Posts Tagged ‘Mount Rushmore’

LinkSwarm for July 17, 2020

Friday, July 17th, 2020

Another Friday, another boatload of links. In fact, too many to wrangle into shape right now. I may have to do another mini LinkSwarm on Saturday.

  • Kurt Schlichter has a warning for our elites:

    Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.

    Well, unpleasant for you.

    Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.

    You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so.

    After all, President Hillary Clinton did.

    Didn’t there arise in your mind, that agonizing Wednesday morning after Mrs. Clinton’s ruination, just the faintest notion that you had been lied to? You tracked the polls, and you reviewed the percentages – most hovering above 90% – that assured you that the glass ceiling was in for an epic shattering. And yet, no shattering was forthcoming. Whether expressly or by omission, you were lied to.

    And it is happening again.

  • “Trump Admin Tells Minnesota Governor To Get Bent Over $16 Million Aid Request Following Riots.” If Democratic officials refuse to defund their own cities from hard-left rioters and thugs, how is that the rest of the nation’s problem?
  • Cancel culture is real.
  • President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was great.

    First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”

    Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.

    Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

  • “Chinese Virologist Flees Hong Kong, Accuses Beijing Of COVID-19 Cover-Up.”
  • Plagues, compared. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Texas governor Greg Abbott says still no lockdown order.
  • Democrat M. J. Hegar won her runoff with Royce West to face incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn in November. Cahnmann thinks Hegar is a much better candidate than West, but she’s not going to get the mountains of money and fawning media Beto O’Rourke got in 2018, nor are the demographic voting dynamics of a presidential election year going to be nearly as friendly to her.
  • Other Texas runoff election results. Fort Bend County Sheriff beating Troy Nehls beating Kathaleen Wall 70% to 30% is interesting, especially since Wall poured $8 million of her own money into the race, more than 16x what Nehls raised. As Ted Cruz proved in 2012: Money isn’t everything.
  • On the other hand, Ilhan Omar’s Democratic primary opponent raised $3.2 million to Omar’s $471,000.
  • Speaking of which: “Ilhan Omar’s Payments To Husband’s Firm Top $1 Million.” She’s certainly adapted quickly to the Washington Way…
  • Former Auburn football coach and Donald trump-endorsement recipient Tommy Tuberville wins Alabama senate primary over Jeff Sessions. I fully expect Tuberville to crush fluke democratic incumbent Dough Jones in the fall.
  • How remote work could destroy Silicon Valley:

    Perhaps no phenomenon is more studied, marveled, and desired in the world of high tech and science than the mystery of serendipity. In seemingly every industry, CEOs pay millions in consulting, design, and architectural costs to multiply and optimize the number of chance encounters between their most creative employees — and hopefully profit from the blockbuster new products that might result. If only they could engineer the cubicles just so, or the indoor waterfall at the right angle, they might orchestrate providential encounters, or at least load the dice in their favor.

    No place on the planet generates more such interest than Silicon Valley. For decades, cities everywhere have tried to replicate the Valley’s record of producing one trend-setting tech giant after another, but none has quite measured up. Like history’s other hubs of outsized accomplishment — Athens in 450 B.C., Hangzhou in the 12th century, and Florence in the 16th century — Silicon Valley has entrenched itself as the world’s centrifugal force for the biggest thing of its age, tech.

    But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge — the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley’s leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work. In May, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees they were no longer required to turn up in the office. Slack said more or less the same to its workers, and the trend was made official by industry colossus Zuckerberg, who announced that he expected up to half his employees would become permanently remote.

    In the years before the pandemic, talent in San Francisco and the Valley were already conflicted about whether to stay, increasingly exasperated by the cost of living. The concentration of highly motivated creators has produced enticing jobs, but also driven up prices. In Palo Alto, the median home now costs $3.2 million. In nearby Mountain View, it’s $1.7 million, and in San Francisco $1.8 million. In other words, the Valley has priced out almost anyone not making high six-figures, and even many of them. The temptation has been to flee elsewhere, and some tech talent had already been doing so.

    But now, if engineers, designers, and venture capitalists are geographically disbanding, working via the cloud instead of walking Google’s halls, surfacing at Buck’s Restaurant, or the cafes on University Avenue, how will future serendipity happen?

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at instapundit.)

  • Lincoln Project co-founder is literally a registered agent for Russia. “The media can keep calling you ‘Republicans,’ but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat.”
  • Another good word is “Grifter”:

  • Iran’s nuclear facilities mysteriously explode. (Scratches chin.)
  • Another day, another fake hate crime, this one at Texas A&M.
  • How idiots destroyed Brooks Brothers. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes:

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Austin response times for emergencies has gotten progressively worse over the years.

    The City would cut the number of cops despite increasing response times for emergency calls and increased violent crime in the city. I suspect other cities will be facing similar budget decisions under similar circumstances.

    I don’t know anyone who thinks we shouldn’t improve officer training and use of force guidelines to minimize harm to citizens. I know a number of cops who have been saying such things for years. I fail to see how decreasing the number of cops will enhance public safety.

  • Oopsie!
  • ESPN suspends “NBA insider and reporter Adrian Wojnarowski after he sent an email to Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley reading, ‘F— you.'”

    The Republican senator asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver last week if he would allow players to wear jerseys with the message: “Free Hong Kong.” Hawley was criticizing the league after officials announced “pre-approved phrases” would be allowed on the back of jerseys while “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of China, according to Fox News.

    Wojnarowski responded to Hawley with the two-word email, which Hawley shared on social media. The columnist soon issued an apology for the message.

    Wojnarowski (or “Woj” as NBA followers call him) still hasn’t clarified which was offensive to him: Supporting American law enforcement officers or supporting freedom for Hong Kong.

  • The Houston Rockets’ Russell Westbrook tests positive for coronavirus.
  • RoadRich will be very sad at this story.
  • “Ca-..ca-…ca-Candygram!”
  • “Black Conservative Informed By White People That He’s Racist.”
  • “Elizabeth Warren Declares Herself Warlord Of Eastern Oklahoma Autonomous Zone.”
  • “Trump 2020 Campaign To Simply Air Unedited Footage Of Democrats Talking.”
  • My friend Dave Hardy has a free swashbuckling SF novel on Amazon through Sunday.
  • “It’s like confetti, but with human bodies!”

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for July 3, 2020

    Friday, July 3rd, 2020

    Job numbers boom! Ghislaine Maxwell captured! CHOP chopped! It’s your Friday before Independence Day LinkSwarm!

  • 4.8 million jobs added in June, blowing away all estimates. This is what keeps Democratic strategists up at night: Between lockdowns and riots, they’ve done everything they can to kill the Trump economy, and the Trump economy refuses to die.
  • FBI arrests Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The memes are already coming fast and furious:

  • “FBI Hires Top-Rated Italian Bodyguard Hiluigi Clintonelli To Protect Ghislaine Maxwell.”
  • Was General Flynn attacked because he was getting ready to audit the intelligence community?
  • Speaking of the intelligence community, here’s why that Russian bounty story was crap. And all your liberal Facebook friends shared it because they don’t care whether a story is true or not, as long as it hurts Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Reason will not save you:

    It is not transcendentally stupid for the alleged anti-racism rioters to destroy a Lincoln statue, though, to normal people, it looks like the act of drooling morons. Now, a good number of these cesspeople are drooling morons, but that does not change the fact that trashing POTUS #16’s statuary is brilliant.

    They have confused their targets – us – by casting off the constraints of coherence.

    Oh wait, you thought that these folks were trying to make a point about racism being bad. And you thought, because that’s how those of us who weren’t raised on Instatwitbook, soy, and critical race theory, that if you point out that something is unreasonable then that will cause the person you were instructing to rethink it. After all, trashing some Honest Abe totem in order to illustrate how racism is double-plus-ungood is about a “12” on the 1-10 scale of unreasonability. And yet, you can point that out all day and they don’t care.

    In fact, they laugh at you for doing so.

    It’s not about making sense. It never was. It’s about making you kneel.

    If you look at everything that is going on, the one common denominator is that every action the woke insurgents take is designed to strip you of your ability to defend your interests, or property, or rights, or life. The idea is to leave you utterly vulnerable, totally exposed, at which point they can do with you as they see fit. The nicer ones will merely reeducate you then demand humiliating submission and tribute. History (and their social media feed) teach that others will happily murder you. Doubt me? Just ask your local kulak.

    Stripping you of defenses takes many forms. One form is defunding and abolishing the police. Oh, someone will be wielding force in society. It just won’t be people accountable to or inclined to protect you. Another form is literally stripping you of your defenses. Why is gun control such a fetish for these creeps? Because you with a gun have the ability to not just say “no” but to exact a price from those who wish to compel a “yes.” So, of course, they want to eliminate your ability to have weapons, but they also want to eliminate, as a practical matter, your ability to use them to protect yourself.

    Look at what happened when the pink polo shirt gun guy quite reasonably grabbed his AR-15 as the savages descended on his property and the cops were AWOL. St. Louis’s Soros-bought DA – who last month released all the arrested rioters – threatened to prosecute him. The media is slandering him too. A pack of jackals threatened his property, his family, and even his dog, and he’s the bad guy for not showing his belly? You see the same fake furor every time some citizen has his car surrounded by a feeding frenzy of scumbags and plows through them to escape. Ignore that the slime are now shooting people they try to trap. The idea is to make you give up instead of fight back because if you fight back, the law comes down on you instead of the criminals.

    Soros really is a shrewd investor.

    The law – and the law generally says you can reasonably defend your life and property (please consult your local laws for specifics and get proper training) – means nothing if corrupt Democrats ignore the crimes of leftists and prosecute normals who dare resist the Blue Terror, which is kind of the point. You thought you could rely on the law and on the government to protect you. Nope. And now you can’t protect yourself either.

    And then there’s reason. That’s a defense too. You can use reason, make arguments, present evidence, and convince people. Not if making sense is beside the point.

    You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like “facts” and “evidence.” Yet so many of us see what’s happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy’s latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Let’s do a double-shot of Kurt: “America’s Problem Is Systemic Liberalism“:

    Forget the bizarre and evil concept of national original sin that is the malignant idea that America is built upon “systemic racism.” America’s true systemic flaw, arising at the time of those miserable progressives of yesteryear and continuing up through the miserable progressives of this rotten year, is what we now call “liberalism.”

    Oh, it’s not classical liberalism, with its concern for expanding economic and personal rights – you know, individual liberty. The current inverted mutation of liberalism is all about constricting economic and personal rights and forcing individuals into collective boxes where their individuality is subsumed into an easily exploited and manipulated conformist whole. Want to test out this hypothesis? Look through the endless woke tweets of your favorite hack journalist, pinko pol, or Hollywood half-wit, or even go up to some self-described liberal in your own life, and see if you can find one iota of deviation from any of the approved liberal dogma. Good luck. You won’t find a smidgeon of nonconformity. You won’t detect a molecule of dissent. These people are the Borg, if the Borg worked in a giant space coffee house, had Bernie stickers on their spaceships, and could not do a push-up. You can’t reason with them – appealing to reason is futile.

    Systemic liberalism is the real poison in America’s veins, not the fanciful notion pushed by bigots, charlatans, and demagogues, that the American enterprise is dedicated to invidious discrimination on the basis of race.

    It’s all a lie and a scam.

  • Our cities burned so race-hustling poverty pimps could rake off the graft:

    Left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committee—the Real Justice PAC—with an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.

    But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.

    Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC’s data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The third—Middle Seat Consulting—was cofounded by one of the PAC’s original leaders, Hector Sigala.

    “There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly.”

    “For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits what’s called ‘private inurement’ or excessive benefit to an individual from the organization’s coffers,” Walter said. “Real Justice PAC isn’t a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesn’t have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like ‘dark money’ influence—should be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies.”

    Ding, the PAC’s technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms’ state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.

  • Seattle’s lawless CHAZ/CHOP zone finally demolished not due to all the murders, but because the scumbag protestors approached the mayor’s house. We can’t have the rabble bothering the more equal pigs!
  • “Left-Wing CHOP Zone Responsible For 525% Spike In Seattle Crime.”
  • CHAZ as socialism’s test case:

    “If you can’t make it work for four square blocks, how can you make it work nationwide?”

  • Democrats evidently believe people people surrounded by rioters should slow down so those same rioters can kill them:

  • Slowly but surely, all the Social Justice rioters are being brought to actual justice: 44 scumbags arrested in Scottsdale.
  • The antifa ringleader of the attempt to pull over the Andrew jackson statue was also arrested. “Jason Charter was arrested at his home by the FBI and U.S. Park Police on Thursday morning and charged with destruction of federal property.”
  • The Social Justice/#DefundThePolice madness is driving cops out of the profession.
  • The lockdowns were a mistake.
  • Consider this your periodic reminder to not freak out over polls.
  • Also, don’t fall for operation demoralize. “It happens every national election. This time it’s early, only June.”
  • Founder of leftist think tank wants to murder people lawfully defending their homes. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Gee, threatening to stab someone for disagree with Social Justice pities can negatively impact your job prospects. Who knew?
  • “UMass Nursing Dean Fired For Saying “Everyone’s Life Matters.” I smell a lawsuit.
  • Our ruling class: “Peter Newell was the former co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity. The 77-year-old from Wood Green, north London, was sentenced last month at Blackfriars Crown Court. He admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16.”
  • British to court to dictator Nicolas Maduro: No, you can’t have Venezuela’s gold. Not yours.
  • Speaking of gold, were there 83 tons of fake gold used as loan collateral in China? It’s smoke and mirrors all the way down.
  • Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon sentenced to five years in prison for fake job scam.
  • India bans Tik-Tok and other Chinese apps.
  • And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of Chinese contracts Indian companies are canceling.
  • China’s reckless border war has pushed India into America’s arms.

    Wary of closer Indo-American ties, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Global Times news outlet published editorials cautioning India from involving itself in U.S.-China tensions and serving as an American pawn against China. Picking up on this notion, Brookings scholar Tanvi Madan believes closer India-U.S. ties triggered the border standoff, with Beijing intending to show India its rightful place.

    Instead, China’s deadly actions might have achieved exactly the opposite—cementing New Delhi’s strategic tilt towards Washington.

  • Speaking of Tik-Tok, on iOS (and probably everywhere) it’s data-stealing malware.

  • And it’s not just Tik-Tok! “Other news apps caught red-handed: ABC News, Al Jazeera English, CBC News, CBS News, CNBC, Fox News, News Break, NPR, ntv Nachrichten, Reuters, Russia Today, Stern Nachrichten, The Economist, and Vice News.”
  • Follow-up: Remember problems with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program? The first four built are all being decommissioned March 31, 2021.
  • “China Never Reported Existence of Coronavirus to World Health Organization.” China lied, people died.
  • “Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows.” Absent other corroborative samples from that timeframe, I would guess it’s a case of sample contamination or a false positive. Still: a data point.
  • “Austin Hospital Withheld Treatment from Disabled Man Who Contracted Coronavirus.” Enjoy your death panels, comrade.
  • To the Democratic Party, Mount Rushmore = White Supremacy. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at instapundit.)
  • “Devin Nunes: 2016 Taught Democrats that ‘It’s Not Enough to Just Have 90% of the Media on Your Side.'”
  • “Richest Liberal Arts School In US Slashes Tuition By 15%, Cancels Athletics Program.” That’s Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
  • Wisconsin enlists school children to wage social justice.
  • Today cancel culture seeks to root out the insidious racism of (checks notes) “kindness yoga.”
  • Club for Growth offers a takedown of The Lincoln Project:

    Grifters gonna grift. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Marx was a racist. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Ice iced, baby. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Redskins Change Name To ‘Lizard People’ To Better Represent Population Of Washington, D.C.”
  • Laughing fox:

    • Have a happy July 4th weekend, everyone!

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »