Joe Rogan did a 2 hour and 36 minute interview with Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw:
They touch on topics ranging from Crenshaw’s Saturday Night Live incident to overseas operations against jihadists to marijuana legalization.
I haven’t watched the full interview yet, but I intend to.
Tags:Afghanistan, Dan Crenshaw, Jihad, Joe Rogan, Middle East, Military, Saturday Night Live, video, Yemen
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, video | No Comments »
Man, it’s been a week. The clown car and NRA pieces have been blowing up my stats, and I’ve got a bunch of other things happening. I tried to watch the Group of Death debate last night, but the stream kept cutting out, so I’ll probably save the reactions for Monday’s Clown Car Update. This LinkSwarm features Dan Crenshaw, Google, and Dan Crenshaw grilling Google.
Professor Posner is correct in pointing to the rivalrous nature of political power and market power. What is less well understood is that markets won that fight in a knockout a decade or more ago. The new reality is that markets — not corporations, but markets — are more powerful than states, and much of the angry, angsty, mob-inciting politics of the Left and the Right in the past decade is simply the emotional noise and churn generated as societies and governments readjust their affairs to accommodate themselves to that new reality. Bill Clinton spent much of his presidency bitching about the bond market, which was his shorthand for the ways in which global markets (especially financial markets) limited politicians’ effective scope of action. He was, uncharacteristically for a man of such modest imagination, ahead of his time.
The power of capital flows is a reality that has made itself known bit by bit to states both liberal and autocratic, from the members of the European Union to the caudillos in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no regard for life or property, brutal and vicious — and constantly getting slapped around by volatility in the energy market. Mohammed bin Salman can command almost anything — except the commodity markets that rule his world.
Much of the hysteria on display in the Democratic presidential primary is American progressivism’s shrieking protest of the new facts of life. Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren are intelligent enough to understand what’s happened: That just at the moment they were primed to take power, power was taken away from them.
Stop laughing. This isn’t funny. Louis CK is now an unperson. You can no longer applaud him or enjoy his
comedyhate speech. If you insist on supporting an enemy of the people, there will be consequences. You will be punished. Your life will be upended. If you care about your future, you will keep your excitement and happiness to yourself when presented with the verboten.“Well, if you don’t like Louis CK, don’t listen to him. You can’t tell other people what they should and shouldn’t laugh at.” We hear that a lot from fascists, don’t we? They think hate speech is free speech, and they don’t think they need to do what they’re told. But they’ll learn. They will be corrected.
Today you’re cheering for an unapproved comedian. Tomorrow you’re marching with tiki torches and tweeting dank memes. The day after that, you’re annexing the Sudetenland. These people must be controlled before the fascism spreads.
Silent movies did some pretty crazy things with trains pic.twitter.com/iLJRj5UMc3
— Silent Movie GIFs (@silentmoviegifs) June 26, 2019
Tags:Andrew "Dice" Clay, Apple Computer, BBC, Ben Shapiro, Border Controls, China, CNEX, Colorado, Communism, Cuba, Dan Crenshaw, David French, Democrats, Dennis Prager, Donald Norcross, Donald Trump, Facebook, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Google, Greg Abbott, Guns, Herbert Meyer, Huawei, Jim Himes, Jordan B. Peterson, Kevin D. Williamson, LinkSwarm, Louis C.K., Nancy Pelosi, Obituary, Patrick Byrne, Project Veritas, Qatar, Reddit, Roseanne Barr, Semiconductors, Taxes, Texas, The Young Ones, unions, YouTube
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Texas, unions | No Comments »
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Border control, Social Justice Warriors, Iran and Geto Boys all feature in today’s roundup…
Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.
Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal.
These actions on the part of Iran follow a series of sanctions from the US Treasury Department, which on Wednesday (June 12) imposed sanctions on a financial conduit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, and last week (June 7) sanctioned Iran’s largest petrochemical holding group.
US officials are also considering sanctions against the Iranian financial body that was established as a trade channel with Europe – a move that would underscore US intolerance to any international workarounds to the Iran sanctions campaign.
You don’t need to read the tea leaves closely to know the administration’s plan for its “maximum pressure” campaign. But one thing the tea leaves don’t show are plans for war. And the reason is simple: the sanctions are working to help achieve President Donald Trump’s priority goal, which is to undermine Iran’s influence and support for terrorism in the Middle East.
The Treasury’s latest steps follow a State Department press briefing, during which its spokesperson, Morgan Ortagus, listed the negative effects Iran sanctions were having on that country’s terrorist proxies and on its other actions in the region. She pointed to the Lebanese group Hezbollah’s “pleas for public donations via billboards, posters and collection cans” and stressed that “Iran is withdrawing Hezbollah fighters from Syria and cutting or canceling their salaries.” This is a big deal.
She also pointed to Hamas’s austerity plan in Gaza and to the IRGC’s budget cuts for Iraq Shia militia groups. She highlighted fuel shortages in Syria due to the cut in Iranian oil supply and noted the IRGC cyber command “is short on cash.”
Others have also picked up on this emerging trend: that Iran sanctions are starving Iran’s proxies of critical funds. The Washington Post reported that US sanctions against Iran have “curtailed” Iran’s finances to Hezbollah, which “has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending.” A fighter with an Iranian-backed militia in Syria told The New York Times that he lost a third of his salary and other benefits, lamenting, “Iran doesn’t have enough money to give us.”
When he withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or what is often called the Iran nuclear deal, last year, President Trump made his top goal clear. Before even addressing Iran’s nuclear capabilities or speaking about working toward a new agreement, he emphasised Iran’s support for terrorism and plans for regional influence as among his key concerns and reasons for withdrawing from the deal. Working to undermine that behavior has been the administration’s top priority in its Iran policy.
Sanctions are particularly taking a bite out of Hezbollah. One wonders, yet again, what the Obama Administration thought it was achieving with the insane and costly Iran deal…
The shock presidential election of 2016 might have prompted partisans on both sides to ask whether the vocabulary on which they relied had become a lifeless hindrance. On the Left, the Clinton political machine suffocated every dissenting voice within the Democratic Party, which denied its members the opportunity to rethink the identity politics death-grip that was strangling them. Then as now, Sanders, more smitten by Marx than the halfway-Nietzscheanism of identity politics, invited his fellow Democrats to step back from the brink. Alas, itself guilty of class privilege, the donor class of the Democratic Party living in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and in the wealthy enclaves surrounding New York City needed a fig leaf to cover its class sins—and, so did not, and will not, allow Sanders to win the Democratic nomination and thereby reveal their unrighteousness.
The Democratic Party will again double down on the rhetoric of identity politics, lose the 2020 presidential election, and conclude—as it did with Russiagate—that some demonic force temporarily bent the arc of history in the wrong direction. The demonic force responsible this next time around? “Hate speech” from the lips of those in the center and on the Right who refuse to rehearse the Red Letter political liturgy identity politics tirelessly repeats—or bow before the false gods that identity politics worships.
Partisans on the Right were given a gift: President Trump. He came into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party understood him not. Many did not want to receive this gift. Having read their Aristotle and Burke, and wishing to remain gentlemen, they withdrew from the political fray—preferring the decorous tyranny of candidate Clinton, the very paragon of identity politics, to the incivility of candidate Trump who, alone among Republican candidates, had the temerity to combat it. “Our tastes, not our ideas, define us”—that is what the 2016 election apparently taught the GOP.
Now forming a Conservative Book Club of sorts, these gentlemen ponder great ideas, entice donors to fund their conferences and think tanks, and all the while enjoin us to believe the vocabulary of the pre-2016 Republican Party continues to be adequate to the troubles we face. It is not.
Today, whether at conservative conferences or in conservative think tanks, the listener even moderately attentive to the conversation will hear of the perils of progressivism and of cultural Marxism, of the need to defend family values, of the importance of being pro-life, of the importance of free markets, and of the threat of multiculturalism. These terms—indeed the constellation these terms form—emerged during the Reagan Presidency, more than three decades ago. If the 2016 Presidential election tells us anything, it is that this verbiage has hardened into nearly lifeless political rhetoric, sustained on life support through institutional buy-in and the assurances of political philosophers sympathetic to conservatism who tirelessly promote the link between the veritable ideas they study and the political vocabulary that has been in place for decades is timeless.
Times have changed, however. Philosophy must gently persuade; that is its privilege and its weakness. Philosophers are concerned with eternal truth. Partisans, by contrast, are concerned with timely rhetoric, opinion, and persuasion. They must engage in comparatively immediate combat. So long as conservatives inattentively conflate philosophizing and partisanship, they will continue to produce partisan vocabularies that masquerade as eternal truth—and partisans unable to respond in a timely manner to shifting times. To win, partisans must know when the weapons of their enemies have changed. Wars—and this is a crucial point to understand—are not won using weapons from earlier engagements. Only armchair soldiers and Conservative Book Club members have the luxury of replaying those battles.
Neither liberals nor conservatives understand the weapon of identity politics, and the immense destruction it can cause. Identity politics does not simply parse different kinds of people. Identity politics is concerned with the relationship of transgression and innocence between different, purportedly monovalent, kinds of people. Identity politics is not just about who we are, it is about a moral stain or purity that defines who we are.
The language of stain and purity, of transgression and innocence, is Christian language. Other religions are concerned with these categories as well, but our long familiarity with Christianity in America means that the invocation of these categories by the practitioners of identity politics derives from Christianity, and from Protestantism in particular. Surveys may indicate that America has lost or is losing its religion; the fever of identity politics that now sweeps the nation suggests these surveys are looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions. America has not lost its religion. America has relocated its religion to the realm of politics.
Identity politics transforms politics. It turns politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. Ponder for a moment, Christianity. Without the sacrifice of the innocent Lamb of God, there would be no Christianity. Christ, the scapegoat, renders the impure pure—by taking upon Himself “the sins of the world.” By the purging of the scapegoat, those for whom He is the sacrificial offering purify themselves. Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities. He is the transgressor; all others—women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQs—have their sins covered over by the scapegoat, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.
The theological perversity of replacing the Divine Scapegoat of Christianity with the all-too-mortal white heterosexual male scapegoat does not imply that he is innocent. Rather, in identity politics, the white heterosexual male becomes more than who he really is—a member of a scapegoated group who takes away the sins of the world, rather than a mortal, like everyone else, involved in transgression, and searching for redemption. The mystery of transgression and innocence, however, cannot be resolved at the level of groups, because in reality not one of them is univocally pure or stained. But identity politics stands or falls on the claim that groups are such unities of transgressors or innocents. Therein lies its weakness, at which all the armament allied against it must be aimed.
This puppy knows the secret of life 💜 pic.twitter.com/a2dssRO0dy
— The Dodo (@dodo) June 13, 2019
Tags:#GamerGate, #NeverTrump, 2020 Presidential Race, 9/11 Attacks, Alabama, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Anne Frank, bureaucrats, California, Charles Murray, Congressional Medal of Honor, Crime, Dan Crenshaw, David Bellavia, David Icke, Democrats, Department of Agriculture, dogs, Edinburg, Foreign Policy, George Soros, Geto Boys, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hidalgo County, Hispanics, Holocaust, Houston, immigration, Iran, Iraq, Irieno Mujihca, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Lucas Silverio, Military, Netflix, New York Times, Operation Iraqi Freedom, pedophilia, Peter Bright, Project Veritas, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, Richard Molina, Syria, Ted Cruz, Texas, Twitter, University of Alabama, Venezuela
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Good economic news, Democrats behaving badly, and dispatches from the #NeverTrump wars.
These findings, examining another year of data and including the increase to $13/hr, are unequivocal: the policy is an unmitigated disaster. The main findings:
– The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by *3.5 million hours per quarter*. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.
– The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.” On average, low-wage workers *lost* $125 per month. The minimum wage has always been a lousy income transfer program, but at this level you’d come out ahead just setting a hundred million dollars a year on fire.
We live, thundered Ahmari, in perilous times, with a progressive vanguard on the rise, dedicated to maximizing individual liberties at the expense of communal and traditional values.
Even worse, today’s social justice warriors, Ahmari continued, see any dissent from their dogmas as an inherent assault. “They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human,” Ahmari wrote, “lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.” This means that no real discussion is possible—the only thing a true conservative can do is, in Ahmari’s pithy phrase, “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
Needless to say, big battles like this one have little use for niceties. “Progressives,” Ahmari went on, “understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values.” Which is not to say they should be jettisoned; instead, Ahmari concluded, “we should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral.”
Almost immediately, French delivered his riposte. Ahmari’s call to arms, he wrote in his response, betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both our national moment and our national character. “America,” French wrote, “will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.”
Which means that civility is not a secondary value but the main event, the measure of most, if not all, things. Bret Stephens agreed: In his column in The New York Times, he called Ahmari—who was born Muslim in Tehran and had found his path to Catholicism—“an ardent convert” and a “would-be theocrat” who, inflamed with dreams of the divine will, had failed to understand that it was precisely the becalmed civilities of “value-neutral liberalism” that has made his brave journey from Tehran to the New York Post possible.
What to make of this argument? Stephens and others clearly imply that behind Ahmari’s call to arms lurked a shadowy figure, draped in Catholic robes, who would force Americans to recite the catechism while banning abortions and forcing gays back into the closet. Scary, if true; ugly bigotry, if not.
You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.
The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”
To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.
Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump.
There are problems with Ahmari’s view, not least that outside the realm of sex, almost nothing about today’s left is dedicated to “maximizing individual liberties” as opposed to enforcing in-group collectivism in the form of victimhood identity politics as a means of keeping a vast array of groups tied to the Democratic Party. But Leibovitz is dead-right in casting #NeverTrump’s vainglorious “Orange Man Bad” puffery as deeply unserious for advancing a conservative agenda.
The Dreamer bill passed last night by House Democrats is far more expansive than many Americans realize, AND fails to address the source of the problem: hundred of thousands of migrants crossing our border illegally.
Listen to my explanation here: pic.twitter.com/WhDGz3lABu
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) June 5, 2019
Brian D’Arcy, business manager of the powerhouse International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Los Angeles, says that Garcetti’s move is just the latest on the environmental front that’s pushing his members toward the GOP — and into the arms of Trump, who effectively wooed blue-collar Rust Belt workers on his way to a 2016 presidential win.
“I’m getting hate mail and blowback from our workers, saying the Democratic Party is doing nothing for us,’’ D’Arcy says, sitting surrounded by his union members in a hall in Los Angeles as they prepared to protest on the streets. Asked if members might gravitate toward Trump, D’Arcy sighed and said, “It’s already happening.”
The last truly professional Mac desktop was the Westmere-powered beast from 2012. The 2013 Mac Pro, as much as I liked mine, was really a prosumer device. Those actual professional users rightly bristled at its lack of expandability, and Apple’s hopes for its all-new design were quickly crushed. The self-inflicted wound was so deep that two years ago Apple did something I can’t recall ever happening before: It issued a mea culpa to its pro user base, and promised an all-new Mac Pro years in advance, which they also promised would be a truly professional, modular, expandable machine. The company went so far as to bring some pro customers on as employees to help with the new Pro’s design.
And, boy, did they deliver. As tech analyst Ben Thompson wrote on Tuesday, “It was fun seeing what Apple came up with in its attempt to build the most powerful Mac ever, in the same way it is fun to read about supercars.”
Full pricing won’t be revealed until this Autumn, but you can bet that it’s going to priced like the supercar of workstations. I’ve seen estimates bandied about the tech-o-sphere that the starting price of $5,999 will balloon up to $25,000 or even $40,000 for a fully specced-out rig. “Would you like to buy a smaller Mercedes sedan, or a computer?” Before you gasp again, that top-end machine will be pretty much a Pixar animation studio in a box.
In a Slashdot thread on the new MacPros, several commenters concluded that specing out a similarly loaded Windows or Linux workstation (1.5TB of RAM, 28-core/56-thread Xeon CPU, four high end GPUs, etc.) is going to cost you as much as Apple’s solution.
Baltimore’s ongoing ransomware dilemma is in many ways a product of more than a decade of neglect of the city’s information technology infrastructure. Since 2012, four Baltimore City chief information officers have been fired or have resigned; two left while under investigation.
CIO Christopher Tonjes, who left in June of 2014, was forced to resign in the face of a Maryland attorney general’s investigation into claims his office had paid contractors for work they didn’t do. In 2017, CIO Jerome Mullen was fired in the midst of an investigation into alleged misconduct, including “inappropriate contact” with women in the mayor’s Office of Information Technology. He denied the accusations and cited “historic issues” with the city’s IT that had led to problems with the city’s 911 system (which was ceded back to the Police and Fire departments’ control in 2015) and a host of other IT missteps.
In fact, the IT department languished following the departure of Mayor Martin O’Malley, who became Maryland’s governor in 2007. O’ Malley had instituted CitiStat, a data dashboard for monitoring things like police and city worker overtime pay, employee absenteeism, and (as it expanded) a host of service delivery and infrastructure issues. The system was immortalized in fictional form in the television series The Wire, and it relied on aggregated reports from city agencies, usually presented in PowerPoint format to the mayor in regular meetings. Little about the infrastructure used to create the data has changed in the last dozen years. An audit of the Baltimore Police Department last year found that precincts were still using IBM’s (Lotus) Notes databases developed by a consultant during the O’Malley administration to track data, and no standard reporting format was used. The versions of Notes used by the police department reached end-of-support in 2015.
(Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
This REALLY needs to go to SCOTUS. A clear #4A violation is saying cops can enter your home WITHOUT A WARRANT to search for drugs?? GMAFB with this nonsense. https://t.co/8FfpH0sG2p
— Liberty 🍺 (@LibertyJen) June 6, 2019
Tags:#NeverTrump, 2018 Election, Apple Computer, Baltimore, Benjamin Netanyahu, Border Controls, border fence, Brian D’Arcy, civil asset forfeiture, D-Day, Dan Crenshaw, data security, David French, Democrats, environmentalism, Eric Garcetti, EU, Florida Man, Foreign Policy, Fourth Amendment, hate crime hoax, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Israel, Justice Democrats, Liel Leibovitz, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Mexico, minimum wage, Seattle, Social Justice Warriors, Sohrab Ahmari, Stephen Green, Sudan, tanks, Texas, Trump Derangement Syndrome, UK, unemployment, unions, Vice News, waste, World War II
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Important traffic notice for Austin residents: Half of I-35 is going to be closed between 290 and Rundberg starting at 9 PM tonight and lasting through 5 AM Monday, June 3, while they take down the St. John’s bridge and route southbound traffic down two northbound lanes, squeezing traffic in both directions. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s going to screw up traffic everywhere between Georgetown and Slaughter Lane. Avoid if at all possible…
Virtually everybody agrees that, in the normal case, a prosecutor should never go beyond publicly disclosing that there is insufficient evidence to indict. No responsible prosecutor should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict. Supporters of Mueller will argue that this is not an ordinary case, that he is not an ordinary prosecutor and that President Trump is not an ordinary subject of an investigation. They are wrong. The rules should not be any different.
Remember that federal investigations by prosecutors, including special counsels, are by their very nature one-sided. They hear only evidence of guilt and not exculpatory evidence. Their witnesses are not subject to the adversarial process. There is no cross examination. The evidence is taken in secret behind the closed doors of a grand jury. For that very reason, prosecutors can only conclude whether there is sufficient evidence to commence a prosecution. They are not in a position to decide whether the subject of the investigation is guilty or is innocent of any crimes.
That determination of guilt or innocence requires a full adversarial trial with a zealous defense attorney, vigorous cross examination, exclusionary rules of evidence and other due process safeguards. Such safeguards were not present in this investigation, and so the suggestion by Mueller that Trump might well be guilty deserves no credence. His statement, so inconsistent with his long history, will be used to partisan advantage by Democrats, especially all those radicals who are seeking impeachment.
My take on this Mueller press conference:
Nothing changed. Still no Russian collusion and no conclusion on obstruction.
But the President’s adversaries will continue to move the goalposts and push impeachment, ignoring what the American people really want: good governance.
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 30, 2019
Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.
Update: For revealing those links, Twitter has banned author Eoin Lenihan.
When my grandparents arrived in Israel, together with 850,000 other Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa, they understood three things.
First, they understood that they were being forced to leave their Arab homelands. My Iraqi grandparents, for example, had very clear memories of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom that left more than 180 Jews dead at the hands of their neighbors. They finally fled their native country in 1951, pushed out by an Iraqi government determined to rid itself of all of its Jews.
When they arrived in Israel, my grandparents did not see themselves as Palestinian Jews—they had never before lived in Mandatory Palestine. They saw themselves as Jews of Iraqi descent returning to the ancient homeland they and their ancestors had dreamed of and prayed of for thousands of years, the land from which they were once expelled and to which they were overjoyed to return. And they also understood themselves to be distinct from their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters: They were all Jews, but my grandparents were proud of their Mizrahi heritage just as the 200,000 Israelis of Ethiopian descent are proud of theirs.
What Is It Like To Battle The U.S. Military In Armed Conflict? pic.twitter.com/gIDyHJJWs2
— Ex Tenebris Lux (@Extenebris_Lux) May 28, 2019
They’re hordes of freaks and geeks, socially promoted like the retards in Common Core to grease the retirement skids of a pack of careerist Courtney Massengales not fit nor capable to pour piss out of their own boots even with the instructions stamped on the heel.
Else we wouldn’t have Rangerettes who can’t climb a short wall, Navy officers who can’t conn a ship without hitting everything afloat, as they dredge up parts from museum pieces to keep their current aircraft flying, Air Force generals pimping for a white elephant plane that cannot fly, missile officers cheating on their proficiency tests, Marine recruits in combat arms who can’t throw a grenade without killing themselves, or “combat leaders” who couldn’t pass a ruck march, West Point “leaders” who condone open communism from faculty and students, and promote a pack of Affirmative Action cadets who couldn’t pass a PRT or meet basic weight and appearance standards, while flashing Black Power signs in uniform. We wouldn’t be doing gender reassignment surgeries instead of physical therapy for combat wounded, we wouldn’t be spending more money on gender sensitivity counseling than on marksmanship training, and we wouldn’t be wavering the insane and drug-addicted into the military in record numbers, just to appease a pack of blue- and pink-haired SJWs.
The US military is broken.
Hugely so. Nearly hopelessly so.
Nostalgia for a time long past when it was otherwise won’t paper over the reality that right now we’re as weak as kittens, with a military that’s going to have its own ass handed to it on a platter, and body bags filled by the gross, because it’s so hamstrung with PC that it cannot accomplish the most fundamental missions assigned to it, eight days out of seven.
Overstated? Probably. Almost certainly. And don’t underestimate “freaks and geeks.” Or both viewpoints are true: Our armed forces aren’t what they’re shaped up to be, but are still miles beyond other country’s armed forces. Or it could be a case of inter-service differences: The army, honed by two decades at the point of the knife in the global war on terror, is the best in the world but the Navy and Air Force have problems. Or anywhere in-between those extremes. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
I think it's legitimate to prefer one culture to another
For example, I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation.
Will this will be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them – on someone else's behalf, naturally https://t.co/4WbZDFjs3o
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 30, 2019
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
*Running joke. Source here.
Tags:abortion, Ackerman McQueen, Alan Dershowitz, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, American Indians, antifa, Austin, Austin Police Department, Border Controls, Canada, China, CNN, Dan Crenshaw, Democrats, Donald Trump, Gulf Cartel, Guns, Hidalgo County, highways, Huawei, Iraq, Israel, James Cole, Jews, Jihad, John Cleese, Kirkuk, LinkSwarm, Little Sisters of the Poor, Media Watch, Mexico, Military, Mississippi, MSNBC, Nancy Pelosi, NRA, Obama Scandals, Obituary, Republicans, Rice University, Rio Grande Valley, Samir Jain, Ted Cruz, Texas, Thad Cochran, trade, USMCA
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Texas legislative news, foreign elections, and a surprising amount on analog synthesizers…
Even before [EU Parliamentary] election results are known on Sunday, therefore, there’s a growing sense that the Brexit party may be a permanent factor in British politics. Opinion polls on how people would vote in a general election show that the party would do less well than in European elections but still run about level with the Tories and Labour. There are deep divisions on policy apart from Brexit that have allowed critics to argue that the party would fall apart once its main goal had been achieved. But the divisions don’t seem deeper than those of other parties, and power or its prospect is itself a unifying social glue. Farage’s rallies around the country are hugely successful — packed, good-humored, more diverse socially and politically than those of the other parties, full of confidence and optimism, and notably without rancor. As with Trump’s election rallies, people seem to find them enjoyable as well as genuinely serious. A kind of Brexit party spirit already exists with many different types of people happy to be together on the bandwagon. It seems less class-bound than any of the existing parties.
And if the Brexit party wins one-third or more of Britain’s votes this week from a standing start, it will change British politics. Such a result would have the effect of a second referendum victory for Leave. It simply would not be possible for Parliament and the mainstream parties to push through a Brexit that doesn’t get the effective consent of Farage and his party. If such a thing is attempted, it will be seen to be anti-democratic and will have to be abandoned quite quickly. It would force the EU to confront the fact that there is little chance of getting a deal like May’s withdrawal deal accepted, and that even if one were to make it into the statute book, it could never be effectively implemented. In those circumstances the EU might simply throw up its collective hands and declare that the U.K. has left without a deal.
The third effect of a Farage success in the European elections would be to realign political parties and, in particular, to place the Conservative party in mortal peril. Voting for a political party is a matter of both loyalty and habit. For lifelong Tories, the idea of voting for another party is anathema. Most people who think about it never actually get around to doing it. But the Tories have certainly given their traditional supporters and those new supporters who voted for them in order to achieve Brexit good reason to leave them on this occasion. Many will do so this week. And as with adultery, betraying your party for another is much easier the second time around.
….during the 2016 Presidential election. The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2019
….Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.” @PressSec
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2019
Must watch & share:
This is one of the most dishonest bills we have passed out of the House.
A purposefully mislabeled bill on “pre-existing conditions” meant to mislead Americans and limit choice and innovation in healthcare.
Don’t believe the spin, here’s my explanation: pic.twitter.com/kQMzfIkfXN
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) May 10, 2019
WOW – This “Guy” Gets It!
This “Guy” Is Nigel Evans – A Conservative British Politician Who Stands Up & Let’s Everyone Know WHY The People Voted For Brexit & Donald Trump!!
I Applaud This “Guy” – Do You??
🔥Please Retweet
— Dustie (@DustieDahl) May 17, 2019
But based on what we know, what’s even more revealing about China’s choices are the U.S.-made products that haven’t made any tariff list. They include civilian aircraft and their engines and parts, which had a 2018 export total of $17.73 billion. They include semiconductors and their components, which last year had China shipments that totaled several billion additional dollars. They include the equipment needed to manufacture and inspect semiconductors and their parts, which racked up at least $850 million in 2018 exports to China; devices for conducting chemical and physical analyses (with $912 million in China exports last year); laser equipment ($304 million), motor vehicles, auto parts, and plastics resins and polymers (which each produced billions in exports to China); and billions of dollars’ worth of other products that the Chinese either can’t (yet) make or can’t make in the amounts that they need—or that consist of goods preferred by Chinese consumers over their Made in China counterparts.
As I’ve said before, semiconductor equipment is an area where it’s all but impossible for the Chinese to do without American technology.
I recently talked with an enterprise security auditor who often finds overseas staff names are just “persona identities” that real humans cycle through using. When someone there quits, someone else inherits their VPN login credentials. Hides staff turnover from customer network.
— CornOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) May 19, 2019
Tags:2016 Presidential Race, 87th Texas Legislature, abortion, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antifa, Austin, Bharatiya Janata Party, Brexit, Brexit Party, Candace Owens, China, Conservatives, corrupt scumbags, corruption, Dan Crenshaw, data security, Democrats, Elections, Elijah Cummings, EU, Facebook, feminists, Florida, Florida Man, Foreign Policy, fraud, Harvey Weinstein, Huawei, Ilhan Omar, impeachment, India, Instagram, Iran, Jihad, John Bel Edwards, Judicial Watch, Laredo, LinkSwarm, Louisiana, Mississippi river, Morganza Spillway, music, Nancy Pelosi, Narendra Modi, Nigel Evans, Nigel Farage, Rahul Gandhi, Scandularity, Semiconductors, Social Justice Warriors, Steve Adler, Texas, Theresa May, UK
Posted in Austin, Communism, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 2 Comments »
Happy Good Friday! Yesterday was a very good Thursday for President Donald Trump, and a very bad one for the media outlets that lied about the Russian Collusion fantasy for two years.
For approximately 3 million people, nothing in the Mueller report could exonerate President Trump of “Russian collusion,” obstruction of justice, and various other high crimes and misdemeanors of which they are certain he is guilty. For those 3 million people (a number reflecting the combined average weekday primetime audience of CNN and MSNBC) Trump’s guilt is an indisputable fact, his presidency an ongoing crime against humanity, his 2016 election a fraud. In a nation of 325 million people, of course, 3 million is less than a single percentage point. However, that hard-core audience of obsessive Trump-haters includes every Democrat in Washington and the vast majority of our nation’s journalists, university faculty, and other such members of the intelligentsia. Therefore, their deranged idée fixehas enormous influence, calling into existence a sort of anti-Trump industry that manufactures a constant output of rage-inducing propaganda. The CNN/MSNBC bubble is the cable-TV equivalent of a cult compound, where dissent from their political religion is forbidden. For the past two years, the fanatics have been told every night by Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, et al. that the final destruction of Trump was at hand — “the walls are closing in!” — and the left-wing faithful awaited their deliverance from the evil man in the White House.
“Orange Man Bad” — that’s a shorthand label for the anti-Trump mentality, coined by an anonymous contributor on a Reddit forum in 2017, mocking the robotic mindlessness of the president’s enemies. No fact that might contradict their Trump-hating beliefs has any validity to them, because Orange Man Bad. By obverse principle, anything done to harm Trump or his supporters, including libel and violent assault, is considered legitimate, because Orange Man Bad. Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel.
What else can explain what happened Thursday, after Mueller finally delivered his 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The delivery of the special counsel’s report was preceded by a press conference at which Attorney General William Barr summarized the result of the investigation. Barr “made clear that, after two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and endless media speculation, the ‘Russian collusion’ story was, as some of us had noted all along, a story about nothing,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. “No member of Trump’s campaign — and in fact, no American anywhere — colluded with the Russians to influence the campaign.” Contrary to what MSNBC and CNN viewers had been told night after night for month after month, Trump is not a Kremlin stooge and yet: “Orange Man Bad!”
Proven wrong on the matter of “Russian collusion,” the anti-Trump media sifted through the Mueller report in search of evidence of other wrongdoing by the president, who of course must be guilty of something. The Twitter feeds of media types filled up with excerpts of the report proving… what? Well, Trump was very angry about being falsely accused of “collusion,” and he didn’t enjoy watching his former associates being investigated and prosecuted as part of what he considered a partisan witch hunt, inspired in large measure by the phony Steele dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. But we already knew that. Trump’s animus toward the Mueller investigation was certainly no secret, but being angry is not a crime and, however angry he was, nothing Trump did amounted to obstruction of justice. Because there was no “collusion,” and thus no crime to conceal, it would be hard to figure out how or why justice could be obstructed in such a case. The innocent don’t fear justice, and if Trump was innocent of “collusion” (as Mueller concluded) why should he engage in obstruction? Never mind basic logic, cried the Trump-haters, because Orange Man Bad!
“Their minds are made up, and mere facts cannot penetrate their ironclad certainty about Trump’s maliciousness.”
The American political and media elites that spent the first two years of the Trump administration promoting the Russian collusion hoax have some explaining to do. And not merely explaining: They owe the president an apology.
As Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday before releasing the Mueller report, “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”
And yet nearly the entire complex of elite media was actively complicit in promoting the biggest political conspiracy theory in American history: that Hillary Clinton lost the election because Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to — well, that was always a moving target — but to somehow deprive Mrs. Clinton of victory. What we now know definitively is that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and a team of very accomplished, mostly Clinton-supporting, prosecutors were unable to find evidence of a conspiracy that had been taken as an article of faith by Trump haters.
Journalists don’t like being called “fake news,” but too many of them uncritically accepted the Trump-Russia narrative, probably because of their strong distaste for Mr. Trump himself. But that lack of objectivity represents a major professional failure, and it’s Exhibit A in why Mr. Trump’s taunt resonates with so many Americans. Gallup polling shows that for 69 percent of Americans, trust in the media has fallen over the last decade. Among Republicans, it’s 94 percent; for independents, it’s 75 percent and for moderates it’s 66. Only among self-identified liberals and progressives does a majority continue to trust the media. They like what they hear.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Looks like NYT and WaPo got their false narratives aligned this morning. pic.twitter.com/KBPLMtDjv7
— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) April 19, 2019
I'm going to need a list of everything the DA owns that is worth less than $750
for reasons https://t.co/W2Bi6Y4NFl
— David Hines (@hradzka) April 16, 2019
.WHY do people do people leave a poorly run, overtaxed state & then vote for liberals in Texas?
Let Texas be Texas!
Welcome to Texas.
Don't vote for what you fled!
Vote Republican this November. pic.twitter.com/O1lDuzOG5I— Deplorable Linda G. {⭐} (@KAG4All) April 16, 2019
Tags:Apple Computer, Arabella Advisors, Camille Paglia, CNN, Communism, Crime, Cuba, Dallas, Dan Crenshaw, Democrats, drugs, Eric Kessler, Foreign Policy, Greg Abbott, Guns, Ilhan Omar, Intel, John Creuzot, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, MS-13, New IRA, New York City, New York Times, Nicolas Maduro, Northern Ireland, NXIVM Sex Cult, Obituary, Project Veritas, public housing, Qualcomm, Robert Mueller, Social Justice Warriors, Steny Hoyer, Texas, unions, Venezuela, Washington Post, Welfare State
Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Texas, unions, Welfare State | No Comments »
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! At least those of you not among the millions dead from the shutdown, assuming you already survived the tax cut and the end of Net Neutrality…
In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer
Since Trump took office, the United States has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.
It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.
In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century—”energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo”—no longer exists.
Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the United States is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.
The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.
In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That’s the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.
The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.
Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.
North Korea and the United States did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.
Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.
The United States—and increasingly most of the world—is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions, and mercantilism of the Chinese government.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
House Democrats are up and running, and their first bill is instructive. Couched as an anti-corruption and good-government measure, it is really an attempt to silence or obstruct political opponents.
A central part of H.R. 1 is “campaign-finance reform,” no surprise given the progressive fixation with money in politics, which oddly turns to mist when Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending. The House bill requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues.
The goal is to identify donors who don’t genuflect to progressive views, then bully or harass them to stop giving. Recall how the Mozilla CEO was driven out after he donated to California’s referendum opposing same-sex marriage.
(Hat tip: MQ Sullivan on Twitter.)
How long would it take for police to arrest me if they found 24 syringes, meth, cocaine, other ILLEGAL drugs and paraphernalia AND a dead body in my home?
How long b4 prominent politicians like @HillaryClinton to distance themselves?
Why wasn’t Ed Buck charged the 1st time? pic.twitter.com/rTGd48jH1C
— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) January 11, 2019
Jair Bolsonaro is “far right” and the media means that as a pejorative.
Turns out he favors the private sector and wants to get rid of government owned industry.
He favors expansive gun rights as a way to combat crime and let people protect themselves. This has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
He favors conservative social policy including a rollback of the LGBT agenda in Brazil. Again, this has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
Most damning in the eyes of many in western media, he favors abandoning restrictions on private property that could threaten Amazonian forest growth, i.e. he’s bad for climate change.
The media has focused a lot on Bolsonaro talking favorably about Brazil’s American backed military dictatorship that ruthlessly exterminated communists and other dissident groups from the 1960’s into the early 1980’s. They suggest Bolsonaro might bring it back.
So far, the only thing Bolsonaro seems to be doing is keeping his campaign promises to fight corruption, roll back progressive social policies his socialist predecessor supported, and expand gun rights. But the American commentariat can do nothing but see everything through the lens of Trump and if you hate Trump, you must hate Bolsonaro apparently.
HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO CUT STRAWBERRY SLICES FOR MY CEREAL BENNY??
But seriously, we are presented with a K-Bar knife at SEAL training graduation, engraved with the name of a fallen SEAL. Never Forget. https://t.co/ZEfI4M0dw3
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) January 11, 2019
Sure, Beto may have the social media upper hand now. But just wait until Joe Biden livestreams his nipple-piercing on Twitch.
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) January 10, 2019
Tags:Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Border Controls, border fence, Boris Yeltsin, Brazil, Cairo, China, Chuck Schumer, Cold War, Communism, Crime, Dan Crenshaw, David Brock, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, Ed Burke, Eqypt, Guns, Instagram, Israel, Jair Bolsonaro, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Matters, Media Watch, Mexico, murder, Nancy Pelosi, Palestinians, Soviet Union, Star Wars, Tamaulipas, Texas, Washington Post, Will Hurd
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | No Comments »
Texas Republican Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw appeared on Face the Nation, and calmly, rationally made the case that the ideas that President Donald Trump is “attacking Democracy” and “attacking the press” is utter nonsense.
Tags:Dan Crenshaw, Donald Trump, Face the Nation, Media Watch, Republicans, video
Posted in Media Watch, Republicans, video | No Comments »
Following Saturday Night Live player Pete Davidson foolishly goofing on the eye Navy SEAL Lt. Com. Dan Crenshaw lost to an IED on his third deployment in Afghanistan, now Republican Congressman-elect Crenshaw came on SNL to get him back.
A lot of pundits were predicting this year’s elections would make one Texas candidate a star, they just got who it was wrong. (Previous posts about Crenshaw can be found here.)
And thanks to the universe for providing easy Veterans Day content for lazy bloggers…
Tags:2nd Congressional District, Dan Crenshaw, Media Watch, Navy SEALs, Saturday Night Live, Texas, TV, Veterans Day, video
Posted in Media Watch, Republicans, Texas, video | No Comments »
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