King Abbott Deems Some of His Subjects Might Be Permitted To Quaff A Flagon Of Ale. Sometime Next Week. Maybe. If The Local Baron Approves.

October 8th, 2020

The title of this post is a shameless riff on this Michael Quinn Sullivan tweet:

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he’s finally going to let some bars reopen at 50% capacity, as opposed to the total closure they’ve been laboring under since March.

While other states like Florida are lifting the last of their coronavirus restrictions, Abbott is keeping his executive orders in place and continuing to keep some businesses closed.

On Monday, Abbott teased an upcoming announcement on Twitter which implied bars and other similar establishments—which have been barred from reopening alongside restaurants and other businesses—would finally be allowed to open their doors.

Abbott’s announcement on Wednesday, however, was less sweeping than many expected.

Instead, Abbott announced a new order that passes the buck onto county judges, who he has given the authority to determine whether local bars can reopen as soon as October 14 at 50 percent capacity.

For many Texans in populous Democrat-controlled counties, such approval will likely be difficult to obtain.

In fact, shortly after the announcement, Clay Jenkins—the Democrat Dallas County Judge—announced he would “not file to open them at this time.”

Williamson County is evidently opening back up, but I’m betting the Democratic judges overseeing Dallas, Travis, Harris, and Bexar counties are perfectly content to keep the remnants of their lockdown in place until the election, if not longer.

Up until this year, I was reasonably pleased with Abbott’s job as governor of Texas, though his cautious, consensus-driven brand of governance has been extremely frustrating for conservative activists who have seen many issues (such as the ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying) die in the legislature thanks to lack of support from the governor’s mansion. But I believe that Abbott’s overly cautious approach has severely hampered Texas’ recovery from the Wuhan coronavirus, especially when compared to Ron DeSantis in Florida, who has completely opened the state up rather than forcing business owners to play “Mother May I” with hostile county bureaucrats. It seems Abbott is more concerned with avoiding risk than doing the right thing.

Gov. Abbott, and Texas, can can do better

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Democrats, Economics, Regulation, Republicans, Texas | 10 Comments »

Cuties Brings Indictments

October 7th, 2020

I was going to write a piece about Cuties, the French film picked up by Netflix that, while theoretically condemning the sexual exploration of children, actually functions as sexual exploitation of children and meets the definition of child pornography.

John Nolte has a good summary of the issue:

If the uproar over Netflix’s Cuties tells us anything, it’s that we’re now at a point where the political left and the national media want to normalize child pornography.

There is no moral world, no sane world in which a movie like Cuties is okay. While I acknowledged in my review that Cuties is critical of the misogynist elements of traditional Islam and that that’s a perfectly reasonable message, I do not agree the movie is a critique of how social media sexualizes children.

To me, Cuties is a classic story with a classic structure. You put your hero through a difficult journey and the hero comes out the other end better for it. That’s what twerking and posting nude photos accomplish for the 11-year-old Ami, the protagonist in Cuties. This journey is portrayed as difficult but ultimately healthy. Spiritually and mentally healthy. There’s no lasting damage at the end of that journey, just growth and enlightenment. Terrible message. Indefensible.

Even if you buy the manure that Cuties is critical of sexualizing children, how is sexualizing children to criticize sexualizing children okay?

Cuties is not like a movie opposed to torture or animal abuse or rape that dramatizes torture and animal abuse and rape. The sexualization of young girls is not dramatized in Cuties. The girls are sexualized. The camera floats all over them like a pervert, even when they spread their 11-year-old legs.

So why is the left suddenly crossing this line? Why is Netflix mainstreaming soft-core child pornography? Why is it now acceptable for the elite media to publish headlines like this one?: “Cuties, Netflix Review: a Provocative Powder-Keg for an Age Terrified of Child Sexuality” — as if only backwards hicks could be “terrified” of sexualizing 11-year-olds.

Or this headline: “The Creepy Conservative Obsession With Netflix’s Cuties, Explained” — as though finding soft-core child pornography revolting and outrageous is all of a sudden a “creepy obsession.”

Those in the media not openly defending soft-core child pornography are defending it by covering up the controversy, by pretending it doesn’t exist.

A few other reactions:

Anyway, I was going to write about it, along with California’s move to decriminalize child-diddling, but 2020’s furious Press Of Events meant I never got to it.

But now a grand jury in Tyler County [corrected – LP], Texas has indicted Netflix for “promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child” over the movie:

A grand jury in Tyler County, Texas has indicted Netflix for “promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child” over the movie “Cuties,” which depicts 11-year-old girls learning to perform sexualized dance moves with a plot loosely wrapped around it.

According to the indictment, Netflix knowingly promoted “visual material which depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or public area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age,” which “appeals to the prurient interest in sex, and has no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

“The film routinely fetishizes and sexualizes these pre-adolescent girls as they perform dances simulating sexual conduct in revealing clothing, including at least one scene with partial child nudity,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last month, as he called for a criminal investigation into the film, calling it “pornographic.”

“These scenes in and of themselves are harmful. And it is likely that the filming of this movie created even more explicit and abusive scenes, and that pedophiles across the world in the future will manipulate and imitate this film in abusive ways…Although the First Amendment provides vigorous protection for artistic expression, it does not allow individuals or for-profit corporations to produce or distribute child pornography,” Cruz added.

The big mystery is why, when the controversy first broke, Netflix didn’t just admit they made a mistake and drop Cuties from their lineup? They could have earned a lot of good will for that. Instead, they just doubled-down, and kept doubling down, that there was nothing at all wrong with sexual depictions of children because it was artistic, you stupid mouth-breathing flyover country retards! Indeed, they’re still defending it, despite a huge spike in service cancellations over it.

Netflix so loves Cuties that they’re willing to lose paying customers and weather a criminal indictment for child pornography over it.

Between this, the California law, and other cultural signifiers (remember all those creepy pro-pedophilia pieces in Salon a few years back?), the inescapable conclusion is that numerous powerful individuals in our culture seem very heavily invested in normalizing sex with children.

Want to guess which political party Netflix CEO Reed Hasting donates big bucks to?

Go ahead. Guess.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Texas | 3 Comments »

Austin Hires Thief For Library, Shocked He Keeps Stealing

October 6th, 2020

As a book collector, book thieves are something that angrys up my blood. Not only did Austin hire a thief, they made it illegal to ask if he was a thief:

A former Austin Public Library employee is facing a pending criminal case after an internal investigation by the city auditor’s office alleged that he fraudulently bought and stole at least $1.3 million in printer toner and resold it online.

Randall Nelson Whited is charged with theft, a first-degree felony because the amount stolen is more than $200,000. The theft occurred from 2007 and 2019 when Whited could approve his own purchases and was subjected to little oversight by his supervisors, according to the auditor’s office.

Sounds like massive incompetence, something we’ve come to expect at just about every level of Austin government. (The possible exception being the police, who of course had their budget cut as a reward for their sanity.)

If you’re going to steal items for years on end, a consumable like toner for a large organization strikes me as a pretty good candidate.

The next thing? Not so much.

Whited also is accused of using city credit cards to buy at least $18,000 worth of items that appeared to be for his personal use, including video games, virtual reality headsets, robotic vacuums, and a drone from a big-box retailer.

Yeah, that sort of thing sends up huge red flags. You were running a $1.3 million scam and you got busted because you used a city credit card to buy an Oculus Rift and a Roomba. Credit cards leave paper trails, which is a big no-no if you were paying attention during Graft 101.

“The library’s poor practices and procedures provided an opportunity for Whited to steal from the city during his tenure, leading to waste and overspending by the department,” the auditor’s office noted in a 72-page report released Monday morning.

A background search shows Whited, who turns 54 this month, has been arrested multiple times on theft charges dating back to the mid-1980s. A city spokesman said Monday that criminal background investigations during Whited’s tenure showed no convictions within the last 10 years.

In 2008, the city banned the criminal history box from its employment application, and in 2016 the city committed to being a Fair Chance Hiring employer. The city conducts two types of criminal background checks, for positions that have financial responsibility or for vulnerable populations.

I’m sure the SUPERgeniuses running the city of Austin were quite shocked when the convicted thief stole from them. What are the odds?

Also, just what does the “for vulnerable populations” euphemism mean here? That you’re immune to background checks if you have a certain color skin?

Whited, according to the report, took advantage of poor purchasing reviews by his supervisors, former Financial Manager Victoria Rieger and Contract Management Specialist Monica McClure.

“Whited also took advantage of several other purchasing and budget-related shortcomings, such as having a role in the approval of his own purchases and insufficient oversight of the library’s budget by Rieger and Assistant Director Dana McBee,” the report said.

As an accounting associate, Whited was responsible for making and approving purchases, cash receipts, billing, and other accounting transactions, the report states.

What could possibly go wrong?

Since Whited allegedly started stealing things in 2007, this is a reminder that Austin leftist incompetence and mismanagement precedes the reigning clown show at City Hall, and will probably continue long after the current cadre of clowns is gone…

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Austin, Crime, Social Justice Warriors | 8 Comments »

BidenWatch for October 5, 2020

October 5th, 2020

Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • New poll shows Biden “lead” down to three points after debate.
  • Hold on! Zogby says it’s down to two.
  • Speaking of polls: How to lie with statistics, CNN division:

    Always check the crosstabs. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Joe Biden is just an idea:

    Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trump’s remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that he’s little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.

    Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.

    There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says “I am the Democratic Party,” and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.

    Biden’s already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trump’s tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, there’s not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

    Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunner’s foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster — one that Biden’s mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy — there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.

  • Biden campaigns from the shadowrealm:

    Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.

    Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.

    Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.

    So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.

    Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.

    If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.

    And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.

    So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.

    And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.

    His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.

    As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.

    As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.

    And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.

    As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.

    As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.

    And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.

    Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Biden sends mixed signals on whether he supports the socialist “Green New Deal,” but his own proposals look like the Green New Deal’s Little Brother:

    For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:

    • “Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
    • “On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
    • “He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
    • “The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
    • “Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
    • “Make climate change a core national security priority.”

    These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.

    Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.

  • Kyle Rittenhouse’s layer threatens to sue Biden for libel for falsely calling him a white supremacist. As well he should.
  • Black members of the Proud Boys react to Biden calling them white supremacists. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of actual white supremacists, “Will MSM Ask Biden To Renounce White Supremacist Richard Spencer’s Endorsement?” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Tech stocks are likely to take it on the chin under a Biden presidency.
  • American Jews should reject Joe Biden.

    The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.

    Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.

  • No Wuhan coronavirus for Biden.
  • Biden refuses to denounce court-packing because he’s afraid of losing the radical left.
  • “The wife of a Massachusetts transit police officer who was injured in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers accused Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately and making a suggestive comment in 2014.” Hey, remember when we were supposed to believe all women during #MeToo? It already seems a million years ago…
  • Not that our media will report any of them:

  • “Biden Transition Team Member Worked With CCP Officials For Over a Decade.” “Suzy George, a new addition to the transition team of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is a former principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
  • The ghost:

  • Context:

  • Beto O’Rourke shows the same keen political acumen that made him a U.S. Senator and Presidential nominee.
  • Heh:

  • The whiff of desperation:

    Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Supreme Court | 5 Comments »

    Observations from the San Antonio Gun Show

    October 4th, 2020

    I finally got my ducks in a row to carry out a roadtrip to the Saxet San Antonio Gun Show, the largest in central Texas, along with Dwight and Mike. (With two large dogs to board, the logistics can be daunting.) My last trip to a gun show was a few years ago, so I wanted to see how The Great Gun Buying Panic of 2020 has changed things. Here are some observations that people of the gun may find of interest.

  • We got there at about 11 AM, and while sales seemed brisk, they weren’t “if you see it you better buy it or it’s gone forever” brisk. At a glance all regular rifle and pistol manufacturers and makes in the usual calibers seemed to be there, with the possible exception of Glocks. Usually they seem to be plentiful, but I don’t recall seeing the usual arrays of new Glock cases. Then again, I wasn’t looking for a Glock, so I might just not have seen them, or the dealer mix was Glock-lite.
  • I was looking for a Smith & Wesson M&P15 in 5.56 NATO/.223, and boy prices have gone up on those. Used to be you could find them in the $550 to $600 range. You could find them in stock boxes at the show, but they started at $998. Supply and demand has driven this one through the roof.
  • My less scientific survey of pistol prices suggests they’re up as well, but not as much, and I got the impression that quality name-brand models were generally up some $100 to $150 over a few years ago.
  • Ammunition prices were also up, and business also seemed brisk, but didn’t suffer from the “put it out and it’s gone” condition people seem to be finding at their local sporting goods shops. I bought 50 rounds of .45 ACP ammo for $25 (and brass, not steel). That’s up from the 33 cents a round I used to pay, but not up as much as I expected.
  • Again, I wasn’t looking for them, but reloading supplies seemed nearly non-existent. The Great Primer Shortage of 2020 continues apace.
  • The San Antonio Gun Show was a whole hell of a lot more diverse than the average antifa riot, with Hispanic, black and Asian attendees. It also seems to skew younger and with more women (maybe 25%) than in previous years.
  • Out: The weirdo Nazi memorabilia dealers you used to find at gun shows last century. In: People selling quilts, water softeners and beard oil (two different vendors for the last).
  • While we were in San Antonio, we tried to hit various Half Price Books locations. Two trips were successful, but but two others stores (including the Broadway location) were inexplicably closed, with locked doors and “closed to foot traffic” signs on the windows.
  • On the way to the show, we had some excellent breakfast tacos at Lucy’s Tacos in San Marcos, which is just a trailer next to a convenience store with three picnic tables under a vine-covered gazebo.
  • On the way back, we had some fine German food for our Saturday Dining Conspiracy at Alpine Haus in New Braunfels.
  • There are still a lot of gun shows in Texas on the calendar between now and the end of the year.

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Guns, Texas | 15 Comments »

    Shooting a S&W .500 Magnum

    October 3rd, 2020

    Been a while since I posted some gun videos, so here’s a video of someone firing the ridiculous Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum, a cool gun I have absolutely no justifiable use-case for.

    Looks like a lot of fun to shoot, assuming your wrist hods up.

    And he’s right: Nobody likes eggplant.

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in Guns, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for October 2, 2020

    October 2nd, 2020

    Welcome to the October country, one of my favorite months! It being 2020, things lean rather more heavily on tricks than treats…

  • Two important points from Tuesday’s debate:

    (1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.

    (2) Trump may have announced that he’s about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Is CIA Director Gina Haspel personally blocking the release of Russiagate documents?
  • New documents show that the goal of the Flynn investigation wasn’t a search for truth, it was to get him fired.
  • So, who had “Armenian Azerbaijani War Over Nagorno Karabakh” on their 2020 bingo card? Here’s a map I swiped from Wikipedia:

    And here’s the Livemap.

  • France has accused Turkey of sending Syrian jihadists there to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan. Remember that Turkey killed over 1.5 million Armenians during the rise of the Young Turks as part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, so the bad blood there goes back a long ways.
  • Virginia passes law decreeing that Christians have no right to that pesky First Amendment and must align their theology with the tranny mafia or face fines. Is your Church government approved, comrade? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Top Obama FBI official wants a commission to rule out any presidential candidates who threaten to bust their scams. Of course, he uses different language… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Has a member of Mueller’s team flipped for Durham?
  • Australian blogger examines Wuhan coronavirus data:

    Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments – probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.

  • Kuwait’s ruler Emir Sheikh Sabah dead at 91.
  • “Clare Bronfman Becomes First NXIVM Sex-Slave Trafficker to Get Jail Time.” Namely six years and nine months. You know it’s a crazy year when you don’t have time to pay attention rich, powerful weirdos being tried for running a sex cult…
  • Coinbase SJW babies: We have to be woke! Coinbase CEO: There’s the door.
  • Hopefully Spotify will do the same to staffers demanding the right to censor Joe Rogan.
  • What things irritate the left the most during a nomination fight? Republicans nominating blacks, women, or Hispanics. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Things generating irrational hatred in Trump Derangement Syndrome suffers this week is (rolls dice)…bales of hay in Rappahannock County, Virginia, population 7,252.
  • The Texas House District 148 battle features a fight between a Hispanic Republican against a Democratic candidate with even more ties than usual to communism. “During a July 2018 presentation, “The Art and Science of Building the Communist Party,” Chairman of the Houston chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Bernard Sampson boasted that his club had placed four communist party members on the Texas ballot, including Morales-Shaw who he specifically identified as a member of his group.”
  • NBA conference finals down 40% since last year, despite involving the Lakers.

    I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. We’re disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.

    I didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.

    My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.

    I guess I’m not alone.

    Conservative America’s divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of America’s public schools. And so forth.

  • New South Korean mini nuclear reactor that can’t melt down approved for use in the United States. First plant is scheduled to come online in Utah, but not until 2029. Faster, please.
  • How to disable the nightmarish bullshit that is the WordPress “Block” Editor.
  • And here’s the post I was tempted to write: “Fuck You WordPress, Yet Again (Block Editor).”
  • Ireland’s Supreme Court rules that Subway bread isn’t. You would think that if it used that much sugar it would taste better. Then again, I’m not sure I’ve bought a Subway sandwich since the heyday of the $5 Footlong era…
  • “See Inside a 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Most Expensive Rolls-Royce Ever Made.”
  • There would be an amusing Tweet here about a guy riding a wall of death with a lion, but some bastard hacked Iowahawk’s account.
  • The good news is that he’s back, the bad news is that right now he’s lacking all tweets after May 22. I hope they get that fixed soon.
  • Enjoy a movie review of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
  • “Amy Coney Barrett Holds Press Conference In Handmaid’s Tale Costume Just To Mess With Liberals.”
  • “Democrats Prepare To Give Republicans Free Ad Footage Of Them Attacking Successful, Religious Mother Of 7.”
  • “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • “‘Coexist’ Molotov Cocktails Now Available.”
  • Looks like someone is worried about the competition:

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court | 3 Comments »

    Rheinmetall Unveils New 130mm Cannon With Autoloader

    October 1st, 2020

    Germany’s Rheinmetall is now testing 130mm smoothbore cannon with a integral autoloader.

    German defense company Rheinmetall has unveiled a prototype of a 130mm smoothbore gun for a future main battle tank (MBT). Combined with a state-of-the-art auto-loader, this system is the latest evolvement in Rheinmetall’s, Main Battle Tank Advanced Technologies competence. According to the company, the increase of 8 percent in caliber results in 50 percent more kinetic energy over the 120mm smoothbore gun from Rheinmetall, installed in thousands of main battle tanks worldwide. The 130mm developmental cannon delivers leap ahead capabilities in lethality for next generation main battle tanks.

    A MBT equipped with the 130mm cannon would be capable of successfully engaging better-protected opponents at greater ranges with superior firepower. Rheinmetall developed its 130mm main gun technology demonstrator to address the emerging necessity of gaining significant performance enhancements against modern armored vehicles. The 130mm live fire demonstrator has completed developmental efforts that have showcased superior energy and output performance when compared to the standard 120mm L55/L55A1 cannon in a direct live fire test with modern targets. The 130mm/L51 smoothbore gun weighs (without mounting components) 3,000 kilograms with a barrel length of 6.63 meters.

    Here’s video of the cannon mounted on what appears to be its Challenger 2 demonstrator chassis:

    Since Rheinmetall currently supplies the L/55 120mm cannon used as the main gun on the M1A2 Abrams (as well as the German Leopard 2, Japan’s Type 90 and Korea’s K1A2), I expect the 130mm to get a serious look as an upgrade for the M1A2, or in the next-generation tank currently being designed under the Next Generation Combat Vehicle—Future Decisive Lethality project, though that effort is said to be looking at lighter and faster tanks.

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in Military, video | 1 Comment »

    Your Obligatory Trump-Biden Debate Post

    September 30th, 2020

    I tried to watch the debate, I really did, but I just hate hearing people talk over each other. It’s a personal aesthetic response, rather than a political one. But for those who didn’t and still want to, here’s the video.

    Some reactions:

    Tags: , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, video | 5 Comments »

    This Week in Democrat Voting Fraud for September 29, 2020

    September 29th, 2020

    A whole bunch of voting fraud stories, of various sizes, have popped up this week, two in Texas alone:

  • First up: “Biden’s Texas Political Director Implicated in Massive Mail-In Ballot Harvesting Scheme in Harris County”:

    A Biden Campaign operative in Texas is attempting to rig the 2020 election with the help of others in a massive ballot harvesting scheme, according to two private investigators who testified under oath that they have “video evidence, documentation and witnesses” to prove it. With the help of mass mail-in ballots, the illegal ballot harvesting operation could harvest 700,000 ballots, one Harris County Democrat operative allegedly bragged.

    The investigators—a former FBI agent and former police officer—claim that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts have been “hoarding mail-in and absentee ballots” and ordering operatives to them fill out for people in Harris County illegally, “including dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election,” Patrick Howley of the National File reported.

    While law enforcement agencies are reportedly investigating these potential crimes, nothing will be done about it until “well after the November 3, 2020 election” the former FBI agent said.

    Dallas Jones was appointed the Biden campaign’s Texas Political Director in late August.

  • More Harris County fraud:

    Texas’ largest county has been approving voter registrations even when people say they’re not citizens, according to a lawsuit announced Monday that found some of those people managed to cast ballots, too.

    The Public Interest Legal Foundation says it uncovered dozens of examples of people who registered in Harris County over the last two decades, either admitted they weren’t citizens or left the box blank, yet were registered anyway. They were removed from the rolls after they later stated, again, that they weren’t, in fact, citizens.

  • Also from Texas: More of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist:

    Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday announced the arrest of a Democratic county commissioner and three associates in Gregg County in East Texas on charges of election fraud in a 2018 election.

    In an announcement with potential significance for the November elections when voting by mail is expected to increase significantly because of the threat of COVID-19, Paxton said Gregg County Commissioner Shannon Brown, Marlena Jackson, Charlie Burns and DeWayne Ward orchestrated a vote-harvesting scheme to help win Brown win the Democratic primary two years ago.

  • The big voting fraud case from outside Texas is from Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis, where a Somali-American connected to Ilhan Omar was caught on video bragging about his car full of illegally harvest ballots:

    A “ballot broker” boasts about keeping hundreds of absentee ballots in his car trunk. He brags about them being filled in by people other than the voters. Often, money changes hands. Witnesses tie the rampant fraud to the campaign chairman of a prominent member of the radical “squad” in the U.S. House. Loose election laws allow people to come from out of state, vote, and then leave again.

    Plus stories of forcing the elderly to hand over their ballots and carrying around a bag of money to pay for ballots.

    They even caught an on-camera exchange of money for ballots, which is a clear violation of federal law:

  • Speaking of voting fraud, Democratic judges have decided to implement ex-post facto voting law changes to allow mail-in ballots to be received seven days after the election and still be counted, including those missing postmarks and non-matching signatures, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
  • Meanwhile, Colorado is mailing ballot registration reminders to the dead, or people that haven’t even been in the state for more than half a century.

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »