Homelessness is A Profit Center For The Democratic Party

October 25th, 2021

In the course of discussing the crises of tent cities with drug addicts infesting just about every blue city in America, Peachy Keenan (I suspect a pseudonym) talks about how homelessness is a major profit center for Democrats:

The homeless crisis is fake. By fake I mean, it’s an engineered social dysfunction created on purpose to ensure a steady flow of suitcases stuffed with unmarked nonconsecutive bills to City Halls around the country. It is a racket. A money laundering operation, just like the Department of Defense budget, and almost at the same astronomical scale.

Just like the open border, Covid, and inflation, fake crises are never allowed to go to waste.

Los Angeles voted itself $1.2 billion to “address homelessness” in 2019. The number of homeless people, naturally, shot up from 40,000 to close to 70,000 now. Meanwhile, Governor Newsom pledged $4.8 billion to “address” and “confront” homelessness in the state, where over 150,000 homeless live.

But wait, there’s more! As the recall pressed in on him, he announced an additional $12 billion to “confront” homelessness.

He’s addressing it, you guys! He’s confronting it!

Liberal politicians understand that homelessness works. Homelessness is good. The more tents the better. The more lunatics who threaten and harass you with their pants around their ankles, the more likely you are to vote for new taxes and more spending.

You see a filth-encrusted hobo nodding out on a curb, urine running down the sidewalk—our leadership class sees cash.

You see a machete-wielding degenerate with stained pants terrorizing tourists on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—a greasy LA city official sees a new tax, a new program, a big pay raise for himself.

There is a reason that LA’s infamous Skid Row has been allowed to fester and grow for almost 40 years. It now spans dozens of blocks in the downtown shopping district of America’s second largest city. It is mile after mile, block after block, of wasted zomboids shuffling past heaps of putrid trash, drug dealers, and pop-up brothels in Porta-Potties.

It’s a perfect grift, and they don’t care if you know it.

Thanks to the tsunami of money, in 2020 there was a 12.7 percent rise in homelessness, “despite an increase in the number of people rehoused.”

I have no clue what “rehoused” means, but I’m guessing it’s a portmanteau of “deloused” and “re-hosed.”

Meanwhile, Los Angeles mayoral candidates like Kevin De Leon continue to double down on the clown world policy of Housing First.

Placing meth and heroin addicts in shiny new apartments with kitchens to clean, dishwashers to load and unload, beds to make, and trash to take out—what could go wrong?

San Francisco just announced it’s building micro-homes for some lucky addicts.

They had to remove the Port-a-Potties from LA’s skid row a few years ago because they were being used as brothels. Prayers to the poor city employee who has to clean out each micro house when the resident ODs.

Solving homelessness “requires us to center solutions in racial equity so that we can dismantle the legacy of racism that still shapes our region’s vast inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity,” says Jacqueline Waggoner, who chairs the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s “Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness.”

If homelessness is caused by racism, what’s with all the sunburned white beggars at every freeway exit in California?

I wasn’t able to find Waggoner’s salary, but Heidi Marston, Executive Director of LAHSA, earned $260,000 in 2019. The mob has to pay its accountants well to keep the schemes going, after all. Marston was also on the Biden-Harris transition team. She must be a good person because she has a sign hanging in her office that says, “You Are On Tongva Land.” (The Tongva are the closest Los Angeles has to indigenous people).

I’m sure Marston reminded the veterans overdosing on fentanyl on Hollywood Boulevard that their tents are on stolen Tongva land.

The cities and states in Blue America have been using homelessness as an excuse to drain America of its wealth for too long.

There’s much more there, including background on the meth crisis and suggestion a solution that Democrats will never implement. But the above ties into my previous discussion of the homeless industrial complex and how the entire “reimagine policing” movement is a grift to take money from police and channel it directly into the pockets of radical leftwing activists.

I believe that early on (say, around the New Deal), liberal Democrats pushed for welfare state programs in the sincere belief that they would improve the the lives of the poor and downtrodden. Today, however, as per the universal law, every new welfare state program is born as a racket, designed to siphon money off the taxpayer and into leftwing pockets.

(Hat tip: Bayou Renaissance Man via Borepatch.)

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 9 Comments »

Did Google Break The Law?

October 24th, 2021

I know that headline is more than a little ambiguous, as Google has probably broken multiple laws, if only because they’re so big and there are so many laws. But “Did Google break the law using sneaky, underhanded means to carry out anti-competitive trade practices to kill off an alternative ad allocating system called ‘header bidding’ because it threatened to damage one of its biggest revenue streams” is way too long for a blog post title.

As a prelude, here’s a brief description of header bidding and how it differs from Google’s “Waterfall” system:

Header bidding is an advanced programmatic advertising technique that serves as an alternative to the Google “waterfall” method. Header bidding is also sometimes referred to as advance bidding or pre-bidding, and offers publishers a way to simultaneously offer ad space out to numerous SSPs or Ad Exchanges at once.

Normally, when a publisher is trying to sell advertising space on its site, the process for filling inventory goes something like this:

First, your site reaches out to your ad server. In general, direct-sold inventory takes precedence over any programmatically sold options. Next, available inventory is served through the site’s ad server, such as Google DoubleClick in a waterfall sequence, meaning unsold inventory is offered first to the top-ranked ad exchange, and then whatever is still unsold is passed along to the second ad exchange, and so on. These rankings are usually determined by size, but the biggest ones aren’t necessarily the ones willing to pay the highest price. (For publishers, this means lower overall revenue if the inventory isn’t automatically going to the highest bidder.)

To further complicate the process, sites using Google’s DFP for Publishers has a setting that enables them to outbid the highest bidder by a penny using Google Ad Exchange (AdX). And since AdX gets the last bid, they are generally in a position to win most of these auctions.

Publishers end up feeling like they aren’t making quite as much money as they would without Google meddling in the bids.

How Does Header Bidding Help Publishers?

Header bidding is a way for publishers to have a simultaneous auction from all the bidders, rather than the sequential strategy that Google uses. By placing some javascript on their website, when a particular page is loaded, it reaches out to all supported SSPs or ad exchanges for bids before its ad server’s own direct-sold inventory is called. Publishers can even choose to allow the winning bid to compete with pricing from the direct sales.

Got that? Here, as best I can understand, is a summary example:

Say Joe Blow’s Ad Agency and Attack Lawyer Collective wants to be the top bidder for serving ads up for the keyword “mesothelioma” (which, at one time, was the priciest keyword you could buy for digital ads), and it is willing to pay, say, $100 per 1,000 impressions. Under Google’s waterfall method, they would never get to bid if Big Madison Avenue Ad Agency was in the top tier of bidders even though BMAAA only offered $50 per 1,000 impressions, because Google would sell those ad slots only to the highest bidder in the top tier, and would never get down to Joe Blow in the third tier. (This is all greatly oversimplified, and feel free to correct/amend this example in the comments.)

Well, due to the big antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by some 38 (last time I looked) state attorney generals (including Texas), lots of dirty secrets and memos have come to light as part of discovery. Many of the most serious bits were redacted, but that was just changed by judge’s orders:

Two corporate behemoths getting together to strike insider deals with each other that freeze out competitors is pretty much textbook anti-competitive practices 101 stuff.

Holy shit! Google and Facebook are agreeing not to cooperate with any antitrust action by the federal government to bring action against the other. That’s not a red flag, that’s the Nostromo‘s flashing lights and screaming self-destruct klaxon in the original Alien.

So according to these documents, Google is not only a monopoly, it is a coercive monopoly that uses illegal anti-competitive trade practices to stifle competition.

And since the lawsuit was brought by a bipartisan coalition of state attorney generals, Google can’t just buy a few tens of millions of dollars worth of Hunter Biden painting to make the entire thing go away…

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Posted in Crime, Regulation, Texas | 4 Comments »

Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenberger Discuss How and When San Francisco Became A Shithole

October 23rd, 2021

So how San Francisco become the homeless, crime, drug and feces-plagued wonderland that it is today? Michael Shellenberger (an author and journalists who has argued for technological solutions to environmental problems) discusses with Joe Rogan how it came to its current state.

Some takeaways:

  • San Francisco has always been friendly to illegal drugs, and in the 1800s it was the last city to shut down opium dens.
  • The movement (well-intention) to treat pain with opioids.
  • When that was restricted in 2010, a lot of opioid addicts switched to heroin.
  • After that came fentanyl, which is much easier to overdose on than heroin.
  • Meth was (is?) a separate epidemic.
  • Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. “The activists just gave the tends to the homeless.”
  • “Women are rapped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed when you can’t make payments on their drugs, drug dealers stabs you with a machete. These are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis from all the feces.”
  • “Progressives have badly misled people into thinking this is a problem of high rents.”
  • “The idea that all black people are victims is a racist idea.”

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for October 22, 2021

    October 22nd, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! Manchin stands firm, Psaki drips with contempt, #NeverTrump and #BlackLivesMatter share a sugar daddy, and “Let’s Go Brandon” pops up everywhere.

  • It’s suddenly beginning to dawn on Democrats that Manchin means it.

    Joe Manchin means what he says. Democrats and the media may not grasp this as it happens so rarely in Washington, and neither group has included that in its calculations. However, that reality keeps getting clearer and clearer, and the Punchbowl crew warn Democrats to figure it out — fast:

    Manchin has been remarkably consistent, and all the major media outlets have reported it time and time again. If you’re surprised by what Manchin is saying now, maybe you’ve been really busy, tied up on other endeavors and haven’t listened to or read what he’s said. That’s understandable. Life moves pretty fast.

    But if you have listened to Manchin and you’re still surprised by or enraged at his positions, that may be because you’re irrationally hopeful he will change his beliefs, or you’re engaging in wishful and likely unrealistic thinking. Maybe you’re just listening to what you want to hear. But don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Half of official Washington has decided that they’re going to ignore what Manchin says and believe he has a secret set of beliefs he’s waiting to unveil.

    Here’s what you have to understand about Manchin: He says what he means. When he gets heavy pressure from the left, it helps him back home.

    Here’s the reality: Joe Manchin is a filibuster-supporting conservative Democrat who is also an ardent supporter of coal, skeptical of big government and massive spending packages. He never pretends otherwise. Let’s all stop acting surprised when he says the same thing for the umpteenth time.

    No kidding. That’s always been the reality, right along with the reality of an evenly split Senate. One would think that Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer would have put those two realities together and realize that launching a massive progressive-agenda reconciliation bill would have been a no-sale from the very beginning. Up to now, Democrats seem to have talked themselves into a fantasy that Manchin was just looking for a deal, or that they could pressure him into folding.

    Now that neither approach has worked — so far, anyway — The Hill reports that Democrats have begun to panic:

    Democrats are facing growing headaches over their sweeping social spending bill as they struggle to show momentum ahead of an end-of-the-month deadline.

    President Biden will meet with groups of moderates and progressives on Tuesday, and he’s facing pressure from some in his party to take a tighter rein on the talks.

    Instead of narrowing their differences, Democrats are dealing with a near constant whack-a-mole of new problems in recent days ranging from climate provisions and child care to increasingly intense infighting between moderates and progressives.

    The “whack-a-mole” is also a product of Democratic fantasy. They larded up the reconciliation bill with the entire progressive wish-list agenda, and as those items get attention, they also draw opposition. This omnibus approach to the hobby-horse list from the Bernie Sanders wing might have worked if Democrats had a clear and significant majority in each chamber of Congress, or if they had worked out the details with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema beforehand. Biden doesn’t have the former and didn’t do any work on the latter, which is why Democrats are playing “whack-a-mole” now.

    Now, as The Hill reports separately, Manchin’s entirely predictable opposition to Green New Deal-esque legislation threatens to torpedo Biden’s entire agenda:

    The hard left is so used to the MSM pandering to their delusions of popularity that cold, hard reality always comes as something of a shock to them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • In West Virginia, Biden is at 76% disapproval vs. 19% approval. What sort of leverage can Biden exert on Manchin? (Hat tip: Jim Gerghaty.)
  • Senate Republicans successfully filibuster Democrats’ voting fraud bill. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Evidently Commie Girl isn’t a popular choice to be Comptroller of the Currency.

    Unsurprisingly, some influential Senate Democrats are getting cold feet about the prospect of President Biden nominating Saule Omarova to lead the OCC. The Cornell law professor educated in the USSR who has proposed that the Fed take over most retail banking activities from the private sector (which a Fedcoin – or ZuckCoin – just might help it to do) while wholeheartedly supporting the progressives’ “Green New Deal” agenda.

    This has, understandably, made many in both Congress, and the industry she is about to regulate, uncomfortable.

    Various Omarova commie policy proposals we’ve previously covered snipped.

    According to CNBC’s main source (who remains anonymous) is that these Senators have already shared their misgivings with President Biden.

    Her selection, coupled with her views on how to overhaul the US banking system, prompted several Senate Democrats or their staff to complain to the White House and suggest that the president’s choice will be tough to support on Capitol Hill, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    This person declined to be named in order to speak openly about private discussions between the White House and Senate offices.

    Others surrounding the OCC nomination process said a handful of moderate Democrats harbor reservations about Omarova and her aspirations to “end banking as we know it,” as she suggested in a Vanderbilt Law Review article.

    Those people cautioned that skeptical senators likely haven’t made a final decision yet but are leaning against her candidacy.

  • Why UK coronavirus death statistics can’t be trusted:

  • “Coronavirus always mutational drift at a steady rate.”

    “Just from a science point of view it doesn’t make sense.”

  • Speaking of untrustworthy coronavirus information, Joe Rogan slams Google:

  • Speaking of Google, supposedly they’re purging “Let’s Go Brandon” videos from YouTube, so let’s see how long until they ban this:

    And this evidently topped iTunes’ rap charts:

  • Virginia Tech is going to limit attendance to crack down on “Fuck Joe Biden” chants.
  • Despite having a vaccine, Putin has given Russian workers a week off due to soaring Flu Manchu cases.
  • In-N-Out Burgers closes it’s Fan Francisco store after refusing to become the city’s vaccine police.
  • Just in case it was still unclear to , yes, the National Institute of Health did fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite Anthony Fauci swearing up and down otherwise.
  • Lileks on Comrade Psaki and “needs“:

    It’s not just the vexation you get when a lot of people are crammed into one place, though. It’s imposed, by dint of not doing anything about the disorderly elements. We will not police the streets so you will step over needles. We will not clear out the encampment so you will have an inert RV fill the neighborhood with smoke when it burns. We will not do something about petty theft, so you will have to wait for the clerk to get a key. We will not confine the mentally ill, so you will be trailed for a block by someone scrabbling a hand in his pants.

    When you complain, you will be told you’re lucky not to be in the situation of the people who are causing the problems.You should be grateful you don’t have to steal Tide. You should be grateful you can afford to replace your broken stove, even though the replacement won’t come for 8 months. (It’ll be 9 next month.) I suppose that’s true, but it’s setting the bar rather low, and making the disorderly uncivil elements the baseline. Anything above that, it’s gravy.

    Revanchist running-dog lackey of the plutocratic hegemony that I am, I am suspicious when the state determintes your needs and justifies their construction. You don’t need the treadmill is you don’t need 14 varities of ice cream is you don’t need that car is you don’t need that hamburger when there’s bug protein is you don’t need fast access to unprotected detergent is you don’t need to go to that wedding is you don’t need . . . this. That. The other thing. And it is churlish of you to think you need this when (insert aching never-solved non-analogous problem that still exists despite decades of expenditures here).

    Ever seen the old Soviet ads? They’re lovely. They didn’t have 15 different brands. They just had a nice ad for marmalade, in general. No confusion. Yes, but did they actually produce any marmalade? Of course! But if there wasn’t any marmalade, because the wreckers and kulaks had prevented the fufillment of the Five-Year Fruit Spread Goals, everyone shared the experience. There was Marmalade Equity. And Comrade Brezhnev had his toast dry? He may have had some at diplomatic occasions, where it was expected.

    What you might take away from the exchange above is this: the press secretary has access to a treadmill, and it works, and if it doesn’t, there are ten others in a row just like it. And membership in the fitness club comes with the job.

  • And never forget that she, and the mandarins she represents, hate you.

    This is what Trump’s critics meant when they said we needed to restore “civility” to the White House: they meant we need the right kind of disdain for the right kinds of people, expressed in the right kinds of ways. Gone are the mean tweets, the off-color jokes, the rough pugilism. Now instead we have Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt. People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it.

    We are ruled over by a cabal of solipsists who feel outraged that the regressive pigs in flyover country express any opinions at all—about the fruits of their labor, about the security of their nation, about the health of their bodies. Their response is that we should “lower expectations” for affordable food, “welcome competition” from a rapidly arming China, and “follow the advice of health experts” on pain of unemployment.

    Who can forget the treacly grin with which Psaki invited us to “stay tuned” for Biden’s forthcoming vaccine decree? She delights in her role, which is to act out the revenge fantasies of all who felt wounded in 2016 by the mere suggestion that their virtue is less than immaculate. We have to reckon with the fact that Psaki, loathsome though she may be, is doing her job exactly as intended. Her affronts are outrageous only to the people who already hate her: from her target audience they elicit shouts of “YAS Kween” and “drag him!” She is not slipping up when she insults your intelligence and riles up your countrymen against you, when she lies unblinkingly out in the open and defies you to do anything about it. That is her job, and she is good at it. She is doing exactly what she was put there to do.

    No one with a spine should take instruction on “civility” from such a feckless cretin or anyone who enjoys her act. If we are to re-learn civic excellence, it will not be from a movement whose moral framework consists of slander and self-satisfaction. Remember that in 2022 and 2024 when they call you a fascist or a bigot or a domestic terrorist or whatever: these are people who think Jen Psaki is a good person. Their opinion about your morals literally doesn’t matter at all.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Heh:

  • “Never Trumpers and Black Lives Matter Have the Same Backer.”

    The press releases went out on schedule and the media rewrote them into news stories. A group of “principled” Republicans was going to fundraise to support Democrat congressmen.

    The stories rolled out on schedule from different media outlets while appearing nearly identical. And the real story, as usual, was not what was on the page, but what had been deliberately left out. Reuters described the Renew America Movement as a group of Never Trump Republicans “whose leadership includes former Republican Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Bill Weld of Massachusetts.” Hardly a single story mentioned the actual leaders.

    The Renew America Movement was co-founded by Evan McMullin (pictured above) and his running mate Mindy Finn. Its national political director, Joel Searby, who is quoted in the media’s writeups, was the chief strategist for the McMullin campaign. Donations to RAM go through Stand Up Republic, which is the anti-Trump group that McMullin and Finn originally set up. The press release for the new pro-Democrat campaign even came from Stand Up Republic. The media actually had to work not to mention McMullin or Stand Up Republic in its stories about the RAM campaign.

    And the media did a fine job of lying by omission to the public in order to elect Democrats.

    Snip.

    Stand Up Republic had scored $800,000 from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice and $750,000 from the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar, a Franco-Persian billionaire, is the richest man in Hawaii and the digital version of George Soros. His projects include the pro-terror site, The Intercept, and a plan to “Reimagine Capitalism”. Hewlett is a more conventional leftist setup.

    The “principled” Never Trumper network championing “moderates” to “heal our country” is actually backed by the same money as Black Lives Matter radicals and racists.

    The Hewlett Foundation is one of the backers of the Democracy Frontlines Fund which poured tens of millions into a variety of black nationalist groups including the Movement for Black Lives.

    The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a BLM umbrella group which is backed by billion-dollar leftist foundations like the Ford Foundation. Considering its wealthy anti-Israel backers, it’s unsurprising that M4BL has embraced the antisemitic BDS movement, falsely accused Israel of genocide, and tried to oust any Jewish groups that wouldn’t join them in destroying Israel.

    The Omidyar Network promised last year that it was committing $500,000 to “racial justice” and focusing on 5 groups including the Movement for Black Lives. It also couldn’t let the anniversary of September 11 pass without announcing a joint initiative with Soros, the Ford Foundation, and other leftists to pour money into Islamic groups fighting against America’s counterterrorism.

    Omidyar is also the sugar daddy of the Never Trumpers, funding The Bulwark together with the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar’s Democracy Fund has provided $1.6 million to Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together. It’s all just Democrats funding Democrats… together.

    (Hat tip: R. S. McCain.)

  • Did Southwest Airlines blink on firing employees over vaccine mandates?
  • Biden channels his inner Cornholio:

  • Fun with Slow Joe:

  • Sarah Hoyt is not impressed by arguments about the inevitability of communism:

    Yeah. Okay, the commies got a plan. That is sort of their one and only given strength. They plan, they organize, they work towards the world’s stupidest things, but they do it TOGETHER. (Eh, mostly.)

    But to believe it’s working you’d have to forget everything from the collapse of the Soviet Union (THEY surely try to forget it) to the repeated smacks on the nose they have got in America, to the fact many of you don’t seem to know that the only reason that the Soviet Union survived that long was because we FED THEM. (Seriously. We should give all those who lost relatives to the Soviet Union and its depredations, including the poor bastards in Africa destroyed by Russia’s Cuban mercenaries a chance to disinter FDR’s corpse and kick it around. It’s no more than a very mild form of justice.)

    Communism is in fact an idea so stupid that only intellectuals can believe it and try to apply it. Fortunately for them they do attract most intellectuals with the siren song of “because you’re smarter than other people, you see this.”

    Snip.

    Orwell was a believer, even if a heretic. As an adult, read the damn thing and tell me it’s in the least likely.

    Not only would it fall apart within years — if not weeks — because no one can manage a large economy well enough for it to survive that long (yeah, China. Sure buddy. If you think China is working out that well, you haven’t looked closely), but it could never extend to the whole world, or everyone would starve and die out.

    The other thing is that it’s 1940s tech extended indefinitely. This might work — eh, sort of — under really tightly controlled regimes, but sooner or letter a clever monkey (ape, d*amn it. We’re apes) throws a wrench in. The internet is a big wrench, and their attempts to put the genie back in the bottle have been markedly unsuccessful. But it doesn’t take the internet. The Soviet Union was brought down by typewriters and copiers.

  • Alec Baldwin kills a cast member of the movie he’s shooting. It may not have been his fault.
  • “Minnesota Hospital Shuts Down ER and Urgent Care Amid Nurse Strike.” That’s Allina Health in Plymouth.
  • The Washington Post wants us to invade Haiti. Remember when it was Republicans that were accused of being the warmongers?
  • Fauci flops, but the industry tries to hide it. ” IMDB just got caught with its pants down. Social media is noticing that they changed the Fauci film 1.6 audience score to 5.8, but they neglected to change the demographic data or the raw distribution, so it looks like they just faked the top-line number.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “DC assistant chief: I was told “have an abortion or be fired.” “D.C. Assistant Police Chief Chanel Dickerson…said when she became pregnant as a young police cadet, she was told she had to have an abortion to keep her job.”
  • Boom:

  • New evidence suggests the Norse were in Newfoundland in 1021.
  • Remember all the fawning coverage that former Democratic congresswoman Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill received despite banging a staffer? Yeah, it turns out that one of the journalists giving her that fawning coverage, Alex Thomas, was banging her too. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Is the most dangerous stretch of water in the world a three foot wide stream in Yorkshire?
  • Here’s a chance to buy the very earliest Apple Macintosh prototype ever offered at auction, this one with the unreliable, abandoned 5 1/4″ “Twiggy” drive, only a few prototypes of which exist.
  • “Panic At White House As All The Stores Are Out Of Depends.”
  • An oldie but a goodie: Living the dream:

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Dozens!

    October 21st, 2021

    Did you hear that some Netflix employees staged a walkout over the latest Dave Chappelle comedy special over the comedian daring to joke about transexuals rather than treating them with the holy reverence they have declared as their unquestioned due? It was all over the news, Twitter, etc.

    How many walked out? Initial reports said “hundreds,” but the actual number appears to be “dozens.”

    Dozens!

    Why is such a tiny protest accorded mainstream media coverage? Because it furthers the victimhood identity politics gaslighting narrative that “transsexual rights,” a fringe concern of a tiny minority of deeply confused people, is a broad and popular movement thanks to the magic of “intersectionaity.” As the newest addition to the Victimhood Identity Politics pantheon, transsexuals automatically became the most sacred, pushing aside blacks, women, etc.

    The overwhelming majority of the American people still understand that you cannot magically change your sex by using hormone therapy and plastic surgery to alter your outer appearance. If you have XX chromosomes you’re female, and if you have XY chromosomes you’re male. Everything else is genetic abnormality or sophistry.

    No number of protests, government dictates, or gaslighting media coverage is going to change that fact.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    Austin Police Department Morale Hits Bottom

    October 20th, 2021

    When we last checked in on the Austin Police Department, it was plagued by staffing issues due to the City of Austin defunding the police and cancelling two cadet classes, as well as Travis County DA Jose Garza’s refusing to prosecute numerous felonies, thus putting numerous criminal back on the streets to commit more crimes.

    Now this piece from Brad Johnson paints a picture of an undermanned department with a morale crisis.

    The Austin Police Department (APD) is bleeding 15 to 22 officers per month as those departing join other departments or leave law enforcement entirely. With them goes decades of irreplaceable experience and left over is a void the City of Austin aims to fill with green recruits and a “reimagined” approach to public safety.

    Political upheaval in Austin is not unlike any other situation in big cities across the country. Mass protests swept Austin as they did the nation last year after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, preceded by months of societal discord caused by the pandemic and related government shutdowns.

    That was followed by grandiose promises by progressive politicians to “reimagine” the way police interact with their community.

    Currently, APD has 200 vacancies and 104 officers on leave on top of the 150 positions eliminated during the 2020 budget cut and redirection. The department’s average response time ballooned from seven minutes to nearly 10 minutes since the summer of 2020. Specialized units are being disbanded and the officers who stay are being redeployed to street patrol to fill the gaps.

    Snip.

    Michele Aparicio first joined APD in 1997. She lasted 23 years with the department before retiring in 2020 a few months into the pandemic.

    Aparicio, a Hispanic, told The Texan that morale has long been a problem within APD and pointed to leadership and its internal decisions as its cause. “Surely seniority and experience had always played a role in promotions, but it got to the point where demographics took precedence over all else,” Aparicio said.

    This, Aparicio said, had plagued the department’s morale and devolved into poisonous interactions with its leadership.

    “There was a point where we had a meeting with Chief Manley and I asked him what he was going to do for morale, and he just put it back on me as a supervisor,” Aparicio said, adding that she was later approached by one of her superiors who informed her Manley didn’t approve of the interaction.

    “I had a lot of respect for Acevedo, he had his flaws, but he was not scared to speak up for what he believed and for all the officers of APD,” said Kyle Sargent, a former APD officer of 15 years.

    Contrasting Acevedo with Manley, Sargent added that he felt the latter began falling more in line and catering his decisions with the city council in mind — then beginning to lurch even further left than it already had been. Officer morale, Sargent said, took a hit with that transition and as Manley’s tenure unfolded, but nothing sped up the trend like what’s unfolded since.

    Snip.

    One contributing factor Aparicio identified was the racial sensitivity trainings officers were put through. “They were literally calling us racist and homophobic officers — a whole class designed to make it seem like we were guilty of being racist, of being homophobic, and that we treated other people differently,” Aparicio said.

    “It wasn’t presented as something like ‘Hey, this is what the nation is going through.’ No, it was presented as APD needs this because y’all are a bunch of racists.”

    “So, the morale was already s— to begin with and then this was forced upon us,” Aparicio emphasized. During those classes, she added, the presenters faced some serious pushback from the APD rank and file and so they “were toned down a little bit.”

    But it didn’t end there.

    Continuing that trend, this year the Austin City Council entered a contract with a consulting firm to provide racial sensitivity training for its police heavily imbued with critical race theory teachings. The city is paying the consultant $10,000 per day.

    See more on that story here.

    Things are about to get worse.

    A change in that buying forward rate is coming early next year. Sargent told The Texan he’s heard as many as 150 to 200 officers could leave in January next year before the change starts in February.

    That would be over 13 percent of the current APD employment leaving in the blink of an eye.

    When officers leave, they are often able to purchase their gun and badge as mementos of their career. But when Sargent resigned, this courtesy was denied to him per a new policy from interim Chief Chacon.

    “It was just vindictive — I felt like he was just trying to punish us for leaving and it sort of put an exclamation point on my decision,” Sargent said. “It’s a small thing but it’s that kind of stuff that just brings morale from low to even lower.”

    Other APD tidbits:

  • Speaking of low staffing:

  • Even critical departments are undermanned:

  • Making it worse: cadets that contract Flu Manchu are being told to quit…or be terminated:

    • It’s going to take proposition A passing in November to keep things from getting much, much worse.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Texas | 12 Comments »

    Democrats to Cops in 2020: You’re Evil Racists And We Want To Defund You! Democrats to Cops in 2021: We Need You To Enforce Vaccine Mandates. Cops to Democrats: Get Stuffed!

    October 19th, 2021

    After spending 2020 calling police “systematically racist” and trying to get them defunded (mainly so they could get their fingers on that money, suddenly it’s 2021 and Democrat-run cities and counties suddenly need police to be their vaccine enforcers. And police aren’t having any of it.

    Take deep blue Chicago for example:

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has foolishly put herself—and the safety of the people of Chicago—in a game of chicken, with at least half the police force ready to defy her vaccine mandate and be sent home from work by City Hall without pay, rather than comply.

    “She wants to play a game of chicken. Well, we’re in a semi. And she’s in a Smart Car. And she wants to play chicken?” said Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara told me on Thursday. “That’s her decision.”

    I figure Chicago’s little Napoleon in pants suits caves by Friday. As I type this on Thursday evening, Chicago aldermen are calling, saying she’s already blinking on her threats of “no vaccine, you’ll be sent home without pay.”

    FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE: She blinked. She did cave. After her repeated threats, she won’t withhold their pay and send them home if they don’t comply with her vaccine mandate. Lori, that’s no way to play chicken or poker. Her chicken little game has come home to roost. Cops have had enough. Now she’s pouting, driving up the ramp of the chicken coop in her little clown car.

    If she didn’t cave, victims of weekend violence would blame Lightfoot because she put her ego ahead of public safety. The smart play was to cave and call it something else. Her media friends can spin it. She can even call it victory, if she wants. But she caved. And that weakens her even more.

    (Hat tip: Rick Moran at PJ Media.)

    Unions for police and corrections officers are suing over vaccine mandates in Allegheny County:

    Across Allegheny County, public employees are fighting vaccine mandates but none as hard as those in law enforcement, which has suffered some of the highest losses from the disease.

    The unions representing the county police and the corrections officers have gone to court to block the county’s order that all employees be vaccinated or be fired.

    According to the National Fraternal Order of Police, 743 police officers have reportedly died of COVID-19, but while the FOP is encouraging officers to get vaccinated, the union opposes mandates, calling vaccines a personal health decision.

    Seattle police are bailing as well:

    The leader of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), which represents over 1,300 officers of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), is calling the COVID-19 vaccine mandate the latest in a long list of betrayals by the city of Seattle.

    SPOG President Mike Solan said city leaders could accommodate officers who don’t want the shot and keep the city safe, but they are choosing not to do that. With just days until the mandate takes effect, Solan said now is not the time to force a vaccine on officers as the police department already faces a staffing crisis.

    “Crime is surging in this city. Our community is demanding more police officers to answer the 911 calls, and the fact we’ve already lost close to 350 police officers because of the politicians’ political betrayal,” said Solan.

    Solan said that before George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, city officials called SPD a “model department” when it came to police reform. But he said the tables turned after Floyd’s death with some city leaders demanding massive cuts to the department.

    Now, Solan wants Mayor Jenny Durkan to do what some other cities have done and allow officers who don’t want to get the shot the option to wear masks, get tested regularly for COVID-19, and not have their assignments changed.

    “For some reason, this mayor is refusing that, which I think is unreasonable and is void of common sense,” said Solan.

    It’s only illogical if you haven’t been paying attention. Every knee must bend to the holy demands of the Party and the State. Heresy against the narrative cannot be tolerated.

    Los Angeles sheriff Alex Villanueva already announced that he was refusing to carry out the county’s mandate.

    What happens to Democrat-run municipalities when the police refuse to carry out unconstitutional mandates?

    Like many Democratic plans to immanentize the eschaton, they don’t seem to have thought a lot of the intermediate steps through…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Regulation, unions | 4 Comments »

    Colin Powell, RIP

    October 18th, 2021

    Colin Powell, Secretary of State for George W. Bush, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for George H. W. Bush, has died at age 84.

    Powell, a consummate Washington insider, was fairly effective in both roles. As Secretary of State, he was much better at managing relations with American allies and various international institutions than (in increasing order of general competence) John Kerry, Madeline Albright, Warren Christopher, Rex Tillerson, Hillary Clinton or Al Haig, but not among the very best of the modern era (George Schultz, James Baker and Mike Pompeo), and was notably better than successor Condoleezza Rice. He kept the Blair government onboard for Operation Iraq Freedom (at considerable political cost to Blair), effectively used the temporary post-9/11 period of international goodwill, maintained the sanctions regime on Iran, and effectively represented a President who was not loved by the “international community.”

    As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, he effectively managed inter-service relations and empowered General Norman Schwarzkopf to produce the most overwhelmingly impressive military victory by American forces since World War II.

    Powell does owe a small measure of blame in that American involvement in Iraq turned out to be a long-running, expensive distraction whose ultimate success was only cemented under the Trump Administration, but that was clearly a bipartisan quagmire, as was the long-running, expensive, disaster in Afghanistan, in which the State Department played a very baleful role.

    That he was a squishy Republican who backed Obama in 2008 shouldn’t change the fact that he was fairly adept at at implementing the policies of the Presidential Administrations he worked for, no matter how mistaken some of those policies may appear in hindsight. Powell was almost universally praised for effective and dignified management in successfully filling two different demanding roles.

    He once described himself in an interview with the New York Times in 2007 as a “problem-solver.” He offered this analysis of himself: “He was taught as a soldier to solve problems, So he has views, but he’s not an ideologue. He has passion but he’s not a fanatic. He’s first and foremost a problem-solver.”

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans | 3 Comments »

    Ruy Teixeira 2002: Hispanic Will Make Democrats The Permanent Majority Party. Ruy Teixeira 2021: Not So Fast

    October 17th, 2021

    In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that demographic changes, especially high levels of Hispanic immigration, were going to transform the American voting demographic enough the Democratic Party would enjoy a natural majority for the foreseeable future.

    Now Teixeira has been reading the tea leaves again, and his new conclusion is: Not so much.

    And once again, the culprit thwarting Democrats is Donald Trump. Like The Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, Trump is disrupting the well-laid plans of secret hidden manipulators in ways they couldn’t foresee.

    Joe Biden in 2020 characterized Donald Trump as, among other things, an unapologetic racist who particularly detested immigrants. This strand of Biden’s campaign was supposed to have special appeal to Hispanics and juice their Democratic support.

    But that didn’t happen. Instead Hispanic voters went in the other direction, giving Trump after four years substantially more support than they did in 2016. According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had an amazingly large 16 point margin shift toward Trump. Among Latinos, Cubans did have the largest shifts toward Trump (26 points), but those of Mexican origin also had a 12 point shift and even Puerto Ricans moved toward Trump by 18 points. Moreover, Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Nevada (16 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points).

    Some details:

    1. Trump’s support was higher among Hispanic working class (noncollege) voters than among the college-educated. Biden carried Hispanic college voters by a whopping 39 points (69-30) compared to just 14 points (55-41) among the Hispanic working class.

    2. Hispanic Trump voters were 81 percent working class and just 19 percent college-educated.

    3. Within the working class, the less education Hispanic voters had, the more they supported Trump. Those with some college gave Trump 39 percent of their vote, high school graduates gave him 42 percent and high school dropouts gave him 53 percent.

    4. Pew breaks income into three broad groups: lower income, middle income and upper income. Trump’s worst group by far here was upper income Hispanics where he received just 28 percent of the vote. But he got 41 percent support among middle income Hispanics and 40 percent support among lower income Hispanics.

    5. Just under a third of Hispanic voters described themselves as conservative. These voters supported Trump by a lopsided 73-26.

    6. Over half of Hispanic voters (53 percent) were very or somewhat confident in Trump’s ability to make good decisions about economic policy. Those who were very confident supported Trump 77-18; those who were somewhat confident supported him 56-40.

    7. Trump support was highest among young Hispanic voters. Those under 30 gave him 41 percent support, those in the 30-49 year old age group gave him 38 percent; those 50-64 gave him 37 percent and those 65 and over the least at 35 percent.

    And the reasons why?

    What lies behind these unsatisfying results for the Democrats? One possibility, as I have previously argued, is that Democrats fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this voter group and what they really care about. Hispanics were lumped in with “people of color” and were assumed to embrace the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all, about jobs, the economy and health care.

    For example, in the post-election wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (VSG) panel survey, well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.

    In this context, it is interesting to note that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement did not rate very highly among Hispanics. In the national exit poll, Hispanic voters were split close to evenly about BLM, 47 percent unfavorable to 49 percent favorable. This significantly trails not just black voters, but also white college graduates, who rated BLM 61 percent favorable to 35 percent unfavorable.

    Consistent with this, Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with BLM. In VSG data, despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more.

    An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans. In the VSG data, these voters agreed, by 9 points, that racial minorities have mostly fair opportunities to advance in America, by 11 points agreed that America is a fair society where everyone has a chance to get ahead and by 20 points agreed that “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

    They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.

    It is probable that Democrats will continue to have problems with this voter group until they base their appeals to this group on what these voters care about the most rather than what Democrats believe they should care about.

    The Democratic Party’s current ideological core is distinctly uninterested in any issues outside the narrow orbits of their own desires (money and power) and obsessions (Critical Race Theory/victimhood identity politics, and completely reordering society in the name of the Successor Ideology). Understanding the needs and opinions of working class Hispanics is not only beyond their current capabilities, but is something they probably feel active hostility toward even considering.

    As previous pieces here have noted, the trend toward more Hispanics embracing the GOP has been especially pronounced in Texas. Open borders do not sell to the vast majority of American Hispanic citizens, who see widespread crime, disorder and general lawlessness from Biden’s decision to cease border enforcement, adding yet another current in the tidal wave of disaster Democrats are threatening to bring down on themselves in 2022.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 7 Comments »

    A Pilot on the Southwest Vaccine Mandate SNAFU

    October 16th, 2021

    Here’s a pilot discussing the recent Southwest Airlines issues.

    His points:

  • Southwest was already running their entire operation too lean, too understaffed, too many hours for the people who are there, and thus the small disruptions spreads out everywhere. “Eventually you have to call in either sick or fatigued, and that’s gonna snowball.”
  • They’re running a lot of overtime to keep the operation running.
  • Too many pilots/trainers laid off during the pandemic, so getting them back up to speed has been a challenge.
  • The mandate is a real issue, because major airlines are considered federal contractors, and the mandate goes against union rules. “It’s a big problem.”
  • Mandate deadline is December 8.
  • Southwest is in the middle of negotiations with their pilot union.
  • The union can’t be leading the strike, because that would be illegal. But individual pilots are a different story.
  • $15 an hour airport support personnel may indeed just quit and work somewhere else.
  • A lot of older pilots (and pilot trainers) are just going to retire.

    • Time to haul this out again:

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    Posted in Regulation, unions, video | 1 Comment »

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