Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s theme is Democratic Governor’s ignoring the constitution to keep their precious lockdowns going, Obamagate, spying (domestic and foreign), a bit about aircraft, and funny animals. Dig in!
Remember how Georgia lifting the lockdown and opening the economy was going to kill everyone’s granny? Yeah, not so much: “Georgia Records Lowest Number of Coronavirus Patients in over a Month.”
Ever since President Trump expressed optimism about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the mere mention of that drug can elicit instantaneous, strident, and finger-wagging condemnation by the mainstream media and all those who are pulling for the pandemic to lay waste to the economy and pave the way for a fundamental progressive transformation of America. Despite its use by health-care providers across the country and around the world to successfully treat COVID-19, you will be mocked as either a fool or a snake oil salesman if you approvingly utter the word “hydroxychloroquine” or even express hope that it can be used to save lives. The word is simply not to be tolerated in polite, progressive society.
Well, it appears that the list of forbidden words is about to get longer. The new additions include “corticosteroids” and “Methylprednisolone.”
What do these widely available and relatively inexpensive drugs with known safety profiles have in common with hydroxychloroquine? Leading physicians are using them in addition to hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID-19. And they are doing so without waiting two or three years for the results of randomized clinical trials.
“Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States.” “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.”
It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a “super spreader” event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are “racist and misogynistic” and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.
Whitmer told ABC’s “The View” that the protests are “really political” as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.
“This is not appropriate in a global pandemic,” she said. “But it’s certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.”
I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs — leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmer’s opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies.
Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy: “Screw your rights. Stay at home.” Wisconsin Supreme Court: “Unconstitutional.” Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy the very same day: “Oh yeah? Then screw your religion! No meetings for you God weirdos!” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
Dallas County Commissioner Judge Clay Jenkins has repeatedly tried to act as the ruler of Dallas County by attempting to force his will on everyone within it and each time he’s been put back in his place by everyone from the citizens of Dallas County to his own fellow commissioners.
Jenkins has now awakened the wrath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who issued a warning to him and other officials in other Texas counties who are trying to illegally prevent Texans from living doing things such as attending church.
According to Paxton’s office, a warning was issued to three county judges and two mayors telling them to back off their make-believe thrones, or else there will be consequences:
Attorney General Ken Paxton today issued letters to three Texas counties (Dallas, Bexar, and Travis) and two mayors (San Antonio and Austin), warning that some requirements in their local public health orders are unlawful and can confuse law-abiding citizens. These unlawful and unenforceable requirements include strict and unconstitutional demands for houses of worship, unnecessary and onerous restrictions on allowing essential services to operate, such as tracking customers who visit certain restaurants, penalties for not wearing masks, shelter-in-place demands, criminal penalties for violating state or local health orders, and failing to differentiate between recommendations and mandates.
Many of the most important mitigation strategies are unknown to the general public because they’ve taken place behind closed doors on the initiative of employers, not bureaucrats, and have little or nothing to do with legal mandates (which are themselves, as I can attest is the case here in Canada, a contradictory, hastily-conceived patchwork of federal and provincial directives and advisories). To give but one example I happen to be familiar with: Many of the men and women you see driving delivery trucks and construction vehicles are now governed by all sorts of rules, at pickup and drop-off, that allow them to perform their functions without coming within six feet of others. In some cases, they’ve been enabled with apps on their phones or dash-mounted tablets that permit them to coordinate these functions without any direct on-site human interaction whatsoever. Or they might be subject to thermometer-gun screenings to determine if they have a fever. Having implemented these lockdown-lite policies at great cost and inconvenience, employers aren’t going to dump them the moment the government gives them permission to do so, even though these procedures have increased costs and decreased output.
Many employers I speak to are actually far more constricted by the concerns of their own employees than by the law itself. At one workplace that I know of, the boss announced that loosened provincial restrictions mean that everyone can come back to work this month. To his surprise, his employees announced that they’d voted on the issue through Facebook, and, no, they would not be coming back, at least not yet. And in Quebec, which is starting to let elementary-school students come back to class this month, thousands of parents—a majority at some schools—have decided to keep their children home. I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. It’s lockdown by mob.
To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so it’s not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if you’re all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along.
Don Surber asked a question back in 2017 that we ought to take a fresh look at: Was Obama using the NSA to spy on Romney during the 2012 election? Given what we know of Crossfire Hurricane, would anyone put it past him?
Related:
Comey: 'We Did Not Spy—We Just Observed And Reported Secretly Without The Subject's Knowledge Or Consent' https://t.co/h3uoUi1JKB
Shurer fought his way *up* a mountain, into machine gun fire, RPGs, etc, neutralizing countless jihadis in the process, getting shot, but still moving forward, to render aid to & evac his brothers that were pinned down. His story is awe inspiring. RIP.https://t.co/jHgoR1XLKC
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) May 15, 2020
TSMC to build chip foundry in Arizona. This is a pretty big deal, as TSMC currently has the best fab tech in the world, and this will be their first ground-up American foundry (they currently have (I think) two other American fabs as the result of acquisitions from WaferTech and TI).
An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.
The New York Times reports that “Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.”
“He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,” the report notes, adding that “he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”
The report explains that Ang’s alleged hiding of the funding enabled him to also get US government subsidies, specifically from NASA, to the tune of more than $5 million.
Recall just days ago we reported that Tesla was sending people back to work at its Fremont factory in Alameda County before the area’s lockdown expired.
Late last week, Alameda County responded by telling Musk that he could not re-open his factory. “We have not given the green light. We have been working with them looking at some of their safety plans. But no, we have not said that it is appropriate to move forward,” Erica Pan, interim health officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said on an online town hall meeting on Friday.
That was enough to trigger a total Elon Musk meltdown. The CEO, who has been going off on diatribes about civil liberties on conference calls and podcasts alike, Tweeted out on Saturday that he is going to be suing Alameda County for not allowing him to re-open
Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.
The question is what took him so long. Thanks to one party Democratic rule, California constantly ranks as one of the worst states to do business in. High taxes and a brutal regulatory environment made California prohibitively expense to do business in long before the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown provided the final straw.
Come to Texas! We would welcome Tesla HQ in Texas. We love jobs & Texans very much want to open up & get back to work (while still staying safe & following sound science). We make lots of cars & trucks in Texas, and we’d love more!! https://t.co/F9O0N3yase
Come to Texas. Enjoy no state income tax, friendly people, best queso on earth, and freedom. Just don’t bring blue voting, or you’ll mess it all up. https://t.co/WJwyW6bEDEpic.twitter.com/E6tdO3edWj
Is this just a negotiating ploy to pressure the county into allowing Tesla to resume manufacturing? Possibly. But plenty of companies have already moved operations from California to Texas, including Toyota, Kubota, and Charles Schwab. And that exodus just keeps continuing.
I used to do a regular Texas vs. California update, detailing how bad California’s business climate was and detailing all the California businesses going bankrupt or moving to Texas. Eventually I got so far behind that the in-progress post simply got too huge to finish. (And this was right around the time I started doing the Clown Car Update, which sucked up huge amounts of my time.) And then the Wuhan Coronavirus came along to wallop everyone’s economy, so most of those links are probably moot. I have a very strong suspicion that ending the unreasonable lockdown conditions earlier than most states will help Texas recover more strongly, and increase it’s lead as a business-friendly environment over California.
Here’s another case of a government official using the Wuhan coronavirus as an excuse to exceed their legal authority. Harris County Democratic Commissioners Court Judge Lina Hidalgo decreed that not only must every resident of the county wear a mask, but that they’d be subject to to 180 days in jail or a $1,000 fine for disobeying:
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo on Wednesday ordered residents to cover their faces in public starting next week, the latest effort by local governments to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The new rules, which require residents 10 and older to cover their nose and mouth when outside the home, take effect Monday and last 30 days. Acceptable garments include a homemade mask, scarf, bandana or handkerchief. Medical masks or N-95 respirators are not recommended as they are most needed by first responders and health workers.
Under the order, the county’s 4.7 million residents must cover their faces at all times except when exercising, eating or drinking; the exemptions also include when individuals are alone in a separate single space, at home with roommates or family, or when wearing a mask poses a greater risk to security, mental or physical health. Violating the mask rules is punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, though Hidalgo urged police to use discretion.
Our officers work every single day to bridge the gap with our community and earn their trust, we will not stand idly by and allow Hidalgo to tear that bridge down, with her horrific leadership and echo chamber decision making.
Let’s just say that Hidalgo’s attempt to release criminals into the public using coronavirus as an excuse was not popular with Houston police officers. They’re also seeking a ruling from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on whether Hidalgo’s decree is legal under Texas law, and note that police response is already way to thin with crime up in the city.
You can read the complete text in the following tweet:
First he established a “strike force” to advise on reopening Texas, headed by three medical professionals (John Zerwas, MD, Executive Vice-Chancellor for Health Affairs at the University of Texas System, Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, and Parker Hudson, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Dell Medical School). I think the makeup of the strike force itself is way too heavy on CEOs and light on small business owners, with a few exceptions like Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Balous Miller (owner of Bill Miller Bar-B-Q).
Further loosening will depend on the data. These are hardly reckless moves.
The entire point of the lockdown was to bend the curve to the point that cases didn’t overwhelm the hospital beds needed to effectively treat them, especially the ICU beds needed to treat the worst cases. The latest data indicates that it probably did just that. Peak Texas coronavirus resource usage was actually on April 15th.
In Harris County, Houston has one the largest caseloads of Wuhan Coronavirus in the country, but the current caseload is well below bed and ICU bed capacity. In Travis County, they have three times as many beds as confirmed cases.
With mask production up and hydroxychloroquine continuing to show results in trials (hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain), we now have a lot more weapons to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus, even if cases increase. The economy can’t wait the 6-12 months for an effective vaccine to be developed. We have the capacity to address additional infections, and (if need be) reverse course if there’s a huge infection snapback.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo have each touted chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, as a promising treatment option for those infected with Covid-19. Some media quickly pounced on the president’s statement. The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, quickly clarified that the agency had not in fact approved the drug as a safe and effective treatment for the new disease, shortly after the president claimed that the drug was “approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.”
Chloroquine is in fact available for prescription in the United States. It’s already being tried as a treatment for the new virus in U.S. hospitals. And multiple manufacturers are rushing to produce more and get it to doctors.
The confusion over chloroquine—along with the broader performance of U.S. regulatory agencies during this epidemic—highlights how our federal process for reviewing and approving drugs and medical devices still leaves much to be desired. Our regulatory regime is costing lives. The early administrative failings of the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, which greatly worsened the crisis in the United States, show how ugly that can be.
Getting a new pharmaceutical compound to market in the U.S. is an extraordinarily complex process. Development time is usually more than a decade. Costs add up to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. After an innovator submits an Investigational New Drug application, the FDA requires a three-stage testing process, then the submission of a formal New Drug Application that typically includes hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation.
Some Chloroquine discussion skipped.
With cases and deaths growing exponentially, federal regulatory authorities can be expected to fast-track new approaches. The agencies were much less willing to afford latitude to the private sector just weeks ago, though—and the United States is now much more vulnerable as a result. Chinese authorities uploaded the SARS-CoV-2 genome onto the Internet on January 10. The CDC developed its own testing protocol by January 21; international scientists developed a different test by the same date, which was soon disseminated en masse by the World Health Organization.
The U.S. testing process failed. The day that the CDC announced it had developed its testing protocol, January 21, was the date of the first documented American case of coronavirus. South Korea documented its first case the same day. But by March 17, the United States had administered only 125 tests per 1 million people; South Korea had administered more than 5,000 tests per 1 million over the same time span. By aggressive testing, South Korea was able to trace viral spread and contain it. Without it, the U.S. was left with little choice but the draconian measures that have shut down much of American life.
As has been widely reported, the CDC’s in-house testing design was flawed, thus compromising early testing results. Mistakes happen, but the impact of the test-design flaw was much greater than it should have been—owing to the U.S. bureaucracy’s tightly controlled process. Even had the CDC test worked perfectly, not nearly enough tests would have been available for wide-scale testing on the South Korean model.
We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.
But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.
Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.
Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.
“Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”
The Times highlights Dr. Helen Chu, who early on had taken swabs from the noses of patients in Washington State who seemed to be suffering from a particularly nasty virus. She proposed to local, state and federal officials testing those swabs for unusual coronavirus infections.
Instead, the CDC told Dr. Chu she’d have to get FDA approval for her test. The FDA nixed it because the lab she worked in wasn’t “certified” to conduct such tests, something that takes months to do.
So early data that could have helped fight what later became a raging pandemic weren’t available. All because a bureaucracy went strictly by the book.
Let’s hope the current crisis results in significant regulatory reform.
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks that Chinese coronavirus cases may be 40 times higher than stated.
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.
The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion. Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people. They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal. Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.
At the heart of China’s communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world. After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.
If one doubts the CCP’s resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country. In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly. The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.
Although it is not the position of our government that the CCP was behind the creation and weaponization of the Chinese virus, we need to at least entertain the notion that a nation that has, in the recent past, killed tens of millions of its own people would not think twice about killing thousands or even millions of other peoples from other countries if it meant putting them in a greater strategic position and helping them fulfill their objective of a communist world order.
Speaking of filthy: “Chinese markets again selling bats.” Ain’t that a kick in the head?
I’ve seen a lot of experts debunking the idea that the current coronavirus pandemic originated at the Wuhan virology lab. But here’s one expert that thinks it might well have. “Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.”
The 15-days Guidelines allowed the nation to prepare to get the equipment and resources needed in-place before a wave of hospitalizations would be required. The 15-days also provided time to garner information possible treatment options for those experiencing symptoms. These include lopinavir-ritonavir, interferon-1β, the RNA polymerase inhibitor remdesivir, chloroquine, a variety of traditional Chinese medicine products, and intravenous hyperimmune globulin from recovered patients.
Based on Task Force briefing discussions with Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, it appears that the team projects that the coronavirus will disappear during the summer, and return in the fall. They are working with the President and the rest of his team to expedite testing, find and produce vaccines, and identify effective treatments while keeping the mortality rate as low as can be achieved in this first wave of infections….
If the curve flattens to around 33,000 deaths, then that is approximately the same as a moderately bad flu year, and far short of the 100,000 the media was presenting this weekend.
President Donald Trump is working hard to reduce the number to as low as can be achieved, based on the advice of Fauci and other team members. They may have access to additional information that indicates the extension of guidelines to the end of April is warranted.
Fauci and his team continue to gather data, and adjustments will be made in the models as speculation is replaced by hard information and results. For now, it appears that Fauci and his team’s original roadmap for the pandemic was good.
More analysis of the numbers. “Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers.”
Scary story about a Washington state choir rehearsal of 60 people, none of whom exhibited any symptoms of illness. “Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Funny how all the leftist sorts are insisting you can’t call it the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan coronavirus. Almost as though they all received the same marching orders from…somewhere. But no, that would be silly. All the useful idiots can’t be on China’s payroll…
Last week’s unemployment numbers were horrible. This week’s are worse. “US jobless claims skyrocket to 6.6 million.” We knew this was coming. We just need to get to the other side of the “V”…
Know what other numbers are hugely up? NCIS firearms checks run. 3,740,688 checks were run in March, easily a new record.
“Italy Risks Losing Grip in South With Fear of Looting, Riots.”
As Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fights to hold Italian society together through a crippling nationwide lockdown, the depressed south is turning into a powder keg.
Police have been deployed on the streets of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, amid reports gangs are using social media to plot attacks on stores. A bankrupt ferry company halted service to the island, including vital supplies of food and medicines. As the state creaks under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, officials worry the mafia may be preparing to step in.
Preventing unrest in the so-called Mezzogiorno, the underdeveloped southern region that’s long lagged behind the wealthy north, has become the government’s top priority, according to Italian officials who asked not to be named discussing the administration’s strategy.
With the European Union’s most dangerously indebted state already fighting the Germans over the terms of the financial aid it needs, the fallout may reach far beyond Rome if Conte fails.
Keep in mind that any postwar Italian government’s grip on power is tenuous in the best of times…(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Panama is fighting the coronavirus by segregating shipping days by gender. What, are Panamanians so randy they can’t see a member of the opposite sex without wanting to get jiggy with them?
Does anyone not on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party trust Beijing’s dictatorship with the power to pervasively monitor communications (spy locally as well as globally), interrupt, deny or corrupt digital services, and possibly take surreptitious control of digital devices, say, the air traffic control computers at Los Angeles International Airport?
Outrageous scenario? No, given Huawei’s baggage is a legitimate worry exacerbated by the regime’s criminal dishonesty (e.g., lying about COVID-19/Wuhan virus). For all practical purposes, Huawei is a Chinese Communist Party tool. In spy lingo, a cutout company can hide an espionage operation. Abundant evidence suggests Huawei serves as a cutout.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez encourages Amazon workers to strike, because Unions. “AOC is so devoted to the commie common good that she wants some of the only people in America who are guaranteed work to voluntarily give that work up for some union talking point.”
What the hell, Vermont? “State officials in Vermont are ordering large retailers that sell critical items such as food and prescription drugs to stop the in-person sale of nonessential products such as clothing and electronics.” An emergency doesn’t give you the excuse to be Shopping Basket Dictator.
Venezuelan patrol ship sinks after ramming cruise ship with reinforced hull. The only way this story could be any better is if the cruise ship was labeled “Donald Trump” and the Venezuelan patrol boat was labelled “The Media.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
I was not on the “oh don’t panic the Wuhan coronavirus is just the flu” bus. It’s a real pandemic with, as far as we can tell, a death rate about ten times that of the flu. People are dropping dead at an alarming rate in Italy. It’s real, it’s deadly, and a lot of the government reactions to it (the China travel ban, the emergency declaration) made sense. I believe in flattening the curve, no matter how many unknown variables there.
Now we’re well past the “making sense” part of the pandemic and onto the “bullshit overreaction and power-grab” portion of the pandemic.
Item the First: “Illinois mayor signs executive order granting power to ban sale of guns and alcohol while addressing coronavirus.” Two things that have absofriginglutely nothing to do with infectious diseases and everything to do with Champaign, Illinois Mayor Deborah Frank Feinen’s power grab.
Officials in seven San Francisco Bay Area counties issued a sweeping shelter-in-place mandate Monday affecting about 7 million people, ordering residents to stay at home and go outside only for food, medicine and outings that are absolutely essential.
The order says residents must stay inside and venture out only for necessities for three weeks starting Tuesday in a desperate attempt by officials to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
How this is compatible with American constitutional rights is not explained. Also, what do you want to bet that absolutely nothing will be done to clear out San Francisco’s huge population of mentally addicted drug addicts shitting in the streets despite the fact that COVID-19 can likely be transmitted by fecal matter?
Item the Third: The tri-state area (New York, Connecticut, New Jersey) is shutting down bars, restaurants and movie theaters. “Restaurants can remain open for take-out and delivery only — and the state is allowing eateries to include booze in to-go orders.”
Kent is not a first-hand witness and much of his testimony is based off of second-hand knowledge. [Page 206-207]
Kevin Bacon has fewer degrees of separation to the Trump Zelensky call than George Kent.
That being said, his closed-door testimony revealed far more devastating pushback on the Democrat narrative than anything else.
Kent testified that it is appropriate for the State Department to look at the level of corruption in a country when evaluating foreign aid. [Page 103]
(Reminder: The Trump administration sent Ukraine lethal aid.)
Kent also testified that Hunter Biden being on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while Joe Biden was VP was a conflict of interest. [Page 226-227]
And according to his testimony, when he raised corruption concerns with the Obama White House, he was rebuffed and was told “There was no further bandwidth to deal” with Hunter. [Page 226-227]
Reminder: Chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is not a fact witness to the Trump Ukraine call.
Taylor was not on the July 25th call and he did not read the transcript until it was publically released for the world to see.
Furthermore, Taylor doesn’t have relationships with any of the players involved. He has previously testified that he did not have direct communication with President Trump, Rudy Giuliani or Mick Mulvaney. [Pages 107-108]
Yet even worse for Democrats’, Taylor’s closed door testimony has undermined their phony narrative.
Taylor testified that at the time of President Trump’s call with Ukraine, the Ukrainians were unaware of the hold on the U.S. aid. [Page 119]
Taylor also testified that combatting corruption in Ukraine is a “constant theme” of U.S. foreign policy. [Pages 86-88]
Surprisingly, McDaniel reports that opposition to the hearings among Democrats is up 6 points. Could it be that there are still some sane members left in the Democratic Party who see this spectacle for what it is? Regardless of what new information is learned, no matter how favorably it may reflect on President Trump, there are a large number of Democrats who will not be swayed. Most Democrats hate Trump so much that, even though they’re well aware of how unfairly he’s been treated, they’re willing to go along with anything that will remove him from office. A six point shift doesn’t seem like much, but even a small move can swing an election.
This shift also makes sense in light of the recent rally data released by Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale…He reported that 27% of those who attended Trump’s Tupelo, MS rally on November 1st identified themselves as Democrats. At an October 17th rally held in Dallas, TX, 21.4% identified as Democrats. These figures are stunning.
1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.
Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.
2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.
At publication, Texas’ crime rate is the lowest it has been since 1965. Similarly, violent crime in Texas is at a 40-year generational low with 410.8 incidents per 100,000 residents, a rate not seen since 1977. This trend follows a decades-long aggregate decrease in both violent and property crime rates. As illustrated in Figure 1, murder—the most heinous crime that can be committed using a firearm—has mimicked the decline as well with the drop in constituent subcategories of homicide. (Note that the rifle and shotgun homicide rates are reflected on the secondary vertical axis on the right in order to display the drop in these rare incidents.)
Further, the percentage of total homicides committed with a firearm in Texas has been trending downward as well. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 2 shows declines across all major categories of firearm homicide, with rifles and shotguns being displayed on the right-hand vertical axis. During the preceding two decades, a handgun has been used in an average of 46.53 percent of all homicides, while rifles and shotguns were used in 3.57 percent and 4.10 percent, respectively. For handguns, the highest use was 54.55 percent in 2005; the lowest was the most recent year, 2018, at 40.12 percent.
Also: “These trends persist in tandem with a proliferation in concealed carry permits being issued. Between 1998 and 2018, the number of concealed handgun licenses issued have increased 568 percent.”
Writer Derek Cohen examines possible solutions to violence involving guns, and finds all of them but one wanting:
The Legislature should consider implementing and funding a Texas program similar to federal initiatives, which uses a multi-pronged strategy of policing and prosecution, agency integration, and identification of violent crime hot spots. The focus would be on criminals with guns, not law-abiding Texans (Governor’s Texas Safety Action Report).
Of all the recommendations made in this report, this enjoys the strongest scholarly backing. This essentially describes what is known as “focused deterrence,” a holistic public safety strategy that includes law enforcement, prosecutors, social services, and analysts. The process begins when on-the-street law enforcement describes gang conditions in the area they patrol, both in terms of geography (what is the gang’s “territory”) and identifying key members. The analysts then create a gang map as well as a relational network of the gang. Those in the gang are notified that they have been identified as such and invited to a “call-in.” During this meeting, attendees are informed of the strategy and, should violence persist associated with the gang, not only will state and federal prosecutors seek the maximum punishment for all potential criminal charges, but gang members stand to face these charges should others within the network be responsible for furthering violence. Conversely, attendees are offered the option of enrolling in relevant social services to ease the transition to a more law-abiding life.
These programs have gone by multiple names during their ascendency: Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), Operation: Ceasefire, and the like. Their efficacy has been demonstrated in individual and meta- analyses, suggesting “that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect.”
Probably should have included a link to this in my Austin homeless roundup, but there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to drunken brawls on Sixth Street, which seems to have gotten much worse in the last year or so. (Hat tip: Paul Martin of KR Training.)
Nine deaths at USC since August? That starts to seem like a startlingly high number. And, accord to feminists, there must have also been thousands of student rapes in the same period…
Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton became the first the secure his reelection in 2020. How? Within hours of the filing deadline closing, his legal team challenged false statements by his only Democratic opponent, who promptly withdrew.
ProTip: Try not to drop your four baggies filled with cocaine. Especially at the airport. Especially if you’re Democratic state representative. Texas Democratic State Representative Poncho Nevarez evidently had to learn that the hard way, and now he’s not running for reelection.
Massachusetts to seize cars of people caught with untaxed vaping products. Even by the standards of Massachusetts crazy that’s Massachusetts crazy, and likely both and Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual) and a Ninth Amendment (neither necessary nor proper) violation.
Despite the roommates’ optimism, the system began to break down soon after its establishment. To settle disputes, the roommates held weekly meetings of the “Committee of Three.”
“I brought up that I thought it was total bullshit that I’m, like, the only one who ever cooks around here, yet I have to do the dishes, too,” said Foyle, unaware of just how much the apartment underscores the infeasibility of scientific socialism as outlined in Das Kapital. “So we decided that if I cook, someone else has to do the dishes. We were going to rotate bathroom-cleaning duty, but then Kirk kept skipping his week, so we had to give him the duty of taking out the garbage instead. But now he has a class on Tuesday nights, so we switched that with the mopping.”
After weeks of complaining that he was the only one who knew how to clean “halfway decent,” Foyle began scaling back his efforts, mirroring the sort of production problems experienced in the USSR and other Soviet bloc nations.
At an Oct. 7 meeting of the Committee of Three, more duties and a point system were added. Two months later, however, the duty chart is all but forgotten and the shopping list is several pages long.
The roommates have also tried to implement a food-sharing system, with similarly poor results. The dream of equal distribution of shared goods quickly gave way to pilferage, misallocation, and hoarding.
“I bought the peanut butter the first four times, and this Organic Farms shit isn’t cheap,” Eaves said. “So ever since, I’ve been keeping it in my dresser drawer. If Kirk wants to make himself a sandwich, he can run to the corner store and buy some Jif.”
Narwhale the Unipuppy. Which was trending over the impeachment hearings two days ago…
In keeping with all that global warming, Austin had an unseasonably early hard freeze this week. Stay warm out there…
Welcome to a Friday the 13th LinkSwarm! Try to avoid hockey-mask-wearing serial killers today.
Although I feel slightly dirty putting up a link to Vox, this piece on how Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend warps the politics of the state is worth reading, even if you have to factor in Vox’s anti-conservative bias. And I was unaware that Alaska now has the highest unemployment rate in the country…
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York are among the worst-run cities in the country, and residents are leaving. If only there was one single common (D)enominator to all those cities…
President Trump seeks a ban on flavored vaping. This is a very stupid approach to something that is largely a non-problem. It’s not the government’s purpose to protect people from themselves, even if it were vaping is several orders of magnitude less dangerous to your health than smoking, and this is appropriately handled at the state or local (not national) level. Plus there is a sufficient framework of laws to making sales to minors illegal anywhere they’re not already illegal. President Trump is simply wrong here.
Brexit is already changing the British economy. For the better.
The economy overall expanded by 0.3 per cent in July, significantly faster than the 0.1 per cent expected, and better than most of our main rivals. Next, we found out that the trade deficit narrowed slightly as imports fell. Finally, we learned that employment was at record highs and that wages were still growing at record rates. Add in a Chancellor who is about to start spending money with carefree abandon and there is no reason why it shouldn’t improve from here. It isn’t fantastic. But it is a decent performance from a mature economy facing what is meant to be its biggest economic challenge in a generation.
The best data we have suggest that the vast majority of Americans view political correctness as a problem, and that, contra the claim of many progressives, this is not a battlefield consisting of resentful ranting whites on one side and oppressed people on the other, the latter simply asking to be treated and spoken of with decency. In fact, the people most enthusiastic about intense forms of language-policing tend to be more privileged and more white, according to a national political-correctness survey conducted by the firm More in Common that made headlines last year. As Yascha Mounk wrote in his writeup in The Atlantic, “While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.” Moreover, “Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.”
Now, people have criticized that survey on the grounds that if you ask people whether “X is a problem,” where X is a culture-war buzzword, you’re likely to get a lot of positive responses. I think there’s something to this critique, but the numbers are too overwhelming to fully discount it. I also think that if you’re going to argue that PC is just a synonym for “being a decent person” you should then explain why so many Americans think that concept is a problem. Are Americans that invested in indecency?
Plus, it would be one thing if this survey were some sort of strange outlier, but if you look at the data we have on specific culture-war blowups of relevance to the PC and/or cancel-culture debates, you find the same pattern over and over. Almost always, the opinions most commonly represented in mainstream progressive outlets are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake. I’ve written about this before: On issues ranging from Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal to the Washington football team name to what term(s) should be used to refer to people of recent Latin American descent, woke-progressive opinion is often very out of line with that of the majority of members of the groups in question. Not only do the wokest progressives not speak for Americans; they don’t speak for the groups they’re claiming to want to protect. A 40-year-old American Indian from Oklahoma — that paragon of wealth and privilege and white resentment, of course — made this point pretty succinctly when he was interviewed for a focus group which accompanied the release of the More In Common survey: “It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.”
“It’s new,” Stone says of cancel culture, the term used to refer to boycotts started (usually via social media) when a person or group is offended by a star or brand. “I don’t want to say it’s the same as it’s always been. The kids are fucking different than us. There’s a generational thing going on.” Currently, Dave Chappelle is in the crosshairs for his latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks and Stones. “I know some people have been canceled for genuinely, like, personal behavior, but Dave is not getting canceled anytime soon,” Stone says, joking that South Park and Chappelle are “grandfathered” out of the culture.
Stone also shared his theory as to why critics were so hard on the latest Chappelle special, while viewers seemed to enjoy it far more. “I feel bad for television critics and cultural critics,” he explains. “They may have laughed like hell at that, and then they went home and they know what they have to write to keep their job. So when I read TV reviews or cultural reviews, I think of someone in prison, writing. I think about somebody writing a hostage note. This is not what they think. This is what they have to do to keep their job in a social media world. So I don’t hold it against them.”
Also:
One of the most notable aspects from last season was the lack of any political dealings, specifically the nearly total absence of Donald Trump via the Mr. Garrison persona. “It was nice for us,” Parker says. “It was nice to not come in and talk about Donald Trump. And I think it was nice for people to watch and go, ‘Oh, yeah, there is still comedy outside of fucking Donald Trump. There is still funny shit as the world goes on.’ And you can get your Trump comedy on so many other shows.”
Every segment they air is selected because they think/hope it will damage President Trump and disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who voted for and support him. They don’t report news. They select only stories that they think will damage President Trump, and ignore or otherwise downplay and dilute the stories that don’t.
MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.
Snip.
Financial institutions are supposed to ignore or reject payment instructions that don’t comport with precise formatting required by the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA), the not-for-profit organization that provides the backbone for the electronic movement of money in the United States. But Slavkin said a number of financial institutions ended up processing both reversal requests, meaning a fair number of employees at companies that use MyPayrollHR suddenly saw a month’s worth of payroll payments withdrawn from their bank accounts.
Fake influencer exposed. Oh wait, let me rephrase that: More fake than usual influencer exposed. I’m not on Instagram, and I’m incredulous that “influencer” is even a thing. Maybe I could start an “anti-influencer” channel, with just videos of me reading a book while occasionally sipping from a can of off-brand diet root beer. Maybe I could get famous brands to me not to wear their clothing…
Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
(Hat tip: Greg Benford on Facebook.)
Poland frowns on Greenpeace’s shenanigans:
No messing about
Armed Polish border guards board Greenpeace 'Rainbow Warrior' ship blocking the delivery of coal to the port of Gdansk.
Greenpeace have accused Polish authorities of using excessive force.
Everybody knows about the 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of bubonic plague.
And those figures are what we’re told. No one, if you can trust the comments sections in the LA Times or the Next Door app for my old Hollywood neighborhood, remotely believes them. They could be three or four times the number. And how do you take a census of the homeless anyway? They are inherently nomadic. But everyone knows they are everywhere, along those sidewalks, under the freeway underpasses, even in the brush up by Mulholland Drive. Maybe they should add homeless encampments to the Disneyland Mulholland ride.
But why has this happened in a place that is so rich it is the fifth biggest economy in the world by itself, ahead of the United Kingdom and just behind Germany? Can’t they just throw money at the homeless and make them go away?
Not so easy. It’s been tried, at least to some extent. Shelters, some of them well built, have been constructed all over the city but the homeless don’t want to stay in them. The reason is these shelters are drug-free zones and the homeless of LA (and San Francisco and Seattle) are anything but drug-free. Most are addicts. They prefer to live in tents where they can smoke what they want, shoot what they want, pop what they want.
So homeless encampments keep growing and sprout up everywhere as the syringes pile up.
Here’s a 10 minute drive through of Skid Row that gives you some idea of the size of the problem:
Here we see what the video producers want us to see as a “respectable” homeless person, the “mayor” of the block he pitches his tent on, and how he tells the “rules” to other homeless people camping there, but we also see that once a week city crews have to clean and hose off the block because it’s become a trash heap.
Notice that everyone in the video frames the problem as government needs to do more. Even the homeless guy realizes the promises are empty. There’s no discussion of eliminating California and Los Angeles’ onerous restrictions on building new housing.
Building costs in California are far above those in other states. A recent report indicates that a home that costs $300,000 to build in Texas would cost about $800,000 to build in California. The report cites factors that increase California costs, including the fact that approval of a major development in California is uncertain and that, once approved, construction can take up to 15 years. Another report shows that building “affordable housing” costs about $425,000 per unit in a multi-family development.
Take a moment and consider how many households can afford an “affordable housing” unit that costs $425,000 to build. Assuming a down payment of 10 percent, a household must earn roughly $100,000 to qualify for a conventional mortgage to purchase that home. Unless building costs fall significantly, this means some form of government subsidy—either to the builder or to the buyer—will often be required for these units to be built and occupied. And these subsidies will ultimately be paid for by taxpayers.
Regulations are a major factor behind outrageous California construction costs, and this includes the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). This legislation, which was passed by governor Ronald Reagan in 1970, requires that environmental review and protection be part of every state and local government decision-making process. But CEQA needs to be reformed. What was intended as a tool for protecting the state’s environment is now used by political organizations, businesses, labor unions, community organizers—you name it—for their own agendas that often have virtually nothing to do with environmental protection.
A key problem with CEQA is that it allows lawsuits brought by private parties, and a parade of CEQA lawsuits can add many years and millions of dollars in costs to projects. Roughly half of CEQA lawsuits are decided in favor of the plaintiff, which in turn promotes more CEQA-based lawsuits. CEQA serves as a litigant’s tool of last resort, because virtually anyone can easily disguise almost any lawsuit as one that is based on environmental concerns. If it involves building on a plot of land, then the environment is affected, no?
It is interesting to note that relatively few CEQA-type environmental lawsuits are brought in New York, which also has strict state environmental laws. But these types of lawsuits are rarely decided in favor of the plaintiff by New York judges, which in turn discourages parties from bringing these lawsuits in the first place.
Project opposition often emerges after years of planning and community outreach and at times is nothing more than a money grab. Imagine that you are a California developer. You must confront not only outrageously high construction costs but also the uncertainty of how long approval will take and the possibility that it won’t be approved unless you pay off a litany of extortive outside interests. Is it any wonder there is not enough new construction in California? This is certainly not what Governor Reagan or the state legislature imagined would happen when the law was passed in 1970, and this is why CEQA must be reformed.
Several attempts to reform CEQA have failed, blocked not only by environmental groups but also by labor. It is not that labor groups put the environment front and center in their agenda but rather that CEQA gives labor an extremely powerful tool in bargaining with developers.
You know who’s right at home in Los Angeles? Rats, who east scraps and human feces left by the homeless people defecating in the street (just like in San Francisco):
And that, in turn, has brought back the medieval scourge of typhus:
The problem is driving longtime businesses out:
Both California and Los Angeles have become one-party Democratic fiefdoms, where progressive policy preferences have been put into action. Tolerance of homeless drug addicts has meant an increase in homeless drug addicts, just like in Seattle.
Many liberals complain about the unfairness of broken windows policing. But when people elect hard-left Democrats to office they put an end to broken windows policing, and when you stop prosecuting lifestyle crimes, you get homeless drug addicts living on the street, which begets piles of garbage, which begets rats, which begets typhus and other infectious diseases. Sure as clockwork.
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
pic.twitter.com/POpYKm7QJD
A herd of 200 goats roamed the streets of a San Jose neighborhood on Tuesday after breaking through a fence. Full story: https://t.co/nlHZA6livT pic.twitter.com/NEAp36bJsb
#dogs #pets #home pic.twitter.com/76KcvUSQV7
