More Democrats behaving badly and Kazakhstan in flames. Enjoy the first LinkSwarm of 2022!
How Democrats running the New York City Department of Correction turned control over to the correctional officers union and they let the inmates run the jail.
For years, mayors and correction commissioners have allowed jail managers to place the least experienced officers in charge of detainee dorms and cells, posts that are critical for keeping order but viewed by many as the least desirable assignments in the system. The managers, who base staffing decisions on seniority, department custom and office politics, have also filled the jobs with guards who have fallen out of favor with administrators, reinforcing the idea that they are punishment posts to be avoided.
When those guards in the housing units have fallen ill, gotten injured or been barred from contact with incarcerated people for other reasons, other rules adopted by city leaders have made finding replacements unusually difficult.
Every mayoral administration since John Lindsay’s in the 1970s has signed union contracts granting unlimited sick leave to guards and the city’s other uniformed workers. And records and interviews suggest that abusing it can carry few consequences: It can take more than a year for the department to bring discipline charges against an officer who is caught abusing sick leave.
On a Thursday in October, one Rikers jail had 572 guards on its work schedule — more than enough to fill the 363 open posts.
But 17 guards were serving suspensions or had stopped showing up for work.
Another 117 guards were on vacation, long-term leave or off doing temporary duties.
Then there were those marked “indefinitely sick” — 136 guards who had been out for 30 days or more but were still on the payroll thanks to generous union benefits.
That tipped the balance, leaving just 302 guards to fill the 363 posts, and forcing double shifts across the jail.
When they have been told that such policies could lead to dangerous breakdowns, city leaders have not acted on the warnings. As recently as February 2018, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top criminal justice adviser presented the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, with a memo that stated that high rates of absenteeism among guards might be driving a rise in jail violence — and recommended steps to stabilize staffing and reduce violent incidents. The de Blasio administration took none of them, and the memo has not been made public.
And when conditions have spiraled out of control on Rikers in recent years, jail managers have favored quick fixes over deeper policy changes. Under scrutiny in 2014 amid reports of brutality by guards, the managers concentrated members of the Bloods gang in some units, the Crips in others, and still other gangs in other areas, hoping the practice would cut down on fights among rival groups. It did not work. Not only did incidents where guards used force rise, but some gangs were positioned to take over housing areas when the pandemic swept through and caused staffing problems.
The mismanagement over the years has left the people charged with running the jail system feeling powerless.
Putting criminals in charge of things does seem like the Democratic Party’s go-to move in a lot of areas…
For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.
The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.
It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population in that way, deciding what can open and what can’t, who must work and who must not, what we can and can’t do, all based on our station in life.
It now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.
That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they’re being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, haven’t protected against infection.
All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still, the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization, much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.
A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with COVID, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: Yes, and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it’s time we change our tune.
Snip.
The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That’s a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean, while the virus circulated season after season.
It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that didn’t happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.
Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it’s suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.
Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people—based on one pathogen—contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.
In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”
Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.
Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American Left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.
A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.
Trump has has taken up permanent rent-free residence in their heads: “MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House’ mentions Trump more than twice as often as Biden.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“I find some kind of sign every single day that someone has been on my ranch,” says Schuster. “Every time I leave my house, there’s some kind of indication that someone has been on my ranch.”
Law enforcement has been called to the Schuster property five times in the past year to respond to incidents where illegal border crossers have knocked on their door or approached their house.
Operation Lone Star, a state effort that has seen additional Texas DPS officers sent to border counties, has been a blessing to the county, according to Schuster, and a relief to the local sheriff and his small crew of deputies. Schuster believes that the DPS patrols on the highways have been a deterrent to the illegal border crossers who use the highways and then bail out to run onto private property.
However, Schuster says the problems will persist for as long as this open border policy continues.
“I don’t know all the politics of it and how all that works, but we’re gonna have to do something, because my parents worked hard to buy this land. People have said, ‘Well, if you’re scared on your own land, you just move.’ It doesn’t work that way,” said Schuster. “This is our land. And they worked hard, and they bought it, and you can’t give up on that land. It’s your legacy. It’s your legacy for your children. And so, it’s not like you just have a house in town, and you could just sell it and move to another community. When you have a ranch, you can’t do that.”
Schuster added, “In the last year, our life has been turned completely upside down. It is something that we just had never foreseen.”
She said that beginning last January, “the number of illegals coming through has been unbelievable. The group sizes are big. You know, growing up on a ranch, around ranching, we’ve always had illegals coming through. Never saw women before, or children. Men come through, maybe two or three; if you saw [a] group of five, that was a big group. We’ve got groups of like 45 coming through.”
The sizable groups are not the only issue with this increased traffic. “They’re very disruptive. We’ve never seen that before,” said Schuster. “The people that have come across primarily from Mexico for work, going from point A to point B looking for a job, did not intentionally tear up our water systems. The debris that they’re leaving behind is unbelievable. I’m picking up trash on my ranch daily, they’re leaving gates open, livestock is getting mixed up, or maybe water gaps between me and my neighbor.”
An incident over the summer left Schuster shocked when some of the illegal border crossers intentionally broke a water line. “I lost about 10,000 gallons of water this summer,” said Schuster. “It probably took me at least six weeks to gain that much water back.”
According to Schuster, “they could’ve reached over—it wasn’t enclosed—and gotten a drink. But they just took a rock and beat this line until they broke it. That’s mean. That’s just malicious.”
Security and safety have taken major precedence in the Schuster family’s life. Game cameras on the doors, rarely going out in the pre-dawn hours, working out of an enclosed truck instead of an open UTV on the ranch, and never leaving the house without a pistol have all become standard practice for the whole family.
Twitter user TimDCpolitico took Florida’s voter rolls from March 31 of 2020 and compared them to the latest figures. The results, he says, are “jaw-dropping,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe them.
Out of over 14 million registered voters, last year Democrats held the edge with 37.38% of registrations compared to the GOP’s 35.28%. (The remaining four million or so — around 26% — were independents or members of minor parties.)
Democrats held a two-point advantage, but higher Republican turnout has made the state safely red in the last two presidential elections.
Snip.
66 out of Florida’s 67 counties shifted towards the red. Three hardcore Democrat counties — Broward (!!!), Jefferson, and Madison — might in some races be considered additional battlegrounds Dems will have to defend.
A fourth, Calhoun, went from dark blue to light red.
That’s impressive.
What should have Democrats strapping on a pair of Extra Absorbent Depends (Endorsed by Presidentish Joe Biden!) is that they lost more than 50,000 registrations in the same time period — even as the state’s population has grown.
Republicans have gone all in on South Texas, but they’re not content for domination of state and congressional seats. They want local government, too.
One GOP group, Project Red Texas, spent the weeks before the December filing deadline to run in the March primary election traveling the region and recruiting candidates to run for county offices, offering to pay their filing fees. The group ended up helping get 125 candidates on the ballot across 25 counties, according to its leader, veteran party operative Wayne Hamilton. He said the group paid for “well over” half the filing fees.
The first step on the road to winning is actually showing up.
Investors may want to think twice about putting their money to work in China, contends DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach.
“China is uninvestible, in my opinion, at this point,” the bond king told Yahoo Finance in an interview at his California estate. “I’ve never invested in China long or short. Why is that? I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the relationship between the United States and China anymore. I think that investments in China could be confiscated. I think there’s a risk of that.”
Snip.
The ongoing crackdown on the operations of big Chinese internet companies such as Didi by the government has rocked investors in the space. The clamping down on the country’s biggest tech names has now led to a tightening of listing requirements by the Chinese government.
To that end, Didi plans to delist from the New York Stock Exchange later this year not too long after a disastrous IPO (in large part because of Chinese authorities).
Meanwhile, the long reach of China’s government also hammered after-school tutoring companies such as TAL Education Group — shares of the name plunged about 95% in 2021.
All of this is in addition to China’s ongoing fight against the rise of cryptocurrencies.
The investing headwinds in the country show up in how the country’s key indexes performed in 2021.
For instance, the Golden Dragon Index — which tracks the performance of mid- and large-cap Chinese stocks — plunged about 49% in 2021. The Wall Street Journal points out the total value of China’s onshore stocks rose 20% in 2021, underperforming the S&P 500’s advance.
And none of that touches the insanely overleveraged real estate market there…
Another day, another high-profile Kamala Harris staffer leaving. “Vincent Evans, the veep’s deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, has quit to take on a role on Capitol Hill.”
Austinites (and anyone who uses metered parking) beware:
🚨Scam Alert🚨 APD Financial Crimes detectives are investigating after fraudulent QR code stickers were discovered on City of Austin public parking meters. People attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and made a payment. pic.twitter.com/Gb8gytCYn7
PayPal just informed me that they have permanently banned my account. Without giving an explicit reason why, the supervisor was extremely rude and implied that it had everything to do with my politics.
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) January 5, 2022
Seeing Collins contorted in a wheeled chair, like Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House, while his two bandmates swayed on either side of him, painlessly upright in elegant, soft grey fashions like Farrow and Ball in human form, bordered on the grotesque. It resembled a satire on the ineradicable nature of privilege and class, rather than evidence of the dynamic tension every band needs to achieve creative synthesis. It was everything the NME said punk disdained. But I can’t imagine John Lydon taking any pleasure in this at all.
To say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions. And, frankly, I’m not qualified to offer much insight into either. But I suspect that he is at least more willing to let us see his human side now. His wife of over 40 years, Nora Forster, has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three and he has committed himself to her full-time care. In 2010, Forster’s daughter Ariane—better known as Ari Up, lead singer of female post-punk outfit The Slits—died of breast cancer aged just 48. Lydon knows something about human frailty, mortality, and loss.
I have the sense that after many years, not on the field of combat but behind the bare timber of the cheapest proscenium arch, the paint is wearing off both these Punch dolls. Both were iconic and pugnacious in their day, but human, all too human, too. Today, it is not prog, let alone Genesis, that attracts Lydon’s ire, but what he perceives to be the betrayal of his ex-bandmates, who have sold out the Pistols’ musical legacy to a TV show—people that do indeed, as he sneered in PiL, see it as nothing more than product.
Lydon was years ahead of his time, on everything from the Savile row to the shark-infested waters in which he was swimming, but I doubt he will take much pleasure in seeing a fellow grafter—and émigré—working through pain to give his fans a chance to say one last farewell, to him and to each other. He might even feel a twinge of grudging kinship. They may not have reached the churchyard quite yet, but their paths are beginning to converge, as all must in the end. And, meanwhile, as the years wear on, who can be sure Her Majesty—God Save Her—won’t bury the bloody lot of them?
Ted Cruz has had a weird week. After the braindead boner of calling January 6 riot participants “domestic terrorists,” he had to issue a huge Mea Culpa on Tucker Carlson. Oh, and he also issued this:
Due to popular demand from angry libs, in 2022 we’ll be putting out a swimsuit calendar. https://t.co/Lr1aDZIv3H
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I’m going to coral all the Afghan Debacle news for separate post, probably next week. In the meantime: Texans are winning political battles, and Australians are losing their damn minds.
Texas finally passes the election integrity bill. Now on to the governor’s signature. Hopefully this will prevent the mass vote-harvesting and manufacturing shenanigans Democrats are so fond of…
Speaking of Democrats, they seem to be waking up to the fact that Biden and Harris suck and will drag them down:
We hear an enormous amount these days about the problem of “Flight 93-ism” on the American right, but a great deal less about the concomitant panic that has led the Democratic Party to behave as if last year’s election represented its last gasp. Since Joe Biden took office in January, his party has been busy cramming everything it has ever wanted to do into a series of multi-trillion-dollar, must-pass bills; hawking a patently unconstitutional elections-supervision bill that would hand it full control of America’s democratic infrastructure; and engaging in a frenzied attempt to pack the Supreme Court, discredit the Senate, abolish the filibuster, and add new states to the union by simple majority vote. If you ask for an explanation of this preposterous behavior, you will be told that it is the product of the Republican Party’s dastardly scheme to implement Jim Eagle. If you look more closely, however, you’ll sense something else: fear — that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.
This fear is well-founded. Joe Biden is an aging, incompetent mediocrity whose main claim to fame, like the Delta Tau Chi fraternity from Animal House, is his long tradition of existence. Kamala Harris, his vice president, is a widely disliked authoritarian whose last run for the White House was stymied by her inability to garner support from more than 3 percent of the Democratic-primary electorate. If, prior to the disaster that was the last fortnight, the Democrats hadn’t sensed that they’d tied their party to a pair of losers, they sure as hell must have now.
Explanation of why the 25th Amendment won’t saved them snipped.
And why should it, given that getting rid of President Biden would not actually fix the Democrats’ problems? Joe Biden’s approval rating is currently around 46 percent in national poll averages — not great for a president in his seventh month in office, but dramatically better than Kamala Harris’s rating, which stands at just 37 percent. Per NBC, Harris inspires “very positive” feelings in just 19 percent of the population while prompting “very negative feelings” among 36 percent — a feat that makes her the most strongly disliked VP since records began. If, today, the Democratic Party decided to cut its losses and replace Biden with Harris, it would be selecting a new president who was nearly ten points less popular than the old one. This would be absurd.
Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have to come during the next set of presidential primaries.
Like many, I’ve wondered who’s actually pulling the strings in the Biden White House. (It’s clearly not Sundown Joe.) I’ve seen various people suggest it’s actually Ron Klain, Valerie Jarrett or Jill Biden. Former Trump intelligence director Richard Grenell says it’s Susan Rice:
Rice, who served as national security adviser under President Obama, was tapped last December by President Biden to take charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council. It is in that role that Grenell believes she is exerting her influence.
“Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over… [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] does not understand what’s going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention,” he said.
Rice is one of the many officials from the Obama administration that landed jobs in the Biden White House. There was speculation that she would be his running mate and when that never materialized, secretary of state.
She is among the wealthiest individuals in the Biden White House, with a net worth estimated to be at least $37.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. She resigned last December from her role as a member of the board of directors at Netflix.
For all the (justifiable) heat the 87h Legislature has taken over its failure to deliver on conservative priorities, it seems to have written the Texas Heartbeat Act in a way that makes it difficult to challenge in court:
[Supreme Court Justices] denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the clarity, courage, and commitment to the rule of law that the five justices demonstrated in the midst of intense fury from the Left — and in the face of an exasperating cop-out by Chief Justice Roberts — are heartening indeed.
Enacted in May, the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as S.B. No. 8, prohibits a physician from performing an abortion (other than in a medical emergency) “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” The fetal heartbeat is usually detectable at six weeks of gestation. The Act specifies an effective date of September 1.
In an ingenious effort to prevent abortion providers from blocking the Act from taking effect, the Act prohibits state officials from enforcing the Act in any way. It instead authorizes any private person to bring a civil action in state court against anyone who performs a post-heartbeat abortion or who knowingly aids or abets a post-heartbeat abortion. (Federal restrictions on standing — on who can sue — in federal court do not apply in state court.) It entitles successful plaintiffs to at least $10,000 in damages for each violation as well as to injunctive relief and attorney’s fees.
Because state officials are barred from enforcing the Act, the usual path that abortion providers would take to prevent the Act from becoming effective — suing those officials to prevent them from enforcing the Act — is a dead end. Instead, abortion providers would be able to challenge the constitutionality of the Act only if and when private individuals pursued civil actions against them. (And they’d have to confront the widely overlooked fact that the Act itself explicitly confers on abortion providers an “affirmative defense to liability” in the event they demonstrate that a lawsuit brought under the Act “impose[s] an undue burden.”)
In mid July, nearly two months after enactment of the Act, various abortion providers sued eight defendants in federal court: the Texas attorney general and four other state officials, a state district-court judge and a district-court clerk from Smith County (one of 254 counties in Texas), and a pro-life activist. But their lawsuit faced overwhelming jurisdictional hurdles. Among other things, none of the defendants was threatening to enforce the Act against them (so how was there even a live controversy?), and all seven of the governmental defendants had strong claims to sovereign immunity.
To make a long story short, when federal district judge Robert L. Pitman last week ruled against the governmental defendants’ sovereign-immunity claims, the governmental defendants exercised their right to immediately appeal the ruling against them to the Fifth Circuit. Pitman then realized that he had lost authority to proceed against the government defendants and had to cancel the preliminary-injunction hearing against them. (The Left viciously faults a Fifth Circuit panel of conservative judges for the cancellation that Obama appointee Pitman had ordered.) The abortion providers suddenly found that they had dug themselves into a deep ditch: The September 1 effective date was fast approaching, and they had indefinitely sidetracked their own effort to obtain a preliminary injunction.
On August 30, the abortion providers made a desperate request to the Supreme Court to block the Act from taking effect. Set aside that they had waited two-and-a-half months to file their preliminary-injunction motion with Pitman. Set aside that they were asking the Court to rule on a set of issues that neither Pitman nor the Fifth Circuit panel had yet addressed. What’s even more remarkable is that because Pitman had never ruled on their request to certify statewide defendant classes of judges and clerks, injunctive relief against the only eight defendants in the case wouldn’t remotely prevent the injury the abortion providers allege they faced.
The Supreme Court majority saw clearly through the huge holes in the emergency application. There was no reason to address the substantive question whether the Act is consistent with Roe and Casey because the abortion providers had failed to meet their burden on the “complex and antecedent procedural questions” that their request presented. The Court has the power to “enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” and the abortion providers hadn’t shown that any of the defendants should be enjoined from doing anything.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Harris County $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract to One-Woman Firm Draws Scrutiny. Newly released documents show a $7 million bid was scored more highly, but Hidalgo’s office intervened to instead give nearly $11 million to a politically connected firm at a higher cost.”
Last month tempers flared at Harris County Commissioners Court after County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” when he referred to a vendor as a “one-woman company.”
Although the expenditure had been approved months earlier in a 4 to 1 vote, little information had been provided to commissioners about Elevate Strategies, LLC, the winner of a $10.9 million contract to conduct vaccine outreach.
It was not until August that commissioners learned that the company was only founded in 2019, listed a Montrose apartment as its business address, and only consisted of one person: Felicity Pereyra, a former deputy campaign manager for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and former employee of both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It almost like the entire purpose of the welfare state is to channel money from the wallets of taxpayers to the pockets of leftwing cronies…
In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?
Australia has been testing the limits.
Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”
Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.
Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
The idea of owning a beauty clinic in an iconic downtown Melbourne retail centre once seemed like a promising business opportunity. So promising, in fact, that I opened a second store nearby, and expanded my total payroll to 20 employees.
Capital costs across the two stores came to $1.6 million; while monthly expenses included $11,000 in loan interest, equipment leases totalling around $30,000, and rent at almost $40,000 (all figures in Australian dollars). It’s a substantial commitment, but this was a vibrant locale. And our market research indicated that demand would be high enough to sustain the necessary investment. Fortunately, the customers showed up—enough to meet wages, pay the bills, and allow me to put money away for a rainy day.
That day arrived last year, in the form of COVID. And not just the disease itself, but also the draconian, one-dimensional response from government officials: throughout the state of Victoria, 600,000 small business owners like me—men and women who collectively employ millions of people and generate a substantial share of the region’s economic output—have been marginalized in the name of public health and safety.
Small-business entrepreneurs are, by nature, both aspirational and pragmatic. We pay our taxes like everyone else, and understand the role government must play in managing national emergencies—including pandemics. But we also expect leaders to avoid imposing unnecessary and unreasonable regulatory burdens and operating prohibitions.
One of the lessons learned over the last year and a half by small business owners is that Australia’s flawed, multi-layered government structure can easily enmesh an owner in overlapping forms of red tape. This has forced us to reflect on what type of society we are becoming, and whether, in Victoria at least, it is still worth setting up businesses here.
Plus police specifically targeting vocal lockdown critics for fines.
“Fauci strongly endorses COVID treatment that the media tried to criticize Ron DeSantis for supporting…Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Dr. Anthony Fauci seem to agree when it comes to the use of monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.”
Joe Rogan contracts Flu Manchu, takes everything the MSM says you shouldn’t take…and throws off the disease in three days:
“All kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, Z-pack, Prednisone, everything. I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip.”
NAD evidently stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotid, and the drip combines some other common vitamins in a intravenous cocktail that seems really frigging expensive ($750-1,000), which is fine if you make Joe Rogan money, but ordinary people may want to stick to a multivitamin (which you should be taking daily anyway).
Commie Antifa teacher boasting of indoctrinating his students is on the run:
the heroes at Project Veritas released an undercover video showing a proud antifa communist teacher bragging about how he has 180 days to indoctrinate his students and make them Marxists. How does he do it? He “scares the f*** out of them.”
Now the proud commie peacock is running scared. He refused to defend himself to another Project Veritas reporter. He claims he fears for his safety, and is worried about his brainwashing teaching gig, which means he KNOWS what he was doing is wrong.
Even his fellow Antifa clowns aren’t happy with him.
In the tweet below, fellow antifa stains bemoan [Gabriel] Gipe’s willingness to spill his commie guts to an undercover Project Veritas reporter. They also question his over-zealous approach to indoctrinating young high school kids and turning them into fellow Marxist comrades.
Some highlights from the undercover video:
Gipe gives extra credit points to students who attend far-left extremist rallies
He has an antifa flag and a Mao poster hanging on his classroom wall
Gipe believes taking up arms against the “state” is a good thing, though it always fails
He shamed a student who claimed the antifa flag made him uncomfortable
The local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just noticed that antifa is a violent bunch of thugs after black bloc-clad attackers beat yet another reporter and tossed her into a busy Portland street for daring to do her job.
After years of similar attacks on reporters, SPJ was finally jostled from its slumber by an attack on reporter Maranie Staab, from a lefty news organization called “News2Share,” for disobeying her Leftist compatriots and doing some reporting.
Antifa responded in the same way they accuse police of doing: They sprayed her with chemicals and threw her into the street.
Shocking video from yesterday’s Portland riot shows antifa robbing female photographer @MaranieRae & hitting her to the ground. She goes to retrieve her equipment & is hit w/pepper spray. Video by @JLeeQuinn: pic.twitter.com/rCkaybcfUR
However, with building news about the number of withdrawn vendors, it’s possible that the costs of the other events would surpass what they would expect to make from a crowd that was already predicted to be less than half of normal. I was seeing 35,000 as a predicted attendance batted around the interwebz, and that assumed full exhibit hall, no restrictions, and a full weekend of activities. If word of mouth about reduced exhibitors managed to knock another 10,000 off of that prediction, I don’t know enough about their financial obligations & forecasting to know if that would drive it into the territory of losing money or not.
Snip.
The Board & Wayne LaPierre are desperate to look like NRA members stand by them, so visibly empty halls with far fewer attendees in already wide aisles would make for press photos they may believe they can’t afford.
Add to this that the ILA Leadership Forum, at least anytime I checked the pages, never had more than the big Texas politicians (Abbott, Cruz, Cornyn, and Crenshaw) along with Mark Robinson from North Carolina listed. It appeared that they couldn’t get commitments from big national names to attend which would have, again, signaled a loss of influence and interest that NRA can’t really afford to be a story.
LaPierre and his cronies seem desperate desperate to cling to power, no matter how far down they drag the NRA with them.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden economy kicks in, China behaves badly (again), and rock stars are fed up with woke. Let’s lead off with this weird photo people have been taking about all week:
How did you make the Carters look like tiny puppets?
Puppet people aside, what better image for the week in which Biden seems to be bringing stagflation back?
If you were wondering when the Trump boom would end and the Biden bust begin, it just did:
U.S. job growth for the month of April fell far below what experts had predicted, as data reported Friday showed an increase of 266,000 jobs, versus an estimate of 1 million — the largest miss relative to expectations since at least 1998.
Economists had suggested a positive outlook for the report, with the White House hoping for a gain of at least 700,000 jobs — making Joe Biden the first president ever to hit 2 million new jobs in his first 100 days. But expectations came crashing back to reality with data showing an overestimation of nearly 800,000 — the worst miss in decades.
The U.S. unemployment rate rose slightly from 6.0 percent to 6.1. March’s payroll gains were also revised downward by nearly 150,000 jobs, from an initial print of 916,000 to 770,000. Labor force participation rate rose slightly, to 61.7 percent.
Huh, irresponsible tax-and-spend policies, rampant inflation and paying people not to work evidently aren’t a recipe for economic success. Who knew?
Speaking of inflation, it looks like it’s back, baby! Rising metal, oil, and ag commodity prices all point to inflation. “Wood prices are at an all-time high at over $1,370 per 1,000 board feet.”
Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owns stock in “Proterra, an electric vehicle company that is being actively promoted by the Biden administration. Further, Granholm being the Secretary of Energy means she gets to make regulations that can directly enrich herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Joe Biden said today, “Most people don’t know: you walk into a store and you buy a gun, but you go to a gun show you can buy whatever you want and no background check.”
This isn’t even close to being true. In fact, gun shows are subject to the same rules as apply everywhere else, which are that:
commercial transfers require federal background checks, but that
private transfers only require federal background checks if they are conducted within one of the thirteen states that superintend non-commercial firearms transactions
There are no special rules for gun shows. The same set of laws applies to them as applies to, say, your kitchen table: If you are in the business of selling guns, you are federally obliged to run a check. If you are not, you are not — unless your state requires you to. That’s it. There’s no “loophole” here, and nothing about gun shows that separates them from the broader debate about private sales.
A new poll from ABC and the Washington Post published on Wednesday found a significant drop in support for new gun-control laws, especially among young people.
The number of Americans supporting enacting new gun laws over protecting gun rights fell from 57 percent to 50 percent, a seven-point drop from when the poll was last conducted in 2018. The number of Americans favoring gun rights jumped from 34 to 43 percent, a nine-point jump. The difference between the two positions narrowed by 16 points overall.
The sharpest decline in support for new gun-control measures came among 18 to 29-year-olds and Hispanics. Both groups saw a 20 percent drop. Rural Americans and strong conservatives saw a 17-point drop.
Worker shortage is so acute that a Tampa MacDonald’s is paying people $50 just to interview for a job. “Some 17 million Americans remain on jobless benefits. Perhaps many of these people want jobs but are getting paid more to sit on the couch.”
How Michael Dell used several financial maneuvers to turn $3.6 billion into more than $50 billion.
The Who’s frontman Roger Daltry says that the woke are ruining the world. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.”
And Daltry wasn’t the only rock star calling BS on the woke. Also taking aim: punk rock icon John Lydon:
Johnny Rotten blames ‘wokeness’ for US ‘collapse’
Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Lydon had some rotten things to say about “wokeness.”
In a recent profile with the Times UK, the aging punk rocker decried “cancel culture” and the activists who campaigned to tear down national monuments which they say promote historical racism. The statues include that of Winston Churchill, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers.
He also blamed academia as well as the media for giving “the space” to “tempestuous spoilt children.”…
Addressing calls to tear down Churchill’s statue in London, Lydon dismissed criticism that the wartime prime minister was racist. However, critics point out that the leader once referred to Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans,” and thought that black people are “[not] as capable or as efficient as white people.”
“This man saved Britain,” Lydon asserted. “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.”
If there are any bigger haters in history than today’s cancel culture, Lydon conceded, it’s the Nazis — and Churchill took care of that.
Florida “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones is a big fat liar. “NPR describes Jones as a ‘top scientist’ leading Florida’s pandemic response. In fact, Jones has held three jobs in her field; all three have ended in her being terminated and criminally charged.”
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.
Sad news (and possibly foul play). “University of Texas linebacker Jake Ehlinger, the younger brother of former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger, was found dead Thursday.”
British cultural icon and punk rock godfather John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) has hailed the “joy” of populist, anti-establishment movements across the West.
Mr Lydon backed Brexit, claimed President Donald J. Trump was unfairly smeared by the “left wing” media, and said he wanted to shake “fantastic” Nigel Farage’s hand for taking on elites.
Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, the Sex Pistols frontman praised how the former UKIP leader led a flotilla of pro-Brexit fishermen in the so-called “Battle of the Thames” – when they faced off with a group of pro-EU millionaires and celebrities.
“After that up-the-River-Thames argument he had with Bob Geldof, I wanted to shake [Nigel Farage’s] hand because it was silly beyond belief.
“Where do I stand on Brexit? Well, here it goes: the working class have spoke, and I’m one of them, and I’m with them,” he said.
The punk icon also said the unconventional outsider President Trump was a type of punk rock politician who was being unfairly attacked by the media establishment.
He dubbed Mr. Trump “a complicated fellow”, adding: “As one journalist once said to me, is he the political Sex Pistol? In a way.
“What I dislike is the left wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as a racist, and that’s completely not true.
“There are many, many problems with him as a human being but he’s not that, and there just might be a chance something good will come out of this situation because it terrifies politicians. This is a joy to behold for me.”
When host Piers Morgan described Mr. Trump as “the archetypal anti-establishment figure”, Mr. Lydon said: “Dare I say, a possible friend.”
All this will be quite a shock to American leftists who wore Anarchy in the UK buttons right next to their Mondale-Ferraro buttons back in the 1980s, figuring that punk was cool and anti-establishment and therefore automatically on leftism’s side.
What liberals forget is that punk rock was itself a reaction to the discontents of the mid-1970s Wilson-Callaghan Labour governments of the UK, a period of high unemployment and labor unrest that would culminate (post-Lydon’s exit from the Pistols) in the “Winter of Discontent” that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power.
It’s not like they sang “Bigger Government in the UK,” now is it?
Punk was a rebellion against the establishment, and there are few establishments more entrenched than our political and media elites.
Also note Lydon’s comment that “the working class have spoke, and I’m one of them, and I’m with them.” As I mentioned before, Brexit passed in large measure thanks to a working class who feel that global elites have abandoned them. In theory, the Labour Party should be able to capitalize on such working class resentment, but they can’t, because they’re largely part of that same global elite.
Indeed, from “bitter clingers” to “basket of deplorable,” the defining characteristic of liberal parties in the West today seems to be their open contempt for the working class they once claimed to represent. Who among our nation’s Democratic Party elites could even plausibly claim to be “working class”?
Note also Lydon’s dismissing media claims of Trump being a racist, a stance that will make Social Justice Warriors despise him (assuming they didn’t already).
Lydon is nobody’s idea of a movement conservative, and I sincerely doubt he’ll be cutting campaign commercials for the Tories anytime soon. But he is his own man, and willing to call bullshit on politically correct lies, and that’s good enough for me.