Austin Police/Jose Garza Roundup for October 6, 2021

October 6th, 2021

There’s been a lot of news on the Austin Police Department and Soros-backed Travis County DA Jose Garza popping up, so let’s dig in:

  • In case you missed it, Austin police staffing levels have fallen so low that police will no longer respond to “non-emergency” calls. “Collisions with no injury or burglaries no longer in progress or where the suspect has left, would not warrant a 911 call. Austin residents in these situations and others like it will have to call 311 and file a non-emergency report.”
  • “Austin Homicide Investigator Accuses Travis County District Attorney of Criminal Witness Tampering“:

    In an affidavit filed Tuesday, Austin Police Department (APD) Detective David Fugitt went to blows with Travis County District Attorney José Garza over his alleged tampering with Fugitt’s testimony in the prosecution of Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.

    Last month, a grand jury indicted Perry for charges including murder, aggravated assault, and deadly conduct after he shot and killed Garrett Foster, a former Air Force mechanic who was protesting in downtown Austin at a Black Lives Matter demonstration on July 25, 2020.

    Fugitt, who is spearheading the investigation into the incident in question, insisted that Garza quashed exculpatory evidence he planned to provide to the grand jury. He indicated that witness statements gathered by Foster’s relatives and their lawyers “were inconsistent with prior interviews” and video of portions of the incident.

    With respect to a charge of threatening imminent bodily injury, Fugitt had also planned to say that the complaining witness “never once suggested that Daniel Perry” had threatened her by purposefully driving his vehicle in her direction.

    According to the affidavit, Fugitt described an interaction he had with Assistant District Attorney Guillermo Gonzalez in which the detective had asked Gonzalez what “ramifications” there would be if he did not abide by the DA’s request to exclude the evidence favorable to Perry. Fugitt says the office merely told him again which evidence he was not to discuss in front of the grand jury.

    “In my mind, after this directive from José Garza, is when the conduct of the District Attorney’s Office [went] from highly unethical behavior to criminal behavior,” Fugitt deposed.

    “I firmly believe the District Attorney’s Office, acting under the authority of José P. Garza, tampered with me as a witness.”

  • More on the same subject:

    When Fugitt refused and stood by his finding of justified homicide, Garza retaliated. That retaliation implicates Austin PD acting Police Chief Joseph Chacon and Assistant Chief Ricardo Guajardo, according to the filing and several others in the case which PJ Media has obtained.

    Snip.

    The documents call for an evidentiary hearing to determine the facts surrounding Det. Fugitt’s direct accusations against Garza, which include new evidence and also implicate the two leaders of APD. The documents also note that Garza opposes such a hearing, which Sgt. Perry’s defense attorneys interpret as evidence of Garza’s guilt.

    The document accuses District Attorney Garza of felony criminal conduct under the Texas Penal Code 36.06(a)(1)(A), unethical conduct, and violation of Sgt. Perry’s right to a fair trial under the law as a defendant.

    You may start to understand why rank-and-file APD officers were less than wild about Chacon being made police chief…

  • It’s no surprise that Garza has tried to seal the evidence against him.

  • That’s not the only thing Garza doesn’t want you to see:

  • “Austin Office Of Police Oversight Director Farah Muscadin Investigated For Spending Enormous Taxpayer Money To Push Critical Race Theory Training.”

    Farah Muscadin, Director of the Austin Office of Police Oversight, has once again pushed to offer bribes to people in the community to take Critical Race Theory (CRT) training. For completing a 22-hour course, people are cashing in with $550 gift (read grift) cards. $55,000 was defunded from the Austin Police Department to fund this radical training course. Guess who is paying for this ridiculous CRT propaganda?

    It is well past time for Austin citizens to demand their own Office of Government Oversight Committee to watch over how these people continue to waste taxpayer funds on pushing this Marxist-influenced indoctrination that is inherently racially divisive.

    The influential driving force behind these shenanigans is Muscadin. Muscadin was ousted from a similar position at Chicago State University for employing the same shady tactics she is pulling here in Austin.
    Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday said they investigated Farah Muscadin, the director of the Office of Police Oversight, and found some disturbing information about her past career at Chicago State University. Casaday sent a letter to Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk noting Muscadin’s name was mentioned in a lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to falsely accuse a professor of sexual harassment while she was working as Dean of Students at Chicago State University. He also provided board of trustee meeting minutes mentioning Muscadin had been “terminated.”

    This blatant waste of money simply boils down to further defunding of the police. The goal of Muscadin and her ilk is to strip the Austin Police Department of every resource possible.

    Indeed, Muscadin’s name appears in that lunatic Reimagining Public Safety Task Force document, the entire purpose of which was to transfer money from APD to various leftwing activist groups.

    While Austin crime and homicide numbers continue to exponentially increase, these extreme-left radical groups keep chipping away at morale and funding to continue the downward spiral Austin is on in terms of law enforcement and public safety. While the excuses and denial are endless, accountability is in short supply. If you want to address the record breaking murder numbers, look no further than these anti-police radicals’ war with the police.

  • Three former Austin mayors come out for Proposition A:

    • Prop A is a necessary start, but crime will not fully come under control as long as Garza is DA and the current hard-left City Council is in power.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 5 Comments »

    Is China Getting Ready To Invade Taiwan?

    October 5th, 2021

    When I previously covered the possibility of China invading Taiwan, I quoted:

    The invasion will happen in April or October. Because of the challenges posed by the strait’s weather, a transport fleet can only make it across the strait in one of these two four-week windows. The scale of the invasion will be so large that strategic surprise will not be possible, especially given the extensive mutual penetration of each side by the other’s intelligence agencies.

    Well, guess what month it is?

    Over the past few days, over 150 Chinese aircraft have violated Taiwan’s airspace. The sabre-rattling has been serious enough that Taiwan has asked for Australia’s help.

    In some way the timing is right for Beijing to go to war. Their economy is faltering, the Biden White House has proved its weakness in Afghanistan (and may be compromised by CCP ties), and a “Great Patriotic War” to bring a “renegade province” in line may be just what the doctor ordered to distract the nation.

    In another way, this is exactly the wrong time to launch an attack, with global supply chains snarled and ports clogged up, how is China supposed to transport troops across the Taiwanese Strait, especially since they need civilian transports to carry troops.

    The Chinese navy now has access to 1.5 million tons of shipping that could carry an assault force across the Taiwan Strait and initiate an invasion of Taiwan.

    For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a transport fleet equal in displacement to U.S. Military Sealift Command’s own quasi-civilian fleet.

    In other words, a lot of ships.

    To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might need to transport as many as 2 million troops across the rough 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait and land them under fire at the island’s 14 potential invasion beaches or 10 major ports.

    That’s a lot of people—far, far more than the People’s Liberation Army Navy can haul in its 11 new amphibious ships, together displacing around 370,000 tons. To transport the bulk of the invasion force, Beijing almost certainly would take up into naval service thousands of civilian ships.

    The National Defense Transportation Law of 2017 mandates that all of China’s transport infrastructure, including ships, be available for military use. Naval engineers have begun modifying key vessels to make them better assault ships—in particular adding heavy-duty ramps that can support the weight of armored vehicles.

    If I was of conspiratorial cast, I might suspect that the shipping snarl was designed to hide the presence of troops ships in the Taiwanese strait.

    Taiwan is taking the threat seriously enough to prepare for war:

    Taiwan is preparing for potential war with China following a series of increasingly aggressive military activity from Beijing, with Taipei’s foreign minister warning that should the nation attack, it would “suffer tremendously.”

    China on Monday sent 52 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the largest military provocation seen yet.

    In anticipation of further aggression, the self-ruled island is preparing to repel any strike and has asked Australia to increase intelligence sharing and security cooperation, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s “China Tonight.”

    “The defense of Taiwan is in our own hands, and we are absolutely committed to that,” Wu told ABC’s Stan Grant in an interview to be broadcast Monday.

    “I’m sure that if China is going to launch an attack against Taiwan, I think they are going to suffer tremendously as well.”

    China, which claims that Taiwan is part of its territory, in the past week has stepped up its saber rattling against the island to press it to back down and accept Chinese rule. Taipei, meanwhile, maintains it is a sovereign country separate from Beijing.

    Is China getting ready to invade? I have no way of reading Xi Jinping’s mind, but I think if a real war were in the offering, we’d see less saber-rattling tests of airspace and more signs of troop mobilization. I looked for any evidence that this was happening, but I haven’t seen in.

    That said, we should still be doing our best to arm Taiwan to the teeth:

    It’s been completely obvious for a long time that China has been preparing, if it so chooses, to take Taiwan by force of arms and keep us from being able to do anything about it.

    It has massively increased its force of ballistic missiles, better to target a wide array of ships and hold at risk U.S. ground units. Prior to the latest, more serious iteration of the missile threat, Tom Shugart of the Center for New American Security estimated that a preemptive Chinese strike on our bases in the region “could crater every runway and runway-length taxiway at every major U.S. base in Japan, and destroy more than 200 aircraft on the ground.”

    China has been churning out long-range strike aircraft and engaged in a historic naval buildup. It now has the largest navy in the world.

    Nonetheless, invading and occupying Taiwan after launching a gigantic, logistically taxing amphibious operation across a 110-mile strait would be no small feat, to put it mildly.

    It should be our objective to keep China at bay, toward the goal of keeping it from establishing its dominance over Asia, as former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby argues in his compelling new book The Strategy of Denial.

    But the Taiwanese haven’t exhibited the urgency one would expect of an island of 24 million people coveted by a nearby nation of 1.4 billion people that makes no secret of its compulsion to try to swallow it whole.

    Until a few years ago, Taiwan’s defense budget was shockingly inadequate. Its military reserves are lackluster. Its frontline units tend not to operate at full strength. It has often been seduced by the allure of so-called prestige weapons, such as top-end fighter aircraft that are irrelevant to its predicament.

    We should be fortifying Taiwan and making it as difficult as possible for China to take. That means stockpiling food, energy, and munitions against a Chinese blockade. It means making its infrastructure more resilient and enhancing its cyber capabilities. It means increasing its capability to detect an early mustering of Chinese forces. It means more mines, anti-ship missiles, air-defense capabilities, and unmanned systems to frustrate a cross-strait invasion.

    Speaking of arming countries against China, Japan is now testing flying F-35Bs off an aircraft carrier. If adopted, F-35s would be Japan’s first carrier aircraft since World War II.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military | 9 Comments »

    The System is Down…The System Is Down…

    October 4th, 2021

    Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down right now. Botched upgrade? Misconfigured router? Expired signing certificate? Who knows? I’m just going to assume its a problem with their latest SuppressAllPostsQuestioningTheHolyVaccineMarrative.yml file. But it’s a reminder of how deeply interconnected all online systems are these days, and how many different things can go wrong at different layers.

    Expect a sudden burst of productivity from American companies.

    And just in case you didn’t get the reference:

    Edited to add: Additional detail:

    Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook…

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.

    The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

    A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)

    With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

    Speculation is that Facebook engineers have locked themselves out of their own network, meaning someone with physical access to the servers will have to fix things…

    Edited to add 2: Krebs offers more details:

    Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

    Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

    In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

    In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

    “Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

    Developing…

    Edited to add 3: Seeing reports that Gmail is down for some people. It’s not down for me. I just tested and it’s working fine.

    Updated to add 4: Facebook appears to be back up, but is way wonky…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Uncategorized, video | 3 Comments »

    Profane Meditations On Current Vexations

    October 3rd, 2021

    People are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. And they’re being increasingly vocal in their displeasure.

    Here’s rapper Samson on the many discontents of the Biden era:

    And here’s J. Random Australian on the country’s lockdown:

    And then there’s the now-ubiquitous “Fuck Joe Biden” chant:

    We are fated to live in interesting times…

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns, video | 5 Comments »

    George Soros Just Dropped Half A Million Dollars To Oppose Hiring More Police In Austin

    October 2nd, 2021

    George Soros, the man whose money helped install radical leftist Jose Garza in the Travis County DA’s office, is so displeased with the push to put more police back on the streets of Austin that he’s dumped half a million dollars into the fight against proposition A.

    The billionaire benefactor of progressive causes across the country, George Soros, has waded into the political fight over Austin’s police staffing — pumping a half-million dollars into a campaign to defeat Proposition A.

    Among other reforms, Proposition A would establish a minimum staffing level for the Austin Police Department (APD) of 2 officers per 1,000. Earlier this summer, APD was floating around 1.2 officers per 1,000 residents. From current staffing levels, it’d require the hiring of roughly 500 officers.

    APD is suffering not only from a dearth in approved positions compared with its staffing level two years ago, but also from rampant attrition within its ranks, averaging 15 to 20 departures per month this year.

    According to the Austin American-Statesman’s Ryan Autullo, the Open Society Policy Center, one of Soros’ advocacy arms, gave $500,000 to Equity Austin which opposes Proposition A.

    The proposition is on the November ballot for Austin voters and is openly opposed by Mayor Steve Adler, Councilmember Greg Casar, and the city’s numerous progressive activist groups who each pushed for the $150 million APD budget cut and redirection last year.

    Here’s the filing document showing the filing. And they’re not the only ones opposing Proposition A:

    As I’ve written before, the hard left opposes adequate funding for policing because it’s much harder for them to rake off money from policing than various “Social Justice” initiatives for which their bureaucratic functionaries control checkbooks. And because they view police officers (probably correctly) as competing institutions of legal force and legitimacy that stand in the way of complete overthrow of capitalism and the current American constitutional order and its replacement with the neo-Marxist/Social Justice/Critical Race Theory “successor ideology.” To them, soaring Austin crime rates are a sign of their success.

    All the more reason for ordinary Austinites to show up and vote in droves for Proposition A.

    (Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 1, 2021

    October 1st, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the Halloween season! Manchin and Sinema are the only thing that stands in the way of a giant, economy-destroying meteor of leftwing pandering, energy crises ramp up in China and Europe, Biden nominates a commie, and more Flu Manchu shenanigans.

  • Inflation hits a 30 year high, yet Democrats are furious two of their own party aren’t letting them run even bigger deficits.
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin calls the giant runway Porkulus fiscal insanity.

    “What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • And you know that $3.5 trillion price tag? Staggering though it is, they’re lowballing it:


    

  • Manchin says that any reconciliation bill must include a Hyde Amendment to bar federal taxpayer funding of abortion. I’m pretty sure Democrats would prefer kicking Manchin out of the party than give compromise on their holy of holies.
  • Manchin and Sinema are a feature, not a bug:

    ‘What if — and hear me out here,” writes Robert Reich, “we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?”

    Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on “every single progressive policy.” If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs. Those two, not the Robert Reichs of the world, are the ones with the power to “stop” things.

    “Should all of this just hinge on those two?” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) asked yesterday. “Absolutely not.” But should doesn’t enter into it. The question is does “all of this” hinge on Sinema and Manchin? The answer is yes. Yes it does. And why? Because, again, “all of this” requires 50 votes in the Senate, and two of those votes aren’t on-board.

    Underneath the complaints that Reich and Bush have leveled sits the erroneous implication that, come election time, American voters are obliged to press a button marked “Republican” or “Democrat,” and that, having done so, they are shipped a drone-like representative of the winning team from a central repository in Washington, D.C. Reich complains that “we elected Democrats.” But this is correct only in the aggregate. In fact, 50 different “we”s elected one hundred senators and 435 Representatives, who between them make up our majority and minority parties. There is nothing in this deal that obliges those emissaries to agree with one another.

    Senators Manchin and Sinema are not a pair of uninvited interlopers who are unexpectedly gumming up the gears; they, themselves, are among the gears. This being so, the duo cannot be said to be “blocking” the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority so much as they are sustaining the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority. Why? Because their decision to caucus with the Democrats rather than the Republicans is the only reason that majority exists in the first place. To hear progressives talk, one would assume that in order to take one’s place within the firmament one must first swear a blood oath to Dick Durbin. Shockingly enough, one is obliged to do no such thing.

  • All this debt limit foo-fora is just kabuki:

    If there’s one thing we know about the looming debt limit crunch and the warnings about the dire consequences of default, it’s this: The government is not going to default.

    The recurring brinksmanship over the debt limit and the partisan refusal to get Republican fingerprints on the increase don’t say much for our political class. But the U.S. Treasury isn’t full of stupid people, and they’ve been through this drill before. Back in July 2011, when the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion was about to be reached, the Washington Post reported:

    The Treasury has already decided to save enough cash to cover $29 billion in interest to bondholders, a bill that comes due Aug. 15, according to people familiar with the matter.

    You can bet they’re making similar plans today. The difference is that 10 years later the debt ceiling is $28.4 trillion, just about doubled, and we’re about to bump into it again.

    Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, probably just in the nick of time. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt (more accurately, gross federal debt) yet again bursting through its statutory limit of $28.4 trillion and soaring past 120 percent of GDP, a level previously reached only during World War II.

  • John Durham subpoenas Clinton law firm Perkins Coie. I’m betting the Dlinton cronies aren’t wild about that at all…
  • Biden nominates an actual communist as Comptroller of Currency:

    The Cornell University law school professor [Saule Omarova]’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.

    Snip.

    Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.

    In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?

    It’s like an entire century of central planning failure means nothing to her, and Henry Hazlitt died in vain. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Democrats Would Prefer That You Ignore All of the Violent Crime Around You.”

    The FBI’s annual report Monday made official what most unfortunately presumed: The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murders since the start of national record-keeping 60 years ago.

    The Uniform Crime Report detailed a murder increase of nearly 30 percent.

    The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase back in 1968. The national rate of murders per 100,000, however, still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.

    The FBI data show around 21,500 total murders last year, which is 5,000 more murders than in 2019. More than three-fourths of reported murders in 2020 were committed with a firearm, the highest rate ever reported.

    Now before you start jumping to conclusions about a correlation between the leftist fever to defund the police and a huge jump in the nation’s murder rate, you should probably be aware of the fact that the Democrats want you to know that there’s no problem at all.

    That’s right, the same people who want us all to live in mortal fear of being breathed on by a stranger at Kroeger are trying to poof away a pile of bodies.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Heh:

  • The Fairfax County School Board would really prefer that you not point out the gay porn in their library.
  • There’s stupid, and then there’s revealing a secret military aircraft on Tik-Tok stupid.

  • “Facebook Takes Down Project Veritas Video Featuring HHS Staff Denouncing the COVID-19 Vaccine.” I think they mean this one:

  • Speaking of Flu Manchu, here’s NBA player Jonathan Isaac calmly explaining why he doesn’t feel he needs the vaccine:

  • The Lancet just gives up on trying to determine the origins of Flu Manchu, much like OJ has given up on finding the real killers.
  • China is trying the classic idiot price controls strategy for its self-inflicted energy crisis:

    China is officially panicking.

    Now that the global energy crisis has slammed China’s economy, leading to the first contractionary PMI since March 2020 as a result of widespread shutdowns of factory and manufacturing, not to mention hundreds of millions of Chinese residents suffering from periodic blackouts, Bloomberg reports that China’s central government officials “ordered the country’s top state-owned energy companies to secure supplies for this winter at all costs.”

    Translation: Beijing is no longer willing to risk social anger and going forward China will be subsidizing coil and nat gas, which will lead to even higher prices, which will lead to even higher prices for other “substitute” commodities such as oil, which is why oil surged on the news.

    The news follows a report on Wednesday that China will allow soaring coal prices to be passed on to factories in electricity prices. But prepare for a surge in PPI, which will likely not be allowed to be passed on to CPI due to ‘common prosperity’. Which logically means margin collapse, and shutting down – so even more structural shortages. Unless we get state subsidies of some sort, or differential pricing for the foreign and domestic market. There used to be a name for that kind of economy. Wall Street used to pretend it didn’t like it.

  • European natural gas prices hit all-time highs.
  • Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh tests positive for Mao Tze Lung.
  • Cenk Uygur says he could take former MMA fighter-turned-comedian-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan in a fight. I’m sure Uygur will get right to it after completing that 3 minute mile and turning down Scarlett Johansson begging for sex…
  • Speaking of Rogan, he says that Trump beats Biden or Harris 100% in 2024. Also says someone other than Biden is running his White House.
  • So say the polls: In a hypothetical matchup, Donald Trump creams Joe Biden by 10 points in 2024.
  • Intel breaks ground on a $20 billion seminconductor fab in Arizona. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Smith & Wesson is moving from Massachusetts to Tennessee.
  • “Crypto-Trading Hamster Performs Better Than Warren Buffett And The S&P 500.”
  • “Leftists Deeply Afraid Things Could Go Back To Normal.”

    “We don’t want normal,” said activist Earnest Greer. “We want radical change. What if everything goes back to the way it was without us completely dismantling and rebuilding the system?”

    Liberals saw the pandemic as an opportunity to get people less clingy to individual freedom and more accepting of government planning significant parts of everyone’s lives. Normal would mean relinquishing that power, which is anathema to the Left.

  • “I said get in the family photo!”

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    Posted in Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court | 1 Comment »

    Matthew Dowd Running Against Dan Patrick For Texas Lt. Governor

    September 30th, 2021

    Matthew Dowd, Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-ABC-News-dweeb-turned-Democrat is running against Republican incumbent Dan Patrick for Texas Lieutenant Governor:

    Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s presidential reelection campaign who later split with the former president publicly, is running for lieutenant governor as a Democrat.

    Dowd also has worked for Bob Bullock, who in 1994 was the last Democrat elected as Texas lieutenant governor, and faces an uphill battle to unseat Republican Dan Patrick, the state’s second-highest-ranking official who has steered Texas politics into the far-right fringes of the GOP.

    In a two-and-a-half minute campaign announcement video, Dowd said GOP politicians have failed the state, zeroing in on Patrick, who he called “cruel and craven” and denounced as a divisive figure who puts his political ambitions over the needs of everyday Texans.

    “Enough is enough. We need more officials who tell the truth, who believe in public services, in common sense with common decency for the common good. … We need to expect more from our politicians,” Dowd says in the ad. “Dan Patrick believes in none of those and that is why I am running for the powerful office of lieutenant governor of this great state.”

    In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Dowd said he started seriously considering running for office after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump who were trying to stop the certification of last year’s presidential election. But it wasn’t until after the state’s legislative session that Dowd really focused on Patrick as his target.

    Well, that’s certainly a very swampy resume. When we last mentioned Dowd he was lying about jihad terror fatalities. And he seems to have scrubbed his Twitter history:

    Does this mean that Democrats will have to swallow their pride, crank up the “strange new respect” machine, and embrace a Bushie in order to have a chance to beat Patrick?

    Not necessarily. Mike Collier, who lost to Patrick by 400,000 votes in 2018, looks to be running again, has already spent half a million dollars and had over $200,000 on hand as of the last reporting cycle. He also ran ahead of Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke in 171 Texas counties in 2018.

    Of course, at last count, Patrick had over $23 million on hand, a substantial warchest for a Republican incumbent in a Republican state in a Republican-favoring cycle that has no primary challengers to worry about.

    Patrick seems formidable enough that George P. Bush forwent a primary run against him to run for Attorney General instead. Are we to believe that a turncoat Bush hanger-on has a better chance against Patrick than an actual Bush? I tend to doubt it. Especially since Dowd seems to have gone full Social Justice Warrior:

    Good thing there aren’t a lot of white Christian men in Texas. Then again, Dowd doesn’t seem a man with a fine grasp of details:

    Turncoat candidates seldom do well in either party, at least since the Great Red Awakening that swept the south in the late 20th century. There’s no reason to believe a former Bushie is going to waltz into a high profile statewide Democratic Party nomination in Texas just because various swamp creatures are pushing his candidacy.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Border Crisis Update For September 29, 2021

    September 29th, 2021

    More news bubbling up on the Biden Border Crisis, so let’s dig in:

  • Remember how stories said the Biden Administration was deporting those Haitian illegal aliens in Del Rio? Yeah, not so much:

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on Sunday that more than 12,000 Haitian migrants who had been camped out under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas, have been released into the US and more may follow them.

    He told “Fox News Sunday” that there are about 12,400 Haitians in the process of having asylum claims heard by an immigration judge, while around 5,000 are being processed by the Department of Homeland Security.

    About 3,000 are being detained.

    “Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000,” Mayorkas responded when asked how many migrants have already been released.

    He added that the number could go beyond 5,000 as other cases are processed.

    Both the Biden Administration and his directory of “Homeland Security” seem to view illegal aliens as a precious resource that they must avoid deporting at all costs.

  • Speaking of Del Rio, Val Verde county has announced they’ve had enough and will join with other border counties to sue the federal government over their failure to enforce immigration laws:

  • The Biden Administration has ordered Border Patrol Agents not to use horses over the ginned-up whipping hoax.
  • Speaking of which, here’s a video on horses with the Border Patrol that Twitter kept censoring:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Biden approval rating is 18 points underwater with Texas Hispanics:

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he’s sending more National Guard resources to the border:

  • Think the situation is bad now? Things are about to get a lot worse when the Biden Administration fires every Border Patrol agent who refuses the Flu Manchu vaccine.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats | No Comments »

    Supply Chain Disruption Update for September 28, 2021

    September 28th, 2021

    I didn’t expect to do another supply chain disruption update just two days after the last one, but there’s a lot more news popping up:

  • An energy shortage is plaguing China:

    Residents in three north-east Chinese provinces experienced unannounced power cuts as the electricity shortage which initially hit factories spreads to homes.

    People living in Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces complained on social media about the lack of heating, and lifts and traffic lights not working.

    Local media in China – which is highly dependent on coal for power – said the cause was a surge in coal prices leading to short supply. As shown in the chart below, Chinese thermal coal futures have more than doubled in price in the past year.

    There are several reasons for the surge in thermal coal, among them already extremely tight energy supply globally (that’s already seen chaos engulf markets in Europe); the sharp economic rebound from COVID lockdowns that has boosted demand from households and businesses; a warm summer which led to extreme air condition consumption across China; the escalating trade spat with Australia which had depressed the coal trade and Chinese power companies ramping up power purchases to ensure winter coal supply.

    Then there is Beijing’s pursuit of curbing carbon emissions – Xi Jinping wants to ensure blue skies at the Winter Olympics in Beijing next February, showing the international community that he’s serious about de-carbonizing the economy – that has led to artificial bottlenecks in the coal supply chain.

  • More than two hundred container ships are waiting to load up outside Chinese ports:

    There are over 60 container ships full of import cargo stuck offshore of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but there are more than double that — 154 as of Friday — waiting to load export cargo off Shanghai and Ningbo in China, according to eeSea, a company that analyzes carrier schedules.

    The number of container ships anchored off Shanghai and Ningbo has surged over recent weeks. There are now 242 container ships waiting for berths countrywide. Whether it’s due to heavy export volumes, Typhoon Chanthu or COVID, rising congestion in China is yet another wild card for the trans-Pacific trade.

    Snip.

    A major driver of congestion on both sides of the Pacific Ocean: Landside capacity (terminals, trucking, rail, warehousing) is limited, but the vessel capacity of a single ocean trade lane is highly flexible.

    While the number of ships in the world is finite, operators can shift ships to wherever they make the most money. And the trans-Pacific is now a particularly lucrative trade: Spot rates including premiums can top $20,000 per forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU).

    “These assets [ships] are super-mobile,” said Sundboell. “What’s happening now is the opposite of what dogged the industry for the past 20 years. Five years ago, people were asking: How can the trans-Pacific rate drop from $2,000 to $1,500 [per FEU] in the space of just six days? It was because you could take a vessel from one place and sail it someplace else, and suddenly there were more ships and a price war and rates dropped.

    “Now we’re seeing the opposite,” he said. As ship operators pile more capacity into the trans-Pacific, congestion rises, delays mount, the incentive for shippers to pay premiums is supported, and all-in rates remain at record highs.

  • Despite shortages, L.A. and Long Beach still don’t operate 24/7.

    Despite the backlog, the busiest U.S. port still shuts down for hours on most days and is closed on Sundays, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Tens of thousands” of containers remain stuck at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. More than 60 ships are lined up to dock, the report says.

    More than 25% of all American imports pass through one of the two ports. LA and Long Beach collectively manage 13 private container terminals. Long Beach officials finally said last week they would try operating 24 hours a day between Monday and Thursday. LA says it’s going to keep existing hours and wait for the rest of the supply chain to extend their hours first.

  • More data points:

  • In Europe, a natural gas shortage has sent price soaring because surprise, surprise, Russia has cut supplies by 57%.
  • The supply chain shortages are hitting small businesses hard.
  • And to top it off, there’s a turkey shortage in Britain due to the aforementioned driver shortage.
  • Finally, the Biden’s Administration’s vaccine mandate is about to make things much worse. “The looming federal mandate on COVID-19 vaccines for large employers could make hiring goals more difficult to reach for warehousing and distribution operations, which are already short on employees, some supply chain experts say.”

    • Keep in mind: None of the supply chain issues are the result of Flu Manchu, but almost all are the result of government overreaction to it.

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    Posted in Economics, Regulation | 18 Comments »

    What If There Was An Austin Shootout And Nobody Noticed?

    September 27th, 2021

    It took a while, but it appears that at least one Austin media outlet, Fox 7, finally noticed something that was bubbling on Twitter Sunday morning, namely that there were a bunch of shots fired in downtown Austin early Sunday morning.

    And there’s video:

    Looks like someone wanted to fistfight, a friend wisely pulled him away, and the other party decided to open up as they were walking away.

    A few points:

  • That’s like the third video of the shooting I’ve tried to embed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that one disappears at some point as well.
  • I count something like thirteen shots fired.
  • Police response was quick.
  • Although this happened in front of the homeless ARCH building on Seventh Street, the perps don’t appear to be Adlers, but just those “youths” we hear so much about.

    • The Sixth Street district use to be an overpriced nightlife district that only occasionally got spicy, but in the last several years it’s gotten progressively more dangerous.

    (Hat tip: @Greggae512.)

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, video | 1 Comment »

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