The Biden Recession bites deeper, Soros’ hands are all over the pro-Hamas protests, California fast food wage hikes hurt workers (but help robotics companies), and some Harris County legal followups. Plus some Zack Snyder bashing. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
For the first time in our history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn’t doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. That is the social compact breaking down.
People aged 30-34, 60% of them in 1990 had one child. Now it’s 27%. People are opting out of America, they’re not optimistic about it, they’re not having kids. Young people aren’t having sex. They’re not meeting, they’re not mating. The pool of emotionally and economically viable men shrinks every day. Which lessens household formation.
They (millennials and Gen Z) look up, they see wealth, exceptional wealth, across my generation and people in certain industries, and they are really struggling. Their purchasing power is really going down…
We get very concerned with housing and traffic once we own the housing. Housing permits are sequestered from young people, housing prices have gone from $290,000 to $420,000 in the last 4 years.
So a young person, a house, stocks that I don’t own, skyrocket in value, let’s have Covid relief and flush the markets and take assets way up because a million people dying would be bad, would be tragic if I got less wealthy, and we’re doing it on their credit card.
Bill Maher is, if anything, clever about his timing like most comedians. His rebellion against the woke mob has been carefully crafted in a way that has allowed him to avoid outright cancellation. It’s not as impressive a revolt as Gina Carano’s because the risk today is far less, but at least he’s willing to address the obvious hypocrisy within the social justice crowd and admit that maybe, just maybe, conservatives had it right all along.
His latest surprising monologue covers an issue everyone has known about for years but almost no one in the media has been willing to address seriously because it involves many of their friends in the entertainment industry. Hollywood was quick to jump on the feminist bandwagon at the helm of the “Me Too Movement”, but this only exposed a small part of Hollywood’s degeneracy. Actresses trading sex for favors from producers and executives is hardly that shocking a revelation. The thing they really don’t want to talk about is the industry’s penchant for pedophilia…
The money quote from that video that’s not in the ZeroHedge article: “The left will overlook child-fucking if a guy from the wrong party points it out.”
One of the deepest darkest secrets of film, television and music media is that the business has long been used as a vehicle for child abusers to target kids in an environment where parental supervision is limited (and lots of money can be gained). This reminds us of yet another environment where parental supervision is limited: Public schools. The political left has also targeted these institutions as ample ground for grooming. Why? As Bill Maher notes, the groomers are naturally gravitating to where the children are.
“Leave the kids alone” is a mantra that the woke movement simply refuses to understand or accept. The reason is relatively transparent – Leftists are less inclined to have children of their own, and so, in order to increase their numbers and power they are required to indoctrinate your kids instead. This is all done under the guise of “inclusion” and the “greater good” but the results of this kind of activism are becoming deeply disturbing. Even moderate liberals are noticing that woke behavior is destroying what remains of their image.
Newly unsealed documents in Donald Trump’s classified documents case reveal that the Biden White House colluded with the National Archives (NARA) and the FBI to concoct a case against the former president.
What’s more, Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to conceal this – telling Judge Eileen Cannon in February that Trump’s counsel isn’t entitled to discovery on documents between the White House and NARA, that the court should toss requests for evidence of the alleged coordination, and that the court should deny Trump’s request for evidence related to secure facilities at his residences. Further, Trump’s request for unredacted discovery of materials should be denied.
Seems like a substantial due process rights violation, doesn’t it?
Immediately after Biden’s signature, the Pentagon announced $1 billion of military assistance to Ukraine from the Presidential Drawdown Authority.
Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, ammunition for HIMARS rocket systems, 155mm artillery rounds, 60mm mortary rounds, and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, are among the U.S. capabilities being provided to Ukraine, the Pentagon said.
The foreign-aid legislation will send roughly $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, with $23 billion being used to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles and $11 billion to fund U.S. military operations in the surrounding area.
Israel will receive $26 billion including $4.4 billion to fund its Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defenses. Over $9 billion of the Israel aid will go towards humanitarian relief.
While I support military aid to Ukraine, Republicans should not have dropped their demand that border security be addressed first, nor should we be raising the national debt to do it. And if we’re going to be paying for David’s Sling and Iron Dome, then we better damn well be getting the tech back to use in our own weapons.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
More on that theme:
TERROR: The occupation of college campuses across the US is a well organized and funded operation led by Soros-backed groups including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). The Soros-backed NGOs pay outside agitators $7800 and… pic.twitter.com/6wzpjBksBs
A lot of Jewish friends, especially those who are finally awake after 10/7, say things like "how is this America?" or "It's so scary that this Jew-hatred is happening everywhere." But it's very much NOT "America" and it absolutely is NOT happening "everywhere." In south Florida,…
A lot of Jewish friends, especially those who are finally awake after 10/7, say things like “how is this America?” or “It’s so scary that this Jew-hatred is happening everywhere.” But it’s very much NOT “America” and it absolutely is NOT happening “everywhere.” In south Florida, Jews wear the dinner plate Magen Davids and no one says one word. In rural Michigan, churches put “pray for Israel” on the signs outside. I’m not naive, obviously Jew-haters can and do live anywhere. But they’re only thriving, open, proud, in blue areas and I’m not going to let people ignore that. A lot of liberal Jews are trying to parse things right now. They imagine they are still of the left but just on this one tiny little thing, their right to exist, they disagree. No, my friends. It’s a house of cards and you’re pulling the one from the very bottom. The whole left ideology is corrupt and you’re going to have to face it. You can’t spread the blame around. The hatred, the rage, the violence, the dehumanization is all coming from one side: yours.
When Democrat judges go rogue. “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The state of California seems hellbent on making life a living hell for middle-class residents, as evidenced not just by their soft-on-crime policies but by the minimum wage increase that went into effect at the beginning of April.
Though the $20/hour wage was ostensibly designed to help minimum wage workers, it has had the opposite effect, with fast food restaurants in the Democrat-run state slashing jobs and hours, implementing hiring freezes, and/or bringing in self-serve kiosks to ease the financial burden.
Something else they’ve had to do is raise prices on the food they serve, with prices going up as much as eight percent at some locations.
While the fast-food industry was founded on utilizing technology to increase efficiency, the robot revolution seems to be speeding up.
Last year, Sweetgreen, a Los Angeles-based fast-casual salad chain, debuted its fully automated Infinite Kitchen at a restaurant in Illinois. Like Mezli, the Infinite Kitchen moves bowls down a conveyor belt where its system automatically portions out ingredients. The technology is “expected to cut labor costs in half while boosting throughput,” according to a trade magazine.
Similarly, the founder of Chipotle recently launched a new fast-casual chain, Kernel, that utilizes robots to heat and assemble vegetarian meals.
In December, a CaliExpress burger joint opened in Pasadena, complete with robot arms that cook burgers and fries, and AI-powered kiosks that allow customers to order and pay (and tip, of course), with their faces. Leaders at Miso Robotics, one of the companies behind CaliExpress, have said it is the first restaurant where all the ordering and cooking is fully automated.
The robots “don’t call in sick, they don’t get drunk the night before work and come in with a hangover,” one CaliExpress leader told a local TV station. “They’re a little bit more reliable.”
Other restaurants, including Cajun Crack’n in Concord, Calif., are experimenting with robots that can deliver food, bus tables, and may soon be taking orders. Robot bartenders and baristas are also in the works.
While restaurant sales are forecasted to increase this year and the restaurant workforce is expected to grow, owners are continuing to struggle with slim margins, in part due to food inflation and rising labor costs. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2024 State of the Restaurant Industry report, 98 percent of restaurant operators are struggling with higher labor costs, and 38 percent say they weren’t profitable last year.
Biden Recession + union-backed wage hikes = boom times for robots
El Paso Democratic judge: Eh, there’s not enough evidence to put these illegal aliens on trial for assaulting state troopers. Just let them go. Grand jury: Nope! We’re indicting 141 of them for that riot.
Another Harris County follow-up: DA Kim Ogg announced that the legal cases against Lina Hidalgo staffers will now be prosecuted by the Texas Attorney General’s office because Democratic DA nominee Sean Teare, who defeated Ogg in the March primary, “works for the Cogdell Law Firm, which is defending Hidalgo’s former Chief of Staff Alex Triantaphyllis in the case, and that he had sought and received Hidalgo’s endorsement.”
The Biden Administration wants to waste taxpayer money pushing radical transgenderism in other countries. “The Biden administration wants to train at least 200 activists to advocate for transgender rights in India as part of a program ostensibly designed to advance America’s ‘national interests,’ according to a federal grant posting.”
More Biden Administration madness: “A popular US convenience store chain has been hit with a civil rights lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority job seekers because it requires applicants to have no criminal record.”
A dust storm of political madness is brewing in Phoenix as Grand Canyon University faces the continued threats of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
Christians have watched as the Biden administration attacks biblical views left and right, with a particularly vehement disregard for the sanctity of life and marriage. As such, it can’t be too surprising that Cardona, a part of this leftist administration, has vowed to shut down America’s largest Christian university.
In late October, Grand Canyon University was hit with “a $37.7 million fine brought by the federal government over allegations that it lied to students about the cost of its programs,” The Associated Press reported—an accusation that GCU President Brian Mueller described as “ridiculous.”
Around the same time, Liberty University, America’s second-largest Christian university, also was fined $37 million “over alleged underreporting of crimes.”
Grand Canyon University appealed its fine in November even though a hearing is not expected until January 2025. But the question Mueller has is one of integrity. Is this genuine consideration for the well-being of students, or is this a targeted attack against religious institutions?
“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the two largest Christian universities in the country, this one and Liberty University, are both being fined almost the identical amount at almost the identical time?” GCU’s president speculated in a speech. “Now is there a cause and effect there? I don’t know. But it’s a fact.”
Trader Joe’s organic basil has an extra organic ingredient: salmonella.
Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed with Rebel Moon 2: “Comically inept…boring and tedious..derivative cliched and unoriginal. It takes a special kind of cinematic anti-genius to bring all these things together into one movie. You have to actively work to make a film this bad”
The Biden Recession hits boardgaming. This is not a field I have much experience with, as the last boardgame I bought was the Kickstarter for the Designer Edition of Ogre. But I have noticed a similar decline in what science fiction book collectors are spending. Still, the idea that boardgames manufacturers are close to $1 billion in debt is pretty staggering.
The Onion sold. “The Onion has a new owner: a company called ‘Global Tetrahedron,’ which is a real thing based on a fake entity invented by the satire site more than two decades ago….The Onion’s new owner is Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, a customer-service software company, he announced Thursday on X (formerly Twitter).” When last we read about Jeff Lawson, he was dumping money on the Dem side in the 2020 Texas Senate race, to no effect. Now people are wondering whether they’ll shut down zombie SJW gaming site Kotaku…
Live in Florida? Ron DeSantis would like you to adopt this cute border dog:
Essentia is a lab/shepherd mix who was rescued from the southern border, where the border crisis affects everyone—even our canine friends. Please consider giving Essentia a great home by adopting her from Big Dog Ranch Rescue.https://t.co/2ATqP5DPQNpic.twitter.com/qMO8JD1zUw
For all that Democrats at the state and national level want to force adoption of them, electric cars are no panacea to solving the “climate change crisis” those same Democrats claim will kill us all.
Peter Zeihan explains why.
“A lot of major auto manufacturers are scaling down their plans to make electric vehicles. Ford and GM have both suspended, well, cancelled plans to build a couple new facilities for battery and EV assembly. No changes to their internal combustion engine vehicle plans.”
Tesla production is also slowing. “They’re going to suspend and maybe even cancel the plans for the gigafactory that they were going to be building in Mexico, although that’s very TBD.”
“From an environmental point of view most EVs are at best questionable.”
“The data that says they’re a slam dunk successes assumes that you’re building the EVs with a relatively clean energy mix and then recharging it with 100% green energy, and that happens exactly nowhere in the United States.”
“The cleanest state is California they are still 50% fossil fuel energy, and they lie about their statistics, because they say they don’t know what the mix is for the power that they’re importing from the rest of the country, which is something like a third of their total demand. And the stuff that comes, say, from the Phoenix area in Arizona to the LA Basin which is something like 10GW a day, which is more than most small countries, is 100% fossil fuel.”
“More importantly on the fabrication side, because there are so many more exotic materials and because energy processed to make those materials is so much more energy intensive, all of this work is done in China, and in most places it’s done with either soft coal or lignite.”
“You’re talking about an order of magnitude more carbon generated just to make these things in the first place compared to an IC [integrated circuit, AKA computer chips]. And that means that these things don’t break even on the carbon within a year. For most you’re talking about approaching 10 years or more.”
But Zeihan is leaving the most important variable out of this equation: The smug sense of satisfaction and moral superiority American leftists feel when driving these cars. Isn’t that worth all those extra coal plants?
Number 2: Materials. “These vehicles require an order of magnitude more stuff, more copper, more molybdenum, more lithium, obviously, more graphite. And the energy content required to put those in process is where most of the energy cost comes from.”
“If we’re going to convert the world’s vehicle fleets to these things, there’s just not enough of this stuff on the planet. I’m not saying that we can’t build on in time, but that time is measured in decades.”
“Supposedly we need 10x a much nickel on all the rest. So the stuff just isn’t there. So even if this was an environmental panacea, which it’s not, we would never be able to do it on a very short time frame. You’re talking a century.”
They’re also way more expensive. “This is not a vehicle that’s for most people.”
“And that’s before you consider little things like range anxiety. I’ve rented an EV. It’s real. There just aren’t enough charging stations.”
“EVs are building up on the lots and people just aren’t buying them without absolutely massive discounts and the discounts are now to the point that the whole industry is no longer profitable even with the subsidies that came in from the Inflation Reduction Act.”
“1% of the American vehicle Fleet to EVs, and it looks like we may be very close close to the peak.”
Not every one of his points hits home (there are, in fact, lots of overpriced gas powered cars and trucks sitting on dealers lots, as a lot of YouTube channels will show you), but he’s mostly correct.
Our conservative estimate is that the average EV accrues $48,698 in subsidies and $4,569 in extra charging and electricity costs over a 10-year period, for a total cost of $53,267, or $16.12 per equivalent gallon of gasoline. Without increased and sustained government favors, EVs will remain more expensive than ICEVs for
many years to come. Hence why, even with these subsidies, EVs have been challenging for dealers to sell and why basic economic realities indicate that the Biden administration’s dream of achieving 100% EVs by 2040 will never become a reality.
Here’s Texas Scorecard’s roundup, with input from Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, True Texas Project, and the Huffines Liberty Foundation and links to Texas Legislative Council Analysis of the amendments. The Texan also has a roundup.
Here’s my quick and dirty list of propositions and recommendations.
Proposition 1 (HJR 126): Protecting the right to engage in farming, ranching, timber production, horticulture, and wildlife management. This is the “right to farm” bill, which provides a bulwark against local, state and federal interference in food-growing activities, such as were messed with by some states during the 2020 Flu-Manchu panic (such as Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer banning seed sales. And remember, such interference in people growing food on their own land was blessed by the Supreme Court in Wickard vs. Flburn. Recommendation: Vote FOR Proposition 1.
Proposition 2 (SJR 64): Authorizing a local option exemption from ad valorem taxation by a county or municipality of all or part of the appraised value of real property used to operate a child-care facility. Another subsidy for a favored industry. Recommendation: Vote AGAINST Proposition 2.
Proposition 3 (HJR 132): Prohibiting the imposition of an individual wealth or net worth tax, including a tax on the difference between the assets and liabilities of an individual or family. A wealth tax is total commie bullshit. Recommendation: Vote FOR Proposition 3.
Proposition 4 (HJR 2 from the second special session): Authorizing the legislature to establish a temporary limit on the maximum appraised value of real property other than a residence homestead for ad valorem tax purposes; to increase the amount of the exemption from ad valorem taxation by a school district applicable to residence homesteads from $40,000 to $100,000; to adjust the amount of the limitation on school district ad valorem taxes imposed on the residence homesteads of the elderly or disabled to reflect increases in certain exemption amounts; to except certain appropriations to pay for ad valorem tax relief from the constitutional limitation on the rate of growth of appropriations; and to authorize the legislature to provide for a four-year term of office for a member of the board of directors of certain appraisal districts. Well, that’s a mouthful. I don’t care for the little unrelated special interest payoff shoved in at the end, but do appreciate the tax relief, temporary though it may be. Recommendation: Vote FOR Proposition 4.
Proposition 5 (HJR 3): Relating to the Texas University Fund, which provides funding to certain institutions of higher education to achieve national prominence as major research universities and drive the state economy. Our social justice-infected universities need less money, not more, and if they’re not willing to give up being factories for radical leftwing indoctrination, they need hard reboots. Recommendation: Vote AGAINST Proposition 5.
Proposition 6 (SJR 75): Creating the Texas water fund to assist in financing water projects in this state. While there’s a need for various water projects around the state, “creating fund X administered by agency Y for the benefit of entity Z” type schemes always offer the opportunity of abuse, and the principle of subsidiarity demands that local entities pay for their own damn water projects, not rely on off-general budget slush funds. Recommendation: Vote AGAINST Proposition 6.
Proposition 7 (SJR 93): Providing for the creation of the Texas energy fund to support the construction, maintenance, modernization, and operation of electric generating facilities. While Texas needs more reliable grid, I see nothing about this proposition that would prevent the fund from being used to subsidize more of the unreliable “green” energy lawmakers already seem to love subsidizing. To quote the Huffines Foundation: “Proposition 7 would increase the cost of electricity without improving the reliability of the electric grid. It would also accelerate the trend toward ending market competition and putting Texas politicians and bureaucrats in control of the Texas electricity market. Texans should reject more subsidies for electric generators and let politicians know that grid reliability should be increased by ending renewable energy subsidies.” Recommendation: Vote AGAINST Proposition 7.
Proposition 8 (HJR 125): Creating the broadband infrastructure fund to expand high-speed broadband access and assist in the financing of connectivity projects. More corporate welfare for things the state shouldn’t be subsidizing. Recommendation: Vote AGAINST Proposition 8.
Proposition 9 (HJR 2 from the regular session): Authorizing the 88th Legislature to provide a cost-of-living adjustment to certain annuitants of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. TFR and TTP came out as neutral. While not philosophically opposed, I suggest voting against until there’s an outside audit to confirm that none of this money is being siphoned off into ESG investing. Recommendation: Vote AGAINST Proposition 9.
Proposition 10 (SJR 87): Authorizing the legislature to exempt from ad valorem taxation equipment or inventory held by a manufacturer of medical or biomedical products to protect the Texas healthcare network and strengthen our medical supply chain. More special interests carveouts. Vote AGAINST Proposition 10.
Proposition 11 (SJR 32): Authorizing the legislature to permit conservation and reclamation districts in El Paso County to issue bonds supported by ad valorem taxes to fund the development and maintenance of parks and recreational facilities. El Paso should pay for it’s parks out of general funds, not bonds, since parks don’t generate revenue to pay back bonds. Vote AGAINST Proposition 10.
Proposition 12 (HJR 134): Providing for the abolition of the office of county treasurer in Galveston County. Normally, I’d be for anything that eliminates a government official. But there’s this from TTP: “AGAINST –The current Treasurer campaigned on a promise to eliminate his position, which prompted this legislative action. Since one less government position means less government, we initially supported this amendment. However, we then heard from many conservative activists in the Galveston area who said they don’t want the position to be dissolved because there will be no more accountability to the office and it will be handed to cronies.” I sort of believe this, since my late uncle (who ran a restaurant there) said Galveston was corrupt from top to bottom. No recommendation.
Proposition 13 (HJR 107): Increasing the mandatory age of retirement for state justices and judges. AGAINST. Turnover at least offers the opportunity of breaking up entrenched power.
Proposition 14 (SJR 74): Providing for the creation of the centennial parks conservation fund to be used for the creation and improvement of state parks. More off-budget shenanigans. Vote AGAINST Proposition 12.
Williamson County early voting locations can be found here. Travis County early voting locations can be found here.
Austin usually has hot, dry summers with a high pressure system parked over us for months on end, but this year it’s been the worst since The Great Drought of 2011, where something like 98% of the state was in stage four drought conditions.
Thus far this year, the drought hasn’t been as bad (we had a decent amount of rain in spring), but the temperature has been more extreme, as this week saw a break from Austin suffering a record 45 days over 100°.
Remember that favoring trendy green energy sources like solar and wind over natural gas was a big contributing factor to the 2021 ice storm blackouts. Hopefully Texas lawmakers have learned their lesson, and more reliable baseload power has come online since.
As always, it’s best to be prepared with flashlights, batteries and maybe a portable power source to power fans and medical devices. (That’s the one that gets the best reviews on Amazon. I just got another power source, but since it came free as part of one of those “Redeem your company’s award points for merchandise from this catalog” type deals, I don’t have enough experience with it to recommend it yet.) You might also consider a home generator, like this one, but those are pricey, loud, and I have no direct experience with them, so you probably want to do some research if you’re going that route.
Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts.
That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer.
This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.
Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days.
Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest?
Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel plants from the grid.
These plants are supposed to be replaced by renewables — wind and solar — but wind doesn’t work on windless days, and solar doesn’t keep your air conditioning running on steamy nights.
The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.”
Institute for the Study of War: “Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.” Other sources are reporting modest Ukrainian gains.
A comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory reveals that Meta-owned Instagram has been home to an organized and massive network of pedophiles.
But what separates this case from most is that Instagram’s own algorithms were promoting pedophile content to other pedophiles, while the pedos themselves used coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza.
Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.
The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.” -WSJ
According to the researchers, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as “little slut for you.”
Sellers of child porn often convey the child’s purported age, saying they are “on chapter 14,” or “age 31,” with an emoji of a reverse arrow.
Speaking of Meta, they’re threatening to “pull news feeds on its platforms for California residents if the state legislature passes the Journalism Preservation Act.” That act “requires big tech companies to pay news outlets a journalism usage fee.” For once the pedo-coddlers are right: No one should be forced to subsidize failing social justice-infected newsrooms.
Speaking of pedophiles: “Itasca ISD Superintendent Michael Stevens arrested, charged with online solicitation of a minor.” Maybe parents wouldn’t worry so much about educators trying to screw their children if educators didn’t keep trying to screw their children.
This week in Democrats passing unconstitutional laws that strip citizens of rights: “llinois’s Gov. J. B. “Jumbo Burger” Pritzker signed himself a whale of a state law yesterday that went into effect IMMEDIATELY. And, immediately, restricted Illinois citizens from pursuing constitutional claims against their state government unless they filed the lawsuits in one of two, Democratic approved, state sanctioned, Democratic counties – Cook or Sangamon.” That’s a prima facie violation of the First Amendment “right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Free New York City crack pipe vending machine cleaned out overnight. “Free crack pipe vending machine” sounds like the punchline to a Norm MacDonald joke from the 1990s, but it’s now evidently the policy of New York Democrats.
North Dakota’s Republican Governor is running for President. Burgum is evidently a billionaire after being an early investor in Great Plains Software, which was sold to Microsoft in 2001. The fact he’s close to Bill Gates doesn’t give me a lot of warm fuzzies, and Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved that rich-but-unknown outsiders shoveling money into a Presidential campaign costs you a lot of jack and earn you boatloads of squat. He’s a pretty decent public speaker, but in a blow-dried 80’s executive sense, and he sort of looks like if Richard Belzer had played the Michael Douglas role in Falling Down.
I know nothing more than this. Evidently local media have ignored it as well:
Tweaker idiot takes the 801 bus hostage. All passengers have exited the bus. Driver is in her seat like a mamaluke. APD is nowhere to be found. Viva la leftists. pic.twitter.com/EpwDhrtCUX
— Blastbeat Industries (@BlastbeatATX) June 9, 2023
“Due To High Crime, Mafia Closes Its Chicago Office.” “How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It’s insane!”
Public Utility Commission (PUC) Chairman Peter Lake and Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) CEO Pablo Vegas sent a clear message to the Texas Legislature on Wednesday: tweak the electricity market so that natural gas generation can be supplemented, or continue to face problems in the summer heat.
I just have to pause here to note that “Pablo Vegas” sounds like an Anthony Weiner pseudonym.
“Operationally, the ERCOT grid is ready for this summer,” Lake said, unveiling the 2023 Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) report. “The reliability reforms that were put in place have been tested and continue to work. We’ve made the grid we’ve got as strong as possible using every tool available.”
The SARA report, as Lake stated, is an estimate of electricity demand and supply for certain scenarios based on past data, not a forecast of what is to come this summer.
It estimates peak demand to reach 82,739 megawatts (MW); for comparison, 1 MW can power about 200 homes during the peak demand hours of the late summer afternoon through evening. To cope with that demand, the state expects to have 97,000 MW of capacity available — two-thirds of which is thermal generation, combined with 13 percent from solar and 11 percent from wind.
However, Lake tinged the grid’s readiness with an omen.
“Data shows for the first time that peak demand this summer will exceed the amount we can generate from on-demand dispatchable power,” Lake warned. “There is no longer enough dispatchable generation to meet the demand of the ERCOT system. So, we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on.”
The State of Texas is adding about 300,000 people per year, which means a larger and larger demand for electricity on the state’s largest power grid.
“In this new reality, our risk goes up as the sun goes down,” Lake added.
Vegas likened the situation to a car: the metaphorical vehicle — the physical grid itself — is up to par on maintenance, but it lacks the necessary fuel — the electricity supply — to power its full trip ahead.
Lake said that ERCOT’s dispatchable supply fleet only grew 1.5 percent from 2008 to 2022. During that time, its renewable footprint grew substantially with now more than 30,000 MW of wind power installed and more than 10,000 MW of solar.
The influx of renewables is driven primarily by the Production Tax Credit — a federal subsidy that pays renewable generators 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour produced — which has given wind and now solar an advantage over thermal generation sources. ERCOT has 31,000 MW of solar generation in the queue along with 5,000 MW of wind.
In contrast, only 800 MW of dispatchable power has been added in the last year, according to Lake.
So thanks to renewables, blackouts may be in the future of Texans this summer.
The Biden administration is announcing a climate rule that would require most fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 — or shut down.
The highly anticipated regulation being unveiled Thursday morning is just the latest step in President Joe Biden’s campaign to green the U.S. economy, an effort that has brought a counterattack from Republicans and coal-state Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s on top of efforts by Biden’s agencies to promote the use of electric cars, subsidize green energy sources like solar and wind and tighten regulations on products including gas stoves and dishwashers.
The draft power plant rule from the Environmental Protection Agency would break new ground by requiring steep pollution cuts from plants burning coal or natural gas, which together provide the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity. To justify the size of those cuts, the agency says fossil fuel plants could capture their greenhouse gas emissions before they hit the atmosphere — a long-debated technology that no power plant in the U.S. uses now.
As an alternative, utilities could hasten their decisions to shut down their aging coal plants, a trend that has already gathered speed in the past two decades. The rule allows plants that agree to close in the first half of the 2030s to avoid most or all of the pollution-reduction mandates.
Safe, reliable nuclear and fossil fuel powered energy is anathema to the Democratic Party because they can’t rake off enough graft from it. Unless you’re willing to let them shove their disasterous green energy programs down your throat, they want you deplorables sitting in the dark.
Jordan Peterson always makes a great Joe Rogan guest, and the new interview they did last week is no exception.
Discussing the Twitter files, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, victimhood identity politics, postmodern theory, and falseness of reducing everything to power dynamics.
On the World Economic Forum:
“Globalist Utopian Tyranny” is a great phrase.
They follow in the wake of “Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it.”
There then follows a devastating take-down of the immortality of pushing 350 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of death through higher energy prices in the hope that maybe 100 years from now life for the poor will be better. I encourage you to watch the entirety of this segment for that.
“It’s a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It’s like there’s a bit of a moral hazard in, that don’t you think?”
“Do you want to save the planet, or do you want the power? And let’s let’s put the second one first, because the probability that you’re a saint or the messiah is pretty damn low. So that’s the danger of the Davos crowd.”
I suspect I’ll be putting up more snippets from this interview sometime this week…
The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.
“The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
“We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
“Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
“Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
“They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”
The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
“They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
“They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
“Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
“Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
“One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”
Next: Why EVs are a disaster.
“All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”
To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:
There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.
This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?
Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.
Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
“I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
“They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
“Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
“The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
“The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
“We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
“El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
“All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”
“Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
“Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.
He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:
Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.
And he’s not a fan of Crypto:
Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”
The combination of pretending to transition to a green energy future combined with dependence on Russian gas and the fallout of the Russo-Ukrainian War has Germany looking at some very tough choices:
“Europeans have chosen to largely remove natural gas from their industrial space, and so we are seeing huge amounts of industrial closures across the entire industrial space.”
“Natural gas isn’t just part of their electricity system, it’s part of their petrochemical system, which is what makes their manufacturing sector possible. So in shutting all this stuff down the Europeans are choosing, maybe not consciously, but they are choosing a general de-industrialization trend for the entire continent.”
“No one is making nitrogen-based fertilizer in Europe anymore. No one is smelting aluminum anymore. A lot of the steel foundries are shutting down.”
And so far it’s a relatively mild winter in Europe. Next year will be worse.
Zeihan talks about how Germany “fudges” some of it’s green energy pledges. (In a previous video he mentioned some bit of legerdemain where they don’t count fossil fuel baseload power that spins up to take over for solar at night.) So exactly what has Germany’s much-vaunted green energy programs accomplished? Not much.
In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050.
Sure, Germany hasn’t managed to transition away from fossil fuels, but they have managed to make their energy infrastructure expensive and unreliable…
Ukraine fights back, Biden isn’t going to do jack about it, Kyle Rittenhouse is going to sue everyone, inflation soars, the Canadian “emergency” is ended, disaster looms for Democrats, and Ilhan Omar gets an unusual challenger. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
While reports of the battle are confused and preliminary, it appears that Ukrainian forces counterattacked, shot down some Russian helicopters, and have so far been able to prevent the Russians from landing reinforcements. Initial claims that the Russian force at the airfield had been “destroyed” were later clarified; it now seems that the battle at Gostomel is continuing. It’s easy to understand how crucial this battle is, simply by looking at a map. If the Russians could gain control of the Gostomel airfield, they could score a quick knock-out of the Ukrainian capital as part of what is being called their “decapitation” strategy.
Russian news services are claiming they’ve taken the airfield, but that may be stale news or propaganda.
Ukrainian forces take up positions in Kiev. Also: “Reports that the Ukrainian military has delivered a strike on a Russian airfield in Millerovo, Rostov Oblast have now been confirmed.”
The invasion of Ukraine by the armed forces of Russia at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders marks the first time since 1945 that Russia has engaged in a conventional war with a near-peer nation.
Ukraine isn’t restive Warsaw Pact nations, it isn’t Afghanistan, it isn’t Chechnya, it isn’t Georgia, and it isn’t Crimea.
The conflict launched by Putin is on a far grander scale than the invasion of Crimea in 2014, launched as Ukraine’s last pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from office in a popular uprising.
Putin, by choosing to reach beyond the ethnic-Russian majority separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas Basin, has decided to end the independent, Western-looking Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a pro-Putin quisling.
And while the fog of war, some deliberate mis-and disinformation operations by the combatants, and the far-from-perfect filter of Western media leaves much unknown at this time, what is known is that Zelenskyy is still in power a day after the Russian offensive. Further, the Ukrainian military appears to be taking a toll on the Russians invading from three sides: south across the Pripyat Marshes from Russian satellite Belarus; west from Russia, including Donbas; and north from the Black Sea in the region of Odessa and Transnistria, a Russian client breakaway state in Moldavia.
Modern conventional war is extremely difficult to do well. Imagine being a conductor of an orchestra, all while the audience was lobbing soccer balls at you and your musicians as you perform J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D — that’s modern warfare. Putin is attempting a highly complicated operation over large distances in the face of a determined foe. Further, he’s doing so with an army largely composed of conscripts serving for only one year.
Since Putin has decided to oust the Ukrainian government, this means that every day Zelenskyy remains in office is another day that adds to Ukrainian national confidence to resist — and another day that Putin looks to have miscalculated.
A Russian Military Ship telling 13 Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender. They were met with a response of " Russian military Ship, go fuck yourself."
Both the EU and the Biden Administration offer sanctions they admit will not do Jack Squat.
FULL DOCUMENT: This is the general license that US Treasury has issued exempting any "energy" related dealings from the sanctions imposed on some of the biggest Russian banks. It's so wide ranging that even includes "wood" as a form of energy exempted | #Ukraine#OOTTpic.twitter.com/3X5t0LFi3W
WATCH: AP reporter roasts Biden's State Department spokesman over the "frankly huge" list of exemptions in Biden's sanctions on Russia.pic.twitter.com/gzAWB4LwMg
Taiwan joins sanctions against Russia, including their semiconductor industry. I don’t know if any fabless Russian chip design company gets their chips fabbed at TSMC, so I’m not sure how badly this hurts their economy in the long run.
It is the West’s wacko environmentalists who handed Russian President Vladimir Putin the leverage and money to invade Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine this week.
Without these wackos, Putin would be just another gangster in charge of a crumbling country, and maybe one on the verge of a revolution to depose him.
But the facts are the facts are the facts, and the facts are these… Thanks to the West’s environmentalists, those smug greenies who are more concerned with carbon output than world peace, this gangster controls much of the energy going to the European Union (E.U.).
Thanks a lot, Greta…
A great mystery:
Under Carter, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Under Obama, Russia took over Crimea. Under Biden, Russia is invading the rest of Ukraine. Russians do land grabs when Democrats control the White House. Democrats get pissed when you point it out. But it is still true.
Biden is demonstrably more hostile to American oil and gas companies than he is to Russian companies, having frozen oil and gas leasesdespite a court order otherwise.
Thanks to Biden’s inflation, the cost of everything is going up. “70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”
Fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.
Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:
It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again…
Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers, seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia, offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . . we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand years.”
To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press…and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…
Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”
The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?
She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother.”
Angeleno’s tax dollars at work:
A city audit found LA spends $837,000 to house one homeless person. Perhaps this is why Newsom has done everything he can to block my statewide audit.
China is getting a good return on its investment in the Biden clan: “DOJ shuts down China-focused anti-espionage program. The China Initiative is being cast aside largely because of perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and U.S. residents of Chinese origin as disloyal.” We can’t let national security stand in the way of political correctness…
In what may be remembered as one of the greatest miracles of all time, it seems that an upcoming American election cycle is set to put an end to the great COVID pandemic in regions that have been clinging to “mitigation” tactics despite them being proven ineffective long ago. What science couldn’t do for blue state governors, politics is about to. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country has already adopted an “endemic” approach to COVID. In my Indiana community, for instance, school systems have been in-person and maskless for well over a year.
A combination of experience and common sense led local officials to recognize that while COVID was a serious virus, and an often-times unpleasant condition to endure, we just weren’t experiencing the kind of mortality rates or critical hospitalizations that would require the suspension of normal life. If I was guessing, I would say that there are more counties, cities, and communities in the United States like mine than not.
While mainstream media may be drawn like a moth to the bright lights of urban areas with all the restrictions, mandates, and panic-fueled policies enacted there, most Americans have been “living with” the virus for a long time now.
In fact, if my community is any bellwether for the nation, most Americans are already wondering why anyone is still attempting to take a non-endemic approach at this point. The virus has proven itself to be, like all other viruses, prone to seasonal surges that are largely unaltered by our theatrical mitigation techniques. Not that anyone with their head screwed on straight ever thought there was value in wearing a porous cloth mask while standing up at a restaurant, then taking it off while sitting down, but the comical nonsense of mask histrionics is now widely appreciated as a goofy spectator sport. Behold:
So silly. And so as opinion polls continue showing that an ever-increasing number of Americans are infuriated by this nonsense, and that they are done with all the aggressive pandemic restrictions that proved unnecessary a long time ago, a public pivot of massive proportions is underway amongst the political class.
Whether it’s big blue state governors like California’s Gavin Newsom hilariously announcing that he will be transitioning his state to the country’s first “endemic” virus policy – meaning they’re going to start doing some things that Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Indiana, and so many others have been doing for over a year – or whether it’s blue city school boards like San Francisco’s being recalled by angry voters for their abusive and needless shutdown and masking policies, it’s clear where we’re headed.
Despite that, the midterm news for Democrats is not good.
Democrats know that they should be preparing for a brutal showing in this November’s midterm elections. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race last year — and, more to the point, the substance and style of his successful campaign — were the first sign of it.
But the hits have kept on coming. In San Francisco last week, two progressive parents succeeded in their campaign to oust three school-board members for being . . . too progressive. Irked initially at how long it was taking for area schools to reopen for in-person learning during the pandemic, these two single parents did some digging and discovered even more to be upset about: an enormous budget shortfall, an intensive campaign to rename dozens of school buildings, and the replacement of a merit-based admissions program with a diversity-minded lottery, among other issues.
Suggesting just how central education has become to politics, San Francisco’s intensely progressive mayor, London Breed — who last fall violated her own mask mandate at a concert and defended herself by saying she was “feeling the spirit” — endorsed the school-board recall effort.
“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the board of education doing their fundamental job,” Breed said after the results were in. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. And that did not occur. . . . We failed our children. Parents were upset. The city as a whole was upset, and the decision to recall school-board members was a result of that.”
San Francisco–based writer Gary Kamiya suggests in a piece for the Atlantic that the results of the recall seem to confirm the conservative narrative. Kamiya writes that conservatives have argued “that the Democratic Party is out of step not just with Republicans, but with its own constituents. . . . Progressives rejected such conclusions, insisting that the recall was simply about competence and was driven by an only-in-San-Francisco set of circumstances.” Kamiya concludes that the best way to read the outcome is “closer to the conservative view.” “At a minimum,” Kamiya writes, “the recall demonstrates that ‘woke’ racial politics have their limits, even in one of the wokest cities in the country.”
Over in Texas, meanwhile, failed Senate candidate and failed presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke is gearing up to become a failed gubernatorial candidate, too. Running against incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, O’Rourke was most recently seen trying to pretend that he isn’t a fan of radical gun-control measures.
Asked about the promise he made during his run for president that he would “take away AR-15s and AK-47s,” O’Rourke attempted a hard about-face.
“I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” he said. “What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. I want to make sure that we protect our fellow Texans far better than we’re doing right now. And that we listen to law enforcement, which Greg Abbott refused to do. He turned his back on them when he signed that permitless-carry bill that endangers the lives of law enforcement in a state that’s seen more cops and sheriff’s deputies gunned down than in any other.”
As Charlie Cooke has noted, this is utter tripe. It also isn’t working. The latest poll of the race from the Dallas Moring News has Abbott up by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent. O’Rourke himself remains underwater with voters: Only 40 percent view him favorably, while 46 percent say they have an unfavorable view of the candidate.
Republicans win a Jacksonville City Council race:
It's a citywide race, and this result will more or less match the average partisanship of the city for the past decade or so. But this was a Dem-held seat, and losing it in this fashion has to hurt the local party. And doesn't portend well in other races.
Kyle Rittenhouse is finally ready to sue, including lawsuits against Whoopi Goldberg and Cenk Uygur. I hope he bankrupts anyone who called him a white supremacist.
Former Houston Rockets draft bust Royce White is running for Congress as a Republican against “Squad” member Ilhan Omar. Hopefully he can be on the campaign trail more than he was on the floor for the Rockets…
