Posts Tagged ‘Beaumont (Texas)’

LinkSwarm for February 4, 2022

Friday, February 4th, 2022

The Carter-era “misery index” (inflation + unemployment) is rising, Canada’s truckers are still honking, more Democratic sleazebag activity, the far left is coming for your kids, China continues to misbehave, and a tragic cheese display collapse shocks onlookers. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden continues to work his magic on the economy. Expected job numbers: +200,000. Actual job numbers: -300,000.

  • But! There are other stories stating that jobs numbers “beat” expectations. Why? Some super sketchy “seasonal” adjustments.

    Why the BLS is applying such a grotesque seasonal adjustment to it, is unclear (actually, if one assumes that the Biden admin tapped the BLS secretary on the shoulder, then it is very clear).

    It’s not just outside analysts who reach this conclusion: in Table C to its report, the BLS showed “December 2021-January 2022 changes in selected labor force measures, with adjustments for population control effects” and confirmed that if one had used an apples-to-apples basis for the January numbers, the number of Employed workers (from the Household Survey) would be down -272K. Instead, thanks to the population control effect adjustment of 1.471 million, the final number was 1.199 million!

    In summary, while the markets had been trading for months on fake data when the BLS failed to catch up to covid reality, and was applying stale seasonal adjustments, they are doing so again today, only in the opposite direction with the BLS now overextending itself in the opposite direction, with a January seasonal adjustment that has never been greater!

  • Inflation hit 5.8% in 2021, the most in 39 years. Pretty sure this year is going to be a lot worse.
  • How bad is inflation? Dwight sent over this link on an Austin restaurant shutting down that includes an eye-opening inflation tidbit. “He pointed out that a container of fryer oil that a year ago cost about $17 had risen to about $50.”
  • Canada’s freedom truckers seem to be making headway with regional governments, some of whom have promised to lift vaccine mandates, but asshole authoritarian Justin Trudeau is refusing to budge.
  • Video footage of a voting fraud mule making 53 trips among 20 ballot drop-boxes.
  • Regular BattleSwarm readers have already seen extensive evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis for Flu Manchu, but National Review‘s Jim Geraghty has a new piece along those lines.

    There are two naturally occurring viruses that are par­ticularly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The first is RaTG13, which shares 96.2 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli. This virus was collected from bat feces in a copper-mine shaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, China, that was the site of a small-scale deadly viral infection with some curious similarities to Covid.

    In April 2012, six miners were assigned to clean bat guano from the mine shaft. Four miners had been working at the site for two weeks, and two had been working there for four days when they all grew ill with a cough and fever and experienced difficulty breathing, aching limbs, heavy and bloody mucus and saliva, and headaches — symptoms of a viral respiratory infection that are similar to the effects of Covid. All six miners were admitted to a Kunming hospital in late April and early May, and three died — one after two weeks, one after a month and a half, and one after three months. The other three survived.

    Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese pulmonolo­gist whose high-profile role has been compared to that of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States, consulted on the cases of the miners. Recognizing that the virus afflicting the miners could be comparable to SARS, researchers sent blood samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for antibody testing.

    In 2012 and 2013, teams of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted a study of coronaviruses in bats in that abandoned mine shaft — and one of the samples they collected was RaTG13.

    The second virus that is particularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is really a cluster of three similar viruses discovered in Laos in autumn 2021. A team led by Marc Eliot, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, collected saliva, feces, and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos and found three new viruses that were each more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103, and BANAL-236.

    Some skeptics of the lab-leak theory contend that the BANAL viruses proved that SARS-CoV-2 is likely a naturally occurring virus, and because Laos was roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan, this pointed away from the notion that the Covid pandemic could be traced back to a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other labs in the city. But there is ample reason to believe that viruses from Laos — perhaps not the BANAL trio, but similar ones — were also shipped from Laos to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    In 2010, Wildlife Trust, a nonprofit international conservation organization dedicated to protecting wildlife, announced it was rebranding itself under the name EcoHealth Alliance. The organization’s president, Peter Daszak, declared that his group had become “the central organization defining the intersection of local conservation and global health” and touted itself as being “on the forefront of informing the public, businesses, and the scientific community about emerging diseases, including potential pandemics.” It is safe to say that EcoHealth Alliance is one of the largest, best funded, and best connected nonprofits, focusing upon “field research and develop[ing] tools to save ecosystems and predict and prevent pandemics.”

    EcoHealth Alliance/illegal gain of function section snipped.

    We know for a fact that the people collecting samples do not always follow the necessary safety procedures. And the risk of accidental infection does not disappear once the viruses and bats are brought back to the laboratories.

    Lab accidents happen. The first argument against the lab-leak theory that can be safely dismissed is the notion that Chinese scientists were simply too careful or too diligent to ever let a virus escape their lab. Accidents occur even in the most well-trained and highly regarded research facilities in the world. In June 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that they had unintentionally exposed personnel to potentially viable anthrax. A month later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found samples of smallpox, dengue, and spotted fever just sitting in a storage room. A decade earlier, the Chinese CDC’s National Institute of Virology in southern Beijing had accidentally released SARS. Twice.

    In February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists detailing that from 2009 to 2015, a federal program “received a total of 749 incident reports from select-agent research facilities,” including “1) needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects, 2) dropped containers or spills/splashes of liquids containing pathogens, and 3) bites or scratches from infected animals.”

    China obviously places the same importance on lab safety as it puts into quality control. Lets pick it up where more CCP perfidy kicks in:

    Finally, there is the undeniably suspicious behavior of the Chinese government since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Until January 21, 2020, the Wuhan Regional Health Commission insisted that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.” On January 4, 2020, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield was incredulous during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Redfield described asking his old friend Gao, “George, you don’t really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?” Gao insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But Redfield recounted that two days later, Gao broke down during a call, “audibly and tearfully distraught after finding ‘a lot of cases’ in the community who had never visited the wet market.”

    In late January and early February, the Chinese government ordered all labs processing samples of the strange new virus to destroy them. On January 3, China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The justification for this order was public safety, although it is hard to see the public-safety benefit in suppressing information about the disease.

    It took a year to get a World Health Organization investigative team into Wuhan, and when that team arrived, it encountered angry refusals to turn over raw data about the earliest cases. According to the New York Times, “disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.” The Chinese government has refused to allow another team of investigators to enter Wuhan or the labs in the city. The Chinese government does not care if it looks guilty.

    A much-hyped U.S. intelligence-community investigation completed in August offered almost nothing useful, declaring, “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” Ninety days of effort, with all the resources of the U.S. government, generated nothing new.

    To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.

    In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didn’t have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being ex­tremely difficult to find in bats.

    This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.

    That would be a remarkable series of coincidences.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Data point. “Younger, working-age people began dying in greater numbers as vaccine mandates hit.”
  • More data:

  • Cyber-attack China hack?
  • Also in China: The Genocide Olympics get underway.
  • “Youngkin Governs For Parents Who Say: Get Away From Our Kids, You Freaks.”

    Glenn Youngkin is governing Virginia according to the implicit campaign slogan that powered his victory: stop messing with our kids, you freaks! That’s the polite version, anyway. Other Republican officials should follow his lead and solidify the GOP as the party of parents.

    Youngkin ran as a conservative champion of normalcy, especially in schools. His campaign was assisted when his opponent declared parents should not have a say in what their children are taught, thereby confirming everything Youngkin was running on.

    Since being sworn in, Youngkin has banned school mask mandates, banned teaching racist ideas from sources such as critical race theory, and requested the new state attorney general, Jason Miyares, to investigate the apparent coverup by Loudoun County officials of a rape committed by a skirt-wearing boy in a girls’ bathroom. He has also started cleaning house in the bureaucracy.

    These measures have provoked pushback from the usual suspects. Left-wing teachers are now worried they’ll get in trouble for teaching the race essentialism derived from critical race theory. Some counties have defied the governor over school mask mandates, and are punishing students who choose not to wear them. But Youngkin is holding firm, knowing this is what he was elected to do.

    Across the nation, parents are in revolt against the Democrat-led educational establishment, and Republicans should eagerly join the fray. After all, it was the Democrat-loving teachers unions that fought to keep schools shut down long after we knew that children were at almost no risk from Covid-19. Likewise, it has mostly been Democrats and their allies forcing children to wear masks when school is open, even though (as a few on the left are finally admitting) masks are particularly harmful for children, while offering no real benefits.

    There are other indignities and cruelties, of course, from shutting down outdoor playgrounds to forcing schoolchildren to study or eat lunch outdoors in freezing temperatures. And these miseries have been inflicted long after any plausible ability to defend them as emergency measures, or to plead ignorance of the consequences. Under pressure from the teachers unions and education bureaucracy, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the well-being of children. Even many liberals now want an alternative to the endless school shutdowns, masks, and other pandemic security theater.

  • Speaking of leftists trying to get their hands on your children: “BLM ‘Week of Action’ Teaching Students Nationwide to Affirm Transgenderism, Disrupt Nuclear Family.”

    Students across the country as young as kindergarten-age are learning that “everybody gets to choose their own gender” and are receiving kid-friendly lessons on disrupting “Western nuclear family dynamics” as part of this week’s national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

    The activist-driven curriculum for the Week of Action, which kicked off Monday, is based off the 13 “Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles.” Those principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is “free from patriarchal practices,” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”

    Black Lives Matter at School offers kid-friendly versions of the 13 principles designed for elementary and middle-school students.

    The Week of Action also includes a list of four national demands: end zero-tolerance discipline policies; mandate black history and ethnic studies; hire more black teachers; and fund counselors, not cops, according to a “starter kit” on the Black Lives Matter at School website.

    In the starter kit, New York City kindergarten teacher Laleña Garcia, author of a children’s book about BLM principles, writes that while “discussing big ideas with little people” it is necessary to “consider age-appropriate language so that our students or children can grasp the concepts.” For example, she suggests not talking about police violence with “our youngest children.”

    When discussing BLM’s principle of being transgender affirming, Garcia offers the following kid-friendly language: “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

    When discussing the BLM principle of a “Black Village,” which includes the goal of disrupting the Western nuclear family structure, Garcia suggests teaching kids that “there are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is that it’s people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe they choose to be a family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes, when it’s a lot of families together, it can be called a village.”

  • Speaking of Democratic policies endangering kids: Repeat child sex offender illegal alien arrested at the border.
  • Now Twitter is kicking off accounts critical of teacher’s unions. Check out The Chalkboard Review.
  • Even in San Francisco, the backlash against the Soros-backed-Democrat-DA crime wave has begun: “S.F. police will no longer cooperate with DA Boudin over police shooting investigations.”

    San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he intends to sever an agreement with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office spelling out the D.A.’s lead role in investigating police use-of-force incidents, in-custody deaths and police shootings.

    The agreement was originally struck in 2019 following intense debate in San Francisco over the role the city’s police department should play in investigating its own officers following a rash of police shootings. Police and the District Attorney’s Office renewed the agreement last year.

  • Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker gave $300,000 in federal Flu Manchu relief funds to #BlackLivesMatter.
  • Speaking of which, there’s more crooked Pritzker shenanigans.

    The more we learn about the Jenny Thornley affair, the more it appears that senior members of the Pritzker administration, including potentially the governor and his wife, may have facilitated a fraud on the state by a now-indicted former campaign aide to enrich her and then obstructed efforts to bring her to justice.

    This is a tangled web, so stay with me as I set forth a timeline of events and characters, according to the Chicago Tribune.

    The former executive director of the Illinois State Police Merit Board, Jack Garcia, discovered evidence that one of the employees under his direction, Jenny Thornley, was stealing money from the people of the state

    Garcia is a well-known, skilled investigator who previously supervised the divisions of internal investigations and forensic services, before becoming the first deputy director of the Illinois State Police. Thornley was a campaign aide for Gov. J.B. Pritzker (her husband, Jared, was also a senior political appointee at the Illinois comptroller’s office) and close enough to Pritzker and his wife, M.K., that she had their personal telephone numbers.

    After assembling the evidence and building the case, Garcia scheduled meetings to fire Thornley and refer her for prosecution on the morning of Feb. 3, 2020. However, on the eve of that day, Thornley contacted (at least) the governor’s wife (pictured, at left) and asked her to intervene, alleging that Garcia had assaulted her sexually a week or so earlier.

    The governor’s chief counsel promptly called the merit board (which is an independent agency created “to remove political influence” from State Police hiring, promotion and discipline) to “advise” it to: (a) cancel her firing and the referral for prosecution, (b) suspend Garcia (the experienced investigator who uncovered the Thornley fraud) and (c) retain an outside counsel proposed by the governor’s office. The merit board went along, but also suspended Thornley, and Garcia voluntarily took and passed a lie detector test.

    Then Thornley sued to stop the investigation of her own claim of sexual harassment.

    The outside counsel, Christina Egan, nonetheless completed an investigation by July 2020 (at the cost of $500,000 paid by the people of Illinois), confirming the evidence Garcia assembled that Thornley had stolen money and committed forgery, and finding no evidence of Thornley’s sexual assault allegation. The State Police Merit Board then reinstated Garcia, fired Thornley, referred her for prosecution. She has now been indicted for theft and forgery.

    However, after Thornley was fired, someone with clout in the Pritzker administration somehow granted her disability payments reserved for people that are actually state employees. These payments (amounting to some $71,000) went on for more than a year, ending days before she was indicted for theft and fraud. These extensive payments were for “injuries” sustained from an “assault” that Egan determined had not occurred.

  • Speaking of Democratic family corruption: “Smoking gun documents tie Nancy Pelosi’s son to fraud and bribery scheme to remove permit violations against squalid San Francisco flop house owned by his ex-girlfriend and probed by the FBI.”
  • Speaking of Pelosi corruption:

  • Speaking of crooked Democratic governors, Washington state’s Jay Inslee (he of the spectacular presidential race flameout) wants to criminalize voicing allegations of election fraud. “Shut up and do the will of the party, comrade!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • But that’s not the only stupid idea he has! He also wants to drive out all the state’s billionaires with a wealth tax.
  • One swampy hand washes the other. “ATF Asks Judge to Order Hunter Biden Gun Inquiry Closed.”
  • Is national concealed carry coming?
  • “‘You Have Blood On Your Hands,’ Former Official Calls on Harris County Judge, Commissioners to Resign.”

    The criminal justice system in Harris County is broken,” said Aimee Castillo, sister of murder victim Josh Sandoval.

    Suspect Devan Kristopher Jordon was out on three felony bonds when he allegedly shot Sandoval during a home invasion robbery last May. Jordon had also missed a court date the week prior to the murder, but authorities did not issue an arrest warrant.

    “I think the criminal justice system is just a revolving door. They murder, they go in, and they come out, and they go in,” said Glenda Martin, Sandoval’s mother. “I think it’s a horrible thing.”

    Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) presented a resolution honoring Sandoval’s life and noted that the suspect was also affiliated with the same crime ring allegedly responsible for the murder in Houston of an off-duty New Orleans police officer last August.

    “There are people who are hurting people who are being allowed to walk around and they should not be period. That is the point,” intoned Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4).

    The fieriest moments of the meeting, however, came later from Steve Radack, former constable and former commissioner who said Democrats on the commissioners court had “blood on their hands.”

    “I never dreamed that after serving 32 years on this court that there would be three members of this court — Hidalgo, Garcia, and Ellis — who would kiss the rears of hardened criminals, who victimize law-abiding citizens, including law enforcement officers,” said Radack. “I’m calling on you three to resign from office so the healing can begin.”

  • Hmmm. “Two Texas inmates killed at Beaumont federal prison in fight involving MS-13.”
  • Speaking of criminal scumbags, Michael Avenatti was convicted of defrauding Storm Daniels of $300,000. This is, what, his fourth felony conviction?

  • On the “Washington Football Team”

  • Heh:

  • This is a pretty crazy IT hiring story. You’ll just have to read it…
  • Get a rope. “Tulsa police find stolen $300,000 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby stripped and hidden in field.” (Hat Tip: IowaHawk.)
  • The scam of New York City sidewalk sheds.
  • Heh:

  • Quel formage!

  • Minneapolis names some snowplows. I do rather like Ctrl Salt Delete…
  • “Joe Biden Beats Out Brussels Sprouts For America’s Least Favorite Vegetable.”
  • “I said all the frisbees!”

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Guns, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm For June 12, 2020

    Friday, June 12th, 2020

    Riots! Guns! Social Justice Warriors! Animated police dogs! Today’s LinkSwarm is packed to its furry ears…

  • The fire this time:

    This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.

    You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.

    When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.

    There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.

    The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.

    Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.

    We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.

    All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.

    The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.

  • Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
  • Looters in California stole a forklift to break into stores.
  • When Democratic Party race-pandering backfires.
  • There’s previous little evidence that black lives matter to Democratic politicians:

    Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.

    If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.

    They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”

    They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is ­entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.

    But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Secondary evidences suggest that the Wuhan Coronavirus was already ravaging Wuhan in September and October of last year.
  • Texas suffers a jump in number of Wuhan coronavirus cases reported. But is it real?

    Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.

    Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.

    Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.

    Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.

    Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.

  • The Bonfire of Wokeness claims the founder and editor of feminist Refinery29. Remember, you can never, ever be woke enough…
  • Andrew Sullivan gagged for having non-PC thoughts. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “Thou Shalt Not Criticise Black Lives Matter”

    To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.

    For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.

  • Well, this is just great: “FCC failed to monitor Chinese telecoms for almost 20 years.”
  • Meant to post this last week: “Whitmer Lifts Stay-at-Home Order Now That People Need to Go Out and Riot.”
  • Canadian professor fired for pointing out that biological sex is real. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Social Justice Warriors at Cornell are trying to get Legal insurrection’s William Jacobson fired for #wrongthink.
  • You know what really sucks? Having your store looted. “They tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying…I’m black, look what you did to my store.”
  • “Black gun owners guard businesses to protect against looting in Minneapolis.”
  • Eleven times gun owners defended life and property.
  • The gun debate is over.

    We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later

    The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.

    There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.

    Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.

  • West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
  • San Diego County government ordered hotels not to take guests unless they were “essential” workers. This strikes me as an unconstitutional taking…
  • Work privilege:

  • San Francisco’s mass transit agency announces it will no longer transport San Francisco police to riots.
  • The Republican National Convention has been moved to Jacksonville.
  • Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:

    The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.

    They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.

    Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • It’s a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization:

    “These ideas are wrong.”

  • Wokeness comes for the New York Times:

    For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.

    Snip.

    The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.

    It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.

  • Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:

    “One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”

  • Important questions:

  • Welcome to the Year Zero:

  • President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.

    President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.

    The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

    The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.

    “The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.

    Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.

    What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?

  • The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
  • Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
  • Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
  • Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
  • Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”

  • Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
  • “Democrats Propose Replacing All Police With Traveling Bands Of Hippies Singing ‘Imagine.'”
  • And speaking of damn dirty hippies, Dwight has this CBS scoop from 1967.
  • World War II bomber story: Two planes, one crash landing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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    Houston Flood Update for August 30, 2017

    Wednesday, August 30th, 2017

    Houston may finally be drying out, but now Port Arthur is under water, Beaumont is flooding and a woman there died saving her infant daughter.

    Other flooding/Hurricane Harvey news:

  • The death total in Houston is now over 30 due to the grisly discovery of six family members drowned in a minivan.
  • If you haven’t seen it already, you probably want to read this post on leftwing jihad sweetheart Linda Sarsour scamming Hurricane Harvey relief dollars for her political PAC.
  • More than forty people have been arrested for looting.
  • An Arkema chemical plant in Crosby might explode due to the flooding.
  • “Hurricane Harvey has brought out the best in people.”
  • JJ Watt’s YouCaring’s original goal was to raise $200,000 for flood relief. Right now it’s sailed over $6 million and is closing in on $7 million.
  • That might be a better choice than the Red Cross.
  • The Texans-Cowboys preseason game, which had previously been moved to Arlington, has been cancelled.

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