“Contrary to the city’s claim, Director Muscadin was not acting within the scope of her authority…[she] clearly was seeking to dictate some future outcome rather than simply making a recommendation as Art. 16 permits,” Gomez ruled.
“[T]he evidence and arguments raise[d] by the city indicate that the city does not consider itself or OPO bound by Article 16’s provisions.”
Has the Biden Amdenistration tipped its hand that considers Taiwan too strategically important to not defend it in the case of a Chinese attack?
Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told a Senate hearing three weeks ago that Taiwan was “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defence of vital US interests”. In words strikingly similar to MacArthur’s, he emphasised the island’s location “at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of US allies and partners”.
This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan. In Beijing at least, the statement is being read as dropping all pretence that the US could acquiesce to a unification of Taiwan with China.
Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in China, believes that US strategic thinking regarding Taiwan has always followed the lines laid out by MacArthur.
Even after establishing diplomatic relations with China, the US “worked to ensure the continuation of a state of separation across the Taiwan Strait”, Wu said. “When we ask the US if they do not hope to see the unification of China, they deny that. But judging from the US’s concrete actions, it is clear that they indeed do not hope to see China unify. Ely Ratner has now said this out loud.”
In Washington, too, some observers think the testimony allows little conclusion other than that the US should not allow Taiwan to become part of China under any circumstances.
Hopefully true, but betting on Joe Biden’s stalwart fortitude is putting your hopes on an extremely weak horse…
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez spotted in Miami Beach while New York City Flu Manchu cases hit alltime highs. As always, Covid Theater rules are for the little people.
I really should have bought this for Dwight for Christmas.
The Critical Drinker is not thrilled at the latest Matrix film:
Ultimately The Matrix Regenerations fails on just about every level possible. It fails to properly honor the past by leaving it well enough alone. It fails to tell a compelling new story, or add new ideas to the world it created. It fails to establish interesting new characters, or take old ones in a new direction. It fails to surpass the spectacle, energy and originality of a 20 year old film. And most of all it fails to deliver a compelling reason for its own existence. The Matrix Retaliations is a film that never should have been made in the first place.
Left-wing sponsors vs. right-wing sponsors:
This satirical video is based on an undeniable truth: the bulk of mainstream corporate and billionaire money resides in and supports liberal-left, not right-wing, media. As the Dem Party became the preferred vehicle of oligarchs, their largesse goes to those urging votes for it. https://t.co/UpuF2ZuGxr
Not a polling choice: A roundup of evidence that a lot of The Holy Covid Narrative is wrong, including that Joe Rogan interview with Dr. Peter McCullough. I’m working on that, but it may take me a few days.
Another mandate injunction, Democrats continue their popularity freefall, China seals more dirty deals, and Turkey melts down. It’s another Friday LinkSwarm!
A federal judge in Texas has issued a preliminary injunction, stopping a new rule from the Biden administration requiring healthcare workers to receive the COVID vaccine as the case moves through the courts.
The injunction came from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo. The case was filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of the State of Texas against Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary.
The injunction was sought against a federal rule that would have required employers that receive Medicaid and Medicare funds—namely hospitals and other healthcare providers—to require their employees to receive a COVID vaccine as a condition of employment.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered that the federal government provide notice to all Medicaid and Medicare providers in Texas that the mandate “will not be implemented or enforced.”
“Healthcare facilities covered by the [Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services] Mandate have a tremendous reliance interest in Medicare and Medicaid funds. Therefore, Defendants unconstitutionally use Congress’s spending powers to ‘commandeer a State’s . . . administrative apparatus for federal purposes’ by conditioning Medicare and Medicaid funds on state surveyor compliance with the mandate,” wrote Kacsmaryk. “As a result, not only would the CMS Mandate prohibit Plaintiffs from enforcing its duly enacted COVID-19 vaccination regulations, but it would likely force Plaintiffs to administer a federal mandate that has a dubious statutory basis.”
“It is a ‘gun to the head’ and an unconstitutional use of Congress’s spending powers to compel Plaintiffs through ‘financial inducement’ to forgo exercising their police powers to enforce a federal statute.”
Democrat support from independent voters has fallen near the crucial 40% line, while almost half of all independent voters tell Gallup that they’re leaning Republican.
“If you’re a Democrat and you’re not terrified,” says The Dispatch’s Avi Woolf, “you should be.”
Well, I’m neither a Democrat nor terrified, but I am conservative and — at least for now — quite giddy.
Gallup recently updated its long-term party affiliation poll, which asks American voters one or two simple questions:
In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?
(If they ID as independents) As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?
Currently, 31% say they’re Republicans, up slightly from the usual mid-20s to 30%. 41% told Gallup that they’re independent voters, in line with the average swing. Only 27% self-ID as Democrats, which is down from the more typical 29-32%.
As recently as May, Democrats were at 32% and the GOP at a dismal 25%.
But that’s before Presidentish Joe Biden had had a chance to do much other than send out FREE! MONEY! (handouts that helped cause our present inflation) and smile for the glowing press coverage. Since then, important parts of his agenda have taken hold and the malign incompetence of his cabinet has been fully revealed.
Apparently, Americans don’t think much of either.
But it’s the second question that should have Washington Democrats changing their shorts.
Indies, asked whether they lean towards the Democrats or the GOP, broke for the GOP 47% to 41%.
At this time in Barack Obama’s first term, the breakdown was a much more Dem-friendly 25R/41I/32D. And the Indy swing was exactly reversed, 41R/47D.
Yet the Democrats still lost a whopping 63 seats in the House and seven more in the Senate in the following midterm election.
Obama enjoyed immensely more personal popularity than Biden does — I know, I don’t get it, either — but couldn’t stop a GOP tsunami when his agenda proved unpopular.
Biden has both an unpopular agenda and a high unfavorable rating draped around his neck like a lead life preserver. And now voters are leaving his party in droves.
The woke are coming for all that sweet, sweet Medicare money.
Buried in the Department of Health and Human Services’s fiscal planning for next year is a proposal to establish bonuses for physicians who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.”
“The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” the HHS writes . “The plan should also identify ways in which issues and gaps identified in the review can be addressed and should include target goals and milestones for addressing prioritized issues and gaps. This may also include an assessment and drafting of an organization’s plan to prevent and address racism and/or improve language access and accessibility to ensure services are accessible and understandable for those seeking care.”
I’m sure this will go over great with Medicare patients. “Mam, I can’t check on your osteoporosis until you check your privilege!” (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)
After Democrats abandoned trying to pass Biden’s giant leftwing “Build Back Better” porkfest this year, is the bill actually dead forever? South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham thinks so.
The South Carolina Republican said that the Congressional Budget Office score, which found the $1.75 trillion bill would add $3 trillion to the deficit, is what led to its demise.
‘I think Build Back Better is dead forever and let me tell you why: Because Joe Manchin has said he’s not going to vote for a bill that will add to the deficit,’ he said on Fox News’ Hannity Wednesday night.
‘Well, if you do away with the budget gimmicks, Build Back Better, according to the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] adds $3 trillion to the deficit.’
‘This is b******t. You’re b******t,’ the West Virginia senator yelled at Arthur Delaney, a reporter for HuffPost Politics, who asked him about reports that the child tax credit has become a major sticking point in his talks with the White House.
‘I’m done, I’m done,’ Manchin fumed as the questions continued.
‘Guys, I’m not negotiating with any of you all. You can ask all the questions you want. Guys, let me go,’ he told the press as he walked through the basement of the Capitol, muttering ‘God almighty’ as he walked away.
What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams, and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and former President Donald Trump “coups.”
To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.
They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.
They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.
They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.
They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.
They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.
They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama Administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.
They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”
They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64% of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.
Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.
And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.
What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?
It is quite simple. The left expects to lose power over the next two years—both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.
After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency – with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment and professional sports – the left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.
The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.
Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.
All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.
Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.
President Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50% and 57%—in Trump’s own former underwater territory.
Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.
In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.
After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the left gains power and administers it.
Hey, remember all the way back to two weeks ago when I said that Turkey’s collapsing currency was something we should keep an eye on? Well, guess what? “Turkey Halts All Stock Trading As Currency Disintegrates, Central Bank Powerless To Halt Collapse.” ZeroHedge suggests that the collapse is engineered to disguise how much graft Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cronies have stolen from the country.
The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear.
A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.
Citing both interviews and direct access to internal Apple documents about repeated visits by Cook to China in the mid-2010s, the report describes a $275 billion deal whereby Apple committed to investing heavily in technology infrastructure and training in the country.
The non-binding five-year deal was signed by Cook during a 2016 visit, and it was made partially to mitigate or prevent regulatory action by the Chinese government that would have had significant negative effects on Apple’s operations and business in the country.
The Information details the nature of the Chinese government priorities included in the 1,250-word deal:
They included a pledge to help Chinese manufacturers develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and “support the training of high-quality Chinese talents.”
In addition, Apple promised to use more components from Chinese suppliers in its devices, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate on technology with Chinese universities and directly invest in Chinese tech companies… Apple promised to invest “many billions of dollars more” than what the company was already spending annually in China. Some of that money would go toward building new retail stores, research and development centers and renewable energy projects, the agreement said.
“Disgrace: Biden abandoned over 60,000 Afghan interpreters, support personnel — along with 14,000 Americans.”
“Trump’s Social Media Platform Gets $1 Billion Investment Boost, Dems Get Nervous.” It will be interesting to see how quickly TRUTH Social can get off the ground.
In yesterday’s post, I forgot to link to these Log4J memes. Enjoy!
Why New York City lags the rest of the nation in unemployment. Thank lockdowns, shutdowns, and insane government. “The economy is not a light switch. The supply chain is not a light switch.” The money quote “New York City is just not that amazing!”
Popular Mexican singer Vincente Fernandez died, and the woke couldn’t wait to crap on his grave:
If you had to tell the story of why Hispanics are abandoning the Democrats in droves using a single image, it would look something like this.
Did you know that an Israeli airstrike hit a Syrian port last week? Did you see anything about that in the news? Seems like the sort of thing the media would cover before they decided that a bunch of lunatics shouting at J.K. Rowling is more important.
Texas House Speaker Dade Phalen attends fundraiser for quorum-busting Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley (including State Reps. Terry Canales, Sergio Munoz Jr., Oscar Longoria, Armando Martinez, and Bobby Guerra, and State Sen. Chuy Hinojosa) while skipping a Republican event a mile away. Remind me again why Phalen is speaker?
“Pasadena Mechanic Sues City Over Parking Space Regulation Prohibiting His Business from Operating.”
There’s nothing this Austin City Council can’t seem to ruin, including the Trail of Lights.
Speaking of science experiments: What happens when you hit a gong with a baseball traveling at Mach 1.5? And you know there’s super-slow motion involved…
Whoa:
A Hutchinson, KS business just West of the Airport destroyed during 80+ mph gusts around 4:30pm.#kswxpic.twitter.com/Yd6ul9EeBo
If it looks like I’ve been absent from Twitter, it’s because I received a seven day timeout merely for posting one of Twitter’s pre-loaded gifs, probably this one:
(If it’s not animated, it says “Die in a fire” at the end.)
Josh Rogin delivers an unnerving scoop in the Washington Post:
Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.
“To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”
In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
“It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”
Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office.
Snip.
Month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.
Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.
Snip.
Elsewhere, Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”
As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.
The rumors started circulating in July: Vice President Harris’s staff was wilting in a dysfunctional and frustrated office, burned out just a few months after her historic swearing-in and pondering exit strategies. A few days later, Harris hosted an all-staff party at her official residence, where most of her office bit into hamburgers and posted pictures of smiling, congenial co-workers on Twitter, pixelated counterpoints to the narrative of an office in shambles.
“Let me tell you about these burgers at the VP’s residence!!” chief Harris spokesperson Symone Sanders gushed in a tweet. “The food was good and the people were amazing.” Her official defense against reports of staff unrest was more searing. She called people who lobbed criticism behind nameless quotes “cowards” and stressed that working for a groundbreaking vice president was a difficult job, but not a dehumanizing one. “We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day,” she told one outlet. “What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club.’ ”
Five months later, Sanders is leaving the vice president’s office, the highest-profile member of an end-of-year exodus that includes communications chief Ashley Etienne and two other staffers who help shape the vice president’s public image. Sanders told The Washington Post her departure is not due to any unhappiness or dysfunction, but rather because she is ready for a break after three years of the relentless pressure that came with speaking for and advising Biden and Harris while navigating a global pandemic.
But the quartet of soon-to-be-empty desks reignited questions about why Harris churns through top-level Democratic staff, an issue that has colored her nearly 18 years in public service, including her historic but uneven first year as vice president. Now, those questions about her management extend to whether it will hamper her ability to seek and manage the presidency.
“Historic” because she checks social justice warrior diversity boxes, “uneven” because the Post will never be allowed to call it “horrible” for the same reason.
Critics scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions. People used to putting aside missteps, sacrificing sleep and enduring the occasional tirade from an irate boss say doing so under Harris can be particularly difficult, as she has struggled to make progress on her vice-presidential portfolio or measure up to the potential that has many pegging her as the future of the Democratic Party.
“One of the things we’ve said in our little text groups among each other is what is the common denominator through all this and it’s her,” said Gil Duran, a former Democratic strategist and aide to Harris who quit after five months working for her in 2013. In a recent column, he said she’s repeating “the same old destructive patterns.”
“Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have (them) pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons,” he told The Post.
The Washington Post spoke with 18 people connected to Harris for this story, including former and current staffers, West Wing officials and other supporters and critics. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid about a sensitive topic. The vice president’s office declined to address questions about Harris’s leadership style.
Her defenders say the criticism against her is often steeped in the same racism and sexism that have followed a woman who has been a first in every job she’s done over the past two decades.
“Shut up, because social justice!”
Her selection as President Biden’s vice president, they say, makes her a bigger target because many see her as the heir apparent to the oldest president in the nation’s history.
“Shut up, because social justice!”
They also say Harris faces the brunt of a double standard for women who are ambitious, powerful or simply unafraid to appear strong in public.
“Shut up, because social justice!”
Some pro-forma Harris defense snipped.
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.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “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.”
For both critics and supporters, the question is not simply where Harris falls on the line between demanding and demeaning. Many worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.
Why should we remotely worry about her future ambitions when she’s obviously not even up to her current job?
Biden’s plans to relieve port crowding at LA/Long Beach haven’t worked.
Looking all the way back to Nov. 2, five weeks ago, the total number of excess dwell containers in Long Beach was down 22% as of Wednesday (the decrease is even higher, at 32%, when comparing to Oct. 28). Yet the numbers in Long Beach have plateaued more recently. Furthermore, the number of total import containers at Long Beach terminals has not decreased — it has actually slightly increased. There were 57,042 import containers at Long Beach terminals on Nov. 1 and 57,970 on Tuesday.
I embraced my people, and my people embraced me. They gave me everything I had always imagined I wanted: a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university; a professorship at NYU, complete with a roomy office overlooking Washington Square Park; book deals; columns in smart little publications; invitations to the sort of soirees where you could find yourself seated next to Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag or any number of the men and women you grew up reading and admiring. The list goes on. Life was good. I was grateful.
And then came The Turn. If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that The Turn doesn’t happen overnight, that it isn’t easily distilled into one dramatic breakdown moment, that it happens hazily and over time—first a twitch, then a few more, stretching into a gnawing discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.
You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about.
You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.
Snip.
You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.
When “the left” becomes the party of wealthy elites and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens and for the U.S. Constitution, and telling people what to do and think at every turn, then that’s the side you are on, if you are “on the left”—those are the policies and beliefs you stand for and have to defend. It doesn’t matter what good people “on the left” believed and did 60 or 70 years ago. Those people are dead now, mostly. They don’t define “the left” anymore than Abraham Lincoln defines the modern-day Republican Party or Jimi Hendrix defines Nickelback.
“The defaults of Evergrande and Kaisa move us to the second step of this China Property downturn, with systemic risk being gradually replaced by idiosyncratic risk,” said Robin Usson, credit analyst at Federated Hermes. He is of course referring to the much bigger risk that is the downturn in China’s residential – and in general property – sector, which as Goldman recently showed is the world’s largest asset and arguably the most important pillar propping up China’s entire economy. Should China’s housing market crash, all bets are off.
Smoke and mirrors all the way down…
Study: “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” (Hat tip: TPPF.)
The rising star on the right is Eric Zemmour, who, writes The New York Times, “became one of France’s best-selling authors in the past decade by writing books on the nation’s decline — fueled, he said, by the loss of traditional French and Christian values, the immigration of Muslim Africans bent on a reverse colonization of France, the rise of feminism and the loss of virility, and a ‘great replacement’ of white people.”
Zemmour is being called “the Donald Trump of France.” And he and Le Pen are now running third and second behind Macron in the polling to become the next president of France, which suggests the power of the issue on which they agree: uninvited and unwelcome Third-World migration.
“You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” said Zemmour in his announcement speech Tuesday, declaiming, “We will not be replaced.”
Neighboring Spain is gripped by the same concern. Refugees and migrants from the global south use Morocco as a base from which to breach the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.
Spain has taken to pushing the intruders back into Morocco.
Madrid has accused Rabat of using the migrants as a diplomatic weapon to extort changes in Spanish policy.
Italy, whose native-born ethnic population has been in a steady decline, patrols the Mediterranean Sea to prevent migrants from Libya from reaching its shores.
Drowning deaths are not uncommon. The Channel and the Mediterranean Sea are more formidable and unforgiving waters to cross than the Rio Grande.
Greece is attempting to keep Turkey from moving refugees and migrants from Middle East wars onto the Greek islands off Turkey’s coast.
Half a decade ago, Turkey was bought off with billions of euros to prevent the millions of Arab and Muslim refugees within its borders from crossing over into the EU.
In the recent clash between Poland and Belarus, the weapon of choice for Alexander Lukashenko was — migrants.
Brought into Belarus from the Mideast, they were moved to the Polish border, forcing Warsaw to deploy troops to keep thousands out of Poland. Lukashenko was exploiting the migrants to punish Poland and the EU for supporting sanctions on his regime.
After Europe united against him, Lukashenko moved the migrants away from the border and sent many back to Syria and countries whence they came.
In the hierarchy of European fears, the perceived threat to national identities that comes with mass migrations from the failed and failing states of the Third World appears to rank as a greater concern than the prospect of a Russian army driving toward the Rhine.
LA crime has gotten so bad that even Hollywood liberals are getting strapped. “‘Even hardcore leftist Democrats who said to me in the past, ‘I’ll never own a gun’ are calling me asking about firearms,’ said Joel Glucksman, a private security executive. “I’d say there has been an increase of 80 percent in the number of requests I’m getting this year.'” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
Judge blocks de Blasio’s private employer mandate for New York City and Louis Rossmann goes on an epic rant, including how it would disproportionately fall on minorities. “You are coming up with a policy because de Blasio is such a stupid cuntrag that it actually turns the clock back 40 or 50 years.” Also: “I don’t know who the fuck would sign up to do this job. I’d expect to disappear if I were doing this job…I would expect to end up on the bottom of the East River.”
Facebook admits that it’s “fact checks” are merely opinion.
If you parcel out your business It needs to multiple companies, but all of them rely on AWS (which had an outage Tuesday), you haven’t necessarily reduced your risk.
The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.
The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.
Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit. Irate device users tweeted their frustrations to Ring’s official account, with many complaining that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out on Twitter that there was a general Amazon Web Services outage. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down.
Others said they weren’t able to turn on their Christmas lights.
Let’s Go Brandon boat wins boat parade, until award is cancelled due to liberal tears.
Boom:
Is this a master class on avoiding Wisconsin, peddling collusion hoaxes and paying Russians to meddle in our elections, deleting e-mails, or being a sore loser? https://t.co/w96auaVbzv
Last week on Thanksgiving vacation, I had to put my Mac through a reboot cycle and lost the zillions of open Firefox Windows. So you may find this week’s LinkSwarm relatively (some might say “mercifully”) brief.
Hunter Biden was pulling down a hefty $10 million a year to spread Chinese influence:
A damning new report claims that Hunter Biden helped expand Chinese influence in America in a $10 million a year agreement and an $80,000 diamond.
In her new book, Laptop from Hell, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, describes Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese-linked energy consortium, called CEFC.
Based on hundreds of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop which he left in a Delaware repair shop in April 2019, and transcripts of messages from WhatsApp, she claims that the Biden family offered their services to CEFC to help expand its business around the world.
In exchange, Devine writes, Hunter Biden received $10 million a year for three years, and a diamond worth at least $80,000.
And, by an amazing coincidence, the Biden Administration is super soft on China.
Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.
“To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”
In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
“It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”
Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office. Through most of 2020, Biden insisted that he was the tough one on China and that the Trump administration only offered “a colossal gap between tough talk and weak action.”
Biden, at a Democratic debate on February 25, 2020, said: “I had spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader by the time we left office. This is a guy who doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug who in fact, has a million Uyghurs in reconstruction camps, meaning concentration camps.”
Biden, writing in Foreign Affairs last spring, said: “Companies must act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere. . . . The United States does need to get tough with China.”
Biden, speaking at the U.S. State Department on February 4, said: “We’ll also take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”
And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.
Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.
Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Snip.
Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”
As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.
It’s not that the Biden administration is doing nothing — an upcoming “democracy summit” invited Taiwan but not China, there have been prohibitions on U.S. investment in particular Chinese companies, and a dozen Chinese companies have been blacklisted for helping the Chinese army with quantum computing.
But these are small-ball gestures while the Chinese government sends 18 fighter jets plus five nuclear-capable H-6 bombers into Taiwanese air-defense zone at one time, Beijing wipes out the last of Hong Kong’s opposition, and the Genocide Games go on with full U.S. corporate sponsorship. We’re attempting minor and symbolic moves while Xi Jinping is attempting big and consequential ones to maximize his leverage over the rest of the world.
In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.
Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.
But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.
More:
The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.
But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”
The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”
How did progressives, who claim to be evidence-based, ever get so committed to Housing First? “Malcolm Gladwell’s [2006 New Yorker article] “Million Dollar Murray,” really helped popularize this idea,” the person said. “But it was based on an anecdote of one person. It works for who it works for but is not scalable. [Governor] Gavin [Newsom] made a mistake [as San Francisco’s Mayor 2004-2011] which was that we stopped investing in shelter. But that’s because all the best minds were saying, ‘This is what’s going to work.’”
One of the claims made by defenders of the open drug scenes is that people who live in them are mostly locals who were priced out of their homes and apartments and decided to pitch a tent on the street. In San Fransicko, I cite a significant body of evidence to show that this is false, and that many people come to San Francisco from around the U.S. for the city’s unusually high cash welfare benefits, free housing, and tolerance of open drug scenes.
The insider agreed. “People come here because they think they can. It’s bullshit that ‘Only 30 percent [of homeless] are from out of town.’ At least 20,000 homeless people come through town every year. Talk to the people on the street. There’s no way 70 percent of the homeless are from here. I would guess it’s fewer than 50 percent. Ask them the name of their high school and they guess, ‘Washington? The one around the corner?’ But you can’t even talk about that without being called a fascist.”
A top adviser and chief spokeswoman for Harris, Symone Sanders, is set to resign from her position by the end of the year, a White House official said Wednesday. It’s one of several high-level departures in the vice president’s office since she was sworn in earlier this year.
Peter Velz, the vice president’s director of press operations, is leaving the office in the coming weeks, along with Vincent Evans, deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, according to reports. Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director, is also stepping down. Advance staffers departed over the summer, soon after a trip to Guatemala where Harris drew criticism for a biting response to a question over when she intended to visit the southern U.S. border.
A source familiar with Harris’s office woes quipped that the defections must be “completely unrelated to reading stories where they are blamed for everything.”
“This is the same story that gets played out again and again — it’s always the vague ‘staffing,’” this person said. “I don’t think there are a ton of staff, present and former, that would rush to defend the way the office is run.”
What percentage of requested water are California farms getting next year? Try 0%.
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw brings the wood to Ron Klain:
Let’s follow up that kudo for Crenshaw with some serious criticism: He was one of 80 Republicans (along with Rep. John Carter, my own representative) to vote in favor of a federal vaccine database. He can swear up and down it’s not going to be used for vaccine passports, but we’ve seen worldwide governments use coercive tools with even less legal justification.
When it comes to arguments on the new Supreme Court abortion case, you can smell the panic.
Real life frequently has symbolism more heavy-handed than fiction. “Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary will close at the end of the 2022-2023.” (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Just got back from Texas and sad to report that the entire state is suffering from the Freedom Variant. Symptoms may include: enjoying your life, breathing fresh air, and not being a paranoid, righteous douchebag.
Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called “social justice.” (Or, in the Biden administration’s parlance, “equity.”)
It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it. According to a very solid case built by an exhaustive Chicago police investigation, Smollett pretended to be the victim of a violent racist and anti-gay assault because he wanted more fame and thus more money.
What better way to achieve that goal than to feed into the enduring myth that minorities in America are suppressed at every turn, even targeted for violence by whites? White men in particular, and, as of 2016, even better if they’re Trump supporters.
Police charged that Smollett offered to pay two brothers he was acquainted with about $2,000 each to act out an attack on the actor in the dead of a Chicago winter night. The siblings, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, told investigators that Smollett had given them $100 to buy masks, a red hat, and a rope that would be fashioned into a kind of noose for the staged attack. The Osundairos were instructed to confront Smollett on a sidewalk, slightly rough him up, and then disappear.
The setup preceeded a previous stunt, wherein Smollett mailed himself a threatening letter that said, “You will d[ie] black fag,” accompanied by an illustration of a hangman. Police said Smollett’s failure to garner any significant national attention from the letter is what led him to fake the assault.
“…This announcement today recognizes that ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” then-police superintendent Eddie Johnson said in late February, after his department probed the events from the night of the incident. He said Smollett was mostly motivated by seeking a salary increase for his role on “Empire.”
That was the conclusion of law enforcement after spending more than $100,000 taxpayer dollars on an investigation to piece together surveillance video, eye-witness testimony, and data gathering that led them to believe Smollett had lied about everything.
But in all fairness, who could blame him? This is what our entire culture is teaching now— that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.
Lucrative opportunities present themselves quickly for those who sell themselves as oppressed and aggrieved. And for Smollett, it worked! Nobody knew who he was before he claimed to have been physically confronted and called the n-word and the f-word by white male Trump supporters. Thereafter, everyone knew who he was.
He was written about in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. A-list celebrities, TV hosts and political leaders expressed their solidarity.
Smaller than a LinkSwarm, here’s a list of foreign hot spots that we might want to pay more attention to than we are right now. And by “we,” I mean “The U.S. Department of State,” which seems to be run by feckless, corrupt Obama Administration retreads. So I doubt they’re up to the task.
Here goes nothing:
Cartel gunmen stormed as prison in Tula, Hidalgo, central Mexico and broke out Pueblos Unidos cartel leader Jose Artemio “El Michoacano” and “La Rabia” Maldonado Mejia, plus his brother and a whole bunch of gunmen. Cartel violence in Mexico is nothing new, but the brazenness of the jailbreak suggests continued weakness on the part of the criminal justice system.
Remember how our chattering classes got their knickers in a knot over Marine La Pen? Well, Eric Zemmour, reportedly a self-styled Gaullist and (get this) Bonapartist just declared he’s running for President of France.
PARIS — Éric Zemmour, a polarizing far-right writer and television star, announced on Tuesday that he was running for French president in elections next year, ending months of speculation over a bid that upended the race before he had even made it official.
Mr. Zemmour, 63, is a longtime conservative journalist who rose to prominence over the past decade, using prime-time television and best-selling books to expound on his view that France was in steep decline because of Islam, immigration and leftist identity politics, themes he returned to in his announcement.
“It is no longer time to reform France but to save it,” Mr. Zemmour said in a video with dramatic overtones that was published on social media, conjuring images of an idealized France and then warning about outside forces that threatened to destroy it.
He has fashioned himself as a Donald J. Trump-style provocateur lobbing politically incorrect bombs at the French elite establishment — saying, for instance, that the law should require parents to give their children “traditional” French names — and rewriting some of the worst episodes from France’s past. He has been charged with inciting racial or religious hatred several times over his comments, and twice convicted and fined.
Mr. Zemmour spoke over 1950s footage full of men in hats and vintage Citroën cars, contrasted with recent clips of crowded subways, crumbling churches, burning cars and violent clashes with the police.
“You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” Mr. Zemmour said, reading from notes at a desk in front of old bookshelves in a way that seemed intent on replicating Charles de Gaulle’s posture when he issued a call to arms against Nazi Germany from London in June 1940.
Mr. Zemmour said he was running “to prevent our children and our grandchildren from experiencing barbarity, to prevent our daughters from being veiled and our sons from being subdued.”
He accused elites — journalists, politicians, judges, European technocrats — of failing France, which he said was represented by a long list of illustrious men and women, including Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Napoleon.
“We will not be replaced,” added Mr. Zemmour, who has espoused the theory of a “great replacement” of white people in France by Muslim immigrants.
Oh, he’s also bigger on Russians than Americans. Which seems strange for a Bonapartist, given that whole “invasion of Russia” thing.
Given the notorious unreliability of our media in reporting on any figure considered even mildly right of center, it’s hard to tell whether Zemmour is indeed a radical extremist, a conservative populist, or something in-between. We’ll find out if he’s a real Bonapartist if he invades Germany and crowns himself Emperor. As a pre-TDS National Review once said about Jean Le Pen, “we have no frog in this fight.”
Minutes before President Tayyip Erdogan delivered a speech renouncing high interest rates once again, the Turkish central bank said it was selling dollars to support the lira. The bank has $25 billion of net reserves as of November, down from $28 billion the month before. But that includes another $48 billion of swaps from local banks, without which reserves are firmly in negative territory.
It’s a flawed bid to support Erdogan’s ultra-loose monetary policy, which has caused the lira to fall more than 40% versus the dollar this year. Propping up the currency might slow Turkey’s descent into hyperinflation, but the country’s pot of dollars risks running out. The bank sold some $128 billion to steady the lira in 2019-2020 and still had to hike rates. When net reserves were at $28 billion in August 2020, it took just five months to run them down to $11 billion – the lowest since at least 2003. The lower reserves fall, the more likely another depreciation becomes.
I’m not an international economic expert, but usually you raise interest rates to stem inflation. The timeless meme protocols call for posting this:
Iranian border guards clashed with Taliban forces along the Iran-Afghanistan border on Wednesday after the Taliban opened fire on Iranian farmers, according to reports.
Local journalist Reza Khaasteh shared unverified video of the scene on Twitter, which appeared to show Iranian soldiers using heavy artillery to push back against the Taliban militants.
Khaasteh tweeted that the Taliban managed to capture several Iranian border posts; however, other reports citing unnamed sources claimed that was false.
OK, the Mullahs and the Taliban is maybe less of a “worry” story and more of a “sit back and watch the fireworks” one…
Kyle Rittenhouse found innocent, vaccine mandates are halted, Kamala is sinking, and the media continues stinking. Plus two scoops of Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday #LinkSwarm!
If you got your facts about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media, then just about everything you know is a lie.
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
CNN and Rep. Ayanna Pressley examples snipped.
But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.
Take each in turn:
First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.
There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.
That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.
In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.
That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.
This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.
So what about the gun?
Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.
But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?
That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.
He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.
Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:
Defense attorney: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?
Grosskreutz: Correct.
Defense attorney: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?
The Court ordered that “Enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ‘COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard’ remain[] stayed pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.” It further ordered that “OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”
Behind this language lies a forceful critique of the Biden mandate. The opinion is here.
One of the factors a court considers in deciding whether to issue a stay is the likelihood that the party seeking it will prevail on the merits. The petitioner must make a strong showing of likelihood of success.
The Fifth Circuit found that the petitioners in this case made that showing. This finding means that the Biden administration almost surely will lose in the Fifth Circuit when the court makes its definitive ruling on the merits.
The court cited a “multitude of reasons” why those challenging the mandate will likely succeed on the merits. The first one, which it described as “obvious,” is this:
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA, was enacted by Congress to assure Americans “safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.” See 29 U.S.C. § 651 (statement of findings and declaration of purpose and policy). It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.
Furthermore, the “sweeping pronouncements” implicit in OSHA’s order are badly flawed. For example, the court noted that the mandate is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees in nearly every industry regardless of their risk of exposure (there is “little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night
shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse”) and “doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity.” On the other hand, it arbitrarily excludes employers with fewer than 100 workers.
Fatally to the mandate, the court found that its promulgation “grossly exceeds OSHA’s authority.” It noted that OSHA’s statutory authority to establish emergency temporary standards “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’”
And, miracle of miracles, OSHA announced that they will actually heed the court’s opinion and suspend vaccine mandate enforcement. A federal agency heeding a rational federal court decision shouldn’t be a surprise, yet here we are.
How unpopular is Kamala Harris? Democratic Media Complex house organ CNN published a scathing hit piece on her.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.
Wait, the warm bucket of spit feels “constrained”? Do tell…
And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Social justice “first woman of color” blather snipped. But lets skip down to where Team Harris gets all snippy over a potential rival:
Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn’t get similar cover any of the times she’s been attacked by the right.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” said a former Harris aide, reflecting conversations last month among several former aides and current allies.
(Imagine there’s an animated hissing cat gif here.)
Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole thing to read how incompetent she and her staff seem at just about everything, and to tote up all the petty slights to Harris, who was only there to bring in black votes in (and didn’t do a great job of that), and now she’s completely disposable.
Despite ending her lackluster campaign for president with a mere 3 percent support among the Democratic electorate, Harris was nevertheless the most obvious pick within the narrow bucket to which Biden had been confined. (Never mind that the apex of her support during the primary campaign came when she savagely attacked Biden on the debate stage, essentially calling him a racist for opposing busing during his time in the Senate, and that she repeatedly said she believed women who had accused Biden of sexual misconduct.)
The simple fact is that Harris is not a good national politician. She is ineffective and unlikeable at best, and, at worst, so unpopular that she’s actively damaging to the administration, likely why Psaki has had to turn to absurdities in an effort to defend her. (Democrats have developed a nasty habit of responding to voters who don’t like them by accusing said voters of racism.)
In Harris’s case, these excuses are because the truth hurts. She has little to no sway with key votes in Congress. She has next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise. These facts shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing that she holds her office not because of her popularity or any relevant skillset but primarily because of her identity.
Had she not been picked as Biden’s running mate, she would’ve remained in a far more advantageous position, keeping a comfortable position in the Senate that would be nearly impossible for her to lose. She was already a media darling, popular among progressives for her supposed ability to “own” conservative nominees during hearings. Rather than winding up in a position with little chance to showboat or collect media accolades, she might’ve remained right there, where her lack of popularity with the national electorate was essentially irrelevant.
In a backwards way, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job.
How unpopular? 28% approval. Usual poll caveats apply. So her numbers might not even be that high!
That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say Christmas doesn’t come early!
Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.
And her staff knows it. “Kamala Harris’s communications director Ashley Etienne is leaving the vice president’s office after reports staff are in-fighting and her boss is being sidelined.”
want to thank the Democrats for giving me, a trial lawyer living in Los Angeles, exactly what I need – a big, heaping tax cut. In their reconciliation bill, there are plenty of giveaways for lay-abouts, losers, and grifters, but also for us living by the beach getting hit with huge state taxes rendered un-deductible by that evil Donald Trump, notorious friend to the rich who he…shafted. Anyway, the Dems are going to wrong this right and fix this manifest justice, though – they are going to make essentially all the money I hand over to the socialist clique that runs the formerly Golden State (and it is a lot) deductible once again.
Cool. Well, for me and other lawyers and similar blue state swells.
People often ask me why I stay in California, to which I reply, “I don’t explain myself to people – buzz off.” But if I were to explain myself to people, I would point out that despite being awash with Californians, California has beautiful weather, my family is nearby, and here I get to be part of the feudal aristocracy sucking the life from working people to fuel my extravagant lifestyle.
See, California was designed for lawyers and similar high-status low-lifes, and the beachside communities where the petty royals dwell do not experience a fraction of the hellish nightmare you see on TV. Oh, what you see is real, just not for those in the Birkenstock nobility. You see videos of hordes of hobos leaving their junkie spoor on the sidewalks and that happens, just not to the people that Prince Gavin of Newsom cares about. I don’t think he cares about me personally mind you, but he cares a lot about my ZIP code.
You can drive ten minutes from my castle and be worried about someone stealing your hubcaps. Once you start heading east over the 405 (That’s I-405 to people who don’t live in LA) real life comes and bites you hard, and the farther east you go, the harder it bites. The roads are trash – gee, I sure expect the infrastructure bill will totally make them nice again – and the schools are cesspits of violence and commie indoctrination, but the peasants just need to accept their lot in life and not complain. Their bitching would ruin our wine tasting.
Of course, I might have more sympathy for these poor devils if they had not lobbied so hard for the role of “Serf #3” in California’s production of “Game of Bums.” They voted for this. They got this. It’s all theirs.
“It’s Not Just White People: Democrats Are Losing Normal Voters of All Races.” Results from a focus group of Virginia voters “who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections.”
When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.
The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”
The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.
“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”
“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.”
Ignore the parts where the writer regurgitates Democratic Party talking points (“for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice,” “Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States.”) and pay attention to what the focus group members of all races are saying. “The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.”
Evidently one American sport is willing to stand up to China: Women’s tennis.
The head of the Women’s Tennis Association Steve Simon has said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in China if tennis player Peng Shuai’s safety is not fully accounted for and her allegations are not properly investigated.
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” Simon said in an interview Thursday with CNN. “Because this is certainly, this is bigger than the business,” added Simon.
“Women need to be respected and not censored,” said Simon.
Peng, who is one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, has not been seen in public since she accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.
Her post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was deleted within 30 minutes of publication, with Chinese censors moving swiftly to wipe out any mention of the accusation online. Her Weibo account, which has more than half a million followers, is still blocked from searchers on the platform.
The mother of a Virginia girl who was raped by a classmate inside a school bathroom reportedly said that she and her husband had been pressured to keep quiet about the incident — and had no clue the 15-year-old boy was then transferred to another school until last month.
“We were silenced for many months,” Jessica Smith told the Daily Mail in her first interview since her daughter was raped at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County in May. “We were told not to say a word that could jeopardize our daughter’s case.”
The boy was found guilty last month of the sexual attack, which sparked a heated confrontation between the victim’s father and school board members.
There seem to be no crimes the left wing won’t condone in their quest to impose “Social Justice” on resisting Americans.
While talking with Joe Rogan, Dr. Peter Attia tells a story about woke ideology in a medical school Urology lecture. It’s remarkable. pic.twitter.com/mftjjNZww1
“A Virginia university has placed an assistant professor on administrative leave after the educator sparked heated backlash for saying it isn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to children.” Allyn Walker, step right up, you’re the next contestant on The Perv is Wrong!
This week marked the 50th anniversary of the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. There have been a lot of milestones on the road to the high tech world we live in today, but that was one of the biggest.
The rare good kind of irony: A team of firefighters was practicing water rescue when a car drove into the water and they had to perform a real water rescue.
