The current debacle unfolding in Afghanistan is a bipartisan disaster at least two decades in the making made much worse by the feckless incompetence of the Biden Administration.
The Pakistan government has repeatedly denied that it provides any military support to the Taliban in its diplomacy regarding its extensive operations in Afghanistan. Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support. In April and May 2001 Human Rights Watch sources reported that as many as thirty trucks a day were crossing the Pakistan border; sources inside Afghanistan reported that some of these convoys were carrying artillery shells, tank rounds, and rocket-propelled grenades. Such deliveries are in direct violation of U.N. sanctions. Pakistani landmines have been found in Afghanistan; they include both antipersonnel and antivehicle mines. Pakistan’s army and intelligence services, principally the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), contribute to making the Taliban a highly effective military force. While these Pakistani agencies do not direct the policies of the IEA, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers help plan and execute major military operations. In addition, private-sector actors in Pakistan provide financial assistance to the Taliban.
As if Osama Bin Laden being caught in Abbottabad and in regular contact with the ISI and Pakistani military officials just weren’t enough of a hint. In addition to jihadist sympathies by the Muslim government, Pakistans deep state regards Afghanistan as “strategic depth” against India. But for 20 years Washington has looked the other way while Pakistan continued that support and killed our troops because we let them obtain nuclear weapons (another spectacular failure from our craptacular CIA), and confronting them would be “inconvenient.”
The United States could have declared victory and gone home after routing the Taliban in 2001, or after the first Presidential election in 2004, or the first parliamentary election in 2005. But our political elites deluded themselves into thinking that “nation building” could be accomplished in the land known as “The Grave of Empires,” that we could succeed where The British Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union all failed. Thus a great deal of lives and treasure were lost propping up various weak leaders to govern a nation that’s historically ungovernable.
This was a bipartisan disaster, and another black eye for national security agencies that made mistake after mistake in the region, from backing jihadist idiots like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar over Ahmad Shah Massoud, to missing Pakistan’s nuclear program, to being unable to figure out how Pakistan is backing the Taliban despite over 20 years of evidence. One has to wonder if it’s mere incompetence, or if the ISI has one or more moles in the CIA. (It also wouldn’t surprise me if China has been financially backing the Taliban as well.),
Like Vietnam, training native armies to fight for themselves (“Vietnamization”) has been a tremendous failure, and like Vietnam, the best and the brightest among our chattering elites fought the war in a way to make us stay in and lose. The result has been the headlong rout of the Afghan national army because evidently 20 years of time, blood and money isn’t enough to mold non-Jihadist Afghans into an effective fighting force.
Yet all that said, the Biden Administration has made things immeasurably worse.
Instead of a quiet orderly withdrawal behind the scenes, Biden precipitously announced a September 11 withdrawal, presumably as an giant “Fuck You” to everyone with an American flag on their pickup truck.
Never forget: the disastrously rushed and catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal is happening because Joe Biden personally thought it would be a cool symbolic gesture and political coup to pull out on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. An artificial deadline he set for glib PR purposes. pic.twitter.com/nHkrPd8yBl
— Jeff B. tried to do his best, but he could not (@EsotericCD) August 15, 2021
Now the ostensible Afghan army is melting before the Taliban advance and leaving possibly billions of dollars of modern U.S. military equipment behind. And just as in Vietnam, we’ve had to rush to evacuate the U.S. embassy, burn secret documents and leave American allies to the tender mercies of our enemies. It’s almost as though ex-Obama Administration official wanted to see American prestige abjectly humiliated on the world stage as punishment for Americans who dared vote against them.
The fact that we’ve achieved something like successful nation building in Iraq is a topic for another time. But in Iraq and Syria, President Trump announced we were going to be withdrawing U.S. troops, and then proceeded to bomb the snot out of Jihadist enemies and whacked Qassem Suleimani. And whoever was in charge of turning the Kurds into an effective fighting forces succeeded where those training the Afghans abjectly failed.
If there’s any grim consolation in all this is the fact that the Taliban will likely have little better success in ruling Afghanistan’s various tribal factions than America has had. Funding functioning guerrilla armies is relatively easy, but turning Afghanistan into a functional country is probably impossible, and now the Taliban and their masters in Pakistani are stuck with that tar-baby.
Hunter Biden is the gift that keeps digging: “The Russians have videos of me doing crazy f***ing sex!’ Hunter Biden is seen in unearthed footage telling prostitute that Russian drug dealers stole ANOTHER of his laptops.” 1. Hunter has more Russian-related felonies in a single weekend than Donald Trump had in his entire lifetime. 2. I don’t lose pennies the way Hunter loses laptops…
The obvious fact is, however, that this corrupt corporate press and the Jennifer Rubin “conservatives” of the world are the ones who propped Cuomo up as “the gold standard,” to use Joe Biden’s words, even describing themselves as “Cuomosexuals.”
Cuomo’s “radical transparency” made him a “terrific bureaucrat,” they said. Cuomo is “inspiring, uplifting, fascinating,” and truly “magnificent,” they insisted. He’s “honest, direct, brave,” and what “real leadership” looks like. Elites gave him an Emmy and blessed him with softball interviews and comedy-hour airtime, with left-wing activists working behind the scenes to discredit Cuomo’s accusers.
Tuesday’s resignation signals it’s the end of the road for Cuomo — for now. But if the media can sit and twiddle its thumbs — or worse, kiss keister and perform comedy sketches with giant Q-Tips — while thousands of elderly folks die in New York nursing homes and women in the double digits tell of a gropey governor’s disgusting habits, we must ask: How many other Andrew Cuomos is the media covering for?
Covering for elite misconduct is a perpetual problem in the media; it didn’t start with Cuomo. As Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson wrote on Tuesday, the media did the same with Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Theodore McCarrick. Don’t forget Bill Clinton or Roman Polanski, either.
“Everyone knew. No one cared. No one said anything until forced to. Then the feigned shock and outrage, the concern about the treatment of women, the hand-wringing and Me Too-ing, the performances on social media,” Davidson wrote. “As long as sexual harassment, assault, abuse, even the sex trafficking of underage girls stays quiet, then [the media] stay quiet, too.”
You read all this and think: The governor is a letch, a creep, a dirty old man. But also a nut—a high-functioning one, a politically talented one, but a nut. Only a nut would do these things, and only a nut would think he wouldn’t be found out.
No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.
(1) When they say inflation will "spike" or increase this year, and then "come back down next year", what they are saying is the price will skyrocket…. AND THEN the price will remain high.
(14) They didn’t. Consumer prices did not increase.
Trump knew they wouldn’t because essentially those trading partners responded in the exact same way the U.S. did decades ago when the import/export dynamic was reversed. pic.twitter.com/FyID9YCSwN
(16) To retain their position, China and the EU responded to U.S. tariffs by devaluing their currency as an offset to higher export prices. It started with China, because their economy is so dependent on exports to the U.S.
Baltimore professor arrested for dealing math. “Prof. Edward C. Ennels taught math at Baltimore City Community College but appears to have been offering a running lesson on supply side economic theory. Ennels reportedly was selling grades on a sliding scale depending on your worth and your ambition: $150 for a C; $250 for a B; and $500 for an A. He has now earned jail time after pleading to 11 misdemeanor charges, including bribery and misconduct in office.”
Speaking of Baltimore schools failing their students: Some Baltimore high school students test at grade school levels.
Dan Crenshaw slams Jennifer Ruben for a huge mistake:
You’re a liar and an idiot. The number you referenced is TOTAL hospitalized since the beginning of the pandemic. Not newly hospitalized. https://t.co/1I7CRES2qA
That’s a hell of a correction. “When we wrote Nolan Ryan struck out 383 batters in a single game, we meant he struck out that many in a single season…”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden not just dropping, but deflating and throwing away the ball on border security, Andrew Cuomo finally behaves badly enough for the MSM to notice, and some tidbits about hacking attacks.
Biden’s proposed budget wants to cutting funding for border security…by 96%:
His administration has presented Congress with a Department of Homeland Security budget proposal that calls for slashing spending on what it calls “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” by 96%.
In fiscal year 2021, Congress approved $1,513,000,000 in funding for border security assets and infrastructure. Biden is now asking that Congress approve just $54,315,000 for fiscal year 2022. That is a reduction of $1,458,685,000—or 96.4%.
What exactly is Biden cutting?
Biden’s DHS has presented Congress with a 562-page “overview” of its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal for Customs and Border Protection. The explanation for its “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” plan is presented on pages 326 through 350 of this document.
The presentation divides “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” into six categories: Integrated Fixed Towers; Remote Video Surveillance Systems; Mobile Video Surveillance System; MVSS-M2S2 Modular Mobile Surveillance System; Border Security Assets and Infrastructure End Items; and Border Wall System Program.
In the past two fiscal years—as reported in Biden’s proposal—the Border Wall System Program has been the most significant of these. “This investment,” it says, “includes real estate and environmental planning, land acquisition, wall system design, construction, and construction and oversight of a physical barrier system.”
In fiscal year 2020, it received $1,375,000,000. In fiscal year 2021, it received the same amount.
Now, if Biden gets his way, the federal government will not spend one penny in fiscal year 2022 on planning or constructing a “physical barrier system” at the border.
Obviously, Democrats want a massive influx of illegal aliens so they can amnesty them and have them vote for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As illegal aliens are still being allowed to cross Texas’ open border, U.S. Border Patrol has reportedly reassigned all hands from “apprehending” to “processing.” A former federal agent says these massive waves of illegal aliens are one of the “biggest sources” of rising cases of the Chinese coronavirus and advises Texans to contact all their state officials to stop illegal crossings at the border.
Victor Avila, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has previously told Texas Scorecard that federal and state officials aren’t making serious efforts to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border. He said the number of illegal border crossings has recently skyrocketed.
On Tuesday, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith (R) told Texas Scorecard that U.S. Border Patrol informed him they had been given new orders. “They’ve all been reassigned to processing,” Smith said. “None of them are actually going to be enforcing the border.” Avila commented, “That is what I’m hearing exactly.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe described processing as “paperwork, documentation, etc.”
“We’re in a bad spot now,” Smith said. “Texas is on its own.”
Speaking of border security: “Texas landowner fears for kids’ safety amid worsening border crisis, says they can’t play outside anymore.”
“More Illegal Immigrants, Border Agents Testing Positive for COVID-19.” The way Democrats love expanding governemnt in the name of fighting Flu Manchu, you wonder if this is a bug or a feature… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released their report on COVID-19’s origins, pointing to evidence of a lab leak, genetic modification, and a cover-up, making the case the virus accidentally emerged from the Wuhan lab in August or September 2019.” Or pretty much what every conservative blogger has been saying for almost a year and a half…
This week’s Democratic political scandal de jour is an official state probe of New York Governor Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo committed multiple instances of sexual harassment. “These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” said State Attorney General Letitia James. It would be ironic if it was this rather than killing some 15,000 elderly New Yorkers by putting Flu Manchu cases in nursing homes that brought Cuomo down.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once widely celebrated for leading New York out of the coronavirus pandemic’s darkest days, is now embroiled in crisis over how many of the state’s nursing home residents died because of the virus and an apparent effort to hide the true toll.
Beginning last spring, Mr. Cuomo was criticized over a state requirement that forced nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized with Covid-19 once they recovered. Critics said the policy had increased the number of virus-related deaths among nursing home residents.
At the time, Mr. Cuomo and his aides dismissed the outcry as politically motivated, and in July, the State Health Department released a report that found the policy was not responsible for an increase. The report did, however, raise questions in some quarters about how the state was reporting deaths.
In January, New York’s attorney general said the administration had undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand. Mr. Cuomo later acknowledged as much, blaming the lower figure on fears that the Trump administration would use the data as a political weapon.
“Don’t you see? We had to lie to you, because Orange Man Bad!”
The suggestion that the actual death count had been covered up intensified criticism of Mr. Cuomo, including from his allies in state government. The scandal deepened after reports that the governor’s aides had altered the July report to hide the true figure.
In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Cuomo’s aides had gone to far greater lengths than previously known to obscure the death toll, repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months.
First, there was the nursing-home scandal, in which Governor Cuomo deliberately undercounted the number of seniors who died due to his directive placing COVID-positive residents back into understaffed, underequipped nursing homes — and then misled New Yorkers and federal officials about it. Estimates suggest that as many as 15,000 New York seniors due to his actions. Worse yet, while covering up these deaths, he took a cool $5.1 million to write a book touting his COVID leadership and then allegedly used state staff and resources to produce this propaganda piece. One needn’t be a skeptic to link the timing of the deal to the cover-up of the scandal.
And that’s just one of the many fires engulfing the Cuomo administration. At this point, it’s hard to keep up with the litany of abuses perpetrated by Governor Cuomo and his staff. Despite anointing himself as a champion of women, Cuomo has been hit with more than ten accusations of sexual harassment since December. First, he said he’d investigate these allegations himself. When public pressure forced him to establish independent investigations of the charges, he stalled for time and declined to comment while the investigations played out. Now, with a Democratic state attorney general investigating the claims, the governor and his top aides have stonewalled, threatened, and gaslit witnesses and state officials, accusing them of playing political games.
There have also been reports that Cuomo’s friends, family, and donors received preferential access to COVID-19 tests and health information. There’s the matter of a $62 million COVID-related state contract being given to a medical network that donated $230,000 to the Cuomo campaign. There’s the claim by gaming interests that the governor’s team threatened them until they coughed up campaign money. And another investigation is centered around allegations that a top Cuomo aide linked vaccine access to political support of the governor.
In an attempt to silence these stories, the governor has responded with brute force. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is on the record as saying Governor Cuomo hurls invective at officials and the media to make them feel “belittled.” Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim — who lost a close family member to COVID in a New York nursing home — called for Cuomo to provide answers about the nursing-home tragedy. Cuomo personally phoned Kim and threatened to “destroy” him, before holding a press conference in which Kim was referred to as a “habitual liar.” Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi has released text messages showing threats she’s received from the Cuomo administration.
The behavior displayed by Governor Cuomo is appalling, but it’s nothing new. This is who he is, and who he has always been.
More ethical lapses snipped.
The obvious lies, the ham-fisted cover-ups, the corruption — we’ve seen it all time and time again from this governor. When there’s even a hint of an investigation into wrongdoing that implicates him or his cabal, Cuomo cuts his losses and scorches the earth. This is who he is: a mean-spirited bully with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, ruthless in defense of his own venal interests and public image.
The Cuomo administration has run the gamut of travesties and tragedies. Personal viciousness is the governor’s calling card, and criminal behavior his M.O. Even as they’re barraged with one scandal and outrageous revelation after another, he and his inner circle continue to operate as though it’s all business as usual. So why is Cuomo still the governor of New York? Democratic lawmakers — the very same ones who called on him to resign when the sexual-harassment claims first emerged — continue to stand with him and normalize his behavior more than seven months later, partially out of fear and partially out of a complete lack of interest in governing.
Meanwhile, Cuomo seems locked into the Ralph Northam strategy: Assume that the (D) after his name absolves him of all sins against Social Justice and just wait out the storm confident no one will dare hold him accountable for his actions. And don’t forget the media’s nonstop fluffing of Cuomo back in 2020:
The Rolling Stone cover; Politico declaring him a “social media superstar”; Harry Enten of CNN declaring that, “The rise of Cuomo shows that times of tragedy can make very unlikely political heroes”; Carl Bernstein declaring that, “[It’s] real leadership of the kind the president of the United States should have provided to the American people throughout this crisis, but hasn’t”; Jesse McKinley and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo’s handling of the crisis has fostered a nationwide following; Mr. Biden called Mr. Cuomo’s briefings a ‘lesson in leadership,’ and others have described them as communal therapy sessions”; Ben Smith of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis”; the New York Post (!) declaring that New York women were developing crushes on him; and Jen Rubin gushing: “Watching Andrew Cuomo is inspiring, uplifting, fascinating. He weaves details and humor and math and common sense all together. He is magnificent.” Even the Columbia Journalism Review started to worry that the adoring tone of the coverage was overlooking real problems with Cuomo’s decision-making.
And this is all separate from his appearances on his brother’s CNN program. I suspect you remember or can find examples I didn’t list above. Oh, another classic example, from Rebecca Fishbein of Jezebel: “I swooned when he told a reporter he had his own workout routine. I have watched a clip of him and brother Chris Cuomo bickering about their mother at least 20 times. I think I have a crush?”
Democrats in Washington want Andrew Cuomo to resign to allow the Democrat lieutenant governor to run New York state. If a Republican were next in line for the job, Democrats would be falling on grenades for Cuomo. That is, after all, what happened in Virginia when Governor Black Face unleashed his oppo research on the Democrats in the line of succession.
There are no criminal charges against Cuomo.
Cuomo’s problem is not sexual harassment. His problem is Democrats see him as a threat if he chooses to run for president.
Democrats in Washington want no part of playing second fiddle to an outsider. They had their fill of outsiders as presidents with Bill Clinton. Democrat senators want the White House all to themselves. In the 6 presidential elections since Clinton, Democrats have nominated a senator or former senator for president and vice president each time.
National Review wants you to know that Huey Long was a bad role model. Or you could just, you know, watch All the King’s Men, which remains a timeless classic. It won the Oscar in back-to-back years with All About Eve, another timeless classic, both of which showed you what the old studio system could achieve when they were working at the top of their game.
Inside the fight against a ransomware attack against the Texas town of Borger (which is way the hell up north of Amarillo):
In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.
Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.
Expensive Ivy League college film degrees are a scam. “Recent graduates from the Columbia University film program have an average loan debt of six figures against a low-to-mid five-figure income. And given that the master’s program takes four years, Columbia alumni enter the competitive field at around age 30, a detrimentally late start. Graduates soon face the shocking realization that they not only crippled their future but also wasted their money and youth.”
Automotive News published a report on Thursday of this week noting that EVs were 2.3 times more expensive to service than ICE vehicles after three months of ownership. Analytics firm We Predict compiled the data by looking at roughly 19 million vehicles between the 2016 and 2021 model years.
That figure drops to just 1.6 times more expensive after one year, the report noted, as a result of a 77% drop in maintenance costs and a decline in repair costs. The data showed that service techs spend about twice as much time diagnosing problems with EVs as they do with regular gas vehicles. They spend about 1.5 times longer fixing them and the labor rate for repairs was about 1.3 times higher.
Presumably some of this gap will drop as technicians become more familiar with them.
Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.
Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.
Also this: “Orchestras should hire diversity consultants to develop ‘extra-musical evaluation’ criteria for orchestral positions, such as serving as an institutional spokesman.” Diversity consultants always demand hiring more diversity consultants. What are the odds?
The Offspring fire longtime drummer Pete Parada for refusing to get a Flu Manchu vaccine. “Given my personal medical history and the side-effect profile of these jabs, my doctor has advised me not to get a shot at this time.” If the other members are vaccinated, why the hell should they care? Stupider still: Parada already caught the virus last year, so he probably has more immunity than the vaccine provides…
Col. Dave Severance, who helped take Iwo Jima (and commanded the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, the one in the famous photograph), dead at 102.
Where does this rank among disturbing YouTube videos? I give it a three.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It’s seems less that I “finish” these than I abandon them…
Flu Manchu deaths hit zero in Sweden. Seems like “protect the elderly and go for herd immunity” was a much better strategy than “lock everything down, throw the economy into a steep recession, throw millions out of work, practice ineffective masking theater and let antifa/#BlackLivesMatter burn everything down so the Democratic Media Complex can drag Biden’s ambulatory corpse across the finish line in November.” Who’d of thunk it?
Did Republicans surrender on pork-laden infrastructure bill? Sure seems that way. You can brag about how small the shit sandwich you’re eating is compared to the much larger one they wanted to shove down your throat, but it’s still a shit sandwich. Write your senators to express opposition to any infrastructure bill.
The brother of one of President Joe Biden’s closest advisors lobbied members of the National Security Council for General Motors in the second quarter, according to a new disclosure report reviewed by CNBC.
The report shows that Jeff Ricchetti, brother of White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, engaged with the NSC for the car-making giant on “issues related to China.” The company paid Ricchetti $60,000 last quarter for his lobbying services.
Gavin Newsom just might lose the California recall. How bad do you have to suck to lose a recall election in a one-party state? The answer is “Gavin Newsom bad.”
By an overwhelming 9-1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer. Though one-third complain that Detroit police use force when it isn’t necessary – and Black men report high rates of racial profiling – those surveyed reject by 3-1 the slogan of some progressives to “defund the police.”
“It’s scary sitting in the house, and when you go outside to the gas station or the store, it’s possible someone will be shooting right next to you,” said Charlita Bell, 41, a lifelong Detroit resident who was among those called in the poll. Last year, when her car was hit by stray bullets during a shopping trip, she hurried home rather than wait for the police for fear the shooter might return.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm“: “Why Are Soros And Gates Buying UK COVID Testing Company?”
In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State Department official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.
90% of the illegal aliens let in by the Biden Administration don’t report to ICE as required by law. This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Bridgeport Councilman Michael DeFilippo has been indicted by a federal grand jury on multiple election fraud charges.
DeFilippo, 35, a Democrat who represents Bridgeport’s 133rd District and has been a city councilman since 2018, is accused of conspiring to “interfere with and obstruct Bridgeport citizens’ right to vote by falsifying his tenants’ voter registration applications and absentee ballots applications, then stealing tenants’ absentee ballots and forging their signatures in order to fraudulently vote for him,” according to Acting U.S. Attorney Leonard C. Boyle.
Billionaire financier George Soros directed $1 million to a left-wing group that seeks to cut funding to police departments around the country, according to federal records.
Soros sent the funds to the Color of Change PAC on May 14, the Washington Free Beacon reported on July 22, citing Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. The contribution was the largest political contribution made by Soros during the 2021 election cycle.
Color of Change, which describes itself as a racial justice group, has frequently called for the defunding of police departments across the United States, including leading an online campaign to slash funding following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
MyPillow employee beheaded in Shakopee, Minnesota. Suspect is in custody. “They say Alexis Saborit is also facing previous charges of property damage, arson, and obstruction. The presiding judge, Richard C. Perkins, allegedly ignored claims of mental illness brought forward to the court and [Saborit] was somehow released back into the public.”
Greetings, and welcome to the return of the Friday LinkSwarm on Thursday! My Mac is working, my house is clean, and I have a newly painted master bathroom with a new floor and a new toilet.
Some links are new, some from a week or two ago.
Minneapolis: “Black Lives Matter activists block city council member’s car until she signs statement that charges against rioters will be dropped.”
“Peter Daszak – whose ‘EcoHealth Alliance’ funneled U.S. taxpayer cash to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – defended SARS gain-of-function experiments that potentially rendered the virus ‘capable of directly infecting humans’ in a Nature article unearthed from November 2015.”
Know who else was funding Peter Daszak’s research? Google.
The unearthed financial ties between EcoHealth Alliance and Google follow months of big tech censorship of stories and individuals in support of the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.
The Google-backed EcoHealth Alliance played a critical role in the cover-up of COVID-19’s origins through its president, Peter Daszak.
Daszak served on the wildly compromised World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 investigation team. He championed the efforts to “debunk” the lab origin theory of the virus, despite mounting support for the claim…
The more we learn about Peter Daszak, one of the main villains of the COVID epidemic, the worse it gets.
Daszak is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization mostly funded by the US government. EcoHealth passed some of that money on to the lab in Wuhan, China.
It was Daszak who organized the letter in The Lancet from February 2020 dismissing as “misinformation” claims that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab. The letter created the illusion of consensus, which internet companies proceeded to enforce through censorship, and the media reinforced by constantly interviewing Daszak himself.
There might be journalistic value in hearing from the Chernobyl plant director about all those clouds floating over Ukraine. But if he suggests the rash of mysterious sores and cancers were due to a faulty shipment of microwaves recently arrived in Pripyat, you’d probably think he was engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning.”
Apparently not the World Health Organization, which invited Daszak to join their microwave hunt in Wuhan.
In the last two days, Daszak has been removed from The Lancet’s own UN-backed commission investigating COVID’s origins, though whether he removed himself or was fired remains unclear.
Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on Tuesday night in an attack on his home, the nation’s prime minister announced.
First lady Martine Moïse was hospitalized for gunshot wounds she received in the attack. Unidentified gunmen broke into the president’s residence on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince during the night and opened fire on the couple.
“A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” Prime Minister Claude Joseph said in a statement. “The country’s security situation is under the control of the Haitian police and the armed forces of Haiti. . . . Democracy and the republic will win.”
Moïse has ruled by fiat for the past two years after Haiti failed to hold elections and the parliament dissolved. Meanwhile, a new prime minister, Dr. Ariel Henry, was scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday.
Opposition figures said Moïse should have stepped down on February 7 of this year to complete a five-year term, and after Moïse refused to leave office thousands of Haitians protested in the streets. The government responded by arresting 23 people, including a senior judge and police official, whom Moïse accused of conspiring to assassinate him.
He might have been right! But it’s not like Moise was some sort of Jeffersonian paragon:
Haiti has experienced growing instability during the administration of President Jovenel Moïse, withunrest, high rates of inflation, and resurgent gang violence. The government’s failure to hold elections in October 2019 resulted in the terms of most of the Haitian legislature expiringon January 13, 2020, without officials elected to succeed them. Moïse is now ruling by decree. The judiciary is conducting ongoing investigations into Moïse’s possible involvement in various corrupt activities, which the president denies. Haitian Senate and Superior Court of Auditors investigations allege embezzlement and fraud by current and former Haitian officials managing $2 billion in loans from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe discounted oil program.
Speaking of getting whacked: “John McAfee Found Dead In Prison Cell After US Extradition Approved.” Ahem:
Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: "We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself". I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.$WHACKD available only on https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq:) pic.twitter.com/rJ0Vi2Hpjj
It took 18 months of steady abuse by rioters and their overlords at city hall for Portland cops to say “no mas” and tap out. As one retired Portland police detective said, “If anyone did to a horse or a dog what has been done to PPB cops for 18 months, that person would have amassed hundreds of counts of felony animal abuse, but it’s perfectly OK to do it to cops, wholesale, and with an army of anarchist pals.”
The police officers in the Portland riot squad, officially called the “rapid response team (RRT),” still work for the agency, but will no longer volunteer themselves for the duty that resulted in “nearly all” members being injured with “broken bones, torn ligaments, and cartilage, traumatic brain injuries, hearing damage, damaged eyesight, lacerations and burns,” in the words of the resignation letter sent to the chief by the squad’s leader.
Expect more of this.
Snip.
The chaos started at the top by assuming rioters were victims and cops were criminals.
In their letter, RRT leader Lieutenant Jacob Clark said rules on the books for dealing with protests and riots didn’t change, but interpretation of those rules changed often and were in conflict with interpretations by council members, the city attorney, and others. Worse, the changes in the interpretations were applied retroactively and officers, staying within the limits of the law, were suddenly written up under a new interpretation of the rules.
Snip.
You can trace the walkout by Portland cops directly to efforts that began with George Soros.
Singer John Legend and BLM co-founder Shaun King followed Soros’s lead and poured money into the campaigns of district attorney candidates who believe cops are the problem, not the solution to keeping order. In fact, keeping order isn’t really a thing for these activists.
In both cities, Leftists poured money behind DA candidates who promised to free criminals and do what they could to stick it to cops and police departments. Portland got Mike Schmidt and LA got carpet bagger George Gascon. These DA’s, aided by unhinged city council members – Jo Ann Hardesty in Portland, Kshama Sawant in Seattle, and their allies in city bureaus – have created less safe cities.
Seattle’s city attorney and King County prosecutor’s lack of prosecutions against actual criminals – because woke ideology – has turned the Emerald City, like Portland and San Francisco before it, into a homeless encampment with no rules, free-flowing drugs, and free rent.
Portland Police union head Daryl Turner is interviewed following the resignation of Portland’s entire riot-response trained police team. pic.twitter.com/dD53nkAGlJ
Nine months after the declaration of a national emergency due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. births fell by 8% in a month.
The December drop marked an acceleration in declines in the second part of the year. For the full year, the number of babies born in the country fell 4% to about 3.6 million, the largest decline since 1973.
Michael “Creepy Porn Lawyer” Avenatti sentenced to two and a half years in prison over Nike extortion case. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane over the endless MSM fawning over Avenatti:
May we always remember and cherish the time Ana Navarro compared Michael Avenatti to the Holy Spirit pic.twitter.com/y63JoX4leq
s I previously reported, earlier this year, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) went off the deep end of all things “woke” and politically correct.
Despite warnings from alumni, faculty, and organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars, UT quietly adopted a “Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity” that is genuinely chilling. Among other questionable practices, this plan institutionalizes the Critical Race Theory version of “equity” (equality of results, as opposed to equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and meritocracy) as the paramount driver of decisions on hiring, promotion, tenure, leadership positions, and even teaching awards and endowed chairs at UT. It also creates a bureaucracy of diversity commissars in each college to enforce the new orthodoxy and mandates re-education of virtually all faculty in the new catechism.
UT insiders tell me this plan was the brainchild and pet project of UT Vice Provost Edmund Gordon, a pronounced CRT advocate. UT’s adoption of this extraordinarily ill-considered plan was the last straw for me (and, based on responses I have received to my article, apparently many other UT alumni as well). UT President Jay Hartzell’s response to this criticism has been to ignore it, which seems to be his preferred modus operandi. President Hartzell’s calculus appears to be that, with the Texas legislature now safely adjourned from its biennial session. UT can continue on its merry way, unmolested by the unenlightened peasantry.
He may be in for a rude awakening.
Russia unveils world’s largest submarine. I’m sure it will be well-engineered and quite capable (Soviet subs were), but I’m betting those “Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedoes” are almost pure vaporware.
“Hedge Fund That Bet Against GameStop Shuts Down As Backers Pull Money.” “White Square Capital, run by a former Paulson trader, has announced that it will return capital to shareholders. Some of the FT’s sources said the decision was likely due to heavy losses stemming from the firm’s GME short.”
A heart I transplanted recently on the Organ Care System. Amazing technology to benefit our patients on the waiting list. Recipient is doing great! pic.twitter.com/8Zr2MxI1ZX
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Hunter Biden channels Hunter S. Thompson (and not in a good way), Slow Joe stumbles around the G7, a top Chinese intelligence official defects, and Gillette inflicts toxic unprofitability on Proctor & Gamble.
It’s beyond any reasonable dispute that the slack-jawed old pervert staggering through this punchline presidency is getting more senile by the day. All the while, his cackling understudy is biding her time everywhere but at the border, getting huffy at being questioned, and generally failing at a job historically assigned to morons as a role where they could do little damage. The only people who dig their hep jive – yeah, go on and believe the 79 percent approval numbers among people now paying $5 a gallon for unleaded – are the talking tubers of cable news. But even the tater thots of Brian Stelter, who is a potato, can’t dispel the growing sense of unease that watching these incompetent weirdos brings.
This epoch is the interregnum, a caretaker presidency presided over by a human asterisk who cares only about his post-lid bowl of mush and being wrapped in a shawl, set in front of the tee-vee, and allowed to watch his stories. The only thing moving less expeditiously than his bowels is his ridiculous legislative agenda, and all the prunes in the world aren’t going to help clear out that particular constipation, not with Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema refusing to commit ritual political suicide on the altar of coastal leftist dreams.
The progs were so close, just a vote or two away, to the unrestrained power they thought they could flex and thereby secure their control forever. But * is no Franklin Roosevelt. Nor is he Teddy Roosevelt. Nor Eleanor Roosevelt, though he could be if he really, really wanted to be. He’s not even Melvin Roosevelt. Instead, Grandpa Badfinger is a rickety joke, bumping elbows with his younger fellow-incompetents at the G7, wandering about mindlessly chasing moths until his ridiculous wife, with her ridiculous “Dr.”, wrangles him back into the hapless pack. You look at this sorry set of leaders of the formerly-free world and the vibe you get is “exhaustion.” There’s no energy, no drive, no hope. Boris Johnson, formerly a man, explained to a bored UK that that “nations coming out of the pandemic need to ‘build back better’ in a ‘greener,’ ‘more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.’” Hack clichés are their solution, but these relics have nothing else. They are weak and stupid and they represent a spent elite that cares about nothing except just a little more time holding fast to their uncertain sinecures.
You can feel the tension beneath the surface, the sense that something is coming, a great changing. Oh, the elite at Davos fantasizes about a “Great Reset,” but they mean it literally – they want to reset the world back to how it was set when they were young and had energy and people hadn’t yet noticed that their venality and incompetence was matched only by their insanely inflated sense of their own abilities. But why would they be any better at pulling that off than they are at anything else? When the shattering disruption comes, they are the ones who will be disrupted, they and the whole post-War establishment our betters thought would last a thousand years and that won’t make it past 80. The elite aren’t, not even close, and we all know it now and we all sense that their Jenga tower o’ power can’t keep from toppling over even as they pull more and more blocks out of it, shredding norms (just this once – it’s always “just this once”) to keep their grip.
But what comes next? Something big, but the question is “What?” The only thing for certain is that the people running things now won’t like it. It’s been said here many times that Donald Trump was not our last chance, but theirs, our final fair warning to our failed elite from back when, at some level, we still thought the ruling caste acknowledged that we normals had at least some theoretical right to participate in our own government. But such illusions, to the extent they had endured, got shattered last November. We heard for four years how the 2016 election had been hacked, stolen, whatever the hyperbole du jour was, and the minute they could proclaim His Asteriskness president questioning elections became treason. But we saw the cheating, and we saw the judicial and executive sleight-of-hand that changed the rules in ways a real Supreme Court would have objected to, and we saw the informal rigging of the election through the lies and covering-up of the professional, licensed, and registered janitors of narrative journalism.
Now it’s all about holding onto power no matter what the cost. The corrupt feds toss trespassers into solitary while letting Antifa/BLM scumbags walk. Their tech buddies desperately try to play whack-a-mole with the unapproved ideas that keep popping up. The garbage media celebrates noted onanists while it ignores the Snortunate Son’s latest entry on his CV of shame – he’s added racial epithets to his remarkable and remarkably unremarked-upon record of tapping the tills of Slavic oligarchs, tapping rando strippers, and re-imagining the classic 80s novel of coke-fueled excess as Bright Lights, Big Guy (who gets his 10%).
It can’t last. Maybe if these puffy clowns were pros they could keep their boots on our throats forever, but they don’t own boots – too cis – and their Guccis and Birkenstocks just don’t have the same heft. They are weak, and stupid, and they are not even cunning enough to ensure that the cops and military, who would be expected to provide their final protective fire when accountability comes to overrun them, are prepared to do their dirty work.
Our venal ruling class: “President Biden and first lady Jill Biden kicked out the British media — to get the pub garden table they wanted.”
Hunter is such an epic scumbag that he was banned from the Chateau Marmont (AKA “the hotel John Belushi ODed in”) for “drug use.” That’s like being banned from Studio 54 for doing too much cocaine…
Speaking of Hunter, congratulations to old friend Diana Fleischman for appearing on Gutfeld to talk about Hunter and other things. “Given the nepotism he’s been given, this is the least harmful way he could be using it…he’s making art at home and blowing through straws rather than sucking through them like he usually does.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Mike the Musicologist.)
Did China’s top counterintelligence officer just defect?
Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.
Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
When FBI agents asked for permission to rip hundreds of safe deposit boxes from the walls of a Beverly Hills business and haul them away, U.S. Magistrate Steve Kim set some strict limits on the raid.
The business, U.S. Private Vaults, had been charged in a sealed indictment with conspiring to sell drugs and launder money. Its customers had not.
So the FBI could seize the boxes themselves, Kim decided, but had to return what was inside to the owners.
“This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes,” Kim’s March 17 seizure warrant declared.
Yet the FBI is now trying to confiscate $86 million in cash and millions of dollars more in jewelry and other valuables that agents found in 369 of the boxes.
Prosecutors claim the forfeiture is justified because the unnamed box holders were engaged in criminal activity. They have disclosed no evidence to support the allegation.
I’m so old when that I can remember when the FBI were regarded as incorruptible knights of justice. Those days are long gone…
Nine out of ten Republican congressman who voted for the last iteration of the Trump impeachment farce have drawn primary challengers.
Congressional members Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) all voted to impeach Trump, while the majority of Republicans voted against the impeachment, believing it was unconstitutional and unwarranted.
Harris has been crashing and burning in regards to the border for weeks. It’s so bad at this point that even the mainstream media are going after her with the kind of veracity you’d never expect. After all, this is Kamala Harris we are talking about, and critical media coverage isn’t supposed to happen. There’s no way a piece like that gets written by CNN without input from the White House.
But here’s the thing – all Joe Biden has to do to save Harris is send her to the border. So why hasn’t he?
Instead, Harris has been left to twist in the wind, thrown into multiple major network interviews without an ability to answer basic inquiries about why she hasn’t gone to personally survey the illegal immigration crisis. There are no actual risks with her going to the border. It’s not like the media are going to suddenly turn on the Biden administration and stop covering up what’s going on. The only real logical conclusion left is that Harris’s disastrous tour wasn’t disastrous by sheer chance.
Don’t get me wrong, Harris is an absolutely awful politician on her own merits. Every embarrassing flub and hysterical cackle of the last week serves as a reminder of why her own presidential campaign was such a failure. Yet, the Biden administration knows she’s incapable of being a likable, competent figure. Instead of helping her and protecting her, they are hanging the border crisis around her neck and throwing her into the deep end with no floaties on. Further, they are negating to do the one thing that could settle a lot of the questions causing Harris so much consternation – just sending her to the border and getting it over with.
Meanwhile, Jill Biden is chilling at the G7, rubbing shoulders with royalty and cosplaying as co-president to the glowing reviews of the media. It’s all just too perfect to be a coincidence at this point. I’m convinced – Harris is the fall guy, and she’s being pushed over the cliff by the very administration she serves.
“The Rapid Response Team, a unit within the Portland police department, voted unanimously to resign on Wednesday during a meeting with the police union. This follows the criminal indictment of an officer for assault stemming from a riot in August 2020.” (Hat tip: Andy Ngo.)
“The secret behind Amazon’s domination in cloud computing. Amazon Web Services is snapping up former government officials who can help them gain access to lucrative federal contracts.” Not the only reason. Google was slow out of the gate and Microsoft’s Azure offering started out as a nightmare to figure out how to price and use. (“Which of these four types of inscrutable, poorly described storage do you want to outfit to your cloud?”)
Australia’s Sky News slams the American media for their tongue bathes of Biden:
MUST WATCH ! Aussies got it right!! It's very refreshing to hear real journalists reporting accurately. Thank you Aussie cousins and @SkyNewspic.twitter.com/MjQZeD3CcN
Joe Rogan ripped CNN’s Brian Stelter on Thursday’s installment of The Joe Rogan Experience. Speaking with Kyle Kulinski, Rogan referenced an unspecified segment on CNN about the popularity of many YouTubers and podcasters, who in some cases receive more viewers than large cable networks such as CNN.
“This is because the market has spoken and your show’s fucking terrible,” said Rogan, addressing the ratings battles. “Brian Stelter’s show keeps slipping and slipping and slipping in the ratings. Same with Don Lemon’s. It’s the same thing. Everybody knows they’re not real. They’re not real humans.”
The New York Times folds, removes defamatory statement about The Babylon Bee:
Big update here. The @nytimes has responded to our demand letter by removing defamatory statements about us from their article. Here's their email to our counsel notifying us of the correction. https://t.co/lv0eYo6NzKpic.twitter.com/OLi5KzMzej
Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome strikes again. “The journalist who broke the story about the controversial 2016 tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was found dead Saturday morning, according to police. The body of 45-year-old Christopher Sign, a news anchor for ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, was discovered by Hoover police and fire personnel at around 8 a.m.” His death is “being investigated as a suicide.” Of course it is.
Federal Judge Terry Doughty blocked the Biden Administration’s suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal land. “The omission of any rational explanation in cancelling the lease sales, and in enacting the Pause, results in this Court ruling that Plaintiff States also have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of this claim.” Evidently “because we hate reliable energy” and “because we can’t channel graft to Democratic Party cronies” aren’t considered “rational” reasons…
Based on the just completed legislative session, this fiscal index ranks Texas State Representatives from most to least fiscally responsible. There’s one for State Senators as well.
Supreme Court rejects Texas-led lawsuit to invalidate Obamacare, citing a lack of standing. Much as I want to see ObamaCare stripped from the books entirely, when Clarence Thomas is part of the majority, that suggests there were indeed issues with the filing. Said Thomas: “The plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the harm they suffered is traceable to unlawful conduct. Although this Court has erred twice before in cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”
“Gillette’s ‘toxic masculinity’ ad haunts P&G as shaving giant takes $8B writedown.” Get woke, go broke. Everyone involved in that debacle should have been fired.
Happy 50th anniversary to Southwest Airlines, who flew their first flight out of Love Field 50 years ago today.
Epic Broadway disaster Spider-Man: Turn off The Dark opened ten years ago. “It opened, after the longest preview period in Broadway history, on June 14, 2011, and went on to lose nearly $100 million.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”
Joe Manchin, controlling the border, and Soros-backed DA’s doing their best to bring back the high crime rates of the 1970s top this Friday’s LinkSwarm:
Seems like this should be a bigger story than it is: Mexico just had it’s midterm elections. But that’s not the big part: “97 politicians had been assassinated. Along with almost a thousand being attacked in some way, shape, or form. Just in this election cycle!”
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says that he will refuse to vote for the Democratic Voter Fraud Enablement Act of 2021. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act.”
Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.
Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”
“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.
Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.
“Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”
Manchin is thwarting The Will of The Party, so naturally Jemele Hill is calling him a racist.
Remember how Democrats were sure Hispanics would usher them into permanent majority status? Not in Texas:
Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.
Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.
The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.
“We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”
Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.
But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.
Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.
Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.
“Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”
It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.
Speaking of illegal aliens, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that those who entered the country illegally and were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons are not allowed to apply for a green card. Also note the Justice Elana Kagan-penned decision makes no mention whatsoever of the “undocumented.” She refers to them, using the standard statutory language, as “aliens.”
The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.
“In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.
“We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”
The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.
While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.
“You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.
“There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”
Speaking of Gascón: “Double murderer approved for parole at third hearing; prosecutors barred from attending under Gascón’s reform.” “Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.” It appears that there’s nothing Soros-backed DAs enjoy more than putting violent, dangerous felons back on the street.
It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.
In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”
What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.
The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.
“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.
The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:
Pick up the trash
Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
Empower police to responsibly do their job
The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.
You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…
“DeSantis Signs Bills Combatting Chinese Communist Party’s Influence In US.””The first bill is intended to safeguard public institutions from ‘undue foreign influence,’ DeSantis said at a press conference, noting that the bill will prohibit ‘agreements between public entities and the Communist Party of China or Cuba or any of these malignant forces.’ The second bill criminalizes theft and trafficking trade secrets under Florida state law.” If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, right now DeSantis would be the early favorite for the GOP nomination.
More words from the man in question:
The reasons are clear ― Florida is successful because we are OPEN and let Floridians make decisions that are best for them. Florida’s budget has $10 billion in reserve because Florida chose Freedom over Faucism. pic.twitter.com/tEzMRH6U6k
Own any of the estimated 40 million guns in America with a pistol brace? Congratulations! The Biden Administration wants to make you a felon.
“Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.
[Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”
How’s that socialized medicine working out for you, UK? “Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England.”
Old and busted: Young families buying homes. The new hotness: Pension funds buying homes. “The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there.”
The Kung Flu lockdowns were a war on the working class:
They are lying to you b/c they think you're too stupid to notice what is happening right in front of you pic.twitter.com/PoeTw1tXaE
Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?
At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.
It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.
On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.
Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.
Speaking of CNN, they also brought back Jeffrey “lubin his” Toobin. Proving yet again that the the Democratic Media Complex will alwaqys refuse to apply its rules to their own.
The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)
At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.
Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Not-so-much news: Gun control bill fails. News: In California.
For all the disappointments of the Texas 87th legislature’s regular session, a number of pro Second Amendment bills were passed.
Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman resigns, said to be interested in running for Attorney General against incumbent Ken Paxton and George P. Bush.
This is probably the wrong Eva to use as clip art here.
French France’s Emmanuel Macron Urges G-7 To Sell Gold Reserves To Fund Bailout For Africa. I imagine that the other G-7 members responses to this proposal ranged from “Are you high?” to “Die in a fire.” (Plus an “Is Matlock on yet?” from Biden.)
Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker has his truck broken into while he was in San Antonio. The Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime stances just keep reaping their rewards…
“How to Protect Your Shopping Trolley From Improvised Explosives.” However, I feel compelled to point out a technical error: The Trophy active protection system is not yet available on the British Challenger tank, making it deeply unlikely that the system would be made available for a Tesco shopping cart.
Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.
Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.
Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:
A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.
Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.
Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.
Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.
It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.
You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.
You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.
Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.
Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.
As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.
(Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.
Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.
And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.
Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.
For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.
But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.
And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.
Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.
This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.
Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.
These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.
Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
“Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
“Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.
Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
“China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
The IDF has successfully completed Operation Guardian of the Walls. This is what the 12-day-long operation looked like in numbers: pic.twitter.com/AM2WoqPx4K
If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.
We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.
Snip.
For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.
Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.
During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,
Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.
Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?
That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.
Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.
Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.
The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.
The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.
Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.
The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.
The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.
Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?
As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.
The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.
To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.
Snip.
Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).
But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.
Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.
Snip.
Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.
For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.
The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.
And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.
This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.
The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).
While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.
They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.
On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.
The usual history snipped.
The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.
Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.
Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.
The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.
Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:
The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.
Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”
This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.
The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.
Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
“AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
“19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
Only recently did I learn the word Chinesium, a much needed neologism describing the crappy, subpar metal that cut-rate Chinese manufacturers build their products out of.
So what happens when you build skyscrapers out of Chinesium? This happens:
Engineers were inspecting a skyscraper in southern China on Wednesday, a day after it triggered widespread panic when it suddenly began shaking, as people took to social media to ask if shoddy construction may have been to blame.
Shoddy construction? In China?
The 1,000-foot SEG Plaza in the southern city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong began swaying in the early afternoon on Tuesday, prompting people inside and those on the streets below to flee.
Emergency management officials quickly ruled out an earthquake as the cause of the wobble in the tech hub’s Futian district.
Officials said no further movement had been detected and experts found “no safety abnormalities in the main structure and surrounding environment of the building.”
The building had stopped shaking by the time people were evacuated, state media reported, and the plaza remained sealed off.
Building collapses are not rare in China, where lax construction standards and breakneck urbanization over recent decades has led to buildings being thrown up in haste.
You don’t say. It’s cut corners all the way down.
Poor construction standards are often linked to corruption among local officials, most recently after the collapse of a quarantine hotel in southern China last year.
As opposed to that corruption among national officials reporters aren’t supposed to mention.
Completed in 2000, the tower is home to a major electronics market as well as various offices in the central business district of Shenzhen, a sprawling metropolis of more than 13 million people.
The building is named after the semiconductor and electronics manufacturer Shenzhen Electronics Group, whose offices are based in the complex.
It is the 18th tallest tower in Shenzhen, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat skyscraper database.
I’d never heard of Shenzhen Electronics Group, AKA Shenzhen Fine Made Electronics Group Company Ltd., which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There are lots of fabless semiconductor manufacturers in various vertical markets I’ve never heard of. Bloomberg says they have 899 employees. So why do they have a website that would have looked ancient even in 2005?
Hopefully their semiconductors are better constructed than the building they work in.
Chinese authorities last year banned the construction of skyscrapers taller than 500 meters (1,640 feet), adding to height restrictions already enforced in some other cities such as Beijing.
Sounds like Chinesium may be a widespread problem in China…
(@ginacarano) 
(@StudiosShelly) 
(@VeBo1991) 
(@ItchyNutts) 