Drone Swarm Boogaloo

November 14th, 2021

Let’s talk about drone swarms.

Relatively cheap, quickly deployed swarms of autonomous drones are probably going to be a major factor in short- to -medium-term warfare. There will probably be (at least) two different types of autonomous drones: Suicide drones for hard targets like tanks, and anti-personnel drones using light weapons. The later could either return to base, or just fall to the ground for later retrieval and refurbishment when their fuel or power run out.

Both will pick out targets using AI.

I’m not much interested in the central question posed by the following video (are drone swarms technically WMDs), mainly because China doesn’t give a rat’s ass about international law. But it shows a variety of different drones being developed in various countries:

Speaking of China, here’s a short video on China deploying drones via a MRLS:

China is investing not only in drones, but also in counter drone technology.

Here’s a look at the Navy’s LOCUST system from four years ago:

LOCUST had a successful test earlier this year.

The advantages of functional drone swarms for armored or naval warfare should be obvious. If you can kill a $10 million Abrams or Type 99 tank and crews with a $100,000 drone, that’s a clear win. Whether such drones can overcome current active protection systems like Trophy is an open question. And Germany’s Rheinmetall just released a video of an anti-drone platform shooting some down:

The problem, of course, is that their system hasn’t demonstrated any autonomous mode, and real battlefield drones will probably quickly adopt a variety of evasive maneuvers rather than hovering nicely in a row to be shot.

Welcome to the AI drone arms race. Make your own SkyNet jokes in the comments below.

Did CRT-Pushing AZ School Board President Break Federal Law?

November 13th, 2021

This is a pretty crazy story:

A school board president in Arizona has been accused of maintaining a secret online dossier containing personal details about parents who opposed mask mandates and Critical Race Theory.

Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg’s access to the Google Drive file was revealed after he accidentally displayed the link in a screenshot he sent to a parent in a heated email chain.

The drive contained files labeled ‘SUSD Wackos’ and ‘Anti Mask Lunatics’ among others in a sprawling database tracking the online activities of parents in the district.

The drive was set to public, allowing anyone with a link to view it, and the contents, including the Social Security numbers, financial information and divorce records of parents, quickly set off a firestorm of calls for Greenburg to resign, according to AZ Free News.

Never mind a school board president keeping a “political enemies” dossier on the parents who are his employers; that’s bad enough. But:

  1. If he used district funds to hire a private investigator to investigate parents, he’s committed fiduciary responsibility fraud, and should be fired with cause for that alone.
  2. If he obtained and transmitted federally defined Personal Identifiable Information (in this case Social Security numbers) for unauthorized uses, it’s a strong possibility that he violated one or more federal statues regarding the collection and dissemination of that information, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

But keep in mind that I Am Not A Lawyer, and anyone more familiar than I with federal privacy provisions should weigh in below.

More background on Greenburg: He’s a democrat, having donated to the Arizona Democratic Party, unsuccessful Democratic congressional candidate Eric Kurland, and unsuccessful Democratic state senate candidate Seth Blattman. (Note: Ignore the entries for Mark Greenburg on the Open Secrets page; I’m guessing that Open Secrets doesn’t like the hyphen in Jann-Michael Greenburg’s first name, as no results come up when you search on his full name, thus the last name and zipcode search.)

The fact that a school board president would break the law to compile “political enemies” dossiers on parents who oppose Critical Race Theory shows what lengths CRT advocates will go to to keep indoctrinating your children.

It’s going to be a long, hard fight against CRT. Plan accordingly.

LinkSwarm for November 12, 2021

November 12th, 2021

Biden takes his Welcome Back Carter cosplay to the next level, fighting the plague of wokeness, and more disasterous Kyle Rittenhouse prosecutor missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!


  • As if high inflation, high unemployment, rising crime, parental unrest over failing schools and a new ABBA album weren’t enough to evoke the late 1970s, now Iranian-backed militias have stormed an American embassy in the Middle East and taken hostages:

    A group of Houthi rebels reportedly stormed the U.S. compound on Wednesday seeking “large quantities of equipment and materials,” according to regional reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The raid comes just five days after the Houthis kidnapped Yemeni nationals who work for the U.S. embassy. “The alleged raid comes after the Houthis kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy from one of the employee’s private residences in Sana’a on November 5,” according to MEMRI. At least 22 other Yemenis were kidnapped by the Houthis in recent weeks, “most of whom worked on the security staff guarding the embassy grounds,” according to MEMRI.

    The State Department confirmed to the Free Beacon that the Yemeni staffers are being detained without explanation and that the Iran-backed militants stole property after breaching the American facility in Sana’a, which housed U.S. embassy staff prior to the suspension of operations there in 2015.

    Next up: Pet Rocks and auras.

  • Today’s columnist decrying wokeness among Democrats is…Maureen Dowd in the New York Times?

    For a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.

    The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?

    There’s some truth in what James Carville told Judy Woodruff: “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.”

    There’s also some truth in what Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat in a tough re-election battle, told The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns about the president: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

    Biden has pursued his two bills with Captain Ahab-like zeal; he pines to be F.D.R. and eclipse Barack Obama, who pushed him aside for Hillary.

    It’s Dowd and the Times, so I can’t say read the whole thing. But even Dowd can smell a dead fish rotting…

  • Kurt Schlicter: “Americans Are Waking Up To The Democrat’s Race Hustle.”

    he smart, moral transcriptionists of our glorious ruling class have discovered what they contend is a terrible crime of wickedness – those rural monsters out there whose skin tone is pale voted for Republicans in astounding numbers. Blatant “whiteness” they call it, a malady that people who aren’t white can suffer from too. Just ask Winsome Sears. And so can the other minority voters who ditched the Democrat plantation in record numbers. But they also contend that voting for Democrats because of your race is great. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, these people are totally hobgoblin-free.

    As a normal person, you will observe that this all makes no sense. That’s incorrect, because it makes perfect sense when you understand that all this race hustling is a garbage scam to secure the liberal establishment’s power. It’s morally illiterate, but the moral angle is part of the scam. See, voting for a Democrat or a Republican, to most folks, is just a thing. It’s morally neutral. Now, many vote for a party by habit. Others vote by the individual or by policies. Keeping the former group and coercing the second are the goals of racializing elections in order to cast casting your vote as a moral imperative.

    Republican, bad.

    Democrat, good.

    Dig through the dross of “privilege” and “whiteness” and you get to the crux of the scam. They use race to turn what should be a choice based on rational self-interest into one based on (alleged) virtue. Suddenly, a vote for the Dem is not something Dems need to earn through competence and quality. It is something they are simply entitled to because they are on the side of righteousness. And this is super convenient because the Democrats just suck. They are terrible. Not even a year in and President * has managed to screw up everything his dusty claws have touched.

    This, you should read the whole thing…

  • Another Virginia post-mortem:

    There were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.

    There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.

    Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.

    “It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.

    And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.

  • This is really bad news: “Metallurgist admits faking steel-test results for Navy subs.”

    A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.

    Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls.

    From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.

    Snip.

    “Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” Carpenter wrote. “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”

    So, she just harmed national security and endangered the lives of American servicemen because she was lazy as fuck. Oh, that makes it all better…

  • Legal Insurrection continues to keep track of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

    Today was the fifth day of the trial by which ADA Thomas Binger’s is seeking to have Kyle Rittenhouse convicted and sentenced to life in prison for having shot three men (two fatally) the night of August 25, 2020 in Kenosha WI, when the city was suffering a tsunami of rioting, looting, and arson following the lawful shooting of a knife-wielding Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers.

    And it would be hard to fully express what a catastrophe this day was for Prosecutor Binger.

    The prosecution’s demise came into the courtroom in the form of its star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, famously struck in the right bicep as he closed on the fallen 17-year-old with a Glock pistol in his hand.

    Grosskreutz is the only survivor from among the three men who were struck by Kyle’s desperately fired rounds, and the only one of Kyle’s attackers available to testify for the State in this prosecution (the fourth primary attacker, “jump kick man,” had the unbelievably good fortune to be missed twice by the 17-year-old, and has since disappeared off the face of the Earth).

    Grosskreutz is fortunate that modern American courtrooms don’t do trial by combat, because otherwise he’d have been carried out of the courtroom mortality wounded by his own testimony.

  • One person waking up: Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian.

    Kasparian said she thought Rittenhouse first chased after Joseph Rosenbaum, sparking the incident that ended with the teen fatally shooting Rosenbaum. However, it was Rosenbaum who chased after Rittenhouse. Moreover, a gun was fired from a third party just seconds before Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum.

    “I was wrong about that, okay, so I want to correct the record,” Kasparian said on her news show. “Look, these details matter, because if you’re going to make an argument that you acted in self-defense, there needs to be some proof that there was an imminent threat.”

  • Some Rittenhouse trial tweets:

  • “The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.”
  • Democrats might do better electorally if they weren’t so rabidly hostile to the Second Amendment.

    Based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe its time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far,though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.

    Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”

    Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.

    Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.

    While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.

    Spoiler: Democrats aren’t going to change course because they are radically, institutionally hostile to civilian gun ownership.

  • What. The. Hell. “Police Visited a Person Who Criticized AOC on Twitter.”
  • Problem: Too many minority students fail tests. California solution: Toss aside objective standards and eliminate tests. That’s like this solution:

  • “Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat.” They’re currently threatening to burn new York City some more. “Democrats at the highest levels have been giving BLM cover since the group was founded. They either excuse BLM’s violence as some part of a protracted mea culpa, or they deny that the violence is happening at all.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • MIT caves to wokeness.

    The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.

    We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”

    Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)

    We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.

  • The war against Critical Race Theory Texas classrooms takes a scalp.

    The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students.

    The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees voted Monday to part ways with the principal, James Whitfield, who was suspended this year at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Fort Worth area.

    The school board had voted in September not to renew Whitfield’s contract, NBC Dallas-Forth Worth reported.

    Whitfield is the principles who accused residents of “systemic racism” and demanded students “commit to being an anti-racist.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

  • Enes Kanter refuses to sweep Chinese oppression under the rug:

  • General Electric is splitting into three companies, “aviation, healthcare and energy.”
  • Toshiba is also breaking itself into three parts, infrastructure, semiconductors and devices. Toshiba used to be one of the top semicodnuctor companies in the world in the 1980s, but I thought they had spun off semi operations as Kioxia in 2018.
  • YouTube disables dislike button because they don’t approve of you being able to dislike things they don’t want you to dislike.
  • F. W. de Klerk, the South African leader who freed Mandela and ended Apartheid, dead at 85.
  • What happens when you apply pitch correction to Robert Plant? Abomination.
  • Cloudflare lava lamps.
  • Library addition: A new book on the Tiger tank.
    

  • “I shall call him Mini-Me!”

  • Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro on The Virtual Metaverse

    November 11th, 2021

    Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro discuss Facebook’s announcement of a virtual reality “metaverse.” Some interesting discussion, though little that will be of surprise to anyone who read cyberpunk in the 1980s:

    Shapiro: “I wonder with this stuff if we’re innovating ourselves out of existence as a civilization.”

    Shapiro:”Let’s just take this on the most baseline demographic level. None of them get married, none of them have babies. In two generations, this ain’t gonna matter. You’re gonna have a good time in the virtual reality and then they’re gonna be no babies to carry this on and the only on earth are going to be religious Jews, religious Catholics and religious Muslims and that’s it.”

    Knowing Facebook, I can only assume their Metaverse will be plastered with annoying ads and “features” you hate. Also, just as soon as you get comfortable in the Metaverse, they’ll change the interface…

    Supply Chain Update for November 10, 2021

    November 10th, 2021

    Thanks to California regulations and vaccine mandates, supply chain problems continue to plague America. Here’s an update on those disruptions and other topics related to the wondrous Biden Economy.

  • Inflation hits a 31 year high.
  • Not only is inflation bad, it’s about to get much worse. Unprocessed goods are up 56% from a year ago. “At the current rate of increase, regular unleaded gasoline will hit $6/gal (National Average) by Easter.”
  • It’s not just us: China’s prices are soaring as well.

    China’s trade balance may have just hit a record on the back of resurgent exports and slowing inflation, but the favorable impact to China’s mercantlist economy was more than wiped out by the just released record PPI and resurgent CPI.

    China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that in October, CPI rose 1.5% Y/Y, higher than the 1.4% expected, and a 0.7% sequential increase from the September print; the CPI increase was evenly split between base effect and sequential growth.

    At the same time factory gate, or PPI, inflation hit a fresh all time high of 13.5%, steamrolling the 12.4% consensus estimate, and rising at the fastest pace since records began in November 1995.

    While the gradual increase in CPI is alarming, and the NBS said that it was affected by weather, commodities demand and costs – it was the producer price inflation that was far more alarming, soaring as a result of a tight supply of energy and resources. In reality, however, there was just one key variable – thermal coal, which as we said last month indicates that PPI will continue rising far higher, although judging by the recent sharp reversal in the price of Chinese thermal coal (if only for the time being), this may be as high as PPI gets.

    Or so Beijing should hope because with the spread between PPI and CPI hitting a new all time record, virtually no Chinese companies that use commodity inputs – which in China is a vast majority – are making any profits.

  • The situation at LA and Long beach ports is not getting better:

    DHL releases service announcements every week so shippers in their network know what to expect at ports all around the world. The most recent announcement came out today, and it shows that the situation at America’s top West Coast port complex is not improving. Here’s DHL’s summary of the port conditions at Los Angeles/Long Beach:

    Ships are waiting 13-22 days to catch a berth. Currently there are 72 vessels waiting for a berthing spot. Both ports are seeing record volumes month after month and the ships at anchor are delayed an average of 4 days. Delays forcing the ships to wait at anchor are expected to continue for the remainder of the year. All terminals remain extremely congested and evaluating a reduction on their window for export cargo acceptance from four to three days. The expected spike on imports generated by the peak season and cargo pre-shipped is already here making the operation more complex. Local trucking delays have been reduced and are being closely monitored. The LAX/LGB rail operations from all terminals and the off dock ramps continues to deteriorate as demand exceeds capacity, therefore inland moves by rail can suffer considerable delays.

    That’s not an encouraging description, and there has not been movement in the right direction. The waiting time and number of ships waiting have been steady for over a month now, according to DHL. If anything, they are getting slightly worse. Here’s how those estimates have changed over time:

    “Port congestion has been a problem for months now, and we’ve yet to see signs of improvement.”

  • “You Know Those Cargo Ships And Trains Waiting To Be Unloaded In California? Yeah, Now Homeless People Are Breaking In And Stealing Things From The Stopped Trains.”

    So, not only will you have to wait literal months for products you’ve ordered to finally make it to their destination, now it looks like you’ll be lucky if any of these things make it to your house because homeless people are stealing from unprotected parked trains.

  • Truckers should be making money hand-over-fist to solve the supply chain crisis. Port constraints mean They’re not:

    We have covered the ocean-carrier side of this crisis (‘In Deep Ship’), and the new fee equivalent to $1m a day, and rising $1m each following day, for a 10,000 TEU vessel whose cargo is stuck in LA/LB port. However, we stressed in that report that the supply chain issue is more systematic. So, allow me to share quotes from an article exposing there is ‘No Trucking Way’ we are about to return to normal:

    “Think of going to the port as going to WalMart on Black Friday, but imagine only ONE cashier for thousands of customers…Most port drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same, and they have to pay 90% of their truck operating expenses…I honestly don’t understand how many of them can even afford to show up for work…In some cases they work 70 hour weeks and still end up owing money to their carrier.

    So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one. They took a 2/3 pay cut and most of these drivers were working 12 hours a day or more…Many drivers simply quit. However, while the pickup rate for containers severely decreased, they were still being offloaded from the boats. And it’s only gotten worse…The ‘experts’ want to say we can do things like open the ports 24/7, and this problem will be over in a couple weeks. They are blowing smoke, and they know it.”

    The author also points out a crippling shortage of truck chassis; warehouse workers, again due to low-pay and Covid, so unloading takes longer; and warns soon there will be less, not more truck drivers. Crucially, he bewails that ocean carriers, ports, trucking companies, warehouses, and retailers are all making great money – so won’t invest before the system collapses further. If so, this book-ends the 1980 deregulation of the US trucking industry under President Carter.

    Meanwhile, Senator Manchin just said ‘No Trucking Way’ to the White House’s fiscal plans, again, which already fail to address the above logistical problems. Perhaps it’s time for US economists to study what weak, share-cropper logistics and on-off fiscal and central-bank liquidity largesse do for emerging markets’ macroeconomic and financial stability?

    Indeed, Bloomberg reports: “Chinese households are encouraged to stock up on a certain amount of daily necessities, such as vegetables and meat, in preparation for the winter months, according to a notice from Ministry of Commerce aimed at ensuring supply and stabilizing prices of such items for the next few months. Major agricultural distributors are encouraged to sign long-term contracts with producers. Reserves of meat and vegetables will be released on a timely basis to replenish market supply.”

  • Another problem: Some 73,000 truck drivers taken off the roads due to newly implemented drug tests.

    The biggest number of clearinghouse violations by far — 56 percent — are for marijuana use, according to federal data. (Amphetamine and methamphetamine violations account for 18 percent, while cocaine and various opioids account for 15 percent and 4 percent, respectively.) Some argue that because marijuana can stay in the body for up to 30 days, testing does not accurately reflect whether a person is driving while under the influence.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Whoever is in charge of Slow Joe’s administration is making everything worse:
    • As Mario Loyola laid out, “The World Economic Forum rates America’s shipping-industry regulations as the most restrictive in the world, chiefly because of the Jones Act. Stifling regulations have left America with the most inefficient ports in the world. A recent review of container-port efficiency ranked the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach below ports in Tanzania and Kenya, near the bottom of the list of 351 top ports. America’s ports are effectively third-world. The 50 most efficient ports in the world are mostly in Asia and the Middle East; none are in America.”
    • Loyola continues, “Above all, it is the shortage of truck drivers that’s causing the current crisis. And why do we have that shortage? One reason, according to truck drivers, is that the restrictions on their access to ports are too onerous. The Jones Act has made that problem worse, too. The Jones Act ‘has made coast-wise shipping prohibitively costly and therefore put additional pressure on alternative inland transit such as trucks and trains,’ Lincicome writes. “In practice, this means badly needed rigs that could be servicing U.S. ports currently are instead stuck on I-95 ferrying oranges from Florida to New York.”
    • Earlier this year, Heavy Duty Trucking reported that the Biden administration had imposed a tariff on truck chassis (the framework that provides the truck base that includes the wheels and axles) made in China; “chassis or sub-assemblies imported from China for the next five years will be subject to tariffs/duties that would add up to more than twice the value of the actual chassis itself.”
    • Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Association in California, told Heavy Duty Trucking that that, “The [U.S. International Trade Commission] really botched their decision, at a time when our industry is needing to inject more equipment, both for capacity and for folks trying to retire older equipment. Now people have to stretch out the useful life of existing equipment, which isn’t an ideal thing from a safety standpoint. And now we’ve created scarcity and increased the cost.”
    • California imposed regulations requiring trucks built before a certain date to replace their engines or not operate in the state.
    • Our Dominic Pino observes that the Biden administration wants to make two-man crews for freight-train engines standard, forever — no matter what technological advances occur. The unions for the train crews argue that trains are like planes and require two engineers — unlike a freight truck, which can be safely driven by one person. “As the Association of American Railroads says, plenty of other trains operate just fine with only one person at the controls. In the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand, one-person crews are the norm, and even in the U.S., passenger trains are commonly driven by one person.”
  • A view from the trenches by (of all people) Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich:

    I’m exactly the sort of person who should be up-to-the-minute on what the senators from Arizona and West Virginia are doing and whether the progressives will go along and whatever else it is that has caused Congress to accomplish absolutely nothing under supposed Democratic control. But I’m not.

    I’m up-to-the-minute on the price of eggs. And the cost of cans for cranberry. And the likelihood of empty shelves when I shop for all the children in my life come December.

    I’m up-to-the-minute on all the big ships you can see lined up just waiting to unload at San Pedro, which is pretty far south of where we’re sitting.

    Twelve dollars for a dozen eggs. At the farmers market on Sunday, I did my own survey. Three stands were $11. The rest were $12. Ten minutes ago, they cost $6.

    One hundred dollars. That’s how much it cost my handyman to fuel up his truck.

    They’re warning that the price of canned cranberries is going to be 50% higher this year because of the scarcity of aluminum for the cans.

    Remember overnight deliveries from Amazon? Notice that all those overnight specials now take three days, and certain products are already being slated for January delivery.

  • The supply chain problems hits ordinary Texans:

    everyday items have started disappearing, leaving the stores with nothing to replace them with.

    Belton resident Laura Zarate said it started slowly.

    She’d go to her local store to buy groceries and the store didn’t have something she needed.

    Now her shopping list is getting lighter as more items move to her can’t get list.

    “When I walk in, on the shelves I see they don’t have a lot of things anymore that we used to buy. They’re kind of empty sometimes. It worries me,” Zarate said.

    And it should worry all of us. In a global economy that lives or dies by its dependence on consumer spending, transportation becomes a vital link in getting products to consumers through something called “the supply chain”.

    The supply chain is a network of transportation that takes goods from factories to airplanes and eventually to warehouses and eventually us.

    And what’s the weak link here?

    “The breakdown is in the supply chain in general,” a Port of Los Angeles longshoreman said.

    However, this supply chain didn’t just have weak links, it looked like a roving gang with bolt cutters tore into it.

    Take Christmas for instance, those decorations that didn’t show up in August could be the only thing we get.

    “The cut-off was probably about a month ago,” said a L.A. warehouse manager, talking about when most of Decembers merchandise should have been here.

    But that supply chain, that network, now has holes in it and empty store shelves prove it.

    What are stores doing about the supply chain problem?

    Frankly, everything they can and everything they can think of because if they aren’t selling, they aren’t making any money.

    Stores blame shipping companies and shipping companies blame overseas companies, who blame the shipping companies and it goes round and round until it just becomes background noise, leaving Laura Zarate, paying more for much less to buy.

    People started noticing it when ships mysteriously started dropping anchor off the coast of California.

    A backup caused by only so many parking spots and so many employees unloading the ships.

    “Everything. Everything on paper, your shirts, your shoes, your bike, computers, air conditioner, everything. Everybody’s waiting for,” said dock workers when asked about the growing problem.

    The world shutdown is the cause but experts say we added to the problem by believing stories shipping companies spun of how their super-efficient delivery system meant you didn’t need a stockpile of stuff.

    “We’ve had a lot of shortages, truck drivers and high utilization of our supply chains since the pandemic started. When you put all that together plus the shift of consumer spending from more services more towards goods, which has created more demand so it’s kind of like a perfect storm really says everything that could go wrong did go wrong and all at the same time,” said Michael Bomba, Ph.D., of the G. Brint Ryan College of Business, at the University of North Texas.

    He says we will soon have to address the issue of better pay for truck drivers, another by-product of shifting spending and COVID.

    (Hat tip: Vance Ginn.)

  • Among the items hit by supply chain shortages: Thanksgiving staples. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Now More Than 100 Container Ships Are Waiting outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.” That’s back on November 1.
  • Today: 111 container ships at dock.
  • Supply Chain Dive has a Port of LA and Long Beach tracker, though right now it seems heavier on policy announcements than actual action to relive congestion. One positive change: “The City of Long Beach is waiving container stacking rules for 90 days to help with port congestion. Previously, stacks could only be two containers high. Now, the city is allowing stacks of up to four containers, or up to five with a special permit.”
  • Some tweets:

  • Locally, the luncheon meat shortage at HEB seems mostly over, but Sam’s doesn’t appear to be stocking 12 oz cans of Diet Dr Pepper, only 20 oz bottles and cans of Dr Pepper Zero Sugar, which has a different formula. So far I don’t like it as much…

    Anti-Woke Academics Announce New University of Austin

    November 9th, 2021

    Yesterday, a number of anti-woke intellectuals announced that they were starting a new university on Bari Weiss’ substack.

    Pano Kanelos:

    So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

    There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

    These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

    The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

    The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful.

    On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

    We had thought such censoriousness was possible only under oppressive regimes in distant lands. But it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society. It can become most acute in the one place—the university—that is supposed to defend “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

    The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.

    The priority at most other institutions is simply to avoid financial collapse. They are in a desperate contest to attract a dwindling number of students, who are less and less capable of paying skyrocketing tuition. Over the last three decades, the cost of a degree from a four-year private college has nearly doubled; the cost of a degree from a public university has nearly tripled. The nation’s students owe $1.7 trillion in loans.

    And to what end? Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one. We should let that sink in. Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students. A system that so brazenly extracts so much from so many without delivering on its basic promises is overdue for a reckoning.

    The warped incentives of higher education—prestige or survival—mean that an increasing proportion of tuition dollars are spent on administration rather than instruction. Universities now aim to attract and retain students through client-driven “student experiences”—from trivial entertainment to emotional support to luxury amenities. In fact, many universities are doing extremely well at providing students with everything they need. Everything, that is, except intellectual grit.

    Snip.

    But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

    I mean that quite literally.

    As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.

    I am not alone.

    Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.

    We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.

    We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

    It’s an interesting collection of people, running from conservatives to “mugged liberals,” all of which I think have objected to the epistemological closure of social justice.

    We are a dedicated crew that grows by the day. Our backgrounds and experiences are diverse; our political views differ. What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry. And so we must be the cavalry.

    It will surely seem retro—perhaps even countercultural—in an era of massive open online courses and distance learning to build an actual school in an actual building with as few screens as possible. But sometimes there is wisdom in things that have endured.

    Here’s the website for the new institution, which states the following principles:

    Universities devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth are the cornerstone of a free and flourishing democratic society.

    For universities to serve their purpose, they must be fully committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.

    In order to maintain these principles, UATX will be fiercely independent—financially, intellectually, and politically.

    About funding:

    We’re completely rethinking how a university operates by developing a novel financial model. We will lower tuition by avoiding costly administrative excess and overreach. We will focus our resources intensively on academics, rather than amenities. We will align institutional incentives with student outcomes.

    The new university is located at 2112 Rio Grande Street in Austin, Texas. For those unfamiliar with Austin, that’s right in the West Campus area, AKA Fratville, immediately to the west of the University of Texas. Presumably they’ll be able to draw some students, talent, etc. from their location, not to mention a lot of nearby student amenities.

    It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out, but one university isn’t enough to stem the tide. All of American education needs a hard reboot, one where everyone pushing social justice down America’s throat lose both their jobs and funding.

    Did Austin Justice Coalition Break Federal Law?

    November 8th, 2021

    With plenty of out-of-state money (including half a million from George Soros), Austin Justice Coalition and their allies managed to deliver a resounding defeat to Proposition A. There was a lot of signage against Prop A, and readers in Austin say they received anti-Prop A flyers. Here’s an example:

    And here’s a closeup of who funded it:

    There’s two places on the flyer it says it was partially funded by the Austin Justice Coalition.

    Tiny problem: The Austin Justice Coalition is a 501(c)(3) organization last time I checked, and 501(c)(3) have very specific prohibitions against engaging in certain types of political activity and advertising.

    (You might be wondering: Is that’s the case, how could SaveAustinNow legally campaign for Proposition A? Easy: They’re a 501(c)(4) organization, the rules for which are different.)

    Did Austin Justice Coalition violate federal law? Maybe. Austin Justice Coalition briefly lost their tax exempt for failing to proper documentation. (It’s easier to search for information on them when you have their tax ID number: EIN 81-3138826.) But I’m not a lawyer, and the IRS statute language specifically mentions that 501(c)(3) organizations can’t campaign for or against candidates. I am unsure whether this prohibition extends to campaigning for or against ballot propositions.

    Perhaps an expert in campaign finance law can shed some light on the issue…

    (Hat tip: Blog commenter Clinton.)

    The Mainstream Media Are Lying Liars Who Win Pulitzers For Their Lies As Long As Their Lies Help Democrats

    November 7th, 2021

    Here’s a Glenn Greenwald thread touching on several strands of mainstream media malfeasance, including the fact that #Russiagate was an obvious hoax manufactured by Donald Trump’s political enemies, and yet the “journalists” spreading lies still won a Pulitzer for their lies, and that the Hunter Biden emails are obviously real, with huge implications for national security, foreign policy, and Biden Administration corruption.

    I think the Ben Schreckinger book Greenwald is discussing is The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, which I have not read.

    They sleep well because they believe doing The Will of the Party is far more important than telling the truth.

    All of these things contribute to the fact that the Democratic Media Complex is one of the least trusted institutions in the world. As a cherry on the top of this distrust, bloated leftwing media talking head Cirith Ungol Cenk Uygur put out a poll asking which was more responsible for damage to the country, right wing media or corporate media:

    It’s still running, so feel free to vote. And here’s a screenshot of the current results, just in case he deletes the results:

    Astrowhatthehell?

    November 6th, 2021

    Astroworld was the name of a now-defunct Houston amusement park. Then it was the name of rapper Travis Scott’s album. Now it’s evidently the name of a rap festival in the parking lot of NRG stadium (close to where the Astroworld theme park used to be) where eight people just died:

    At least eight people are dead and dozens more injured after a sold-out crowd of roughly 50,000 surged during rapper Travis Scott’s performance late Friday at the Astroworld Festival outside NRG Park, overwhelming security forces and resulting in one of the deadliest concerts in U.S. history.

    As Scott’s performance started shortly after 9 p.m., the chaotic crowd seemingly swallowed everyone in it, Instagram user SeannaFaith wrote.

    “The rush of people became tighter and tighter. .. Breathing became something only a few were capable. The rest were crushed or unable to breathe in the thick hot air,” she wrote. “It was like watching a Jenga tower topple. Person after person were sucked down…. You were at the mercy of the wave.”

    “We begged security to help us, for the performer to see us and know something was wrong,” she continued. “None of that came, we continued to drown.”

    Then, one person fell. And another.

    “We had a mass casualty event here at Astroworld,” Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña said.

    Seventeen people were taken to the hospital, 11 of whom Peña described as being in cardiac arrest. Eight are confirmed dead. Some of the victims might be children.

    Sounds quite similar to the tragic 1979 Who concert in Cincinnati, where 11 people died. It seems the lessons from that have been forgotten.

    The original Astroworld park also had a reputation as being deadlier than other parks in the Six Flags family. Two workers were killed during construction in 1968, and a maintenance worker was killed after being struck by a roller coaster car.

    There’s was also some weird scheme to build a virtual Astroworld theme park on blockchain technology. It always seemed more like buzzword bingo than a business plan, and I don’t think much has come of it.

    LinkSwarm for November 5, 2021

    November 5th, 2021

    Remember, remember, this Guy Fawkes Day LinkSwarm!

  • Nancy Pelosi: “See how we got slaughtered? Now march right uphill and take that machine gun nest for the glory of the party!”

    The Associated Press reports that, unchastised by Tuesday night’s rout, Nancy Pelosi plans to ready the House of Representatives for a “debate and vote on a revised draft of President Joe Biden’s now-$1.85 trillion domestic policy package.” The decision, the AP suggests, is intended to “show voters the party can deliver on its priorities.”

    That’s one way of putting it, certainly. Another might be: Nancy Pelosi hopes to appease the progressive wing of her caucus by sending her most vulnerable members unarmed into the Somme.

    Substantively, what Pelosi is proposing is bonkers. For a start, there is no “Build Back Better” bill. It remains what it has always been: a slogan, in search of a topline, in search of an agenda. There is only one thing on which the Democratic Party is agreed, and that is that the United States should spend at least two trillion more dollars over the next decade than it had planned to before Joe Biden won. On what? Well, that depends. Some want tax cuts for the rich. Some want to send checks to Americans who have kids. Some want a bunch of new permanent programs. Some want climate-change-mitigation measures. Some want to a second New Deal. At various points during the last few months, all of these things have been in the bill in one form or another, and, at various points, they’ve been taken out again. There is a reason that we have not had a “national debate” over the “Biden agenda,” and that reason is that, beyond its cost, there is nothing concrete to debate.

    The result has been the creation of a protean piece of vaporware that nobody in Congress seems much to like, and that the American people seem increasingly to loathe. Since Tuesday’s elections, the institutional Democratic Party has rallied stupidly around the idea that, in order to stave off further electoral losses, it must show voters that it can “get things done” — as if the average American citizen favors action for its own sake. But, of course, it must do no such thing. Reflecting upon this fallacy, Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, noted yesterday that “nobody elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” while Representative Kathleen Rice, her colleague from New York, seemed baffled by the whole thing. “I don’t understand some of my more progressive colleagues saying [that Tuesday] night now shows us that what we need to do is get both of these bills done and shove even more progressive stuff in,” Rice said.

    Rice is correct. And yet, inexplicably, “shove even more progressive stuff in” is precisely what Nancy Pelosi has chosen to do in response.

    “Do the will of the Party, comrade, and know that when we step on your corpse, we’re climbing to a glorious future!”

  • Examples of why the Democrats’ revised spending bill is still awful.

    Budget Gimmicks Pour Gasoline on Inflationary Fire

    The main number mentioned about the bill is the claimed cost of $1.75 trillion in spending and tax credits. For starters, this is only an educated guess on the part of Democrats, since official congressional scorekeepers have not had a chance to weigh in yet.

    More importantly, that stated cost (which is not zero) is only possible as a result of deliberate budgetary gimmicks. Many key programs expire after a few years rather than the usual 10 years, and in some cases expire after a single year.

    Amazingly, the bill’s cost would more than double without the gimmicking.

    This would still be a problem even if all of the programs are allowed to expire. That’s because the bill front-loads the spending while spreading tax hikes across the decade, meaning it would increase deficit spending significantly in the first few years, especially the first year.

    In turn, that deficit spending would mean artificially injecting billions of dollars into the economy. This would only serve to worsen the biggest wave of inflation in decades.

    Causing hardworking families to pay more for essentials is no way to “build back better.”

    Using Taxpayer Dollars as a Back Door to Mass Amnesty of Illegal Immigrants

    Providing amnesty to illegal immigrants has been a top priority of the left for decades. While the spending package is supposed to be just that—a spending package, not a new immigration law—Democrats are attempting to sneak amnesty through the back door.

    Because the bill is written to fit within strict budgetary rules, there are limits to what it can contain. The Senate parliamentarian has ruled against the inappropriate amnesty provision twice already, with the second decision relating to the language that’s in the revised bill.

    Democrats have said that the current immigration text is a “placeholder” while they make a third attempt to convince the parliamentarian to give them what they want. The fact that they’re including text that has already been ruled out of order demonstrates how little regard they have for the rules.

    Plus handouts for the wealthy, more social justice indoctrination, and $2.5 billion for “tree equity.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Manchin still isn’t having any:

    A point Manchin made about the use of “budget gimmicks” by fellow Democrats [could] doom the Biden agenda.

    Manchin reiterated his concerns about “exploding inflation,” the debt, the potential for rising interest rates, and the creation of new social spending programs. “How can I in good conscience vote for a bill that proposes massive expansions of social programs when vital programs like Social Security and Medicare face insolvency and benefits could start being reduced as soon as 2026 in Medicare and 2033 in Social Security?” he asked rhetorically. “How does that make sense? I don’t think it does.”

    Initially it seemed as though he was just demanding the need for a CBO score when he talked about the need for more transparency about the bill’s fiscal impact. That alone would be consistent with a strategy of wanting delay legislation that he would ultimately vote for. And there are a myriad of ways for Democrats to game the intricacies of the CBO process to get an acceptable enough score for Manchin to vote for.

    But then Manchin took things a step further.

    He said, “As more of the real details outlined in the basic framework are released, what I see are shell games — budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that amount if the full time is run out. If you extended it permanently. And that we haven’t even spoken about.”

  • Further, Manchin saiud that he won’t vote to overrule the Senate Parliamentarian on reconciliation rules.

    “I’m not going to vote to overrule the parliamentarian,” Manchin added. “I’m not going to do that; they all know that.”

    Because Democrats are trying to bypass Senate Republicans on President Biden’s spending plan, they have to comply with the rules governing reconciliation, an arcane budget process that lets them avoid the filibuster.

    The Senate parliamentarian provides guidance to senators about if policies meet the Byrd rule, named after the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), that restricts what can be included in a reconciliation bill.

    If it doesn’t comply with the rule, it will be stripped out of the bill — or Democrats could try to overrule the parliamentarian. But that would take total unity from the 50-member Senate Democratic caucus, meaning they would need Manchin’s support.

    In addition to Manchin’s opposition, members of Senate Democratic leadership have previously signaled that they don’t believe they have the votes for such a move.

    But the parliamentarian has frustrated activists this year, first by ruling against including a $15 per hour minimum wage in a coronavirus relief bill. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tried to put it back in the bill as an amendment, which required 60 votes because it didn’t meet the budget rules, but lost several Democratic senators in addition to Republicans.

  • The Biden Administration has finally unveiled their vaccine mandate.

    On September 9, President Biden announced a directive to the Labor Department to develop a temporary emergency rule for businesses with 100 or more employees that would require workers to be fully vaccinated or be tested at least once a week. Biden declared that, “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers. We’re going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.”

    This morning, the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration announced that starting on January 4 — sixty days from today’s publication — new vaccination-or-test requirements for businesses with more than 100 workers will go into effect, as well as a vaccine mandate for health care workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid.

    OSHA is issuing the vaccine mandate under an “emergency temporary standard,” which means the regular public comment period was skipped. Emergency temporary standards are applied when “workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards and that an emergency standard is needed to protect them.”

    Just past the Christmas season. Funny that.

  • “Mandate Meltdown: 26 NYC Firestations Shuttered, LA Sheriff Warns Of ‘Mass Exodus‘, Tucson Water District Faces ‘Staff Shortage.'”

    We’re f–ked. We are going to toast like marshmallows,” retired electrician Vinny Agro, 63, told the Post. “It’s another sad day for New York City.”

    Across the Rockies, Los Angeles Country Sheriff Alex Villanueva has warned of an “imminent threat to public safety” caused by a “mass exodus” of thousands of deputies and civilian personnel who refuse to take the jab.

    “I could potentially lose 44% of my workforce in one day,” he wrote in a Thursday open letter to the Board of Supervisors, adding that he can’t enforce “reckless mandates that put public safety at risk.”

    This seems to be the desired outcome. Ordinary people who voted for Democrats might start to ask why.

  • And here come the lawsuits!

    Within hours of the Biden administration unveiling a Jan. 4 deadline for 100 million workers to get vaccinated, a small business advocacy group announced it is filing a lawsuit seeking to block the measure.

    “The Biden administration’s vaccine mandate is clearly illegal and will have a devastating impact on our small business community and our entire economy,” said Alfredo Ortiz, the CEO of the Job Creators Network.

    CN is suing the administration on the grounds that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t have authority to impose the mandate and that, in any case, there is neither the grave danger nor necessity to issue it.

    It’s just one of many court battles set to ensue over the rules, many coming from Republican leaders accusing the federal government of overreach into personal medical decisions.

    At least 19 states have filed three separate lawsuits aimed at stopping the previously announced mandate for federal contractors, and the rules are being challenged by most of the Republican caucus in the Senate.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Teachers Union: ‘It’s OK’ That Kids Don’t Know Math, ‘They Know The Words Insurrection and Coup.'”

    The head of the Los Angeles teachers union said “there is no such thing as learning loss,” despite evidence of massive educational declines due to a year of remote learning.

    Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, told LA Magazine that “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”

    Anyone know what it takes to decertify a union?

  • Yes, they are teaching Critical Race Theory:

  • Legal Insurrection has been all over covering the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Here’s day 2. So far everything argues for legal self-defense, even the prosecution witnesses. “I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that seems capable of meeting their burden to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt. And I’m beginning to wonder if we ever will.”
  • How Republican truck driver Edward Durr defeated Democratic New Jersey State Senate President Steve Sweeney.

    “The main issue was rights,” Durr said, via phone. “People talk about how New Jersey has the highest taxes, and we’re the worst state for business, with high debt, and so on, but bottom line is rights. It’s family.

    “When somebody’s messing with your family, you’ll do anything,” he said. “The governor was messing with people’s families. When you mess with somebody’s job, their livelihood, their home, their children — people just won’t take that.”

    Durr said that New Jersey’s harsh coronavirus policies had helped create a “perfect storm” that made his victory possible.

    “It was the combination of a governor who acts like a king, and a senate president who acts like a court jester, and does nothing. That made it very easy to convince people they were not being paid attention to. And when they got ignored, they got angry.”

    But Durr, 58, did more than just get lucky. And he spent more than the $153 that has been highlighted in media reports.

    “That’s the amount I spent prior to the primary,” he explained, somewhat exasperated by the inaccurate reporting.

    He estimates that he spent about $8,000 to $9,000 in total, mostly on campaign literature, yard signs, and a now-viral video.

    He also worked hard, walking door-to-door to speak to voters. Having left long-haul trucking for a job working a local route close to home, he was able to use afternoons and evenings to campaign in the district, together with several volunteers.

    “I walked three to four hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Saturdays and Sundays, I walked six to eight hours. We usually had half a dozen volunteers. One time we went out and we had twelve to thirteen go out with us,” he recalled proudly.

    “Trust me, plenty days I did not feel like walking. It was too hot, my ankles and my feet hurt — I’m not a young man anymore, and I have gout, and plantar fasciitis — it was a hard thing.

    “But it was well worth it, because it allowed me the opportunity to talk to every person I could possibly talk to, and understand what they were feeling, and get the pulse.”

    (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • Joe Rogan 1, “Journalists” 0. “So far, there isn’t a lot of evidence that ivermectin is a good anti-covid therapy, and federal agencies have warned people who hear about the drug not to consume a paste intended for livestock. But that doesn’t mean Rogan ate horse dewormer. You don’t fight disinformation with disinformation. Not if you’re a good reporter.”
  • “Police arrest suspect who shot HEB employee in North Austin.” Since Prop A failed, expect more shootings.
  • “Main Steele Dossier Researcher Arrested in Durham Probe.”

    The primary researcher behind the Steele Dossier, a collection of unsubstantiated opposition research linking the 2016 Trump campaign to the Kremlin, was arrested by federal authorities Thursday.

    Russia analyst Igor Danchenko’s indictment stems from the federal probe led by John Durham, the special counsel tapped by the Trump administration to audit the Russia investigation for malfeasance, anonymous individuals with direct knowledge of the matter told the New York Times.

  • Is China planning to build 150 nuclear reactors?
  • “Nobel Prize Awarded for the Worst Climate Model.”

    Syukuro Manabe has been a pioneer in the development of so-called general circulation climate models (GCMs) and more comprehensive Earth System Models (ESMs). According to the Committee, Manabe was awarded the prize “For the physical modelling of the earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming.”

    Snip.

    Every six years or so, the U.S. Department of Energy collects all of these models, aggregating them into what they call Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIPs). These serve as the bases for the various “scientific assessments” of climate change produced by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the U.S. “National Assessments” of climate.

    In 2017, University of Alabama’s John Christy, along with Richard McNider, published a paper that, among other things, examined the 25 applicable families of CMIP-5 models, comparing their performance to what’s been observed in the three-dimensional global tropics. Take a close look at Figure 3 from the paper, in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, and you’ll see that the model GFDL-CM3 is so bad that it is literally off the scale of the graph.

    At its worst, the GFDL model is predicting approximately five times as much warming as has been observed since the upper-atmospheric data became comprehensive in 1979. This is the most evolved version of the model that won Manabe the Nobel.

    In the CMIP-5 model suite, there is one, and only one, that works. It is the model INM-CM4 from the Russian Institute for Numerical Modelling, and the lead author is Evgeny Volodin. It seems that Volodin would be much more deserving of the Nobel for, in the words of the committee “reliably predicting global warming.”

    Might this have something to do with the fact that INM-CM4 and its successor models have less predicted warming than all of the other models?

  • Lucifer Devil stabbed to death on Halloween. Looks like some Satanist dumbasses had the instructions upside down…
  • Play Taken games, win Taken prizes.

  • Zillow shuts down its home-flipping business. Louis Rossman says good riddance. Maybe you shouldn’t have kept tweaking your algorithm until you were paying way above market rates for housing…
  • “1959 Miller-Meteor Hearse powered by a 707 horsepower Hellcat engine.”
  • Happy feet!