Posts Tagged ‘Ebola’

Elon Musk Talks DOGE With Joe Rogan

Saturday, March 1st, 2025

Joe Rogan interviewed Elon Musk again, talking a lot about AI and his DOGE work. I haven’t remoptely seen all of it yet, but a lot of the DOGE stuff is interesting.

  • Joe Rogan: “Everybody should be celebrating that we’ve found a way to cut out fraud and waste. If you pay taxes, and you don’t like that you have to pay so much in taxes, and then you find out that there’s significant fraud, and waste that’s been exposed you should be celebrating. It shouldn’t be ‘oh no, the wrong people found this fact and now it’s a bad thing.'”
  • Elon Musk: “Mutilating animals in demented studies, that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show.”
  • JR: “The beagle puppy one, where they they covered their head in a basket and put fleas on their head so they eat them alive.” Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.
  • EM: “The real threat here is to the bureaucracy…[they say] ‘Trump as a threat to our democracy’…but if you if you just replace ‘threat to democracy’ with ‘threat to bureaucracy,’ it makes total sense.”
  • EM: “DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy.”
  • EM: “Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.”
  • EM: “We saw one person was getting $1.9 billion sent to their NGO which basically got formed about a year ago.”
  • EM: “The whole NGO thing is a nightmare, and it’s a misnomer. Because if you have a government-funded non-governmental organization, you’re simply a government-funded organization. It’s an oxymoron.”
  • EM: “Government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if they were the government, but are somehow made legal if it’s sent to a so-called nonprofit.”
  • EM: “People cash out these nonprofits. They become very wealthy through nonprofits. They pay themselves enormous sums through these nonprofits.”
  • EM: “It’s a gigantic scam. Like, one of the biggest, maybe the biggest, scam ever.”
  • EM: “I think there a total number of NGOs, probably millions. But in terms of large NGOs, tens of thousands. It’s actually kind of a hack to the system, where you know someone can get an NGO stood up for for a fairly small amount of money, like George Soros.”
  • EM: “[Soros] is really good at this. George is like a system hacker. Like he figured out how to hack the system. He’s a genius at arbitrage…he figured out that you could leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a ton of money to that nonprofit. So you can take what might be a $10 million donation to a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion dollar non-NGO.” So Soros isn’t destroying America with his money, he’s destroying America with our money.
  • EM: “And then [the] government continues to fund that every year, and it’ll have a nice sounding name like The Institute For Peace, or something like that.”
  • EM: “It’s a giant graft machine.”
  • JR: “It’s a giant propaganda machine, a giant regime change machine.”
  • EM: “Yes.”
  • EM: “We have continued fund things that appear to be legitimate.” And here’s where I part ways with Elon. “Doing good works in foreign countries” is not a constitutionally enumerated power or responsibility of the federal government, and thus should not be undertaken by the federal government.
  • Musk notes that we don’t want to donate to a lab that says they’re fighting Ebola only to find out they’re creating mutant strains of Ebola.
  • EM: “Interest payments on the national debt exceeds the defense department budget, which is truly astounding, which means so we’re paying over a trillion dollars of interest on the national debt.”
  • EM: “As bad as Twitter was, the federal government is much worse.”
  • EM: “The federal government is not break. It’s literally losing $2 trillion a year and it fails its own audits.”

    • Watch the whole thing.

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    Posted in Budget, video, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For May 10, 2024

    Friday, May 10th, 2024

    Details on the people and organizations dedicated to burning America down, more Biden corruption, more of his censorship regime, a few Russo-Ukrainian War updates, and a pedophile gets ventilated. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Park MacDougald at Tablet has a really in-depth look at the radical network setting America on fire.

    Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.

    But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.

    The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago. Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades. At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.

    These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall. Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

    “What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”

    The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.

    Snip.

    The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

    JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.

    SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

    Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

    Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

    WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting.

    More info on the people backing the Stop Cop City protestors:

    Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested. CJA’s website promotes a grab bag of far-left causes, and includes a “Free Palestine” page proclaiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” To this day—eight months after the Georgia RICO indictment alleged that the Forest Justice Defense Fund was a fraudulent charity paying for ammunition purchases in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy—CJA maintains a Stop Cop City page urging readers to donate to the Forest Justice Defense Fund and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. CJA also endorsed a “statement of solidarity” with Stop Cop City, which claimed, by the inexorable logic of intersectionality, the fight against “gentrification and police violence” in Atlanta as part of the fight against climate change.

    CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network. But it has another financial supporter, one that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”

    Read the whole thing.

  • More on the same subject: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.” Surprising to people who haven’t been paying attention, maybe.

    The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

    Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.

    Soros declined to comment, but a spokesperson with the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is the founder and chairman, said in a statement that it “has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously funded the Tides Foundation and other groups, said it no longer has active grants to Tides. It also does not support Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow.

    Covers some of the same ground as the Tablet piece, but still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • MIT bans diversity statements. Good. Such racist dross only hinders real engineering.
  • Something resembling justice? “Judge Indefinitely Postpones Trump’s Classified Documents Trial.”

    Former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents is being postponed indefinitely.

    Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon ordered a new pretrial schedule for motions and discovery Tuesday afternoon after the classified documents case was originally scheduled to go to trial later this month.

    “The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon said in her order.

    The trial will likely be pushed until after the 2024 presidential election this November.

  • “The Only Problem Joe Biden Has Is That People Think He’s a Bad President.”

    It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately.

    No incumbent president should ever want to be near 43 percent in a head-to-head ballot test. Yet here is Joe Biden at 43 percent in the latest CNN poll, 43 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll, 43 percent in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, and 43 percent in the latest Harvard/Harris poll. (NB: Biden ticked up to 48 when Harvard/Harris pushed respondents to choose between Trump and Biden, and the Economist/YouGov poll had RFK Jr. in the mix.)

    Detect a trend? (There are other polls that have Biden a little higher.)

    It’s no mystery why Biden’s polling is at crisis levels.

    An incumbent president’s level of support in a reelection bid is typically tethered closely to his job approval. It’s hard to get much more than a couple of points above it. Biden’s job approval is at 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average and at 39.3 in the 538 polling average.

  • How Hamas Bought Joe Biden.

    Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.

    As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.

  • In one of the world’s least anticipated sequel, a Chinese lab has spliced snippets of Ebola to create a deadly new virus.

  • More details on the Biden Administration’s censorship regime.

    Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 800-page report that reads like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

    Take a look:

    • In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”
    • In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”
    • In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”
  • There’s chutzpah, and then there’s chutzpah: “Denver Illegals Make Demands, Include ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Food, Lawyers, Unlimited Showers And Warnings Before Evictions.”
  • It was fun seeing Ukraine’s Bradley’s take out Russian tanks with their Bushmaster, but they just took out a T-80 from a mile away with their TOW missile, which is the recommended method of a Bradley killing a Russian tank.
  • Ukrainian drone hits Bashkiria Oil Refinery some 1,500km from Ukraine’s border.
  • In addition to using high tech weapons against Russia, Ukraine is also using caltrops to shred their tires, a weapon first deployed by the Roman empire.
  • “Pedophile Surprised By Seattle Police Takes The Hallway Temperature Challenge.” Purp pulls a gun and gets multiple mags dumped into him. (Hat tip: Active response via KR Training.)
  • I have heard the Social Justice Warrior suing, each to each. I do not think that they will sue for me… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The most gun-friendly states of 2024. Texas ranks 8th.

  • So the City of Pasadena, Texas was hassling Azael Sepulveda’s Oz Mechanics car repair shop over parking for no apparent reason, came to an agreement to settle his lawsuit, and now says, get this, they don’t have to follow the agreement because they claim the city enjoys “immunity” from lawsuits. “The property he purchased had housed another auto mechanic shop for more than 30 years and included five parking spaces, but under revised ordinances, the city demanded that Sepulveda provide 28 parking spots.” Somebody in the Pasadena city government deserves a dick punching…
  • Brandon Herrera finally produces an AK-50 that doesn’t jam or spontaneously disassemble.
  • “The Jerry Seinfeld Pop-Tart Movie Is The Least Funny And, Quite Possibly, Worst Movie Ever Made.” I rather doubt the latter, but the trailer I saw of it did look pretty dire.
  • “Hamas Celebrates Proposed Ceasefire With Rocket Barrage.”
  • “Uighur Slaves Struggling To Keep Up With Demand For Palestinian Headscarves.”
  • Save the puppies!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for March 20, 2020

    Friday, March 20th, 2020

    I hope you’re enjoying your splendid isolation on the first day of spring. As in previous weeks, the Wuhan coronavirus dominates the news with the reminder that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away…

  • President Donald Trump invokes the Defense Production Act of 1950 to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus. “The legislation allows the president to require production and orders from certain industries to prioritize the response to a national emergency.”
  • Not just the flu. “On a scale of 1 to 10, he said, the pain was 15… Imagine your lungs turning solid. It’s like suffocating.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci: You better believe the China travel ban made a difference.
  • Don’t let the MSM revisionism fool you; President Trump was relentlessly slammed by Our Media Betters for that decision:

  • So many dead bodies in Iran that trenches for them can be seen from space.
  • The problem with the CDC isn’t underfunding, it’s refusing to focus on its actual job:

    The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

    The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

    At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

    Snip.

    During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.

    The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.

    In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.

    In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an “AIDS-free generation” by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the “AIDS-free generation” never arrived and was never going to.

    The CDC isn’t prepared to fight epidemics because it’s too concerned with pushing gun control, fighting obesity, and waging social justice. (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)

  • If you calculate Wuhan Coronavirus deaths per capita, America is crushing it.
  • “Beijing Fears COVID-19 Is Turning Point for China, Globalization.” Ya think?

    What Beijing cares about is clear from its sustained war on global public opinion. Chinese propaganda mouthpieces have launched a broad array of attacks against the facts, attempting to create a new narrative about China’s historic victory over the Wuhan virus. Chinese state media is praising the government’s “effective, responsible governance,” but the truth is that Beijing is culpable for the spread of the pathogen around China and the world. Chinese officials knew about the new virus back in December, and did nothing to warn their citizens or impose measures to curb it early on.

    Instead of acting with necessary speed and transparency, the party-state looked to its own reputation and legitimacy. It threatened whistleblowers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and clamped down on social media to prevent both information about the virus and criticism of the Communist Party and government from spreading.

    Unsurprisingly, China also has enablers abroad helping to whitewash Beijing’s culpability. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused for months to declare a pandemic, and instead thanked China for “making us safer,” a comment straight out of an Orwell novel. This is the same WHO that has refused to allow Taiwan membership, due undoubtedly to Beijing’s influence over the WHO’s purse strings.

    Most egregiously, some Chinese government officials have gone so far as to claim that the Wuhan virus was not indigenous to China at all, while others, like Mr. Tedros, suggest that China’s response somehow bought the world “time” to deal with the crisis. That such lines are being repeated by global officials and talking heads shows how effectively China’s propaganda machine is shaping the global narrative. The world is quickly coming to praise the Communist Party’s governance model, instead of condemn it.

    The reality is that China did not tell its own people about the risk for weeks and refused to let in major foreign epidemiological teams, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the world could not get accurate information and laboratory samples early on. By then, it was too late to stop the virus from spreading, and other world capitals were as lax in imposing meaningful travel bans and quarantines as was Beijing.

    Because of China’s initial failures, governments around the world, including democratic ones, now are being forced to take extraordinary actions that mimic to one degree or another Beijing’s authoritarian tendencies, thus remaking the world more in China’s image. Not least of the changes will be in more intrusive digital surveillance of citizens, so as to be able to better track and stop the spread of future epidemics, a step that might not have been necessary if Beijing was more open about the virus back in December and if the WHO had fulfilled its responsibilities earlier.

  • Are Chlorequine or Hydroxychloroquine a cure for the Wuhan Coronavirus? They just got approved for that use so I suspect we’re going to find out. Props to reader Greg Timoney for pointing out this post a few days before the news broke more generally.
  • Debunking Cornavirus lies about the Trump Administration.
  • Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar endorses President Trump’s policies to combat the Wuhan Cornavirus:

    And the moon became as blood… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • CNN praises Trump’s coronavirus leadership. And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth…
  • “After this, whenever after is, we should never let the relationship with the Chinese state go back to normal.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Pretty good thread on what is and isn’t available in various supermarkets in various parts of the country. This week week at my local HEB, chicken was low but ground beef was available, as well as bread and eggs. Lots of things were picked but usually alternates were available if you were willing to switch brands or sizes. Didn’t check toilet paper.
  • Texas-based used bookstore chain Half Price Books has closed all it’s stores due to the coronavirus.

    I’ve bought a number of books there over the years…

  • List of which Austin-area employeers are letting their employees work from home, and which aren’t. I can well understand semiconductor manufacturers like Samsung and AMD keep running their fabs; an idle fab line can lose up to $1 million an hour, and you’re not going to catch coronavirus in a bunny suit in a cleanroom anyway…
  • Nancy Pelosi tried to slip taxpayer-funded abortions into the coronavirus relief bill, because of course she did.
  • Important data reminder:

  • Another professor caught shilling for China.
  • The Austin City Council has decided that there’s no need to clean up homeless encampments in the present crisis. “In the current situation, however, homeless encampments ought to be the first place you look to shut down transmission of infectious diseases. Instead, those are the one place that will be left completely alone.”
  • “GOP wins three special Pennsylvania [State] House races, including a ‘Hillary district.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Harris County finally settles a lawsuit to provide information on foreign nationals illegally registered to vote.

    After two years of hiding public voter data, the state’s biggest county will finally disclose records of foreigners illegally voting in Texas elections, ending a court battle initiated by an election integrity group.

    This week, Harris County settled a lawsuit brought against its top voter registration official and agreed to release all records of noncitizen voters requested by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that specializes in fighting to enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws.

    Snip.

    PILF sued Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Ann Bennett in 2018, after Bennett’s office refused access to records of registered voters identified as noncitizens, as well as actions taken by the county regarding those registrations.

  • “Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients.”

  • Production on Saturday Night Live shut down. I’m so old I remember when it was funny…
  • Christopher Hitchens, anti-identitarian:

    Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:

    People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

  • Cancel culture comes for Woody Allen.

    In the summer of 1992, actress Mia Farrow found out that her adopted daughter Soon-Yi was still romantically involved with Mia’s ex-long-time-boyfriend and collaborator, Woody Allen. According to then-21-year-old Soon-Yi, Mia responded by telling a psychologist that Woody was “satanic and evil,” and that she needed to “find a way to stop him.” Three days later, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Mia’s daughter, accused Allen of molesting her in Mia’s Connecticut house. But when the child’s accusations, which were captured on videotape with reported coaching from Mia, were investigated by the Connecticut State Attorney, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Department of Social Services, no credible evidence could be found to support the allegations. As Kyle Smith reported in a definitive National Review article, Mia’s own nanny “quit the family rather than support Mia’s version of events.” And Dylan’s brother Moses wrote in 2018 that the Mia-Dylan abuse narrative simply made no sense given the architecture of the Connecticut house where the abuse allegedly took place. Yet Woody Allen was nonetheless smeared as a rapist and pedophile. And last week, his publisher, Hachette Book Group, announced it would cancel its deal to publish Allen’s memoirs.

    The accusation always struck me as bunk. You can believe that Allen marrying his girlfriend’s stepdaughter is a creeper move without believing he’s a pedophile.

  • Former Ars Technica writer and Anti-GamerGater Peter Bright found guilty of attempted enticement of a minor for sex.
  • “Trump Says, ‘I Don’t Want Any Americans To Die’, NYT Quotes As ‘I… Want… Americans To Die.'”
  • Funny dog tweet the first:

  • For Dwight:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Pandemic Update

    Sunday, January 26th, 2020

    Ready for an update on the pandemic that might kill us all? For those keeping track of the Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV):

    Total Infected: 2116
    Total Deaths: 56
    Total Recovered: 52
    Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed: 14 (China (including Hong Kong), Thailand, Macau, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, France, South Korea, United States of America, Vietnam, Canada, Napal)

    Slightly over 50% mortality? Not good! And the number of total infected jumped just over 100 while I was writing this. But those numbers may not be accurate anyway.

    Let’s dig into the latest news.

    First up: this handy interactive map of the contagion.

    But! China may be hiding the real extent of the pandemic:

    As the world’s cortisol and stomach acid levels rise every hour in parallel with the number of officially reported Coronavirus infections (and deaths), which as of Saturday morning was roughly 1,400…

    … the world has an unpleasant flashback to 2003 when for weeks Beijing would lie and hide the full extent of the SARS epidemic to avoid risking a social panic. To be sure, this time China has done its best to pretend it has learned from the past and it is so transparent, even President Xi Jinping warned that the country is facing a “grave situation”, and that the spread of the deadly virus is accelerating after holding a special government meeting on the Lunar New Year public holiday.

    Snip.

    In China – which has put over 56 million people on lockdown quarantine – the coronavirus has killed at least 41 people and infected over 1,400 in China. Ominously, a UK researcher predicted that the Coronavirus would infect over 250,000 people in China in under two weeks, which has sparked a renewed fear that China will once again try to underrepresent the true severity of the diseases until it is too late.

    The problem is that even as China theatrically pretends to be so forthright about the extent of the epidemic – if only to avoid panic and chaos over allegations it is again hiding the full impact of the disease – it is doing precisely that, and now we know just how it is doing that: instead of putting down coronavirus as the cause of death for an unknown number of Wuhan casualties, China’s coroners and hospitals merely ascribe death to “viral pneumonia”, case closed.

    Remember the Wuhan infectious diseases lab we talked about yesterday? Well Canada kicked a member of that lab out of the country last year supposedly for transporting deadly strains out of Canada’s only class 4 pathogen lab:

    A researcher with ties to China was recently escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation into what’s being described as a possible “policy breach.”

    Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada’s only level-4 lab on July 5, CBC News has learned.

    A Level 4 virology facility is a lab equipped to work with the most serious and deadly human and animal diseases. That makes the Arlington Street lab one of only a handful in North America capable of handling pathogens requiring the highest level of containment, such as Ebola.

    Security access for the couple and the Chinese students was revoked, according to sources who work at the lab and do not want to be identified because they fear consequences for speaking out.

    Sources say this comes several months after IT specialists for the NML entered Qiu’s office after-hours and replaced her computer. Her regular trips to China also started being denied.

    Snip.

    Qiu is a medical doctor from Tianjin, China, who came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996. She is still affiliated with the university there and has brought in many students over the years to help with her work.

    Currently head of the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program at the lab, Qiu’s primary field is immunology. Her research focuses on vaccine development, post-exposure therapeutics and rapid diagnostics of viruses like Ebola.

    She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba.

    Cheng also works at the lab as a biologist. He has published research papers on HIV infections, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), E. coli infections and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome.

    Also:

    “China and Canada’s relationship right now stems from China using espionage to advance its strategic interests, be that its security interests or its economic interests,” West said. “How Canada deals with that going forward, especially given that we have two Canadians who remain in Chinese custody, will be very interesting to watch.”

    This isn’t the first time police have investigated an incident at the lab.

    In 2009, a former researcher at the lab was convicted of trying to smuggle genetic material from the Ebola virus across the Manitoba-North Dakota border.

    The FBI is also investigating cases involving Chinese researchers in the United States.

    So add “China weaponizing Ebola” to the list of things to worry about.

    If this video from China is any indication, Chinese citizens are appalled at the way their government has handled the crisis:

    The U.S. is closing its embassy in Wuhan and evacuating everyone there.

    A third U.S. case has been confirmed, this one in Orange County, California, adding to confirmed cases in Chicago and Seattle.

    Closer to home, there’s still no word on whether the possible College Station infection is coronavirus or not, and four Texans total have been tested, one of whom tested negative.

    That’s how things stand now. A year from now, either we’ll look back on this as a minor epidemic that ran it’s course until being contained (much as happened with SARS), or else we’ll refer to it as the Thanos Plague that wiped out a goodly portion of humanity.

    Update: Five U.S. cases, including cases in Los Angeles and Arizona.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Texas | No Comments »

    Captain Tripski

    Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

    Well, this isn’t good news:

    A sudden explosion at a Siberian virus research center on Monday reportedly left the facility engulfed in flames, according to several Russian news outlets.

    Firefighters and other emergency personnel were dispatched to the “Vector Institute” located several miles from Novosibirsk – an emergency which was upgraded “from an ordinary emergency to a major incident,” according to RT, due to the research center for virology and biotechnology housed in the facility – however the mayor of Koltsovo said there were no biologically dangerous substances in the area where the explosion occurred, and that the Vector laboratory was not in use at the time.

    The State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology Vector, also known as the Vector Institute, and which is located deep inside Siberia for a reason…… is a biological research center in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk Oblast, Russia. It is analogous to both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Army Chemical and Biological Defense Command. It has research facilities and capabilities for all levels of Biological Hazard, CDC Levels 1-4.

    Of note, Vector is reportedly one of two places worldwide where smallpox is stored.

    The laboratory is known for having developed vaccines for Ebola and hepatitis, as well as for studying epidemics and genera issues surrounding immunology. During the Cold War, it was thought to be part of now-defunct Soviet biological weapons program, meaning that some of the most dangerous strains – including that of smallpox, Ebola, anthrax and certain plagues – are still being kept inside the Institute’s building.

    With that in mind, a local branch of the Emergencies Ministry swiftly responded to the call, sending in 13 fire engines and 38 firefighters, who entered the six-story building minutes after arrival.

    If this ends up destroying the world through an unstoppable pandemic, it’s been nice blogging for you!

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    Posted in Military | 2 Comments »

    MSNBC: A Travel Ban To Ebola Nations is Racist. Democrats: Let’s Institute a Travel Ban

    Tuesday, October 21st, 2014

    MSNBC has repeatedly stated that a travel ban from Ebola-stricken nations is racist:

    Now it turns out that lots of Democrats (especially of the “endangered Senate incumbent” variety) have come out in favor of a travel ban:

    Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire joined the crowd on Monday night, saying through a spokesman that she “strongly supports any and all effective measures to keep Americans safe including travel bans if they would work.” Shaheen said last week she didn’t think a travel ban makes sense, but she is facing heavy criticism from her Republican opponent, former Senator Scott Brown, on the issue. Under pressure from Republicans, Senator Kay Hagan came out in support of a ban late last week, and Senators Mark Pryor and Mark Udall have also called for travel restrictions.

    Even Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat who is not in a particularly close race, changed his stance on Monday and said the government should “seriously consider” a ban.

    Strangely enough, I haven’t heard of anyone on MSNBC calling those Democrats racist. (Then again, I don’t watch it, but I think I would have heard about it had it happened. If they have, let me know…) So, there are two possibilities here:

    1. All the Democrats calling for a travel ban from Ebola-stricken nations are racists.
    2. MSNBC is made up of lying hacks for the Democratic Party

    Of course, I suppose that both could be true.

    And what’s MSNBC going to say if, as widely rumored, Obama himself comes out for a travel ban?

    I think we all know the answer to that…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for October 20, 2014

    Monday, October 20th, 2014

    I was at a writer’s workshop this weekend, so it’s slow going getting back into the swing of things:

  • Early voting in Texas starts today. Find your polling place here.
  • ObamaCare is failing to control costs.
  • Sure, it’s screwed over the many people who have lost their policies or seen their rates skyrocket, but besides Democratic Party functionaries, is there anyone who is happy with ObamaCare? Why yes, there is: Insurance companies
  • Department of Defense hid discovery of chemical weapons in Iraq. In other words: Bush was right, and his critics were wrong…
  • Looks like U.S. air power is finally making a difference in Kobane.
  • On the other hand: “U.S. Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS: Not only are foodstuffs, medical supplies—even clinics—going to ISIS, the distribution networks are paying ISIS ‘taxes’ and putting ISIS people on their payrolls.” Let’s not do that…
  • A sign of how deadly Ebola is: “That Science article written by 58 medical professionals tracing the emergence of Ebola—5 of them died from Ebola before it was published.” (Hat tip: Jerry Pournelle via Instapundit.)
  • The Democratic talking points that “Republican budget cuts” helped create the Ebola outbreak are such obvious lies that the Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios.
  • Speaking of Ebola…

  • “Having Jimmy Carter out-hawk you is like having Joe Biden attack you for being verbally undisciplined…Doing nothing about the Islamic State was Obama’s foreign policy until the domestic political situation made his foreign policy untenable.”
  • Another Democratic Senate candidates refuses to say she voted for Obama. Hey, remember when all those Republican senate candidates refused to say whether they voted for Reagan? Me neither.
  • So just how much did Kay Hagan’s family get from a USDA energy program? USDA: We’re not going to tell you.
  • Democrats bringing in Marc Ellis is pretty much a sign they know they’re already breaking the law.
  • Tom Harkin is not pissing his campaign contributions down Bruce Braley’s rathole of a campaign.
  • Why should blacks turn out for the Democratic Party?
  • Real rape vs. “rape culture”:

  • Why Ezra Klein supports “An Enabling Act for the Salem Rape Culture Trials.”
  • Then Klein doubled down on stupid, proving how deeply over his head he’s in. Again.
  • FIRE‘s VP also takes a wack at Klein’s stupidity.
  • Is there any doubt that, under these new kangaroo court procedures, the innocent Duke lacrosse players would have been expelled labeled sex offenders? I suspect that for Social justice Warriors, this outcome isn’t a bug, but a feature…
  • MoveOn.org has a “Get the money out of politics” ad contest. Unexpected conservative landslide ensues.
  • World’s least shocking news: New York Times reporters follow liberal Twitter feeds almost exclusively. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • The #GamerGate Hate Hoax. But it’s not like Robert Stacy McCain knows anything about online death threats…
  • Has PETA reminded us what insane lunatics they are recently? Well, they’re complaining about Google View using a camel.
  • ISIS kills ISIS.

  • Is your religion approved by the City of Houston, comrade?
  • All about the man recreating the 1918 flu strain that killed 40 million people
  • Remembering Aitazaz Hassan Bangash, whose sacrifice saved hundred from a suicide bomber in Pakistan.
  • This looks like it could be an interesting book.
  • Holly Hansen has the rundown on Round Rock ISD board candidates.
  • SXSW would like to to keep the peasants from exercising their annoying freedoms during their festival. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • What every President drank.

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, ObamaCare, Texas | No Comments »

    Facts About Obama’s New Ebola Czar Ron Klain

    Friday, October 17th, 2014

    Obama has finally twigged to the seriousness of the Ebola crisis and nominated Ron Klain, a doctor who specializes in infectious diseases and taught at Johns Hopkins, as “Ebola Czar.”

    Ha, just kidding! He’s a lawyer and longtime Democratic political operative.

    A few more facts about Klain:

  • He helped approve the loan to Solyndra.
  • He met his environmental activist wife while both were undergraduates at Georgetown.
  • Kevin Spacey (who looks nothing like him) played him in a movie about the Florida recount.
  • He used to be a columnist for Bloomberg View. Really, what screams “I’m an Ebola expert” more than “Keeping Working-Class Voters for Obama” or “How Democrats Can Make Their Case for Raising Revenue”?
  • He has a Twitter feed. You have to go back to October 2 to find a mention of Ebola: a retweet.

    • Did George W. Bush ever attempt such a tone-deaf nomination? Once, when he tried to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Except: 1. He quickly withdrew it, and 2. Miers was at least a lawyer. This is like Bush nominating Miers to be Surgeon General.

    As Instapundit is wont to say, “the country is in the very best of hands.”

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    Posted in Democrats, Obama Scandals | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for Friday, October 3, 2014

    Friday, October 3rd, 2014

    Here’s your Friday LinkSwarm of semi-random linkage goodness:

  • ObamaCare’s war on women: higher premiums, cancelled plans, fewer options.
  • ObamaCare has already cost $73 billion and counting.
  • And the Healthcare.Gov website cost 2.5 times what the Obama Administration told us.

  • The inequality police are worried that we are living in a new Gilded Age. We should be so lucky: Between 1880 and 1890, the number of employed Americans increased by more than 13 percent, and wages increased by almost 50 percent. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the Barack Obama years will not match that record; the share of employed Americans is lower today than it was when he took office, and household income is down. Grover Cleveland is looking like a genius in comparison.

  • The middle class is poorer today than it was in 1989. Thanks, Obama! (Hat tip: Instapundit).
  • World Health Organization refuses to approve experimental drugs for Ebola patients. Because they might get sick…
  • CDC chief thinks a ban on travelers from Ebola-infected countries would be “wrong.” Wrong for who? People who won’t get infected?
  • Real Salon or parody Salon? “The problem with ‘Ebola’: The troubling, xenophobic language of disease.”
  • And if Ebola wasn’t bad enough, Enterovirus D68 has been found in four people who died.
  • And that Enterovirus D68 outbreak may be related to Obama’s decision not to deport illegal aliens.
  • Even 60% of Democrats think Obama is a wuss when it comes to ISIS.
  • U.S. troops fighting in the warkinetic overseas contingency engagement against ISIS are not eligible for campaign medals.
  • NRA’s Political victory Fund has released their ranking of candidates. That’s the one for Texas, but you can select all the other states as well.
  • Liberals are hypocrites when it comes to big bucks “dark money” fundraising.
  • “The places where our self-appointed elites congregate are turning into precisely the places where actual voters are getting thinner and thinner on the ground.”
  • Despite what radical feminists would have you believe, sex crimes on campus are going down, not up.
  • Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott: voting fraud is real.
  • Appeals court finds Texas abortion laws constitutional.
  • “‘He’s from Texas, honey,’ I yelled at the television, startling the cats, ‘That’s not “armed”, that’s “dressed”, you island-dwelling herbivore! Jesus, you cud-chewing Eloi, how do you people open packages? With your teeth, like an animal?” For a bonus, try to work “cud-chewing Eloi” into your next conversation… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • More domestic violence in the MSM than the NFL: ESPN, ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times.
  • Bill Maher goes after liberals being soft on Islam. “Saudi women can’t vote or drive or hold a job or leave the house without a man. Overwhelming majorities in every Muslim country say a wife is always obliged to obey her husband. That all seems like a bigger issue than an evangelical Christian bakery refusing to make gay wedding cakes. ”
  • What happens when you bail out of an SR-71 at Mach 3 and 78,000 feet.
  • Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but something about this film has “suck” written all over it…
  • Two words: Homemade flamethrower.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, ObamaCare, Texas | 2 Comments »