Posts Tagged ‘Artur Pawlowski’

LinkSwarm for October 15, 2021

Friday, October 15th, 2021

Biden is bumbling, borders are crumbling, bankers are plotting, and Art is out. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green finds out the real reason behind the supply chain SNAFUs: California Democrats changing the rules because they weren’t getting enough kickbacks and graft from an efficiently functioning transportation system.

    The immediate problem, the one in Los Angeles, has been caused by the state’s vindictively regulatory state government.

    We’ll get to the trucker shortage in just a moment, but California also faces a shortage of trucks for them to drive.

    Twitter user Jerry Oakley reminds us that “Carriers domiciled in California with trucks older than 2011 model, or using engines manufactured before 2010, will need to meet the Board’s new Truck and Bus Regulation beginning in 2020.” Otherwise, “Their vehicles will be blocked from registration with the state’s DMV,” according to California law.

    Snip.

    As a result, trucks aren’t being purchased to replace the ones being regulated out of business.

    But even if there were plenty of trucks in California, there wouldn’t be enough truckers to drive them — and it isn’t because the truckers are too old.

    “Traditionally the ports have been served by Owner Operators,” Oakley says, who are non-union. But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”

    Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

    In fact, those work rules helped create the crisis conditions.

    The exact language of AB-5 was copied and pasted into Presidentish Joe Biden’s $5 trillion (Or: Five Million Million Dollar) “Build Back Better” bill currently stalled in the Senate.

    It’s one thing for Californians to screw themselves over, but AB-5 is hurting the entire country’s economy — and Washington Democrats want to take AB-5 nationwide.

  • Social Justice doesn’t want to win, it wants to destroy you:

    If you’re unaware, [David] Shor was canceled for accurately summarizing the contents of an academic paper. Shor made a point that he felt was important for the messaging of the Democrats. At the time the country was exploding in riots aligned with BlackLivesMatter and driven by anger over the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. Shor linked to a paper that argued that riots have bad political consequences for Democrats. This would not seem to be particularly inflammatory; people indiscriminately burning and smashing shit has little obvious utility for the marginalized or anyone else. But Shor lost his job for tweeting that paper and agreeing with its thesis. Similarly, the Intercept’s Lee Fang was absolutely mobbed for the crime of recording an interview with a young Black man who was critical of the riots and the protest movement from which they sprang. He almost lost his job, as well.

    (Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other.)

    Not that they had rebutted a particularly coherent pro-riot argument. There was little in the way of defense of riots in 2020 at all, really. Many attempted to invoke Martin Luther King in that regard, which is hilarious and bizarre concerning a man who among many other critiques of riots said that they “are not revolutionary but reactionary because they invite defeat; they offer an emotional catharsis, but they must be followed by a sense of futility,” and that close to the end of his life. (In their defense, almost no one who invokes MLK has actually read him.) But what Shor and Fang were guilty of was not of breaking with some intellectual mandate within liberalism but with speaking out of turn, with criticizing the wrong people. The difference between Shor and Fang’s criticism of the pro-riot side and the behavior of those who rose against them is that Shor and Fang never tried to destroy anyone, didn’t tweet at anyone’s boss in an attempt to get them fired, didn’t have the inclination or the power to punish those who dared to disagree with them. But those who targeted them were operating in a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please.

    Snip.

    The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them. Are most of these institutions false friends? Of course. But that, too, is not much of a defense.

    This tendency to be promiscuous in enthralling elites and powerful institutions should be a clue to the fact that, despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.

    Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces. (The former two groups have some overlap, but it’s not a perfect circle.) There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared.

  • Do global elites have incentives for pushing “Green Energy”/”Climate Change” nonsense? $150 trillion of them.

    Now, in case someone is still confused, none of these institutions, and not a single of the erudite officials running them, give a rat’s ass about the climate, about climate change risks, or about the fate of future generations of Americans (and certainly not about the rising water level sweeping away their massive waterfront mansions): if they did, total US debt and underfunded liabilities wouldn’t be just shy of $160 trillion.

    So what is going on, and why is it that virtually every topic these days has to do with climate change, “net zero”, green energy and ESG?

    The reason – as one would correctly suspect – is money. Some $150 trillion of it.

    Snip.

    How much would this green utopia cost, because if the “net zero”, “ESG”, “green” narrative is pushed so hard 24/7, you know it will cost a lot.

    Turns out it does. A lot, lot.

    Responding rhetorically to the key question, “how much will it cost?”, BofA cuts to the case and writes $150 trillion over 30 years – some $5 trillion in annual investments – amounting to twice current global GDP!

    At this point the report gets good because since it has to be taken seriously, it has to also be at least superficially objective. And here, the details behind the numbers, do we finally learn why the net zero lobby is so intent on pushing this green utopia – simple answer: because it provides an endless stream of taxpayer and debt-funded “investments” which in turn need a just as constant degree of debt monetization by central banks.

    Consider this: the covid pandemic has so far led to roughly $30 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus across the developed world. And yet, not even two years later, the effect of this $30 trillion is wearing off, yet despite the Biden’s admin to keep the Covid Crisis at bay, threatening to lock down society at a moment’s notice with the help of the complicit press, the population has made it clear that it will no longer comply with what is clear tyranny of the minority.

    And so, the establishment needs a new perpetual source (and use) of funding, a crisis of sorts, but one wrapped in a virtuous, noble facade. This is where the crusade against climate change comes in.

    Imagine a central banker, destroying your bank account through hyperinflation…forever.
    

  • The Biden Administration has discarded $100 million worth of border wall segments and is paying workers $5 million a day not to build the wall.
  • They’ve also halted worksite immigration enforcement.
  • Controlling (barely) all three branches of government, you wouldn’t expect Democrats to show this much panic.

    he results in 2020 came as a shock to Democrats for several reasons. First, Joe Biden’s official margin of victory, while slightly larger than Obama’s in 2012 at 51.26% to 46.8%, was half the size that polls, such as Nate Silver’s 538, had showed, at 51.8% to 43.4%. But even more concerning for Democrats, the locations of the polling error tended to be not in places where Democrats were strong, but rather either in swing areas where they hoped for gains, or areas where Obama had done well in 2008 and 2012, but Trump had won in 2016. In effect, Democrats won areas they felt were moving in their direction such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin by far less than they expected, and lost states they thought were close such as Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins.

    The implications of this in the Presidential race were obscured by the fact that the numbers showed Biden won. But they were keenly felt in the Senate races, where Democrats lost races in Iowa and North Carolina where they believed they were favored, and their candidates did worse than Biden even where he won, such as in Michigan and Maine. The result at the time was to leave the Senate at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats, a situation transformed by the victory of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock against a dysfunctional Georgia GOP in January 2021. Nonetheless, it was ominous and it set the tone for Democratic behavior in 2021.

    In light of these results, we can understand that the reason Democrats are now obsessing the filibuster is not because they have a mere 50 seats in the Senate. When Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut calls out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for blocking legislation that 48 Democrats support, he is doing so not because he believes they are likely to be 50 or 52 Senators for it in the future but because he is pretty sure 50 is as good as it is going to get. In 2008, Democrats won 60 Senate seats, and while with hindsight we can see this was a high-water mark, at the time Democrats dreamed bigger. After all, Mitch McConnell had only won 53%-47% in 2008. There were also open seats in states Obama had won in 2008 such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida coming up in 2010, and there was a path to a Democratic supermajority.

    That is not the case after 2020. In 2020, only Susan Collins won reelection in a state won by the Presidential candidate of the opposing party. Democratic challengers, including strong ones such as Montana’s two-term governor, Steve Bullock lost, and lost badly (by 10% in Bullock’s case). This was also not just a 2020 phenomenon. Despite a good year for Democrats overall in 2018, Democratic incumbent Senators lost in Florida, Indiana, and Missouri that year.

    Biden’s underperformance scared Democrats because it indicated a ceiling, rather than a floor for their strength.

    In 2022, Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all states that went to Biden, but within margins whereby strong GOP challengers, which exist in all those states, could win. More problematically, the list of Democratic targets includes only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among states Biden won, and North Carolina and Florida among states Trump won by less than landslide margins. Matching Biden exactly would get the Democrats a gain of two seats; but even in 2020 most Democratic candidates ran behind Biden, and Biden is himself deeply unpopular today.

    The situation in the House is, if anything, worse for the Democrats. Democrats lost 12 House seats in 2020. The impact of redistricting is overblown – Republicans will gain a marginal advantage from the lines, but census results show the areas growing most quickly lean Democrat – yet nonetheless, the Democrat position is so weak that any deterioration in Biden’s position will be fatal to their 2022 hopes.

    In effect, the 2021 Democratic majorities are on a “death watch,” and Democrats’ confused attempts to deal with that realization is determining their current erratic behavior.

    The split in the party is not so much between the moderates and the progressives. It is between progressives and moderates who desire political futures and those who know they have none. Pelosi is able to generally pass left-wing legislation in the House despite her narrow majority because many of her moderates know they are doomed no matter what, and are willing to cast their votes for the progressive agenda. In turn, AOC and the Squad feel free to sabotage any compromises because their own seats are safe and they believe they have time to fight another day, even if it is ten years from now. By contrast, both Sinema and Manchin seem to resent the efforts of other Democrat officials to pressure them to commit political suicide or behave as if they personally are doomed, just because it is true of some of their colleagues. In particular, rhetoric out of the Democrat caucus that Manchin is “probably in his last term anyway” or that Sinema “won’t win reelection” seems predicated on the idea that both should act as if they are finished and behave accordingly.

    But think about the deeper implications of that statement: All moderate Democrats (with the possible exceptions of Manchin and Sinema) are aching to do The Will of the Party and push the most radical, leftmost agenda possible if only it weren’t for the pesky problems of winning elections. Even moderate Democrats are leftwing radicals.

  • Democrats really want to get their hands on all your banking information. Remember how Obama weaponized the IRS? That was just a foretaste. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden: The war against terror is over! Supreme Court: Then why are you still doing all these things that are only legal if a war’s still on? Biden Administration: Yeah, when we said the war against terror was over, we didn’t mean it was over over…
  • You know Merrick Garland’s social justice warrior problem? It gets worse:

    We learned, too, that Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, through his company, Panorama Education, sells CRT materials to public schools. And yesterday, it turned out that Panorama is also spreading material calling Trump and his supporters “white supremacists”

    Alexander “Xan” Tanner, a very White man, is married to Merrick Garland’s daughter. Tanner co-founded Panorama Education, which purports to provide a data platform that delves into students’ psychosocial issues in order to help schools intervene in problems and improve the school climate. In a word, it’s creepy…

    The educational workshop released by Panorama Education, co-founded by Alexander “Xan” Tanner, the group’s president, revolves around “systemic racism” and includes an article as a resource that states the Ku Klux Klan and attendees of Trump’s rallies are both “examples of white supremacy.”

    Garland should be forced to resign.

  • “More Hunter Biden Questions: Art Gallery Repping Him Gets Big Federal COVID Loan.” Try to contain your shock.
  • A husband and wife were arrested for trying to sell U.S. submarine secrets. “Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebe, 42, and wife, Diana, 49, were charged Saturday with selling secret information to an unidentified foreign country.” Bonus! “The woman arrested with her Navy nuclear engineer husband for allegedly selling secret information about nuclear submarines to an undercover FBI agent appears to be vocally in support of Black Lives Matter and ‘resistance’ movements on her social media.” There’s a lot of shocked face in this LinkSwarm…
  • Michigan charges three women with more of that 2020 election fraud that doesn’t exist.

    Investigators determined Trenae Myesha Rainey, 28, a facility employee, did not contact residents as set by procedure and instead filled out the applications and forged the resident’s signature to each application….

    Investigators determined Nancy Juanita Williams, 55, planned to control absentee ballots for legally incapacitated persons under her care by fraudulently submitting 26 absentee ballot applications to nine identified city and township clerks.

  • Sydney Lockdown Finally Ends After 106 Days.” Now Sydney residents just need to track down the people who ordered it and throttle them
  • “School district equity chief canned after racist, anti-white videos surface.” That’s a good start, but every “chief equity officer” should be canned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • It’s FBI informants all the way down.
  • Empty Shelves Joe.
  • Morgan Freeman still isn’t having any of your defund the police lunacy. “I am not in the least bit for defunding the police.”
  • Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate and Clinton toady Terry McAuliffe lies again.

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe incorrectly stated on Thursday night that there were 1,142 children in Virginia’s intensive care unit beds, a gross overestimation of the virus’s current impact in the state.

    “We in Virginia today, 1,142 children are in ICU beds,” McAuliffe stated during a roundtable discussion with local reporters. The statistic is a massive overestimation. Virginia Department of Health statistics show that there are a total of 443 people of all ages currently in ICU beds, a fraction of the figure McAuliffe put forth for children.

    The state database shows the number of Virginians in ICU beds infected with COVID-19 has never come close to 1,142 since the first hospitalizations in March 2020—the peak of individuals hospitalized in the ICU with COVID-19 was on Jan. 13, when there were 587 cases. State records show that just 1,094 individuals younger than 19 years old have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Children, who rarely get seriously ill from the virus, have never made up a significant chunk of hospitalized individuals.

    McAuliffe also said during the roundtable Virginia had “8,000 cases on Monday,” another exaggerated statistic. On Monday, Oct. 4, Virginia saw 1,220 “confirmed” cases and 864 “probable” cases, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

    The state has never seen 8,000 confirmed cases in a day. According to the department, Virginia’s 7-day moving case average peaked at 5,904 on Jan. 8, 2021—a number thousands short of McAuliffe’s case assessment.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Oregon county declares “illegal pot emergency.” On the other hand, the “emergency” is that they can’t seem to regulate illegal pot farms.
  • Eight Texas Constitutional questions are on the November 2nd ballot.
  • “Longtime politician Mark Ridley-Thomas and the former dean of the School of Social Work at a university in Southern California were indicted today on federal corruption charges that allege a bribery scheme in which a Ridley-Thomas relative received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.” This is the fed indictment notice, so it doesn’t mention that he’s a lifetime Democrat, in addition to being an LA City Councileman and former state rep.
  • Dwight has more details.
  • Art Acevedo out in Miami. Sounds like a mixture of BS and real Acevedo stupidity. And it’s generally not a good idea to compare Miami Cubans to commies…
  • This is why the left feels compelled to crush police unions: “Chicago Police Union to Defy Vaccine Mandate and Dare the City to Enforce It.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Buy an electric vehicle,” they said. “They’re just as good and you’ll be saving the earth,” they said. Well surprise! “UK Readying New Law Mandating Home EV Chargers Be Shut Down During Peak Hours.” Also: “Beginning May 30, 2022, all chargers that are installed must be ‘smart’ chargers connected to the internet, allowing their functions to be limited between 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm.” Big brother in his squad car’s coming near…
  • Communist China demands that Christian pastor denounce himself for daring to preach the gospel in violation of state doctrine. Oh wait, did I say Communist China? I meant “Canada.”
  • Texas House passes Save Girls Sports act to keep them from having to compete against men.
  • UK: “Sir David Amess: Conservative MP stabbed to death. Police said a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after the attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea.” Police seem awful tight-lipped on details about the murderer…
  • “Wyoming teenager hauled out of high school in handcuffs for refusing to wear a mask.” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
  • British baker busted for selling cookies with illegal sprinkles.
  • Amy Alkon posts negative review for company trying to game Amazon reviews. result: Amazon deletes the review.
  • Heh:

  • John Deere workers go on strike.
  • Freedom Flu protest outside Southwest Airlines Monday, October 18:

  • “Southwest Airlines Offering Free Flights To All Passengers Who Are Vaccinated And Can Fly A Plane.
  • When the federal government banned sliced bread, supposedly due to helping the war effort in World War II. But nobody would admit who ordered it, or what scarce wartime commodities it was supposed to save, and the ban was lifted after two months. Sound familiar? Well, except for that whole “admitting the mistake and quickly reversing course” part…
  • You may be metal, but are you reach your hand into a shark’s mouth to remove a hook metal?
  • Armadillocon is this weekend.
  • Get hyped!

  • LinkSwarm for May 14, 2021

    Friday, May 14th, 2021

    The Biden Recession blooms, Bibby bombs, Baltimore burns, inscrutable Flu Manchu somehow infects the vaccinated, and Canada’s institutional religious hostility inflicts its revenge on the pastor that defied them. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Carter Malaise II: Inflation Boogaloo: The core inflation rate is now at 11%. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • If inflation wasn’t enough to remind you of Biden’s reboot of That 70’s Show, how about long gas lines? An east coast gas pipeline was shut down by ransomeware attack launched by a hacking group called DarkSide.

    Rendered with the magic of dyslexia

    We’re actually very fortunate that a for-profit gang carried out this hack, rather than a terrorist group or state actor.

  • “South Carolina Follows Montana In Ending All Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Programs.” Strange how the government paying people not to work hurts jobs numbers…
  • Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (WV) says he’s not going to let the Democrats’ election-theft bill pass. Good for him. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Seeing some reports stating that Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, but seeing some Twitter commentary that, no, they haven’t entered, but that IDF artillery and tanks are pounding Hamas tunnels.
  • Why won’t those violent Israelis just let themselves be killed?

    Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

    But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

    This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

    The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

  • Hamas is the instrument of Iran’s proxy war against Israel:

    Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons. “Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons,” Khamenei said in an online speech.

    “With divine guidance and assistance, we planned, and the balance of power has been transformed in Palestine, and today the Gaza Strip can stand against the aggression of the Zionist enemy and defeat it.”

    Khamenei went on to offer the reason why Iran was sending rockets, missiles and tons of explosives to the Gaza Strip: “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous tumor in the region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

    Khamenei’s admission shows how the mullahs in Tehran have been lying to the West for many years. In 2011, Mohammad Khazaee, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations, sent a letter to the President of the United Nations Security Council in which he vehemently denied that Iran was smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip.

    

  • Baltimore was one of the first cities to try “de-policing.” How did that work out for it? Not so hot:

    This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.

    Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.

    The tried “broken windows” policing without understanding it:

    The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.

    O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.

    The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.

    In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.

    True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”

    Then they adjusted:

    O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”

    Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.

    And then the Social Justice started:

    Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.

    First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.

    Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”

    So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Baltimore’s Soros-backed City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby can’t be bothered to indict antifa rioters, but she can ask the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson for daring to criticize her.
  • Speaking of defunding the police, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey admits that defunding the police was a huge mistake. If only the rest of the Minneapolis had realized this before all the deaths.
  • “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.”
  • Russia’s robot army is mainly vaporware.
  • Just about everything they told us about transmission vectors for Mao Tze Lung was wrong:

    Bars, gyms and restaurants. Those were just a few settings health experts warned could become hotbeds for COVID-19 spread as states began reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 following the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

    Yet, public data analyzed by ABC News appears to tell a different story. The data from states across the country suggests specific outbreak settings (including bars, gyms, restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and stores — for the full list, see graphic below in story) only accounted for a small percentage, if any, of new outbreaks after the pandemic’s inital wave in 2020.

    Snip.

    Based on ABC News’ analysis of public data of all coronavirus cases in four states and D.C., the outbreak settings accounted for less than 5% of all COVID-19 cases in those states.

  • “World’s Most Vaccinated Nation Sees Active COVID Cases Double In Under A Week.” Mysterious uptick in the Seychelles.
  • Another data point: “Yankees Suffer COVID Resurgence As 8 Fully-Vaccinated Players, Staff Test Positive.” A fluke? Bad batch of vaccines? Bad batch of tests?
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • “Why Did Biden Census Bureau Add 2.5 Million More Residents to Blue-State Population Count?” The question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?
  • Kansas’ Republican legislature overrides Democratic governor’s veto of election integrity bill.
  • Texas congressman Chip Roy is running ran against Elise Stefanik for conference chair to replace Liz Cheney. (Oops, he lost, 134-46.)
  • Remember the Polish pastor who kicked police out of his Canadian church? Well, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The State: “Calgary pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for holding a church service.” That will teach him for daring to think Canada has freedom of religion…
  • How we got to the Ever Given. The first container ship only carried 58 boxes. Current container ships can carry as many as 24,000…
  • “Former Democrat Speaker of House in Oregon Arrested for Sex Trafficking.”

    Dave Hunt represented Clackamas County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 2003 through 2013. Hunt was the former Democratic Leader, Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House for the State of Oregon. As a legislator, Hunt the sponsor of a bill criminalizing sex trafficking in 2007. Hunt is currently a lobbyist working to influence the very chamber he left.

    However, even more ironic in 2011, Dave Hunt use his position to support and vote for HB 2714. That bill created the crime of commercial sexual solicitation, the exact crime police used to charge Hunt when he was arrested and cited.

    Sort of sounds like a garden variety prostitution solicitation charge. But if he’s one of the legislators to redefine that as “sex trafficking,” my sympathy is extremely limited.

  • Colorado Democrats give up on their gun control push. (For now.) Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I-40 bridge over Mississippi closed due to a giant crack in a key structural beam.
  • Telsa plans more expansion in Travis County.
  • NRA’s bankruptcy petition has been dismissed. Understandably, since it seemed a transparent ploy to begin with. It’s too bad Wayne LaPierre seems intent on dragging the NRA down with him…
  • Mark Sebu follows up on the Kentucky Ballistics explosion. Evidently it would haven taken 161,520 PI to shear the threads off the Sebu RN 50. Also, there were no pre-cuts on the sabot, suggesting it may indeed have been a counterfeit SLAP round that caused the explosion.
  • Not the Babylon Bee: O.J. Simpson backs Liz Cheney, accuses the Republican Party of “dishonesty.” I don’t feel I can adequately parody this real-life event, even though I should probably take a stab at it…
    

  • Sign you may be in a cult: They keep keep the mummified body of the dead leader in someone’s home, covered by Christmas lights. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter James May found out that trickle charging a Tesla S’ main car battery didn’t charge the ordinary car battery, the one responsible for regular electric systems…like unlocking the hood latch to reach the same battery. Result: an hour of work just to reach the dead battery.
  • Speaking of impractical automotive accoutrements, here’s a Bugatti watch with a “working” W16 engine, yours for a mere $280,000…
  • Foamy: “Stop saving the stupid people!”
  • “Disney To Remove Problematic Kiss From Classic Movie, Snow White Will Now Remain Dead.”
  • Pipeline blues:

  • “Damnit! I had two sawbucks on Beatlebaum!”

  • Polish Pastor Don’t Play That

    Sunday, April 4th, 2021

    Happy Easter! Enjoy this Polish Pastor in Calgary forcing police who tried to shut him down out of his Church by the sheer force of his personality.

    “Don’t come back unless you have a warrant!”

    “Out Gestapo!”

    “Communist!”

    (Hat tip: Not the Bee.)