Breaking: Jihad Hostage Situation In Texas (Update: Hostages Rescued, Jihadi Dead)

January 15th, 2022

“Police in Colleyville, Texas, involved in standoff at synagogue.

Authorities are negotiating with a man who has reportedly taken people hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during services on Saturday that were being streamed live, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The Colleyville Police Department posted on Twitter earlier on Saturday that it was conducting SWAT operations on the block where Congregation Beth Israel is located and said that all residents in the immediate area were being evacuated.

Evidently a jihadist mad that his jihadist sister was jailed:

Updates as they occur…

Update: One hostage released.

Update 2: All hostages rescued alive and well.

Not word yet on the hostage-taker.

Update 3: Hostage-taker reported dead.

Update 4: Dead hostage-taker identified as UK citizen Malik Faisal Akram.

Here’s a profile Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who was praised for remaining cool during the entire hostage event.

Update 5: NRO has an interview with the rabbi.

The terrorist, who the FBI named as 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, reportedly knocked on the door of the synagogue before Cytron-Walker welcomed him in and made him a cup of tea. Struggling to speak on air, the rabbi said that he didn’t notice anything suspicious about the character until they prayed together.

The rabbi said he realized something was amiss when, during prayer, as his back was turned away from the man, he heard a click and “it was his gun.” The man then revealed himself and started ranting for hours about his family and Islam, according to a Facebook livestream broadcast from inside the house of worship.

“If anyone tries to enter this building, I’m telling you . . . everyone will die,” he said during the livestream. He demanded the prison release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted of attempting to murder U.S. soldiers while Siddiqui was in their custody in Afghanistan in 2010.

Snip.

“During the last hour of the standoff, he wasn’t getting what he wanted. It didn’t look good, it didn’t sound good. We were terrified. And when I saw an opportunity where he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure that the two gentlemen who were with me, that they were ready to go. The exit wasn’t too far away,” he explained. “I told them to go, I threw a chair at the gunman, and I headed for the door, and all three of us were able to get out without a shot being fired.”

Virginia’s Republican AG Gets Down To Business

January 15th, 2022

Virginia’s incoming Attorney General Jason Miyares was sworn in today and he hit the ground running, letting go at least 30 AG staff members. “While it’s routine for lawyers at the top of the office to be replaced when one political party loses control, the number of lawyers fired surprised the outgoing Herring administration.”

Good. Newly inaugurated Republicans Governor Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Governor Winsome Sears and AG Miyares were elected in large measure because of the widespread revulsion at imposition of radical, racist Social Justice Warrior policies in schools and elsewhere. The only way to start curing these policies to is issue pink slips to the people promulgating them. Wokeness must be burned out of government and academia.

Let the purges begin.

Updated to add: BOOM!

“Gov. Youngkin to sign executive actions banning critical race theory, ending school mask mandate and rescinding vaccine mandate for state employees.”

LinkSwarm for January 14, 2022

January 14th, 2022

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.



  • After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin declares for the zillionth time “Nah, I’m good.” And…
  • Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
  • But don’t let the focus on Manchin and Sinema fool you. Several other Democratic senators secretly opposed ending the filibuster as well.
  • Indeed, it sets up a no win scenario for some of them.

    If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

  • Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:

  • Baltimore Democratic State’s Attorney and Soros-tool Marilyn Mosby, “the city’s top prosecutor, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of perjury and filing false mortgage applications related to her purchase of two Florida vacation homes.” You may remember Mosby from such previous hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law” and “I want the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson.”
  • Think the supply chain is screwed now? China just locked down several big ports over Flu Manchu.
  • “To staff, Kamala Harris is a clueless bully who refuses to do her homework.”

    Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.

    She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.

    “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.

    One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Google, Twitter employees flood Democrats with donations as companies are accused of censoring conservatives.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Dr. Malone on Gettr.)
  • “J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election.”

    The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

    Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

    Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

    Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

    It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.

    With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

  • Why Democrats must make a mountain out of the molehill of January 6.

    The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

    That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

    Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

    Snip.

    That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

    Snip.

    Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.

    The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

    CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.

    The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • EU to exempt luxury yachts from carbon taxes because of course they are.
  • Hollywood’s new rules.

    A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.

    The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.

    Snipped.

    So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)

    The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.

    Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)

    Snip.

    The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.

    “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”

    Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”

    Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”

    It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”

    That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.

    “Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.

    Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…

  • Steve Harvey says that wokeness has killed comedy.
  • Biden’s approval ratings hit new lows. Again.
  • Speaking of Biden, I wonder if this is what it’s like inside Biden’s head: A myriad of voices, and no independent will at the center.

  • Speaking again of Biden, remember that he backed a lot of economic turkeys other than Theranos.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:

  • “Senate Democrats Block Cruz’s Effort to Sanction Russian Pipeline.”
  • Mike Rowe discusses why 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs, and the coming severe shortage in trades workers.
  • Speaking of Rowe, here he discusses why the nonstop panic porn has desensitized Americans.

  • And speaking of healthcare worker shortages:

  • For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
  • Dwight has a good, deep dive on the course he took on how to survive a gunfight out at KR Training.
  • The Young Conservatives of Texas have their ranking of legislators out.
  • TPPF’s Joshua Trevino has a pretty swell essay about Midland-Odessa.

    What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.

    All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.

    Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Heh:

  • Lunatic stabs police dog to death. Lunatic gets dirtnapped. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
  • So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
  • A list of Austin restaurants that closed in 2021.
  • Bill Burr remembers his friend Bob Saget.
  • Impressive!

  • Richard Hammond makes the case for classic cars.

    They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.

    I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.

  • “Supreme Court Sets Dangerous Precedent Of Letting The American People Make Medical Decisions For Themselves.”
  • “FBI Promises To Make Hoaxes Less Obvious This Year.”
  • Dog stolen from man on Christmas Day found and returned. Man, these winter allergies are real killers…
  • BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Biden Business Vaccine Mandate

    January 13th, 2022

    BOOM:

    The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its sweeping vaccine-or-test requirements for large private companies, but allowed similar requirements to stand for medical facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid payments.

    The rulings came three days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s emergency measure started to take effect.

    That mandate required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees must get vaccinated or submit a negative Covid test weekly to enter the workplace. It also required unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors at work.

    “Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.

    “Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category,” the court wrote.

    This was obviously the right decision.

    Given that we know vaccines don’t prevent people from getting Flu Manchu, or prevent transmission, one wonders if the Biden Administration and their enablers will give up on their vaccine power grab. Probably not, as there’s clearly another agenda at work behind the global push for vaccine mandates and passports.

    Austin News Roundup For January 13, 2022

    January 13th, 2022

    Here’s a roundup of Austin news that’s been clogging the chute:

  • Alder aide pleads guilty to federal charges:

    A former Austin city staffer has pleaded guilty to taking payments from a nonprofit that won a federal contract he promoted while working as Mayor Steve Adler’s aide.

    Frank Rodriguez, 71, who left his job as a senior policy adviser to the mayor after the American-Statesman investigated his actions in 2017, pleaded guilty this month to conspiring to misapply federal funds and to falsifying records. He faces up to five years in prison and will be sentenced March 24 in federal court.

    Snip.

    Latino HealthCare Forum, a nonprofit that Rodriguez co-founded and once ran, reaped $1 million in public money for programs Rodriguez helped create, the Statesman uncovered in its investigation.

    Rodriguez stepped down from the nonprofit to join the mayor’s office in 2015. However, he still applied for federal Affordable Care Act grant funding on behalf of the nonprofit, calling himself the organization’s chief development officer who would work full time as the project’s director, investigators said.

    FBI investigators confirmed Statesman reporting that Rodriguez used his city job to influence the success of his own application, then benefited financially from the application’s success.

    It’s all about the Benjamins.

    In January 2017, while Rodriguez was still a city employee, he emailed other city staffers a document entitled “Crisis.docx,” after learning about the Statesman’s investigation.

    Pro-tip: Never leave an email trail for your graft and fraud, especially if you’re using or interacting with government email systems…

  • Austin returns to Stage 5 of Covid Theater.
  • With lunatic socialist Austin City Councilman Greg Casar running for congress, there’s a a special election to replace him on January 25.
  • Police catch wanted sex offender in the act of raping a 7 year old boy, only for Associate Judge Christyne Harris Schultz to set bond at a paltry $50,000 rather than $1 million.
  • Austin Network looks at the Homeless Industrial Complex.

    Homeless normativity is not a known term as it is something I made up, meaning that politicians and local authorities have allowed for a normalizing of homelessness through telling the cops to no longer enforce laws [AKA decriminalization] like illegal camping, littering, panhandling, or public defecation. This has gone on in coastal state big cities for the last several years and has allowed for the initial shock of homelessness, that “I need to do something” mindset of volunteering to hand out food or donate the clothes you never wear, to an acceptance that clothing and food will not help and that the sympathetic hobo-like bums of yore are now a more zombified set and not to be approached. It’s as if homelessness has become mainstream, no longer an outlier underground element of society. In this acceptance by local government–but not necessarily you–there is the phenomenon that if you speak ill of these folks that you are a bigot and discriminating against a group that needs your unlimited patience and big hearted compassion. There is an added narrative of urban camping and a nostalgia for bucking the trend of 9 to 5 and being off the grid, resulting in a romanticized bent to it regardless of the apocalyptic conditions.

    The mystery of this apathy can be explained in an invisible threat to America’s democracy, the Homeless Industrial Complex. The term, co-opted from Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex, may prove to be more difficult to unravel than its military version.

    The HIC (Homeless Industrial Complex) has proven to perpetuate homelessness through an alliance of special interest groups, local bureaucracies, advocacy groups, even construction developers. The most formidable and largest of scale example of this is when politicians use public money to build, via private developer, some form of housing, like apartment complexes or renovating an inner-city building into SRO (single room occupancy). Local agencies collect development fees, and a non-profit is contracted to run the property for the undetermined remaining life of the property. The problem, of course, is the exorbitant costs for this process. The product ends up being well over the price of any private, competitive construction endeavor. Then the people hired to run the properties operate under an extensive system of bureaucratic costs of high salaries, outreach campaigns, catered lunch meetings, and, yes, corruption.

  • Speaking of which: Just how did Austin spend federal dollars to fight homelessness?

    So when we look at direct assistance to families, here’s how some of that money was spent: take the community services block grant for $1.2 million designed to provide direct financial assistance to families.

    As of February, $244,277.99 had been given to 367 people in 131 households. The KVUE Defenders asked for an update and did not get a response.

    A little more than $1 million ($1,041,851) was set aside to help people experiencing homelessness and impacted by COVID-19. That money went to pay the leases for five hotels that were used as pro-lodges, which according to the City, helped provide temporary shelter to 615 people.

    Another $1 million went to emergency rental assistance that money ended up helping 147 people. The City goal was to help 143 people over 12 months. That goal was surpassed within seven months.

    Snip.

    In a recent city council meeting, the City’s homeless officer, Dianna Grey, said the City really needs $515 million more.

    “That plan is to house 3,000 people … hundreds of them getting houses this year and 3,000 people over the course of the next three years. And that would be drastic,” said Casar.

    For the math challenged, that’s $171,666 per homeless person housed. I bought my own house for slightly less in 2004. Seems like there’s an awful lot of graft going on there…

  • Is Facebook moving its headquarters to Austin? Maybe.

    Facebook’s parent company Meta has become the latest California corporation to at least partly move to Texas as it has signed a massive lease called “the largest ever in downtown Austin.”

    “The lease is the largest ever in Downtown Austin and larger than the entire Frost Bank Tower in terms of square feet,” KVUE reported.

    The Austin Business Journal reported the lease includes all office space in the city’s tallest tower. The skyscraper is still under development.

    “Months of speculation have come to an end as California-based Meta Platforms Inc. — the parent company of Facebook — recently leased the entire commercial half of Sixth and Guadalupe, the 66-story high-rise under construction downtown that will be Austin’s tallest building when finished. The social media company has also pledged hundreds more jobs in the Texas capital,” the report said.

    The lease includes 589,000 square feet across 33 floors of the skyscraper.

    “We first came to Austin over 10 years ago with just seven employees, now over 2,000 of us are proud to call Austin home. We’re committed to Austin and look forward to growing here together,” Katherine Shappley, head of Meta’s Austin office and vice president for commerce customer success, told the outlet.

    Facebook announced in July that it would be embarking on a “metaverse” initiative, changing the company’s new name to “Meta.”

    That’s probably good for Austin jobseekers with technical skills, but bad for people trying to afford housing downtown. Speaking of which:

  • “New data shows a continued increase in rent prices for Austinites.” “New numbers from ApartmentData.com show apartment rents in the Austin area went up about 25% between December 2020 and December 2021.”
  • An End To Chinese Skyscrapers?

    January 12th, 2022

    Last year, China banned skycrapers of more than 500 meters high, and put considerable restrictions on those more than 250 meters high.

    Now comes word that they’re banning buildings over 150 meters high as well.

    Larger cities will be limited to 250 metres — less than half the height of China’s tallest buildings.

    Now, special exemptions may still be given if a small city really needs a new skyscraper, but they absolutely, definitely cannot go above 250-metres.

    Likewise, a bigger city could go higher than that if it has a convincing case, but if it wants to go over 500-metres then forget it. No more Shanghai Towers or Ping An Finance Centers — and that’s final.

    There are even new rules to follow past the 100-metre mark. To go higher than that a building will need to meet certain seismic performance and fire safety requirements.

    Which sort of suggests that they didn’t have seismic performance and fire safety requirements before. Or maybe not adequate requirements. (Previously.)

    Here’s the article in video form:

    The usual subjects are touched on: The real estate market collapse, buildings so large there was no way all the space in them would ever be rented, Ghost Cities, etc. But the fact that the skyscraper boom got so far out of whack with economic reality is just another indication of how much of China’s “economic miracle” is a complete mirage.

    Supply Chain Update, #BareShelvesBiden and Regional Differences

    January 11th, 2022

    Here’s a supply chain post that covers a few related topics and a little local reportage.

    First, those long waits for port berths at LA/Long Beach are at an all-time high:

    As of Friday, there were 105 ships waiting for berths at Los Angeles and Long Beach. That’s the highest number ever, according to FreightWaves.

    Back in November, the port authorities in southern California adopted a new queuing system for ships that allows them to wait anywhere in the world without losing their spots in line. They did this because the exhaust from all the ships idling near the ports was harming the air quality. For a few weeks, this change made it appear as though the number of ships waiting had declined because they were no longer clogging up the harbor. But the Marine Exchange of Southern California adjusted its counting method soon after.

    Only 16 of the 105 ships waiting are within 40 miles of the ports, FreightWaves says. The other 89 are scattered all over the world, with many congregating off the Baja peninsula.

    Here’s some perspective from the story on what this congestion means relative to other times:

    There are now more than three times as many container ships waiting for LA/LB berths as there were at this time last year, 11.6 times more than on June 24 (the low point for last year), and 31% more than on Oct. 24, when online searches for the term “supply chain” peaked and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announced a new Biden administration-backed congestion fee plan.

    FreightWaves also notes that the total amount of cargo waiting offshore is 815,958 TEU (20-foot equivalent units). That’s more than the combined amount of imports for Los Angeles and Long Beach for the entire month of November, the story says.

    Second, #BareShelvesBiden has been trending on Twitter as people report largely bare shelves at their local supermarkets.

    Indeed, it seems to be happening across the country:

    When you add up all of these reports, it seems like a lot of genuine and glaring problems for the White House chief of staff to dismiss as just “an overhyped narrative”!

    It’s not hard to find Biden defenders who insist that the Twitter hashtag “#BareShelvesBiden” is “artificially amplified by far-right users to manipulate the trending section.” Fine, maybe they are, but consumers and local news affiliates aren’t hallucinating these empty shelves, and businesses aren’t imagining this inability to get the supplies and parts they need.

    I guarantee you that when this newsletter is shared on Twitter, some ninny will respond that he just went to Safeway or Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and didn’t see any shortages — as if the complaint about the supply chain was a contention that every shelf on every store in every community was bare. No, the problem is that an unpredictable mix of goods are suddenly unavailable, with little sense of when new shipments will arrive. Sometimes this problem has minor consequences — getting straight fries instead of curly fries — and sometimes there are huge consequences, such as oncologists who are struggling to get more medications and other medical supplies.

    As with the border, inflation, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Covid-19, and the shortage of tests, we have to waste time convincing the administration that the country’s problems are actually real problems; the Biden team’s reflexive instinct is that any reports of problems are just right-wing propaganda. (Or perhaps someone like Klain will tell us to be appreciative because we have “high class problems.”)

    I’m fortunate that here in Central Texas, we seem mostly unaffected. There are spot shortages of a few things at HEB (the only places I see really big holes are in luncheon meat; cuts of beef, chicken and pork in unprocessed form seem reasonably plentiful), and they’ve been out of V05 Extra Body conditioner for weeks. Sam’s also seems to be getting plentiful supplies of things, and last week they had Dog Pill Pockets (which they had been out of for several weeks before).

    The nation’s supply chains may be poised to take another hit soon as Canadian vaccine mandates for truckers going into effect January 15.

    Art Laffer has a recipe for fixing the problem: Get Biden Administration policies out of the way.

    In an interview with “Varney & Co.” Tuesday, former Reagan economist Art Laffer called on the Biden administration to get out of the way of the supply chain crisis, arguing the administration’s economic policies are causing the problem instead of solving it.

    ART LAFFER: I’d follow Reagan’s advice: Don’t just stand there, undo something. Get them out. Stop paying people not to work. Get the government out of the process and that thing will clear up very quickly. That’s exactly what needs to be done. It’s the government that is causing the supply chain problem. It’s not the solution, it’s the cause. And the same thing with rapid testing and all the other things. The one thing that Trump knew how to do was get production to work correctly. And when he put through that operation to get it – Warp Speed, to get it, it worked because he worked with the markets — not against them.

    Will Biden take Laffer’s advice?

    Will Jackass Forever take home the 2023 Oscar for Best Picture?

    Kazakhstan, Hunter Biden And…A Bio Weapons Lab?

    January 10th, 2022

    What are my qualifications to write about Kazakhstan? Well, before the situation there boiled over last week:

    1. I knew it was an ex-Soviet republic, so…
    2. I knew it existed before Borat.
    3. I can find it on a map.
    4. I knew it was a majority Muslim nation, which made the Soviet Afghan War Very Unpopular there.

    So it’s a one-eyed, squinty, myopic man in the land of the blind sort of thing, but there’s a a whole lot of Kazakh news breaking, so let’s tuck in.

    ZeroHedge has additional information on its importance to Russia, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t.

    Mass protests and anti-government violence have left dozens dead. Russia is deploying 3,000 paratroopers after Kazakh security forces were overrun. The largest city, Almaty, looks like a warzone. To appreciate why Russia is willing to deploy troops to Kazakhstan, it’s critical to understand the depth of Russia’s vital national interests inside the country. This isn’t just any former Soviet republic. It’s almost as important to Russia as Belarus or Ukraine.

    First, Russia and Kazakhstan have the largest continuous land border on planet earth. If Kazakhstan destabilizes, a significant fraction of the country’s 19 million residents could become refugees streaming across the border. Russia is not willing to let that happen.

    Second, roughly one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnic Russians. Kazakh nationalists are overwhelmingly Muslims, who resent the Orthodox-Christian Russian minority. Russia believes that civil war would entail a non-trivial risk of anti-Russian ethnic cleansing.

    Third, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the heart of the Soviet space program. Russia still uses it as its primary space-launch facility. The Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East will lessen that dependence, but it still isn’t complete.

    Fourth, Russia conducts its Anti-Ballistic Missile testing at the Sary-Shagan test site within Kazakhstan. This is where ongoing development of the S-550 ABM system is occurring, one of the foundations of Russia’s national security.

    Fifth, Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle is intimately linked to Kazakhstan. Russian-backed Uranium mining operations are active in the country. Uranium from Kazakhstan is enriched in Novouralsk, Russia and then returned to Kazakhstan for use in Chinese nuclear-fuel assemblies.

    Collectively, these security interests make Kazakhstan a region that Russia is willing to stabilize with force. The 3,000 troops it has already committed are not the maximum it is willing to deploy. If necessary, these will only be the first wave of RU forces in the country.

    3,000 troops for a country roughly three times as large as Afghanistan is not going to pacify a country if the country doesn’t want to be pacified.

    All that provides a thorny geopolitical problem for Kazakhstan’s neighbors (including China, where it borders Xinjiang, and for which it it would provide the ideal base for any Uigher insurgency), but isn’t why I’m writing about it. No, what caught my attention is The Hunter Biden connection:

    Among the boldest and eye-brow raising political moves by embattled Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev within the past days that grabbed international headlines was his ordering the arrest of Kazakhstan’s powerful former intelligence chief, Karim Massimov, on the charge of high treason.

    Indicating that amid widespread fuel price unrest which quickly became aimed squarely at toppling Tokayav’s rule there’s a simultaneous power struggle within the government, Massimov had headed the National Security Committee (KNB) up until his Thursday sudden removal and detention. Massimov had served as the prior longtime strongman ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev’s prime minister and has long been considered his “right hand man”.

    Nazarbayev was essentially “president for life,” an Ex-Communist Party leader who transitioned to ruling the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union until resigning during a wave of protests in 2019.

    Shortly after, a photo has resurfaced, currently subject of widespread speculation which shows Joe Biden and Hunter Biden posing with the now detained Kazakh security chief Karim Massimov, along with well-connected oligarch Kenes Rakishev.

    With Hunter, it always seems to be oligarchs all the way down. I can only assume they have the best cocaine and teenage prostitutes.

    Further an email and communications have surfaced, previously subject of extensive reporting in The Daily Mail, and related to prior extensive commentary and questions concerning Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ – that appears to confirm that Hunter Biden and Massimov were “close friends”. Reporting at the time indicated that “when Biden was vice president, Hunter worked as a go-between between for Rakishev from 2012 until 2014. And further the emails were from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing that Hunter made contact with Rakishev. And more: “Per the report, Hunter successfully got a $1million investment from Rakishev to a politically-connected filmmaker.”

    According to a 2020 article in The New York Post written when the photo first began gaining attention among Western pundits, “The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.” Concerning his relationship with Kazakh oligarchs and power-brokers, the NYPost story had detailed further:

    …Hunter Biden’s alleged work with Rakishev, claiming he dined regularly with the Kazakh businessman and attempted to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington, DC, and a Nevada mining company.

    But Rakishev, who enjoys close ties to Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president, reportedly ran into trouble when Western business partners realized that the opaque origins of his reported $300 million fortune could become a “liability,” the Mail reported.

    This brings up a slew of questions, starting with: What is the nature of the ties between the Biden family and Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president and his circle of oligarchs and powerful security officials?

    That’s a darn good question.

    But today’s Kazakhstan revelations took a strange turn, when the government claimed that a U.S.-funded bio-weapons lab hadn’t been seized by protestors.

    Wait. A what???

    Officials in Kazakhstan have denied that a controversial ‘military biological laboratory’ was seized in the recent unrest, which has so far claimed 160 lives since starting on January 2.

    It is not clear if the 164 deaths refer only to civilians or if law enforcement deaths are included, but the number – provided by the health ministry to state news channel Khabar-24 – are a significant rise from previous tallies.

    Kazakh authorities said earlier on Sunday that 16 police or national guard members had been killed.

    Russian media highlighted claims that the US-funded facility near Almaty was compromised, resulting in a possible leak of dangerous pathogens.

    The airport, mayor’s office and secret services buildings fell briefly into the hands of rioters during a wave of protests backed by shadowy armed cells.

    The secret bio-laboratory funded by the US defence department – which has links to Russian and Chinese scientists – was also compromised in the disturbances, according to social media claims that it was seized.

    ‘This is not true. The facility is being guarded,’ said the health ministry which is responsible for the Central Reference Laboratory, in Almaty.

    Official Russian news agency TASS had highlighted alleged social media reports that it was taken over by ‘unidentified people’ and ‘specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab so a leak of dangerous pathogens could have occurred’.

    The laboratory’s existence has been controversial and in 2020 the country formally denied that it was being used to make biological weapons.

    At the time, the Kazakh government stated: ‘No biological weapons development is underway in Kazakhstan – and no research is conducted against any other states.’

    It was built in 2017 and is used for the study of outbreaks of particularly dangerous infections.

    Dangerous pathogens are stored here, it is reported.

    2017 date aside, there was already an ex-Soviet pathogens facility in the general vicinity (Almaty = Alma-Ata), so my suspicion is that it’s a more modern facility for an existing lab team.

    Maybe it’s not a bio-weapons lab. Maybe it’s just studying pathogens to better fight them.

    Just like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    So: It’s totally a bioweapons lab.

    Both the United States and Kazakhstan are signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention, which outlaws “the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons.”

    Is the CDC actually funding/working with a biological lab in Kazakhstan?

    No.

    It’s helping/funding 17 labs in Kazakhstan.

    CDC strengthens clinical and laboratory capacity to minimize biosecurity threats in the Central Asia region through collaboration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its Cooperative Biological Engagement. CDC works with public health laboratories across Kazakhstan to build a robust and sustainable network of quality management systems, standard operating procedures, training requirements, disease surveillance and testing capacity, and necessary legal and regulatory framework. CDC and the Kazakhstan MOH also partner with hospitals to improve surveillance and testing of especially dangerous pathogens and antimicrobial drug-resistant pathogens.
    webicon-magnify

    CDC assisted all 17 regional laboratories within the National Center for Expertise in Kazakhstan to achieve ISO 15189 standard certification for laboratory quality management.

    That’s all from Infowars. Oh wait, did I say Infowars? I meant the CDC’s own website.

    Maybe we owe Alex Jones an apology.

    This is breaking story that sprawls out in dozens of directions, but I think Dr. Fauci has even more ‘splainin’ to do…

    Sussing Strange, Sudden, Suspicious, Sinister Synchronization

    January 9th, 2022

    Scottish commentator Neil Oliver has noticed strangely coordinated messaging arising among rarefied strata of our global elites about the supposed perfidy of the unvaccinated all at the same time.

    “Build back better,” “the unvaccinated aren’t citizens,” etc. all hymns from the same book. But who wrote the book?

    Debunking A Little Bit Of Italian Panic

    January 8th, 2022

    There are so many horrible government reactions to Flu Manchu across the globe that when reports of the latest repressive measures spread on social media you’re inclined to believe them. However, one that’s not so much wrong but out-of-date is the one that Italy will prevent the unvaccinated from using banks:

    Now those horrible measures were indeed in the draft decree before members of the Northern League got them taken out. Though the actual rules are bad enough:

    Italy on Wednesday made COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for people from the age of 50, one of very few European countries to take a similar steps, in an attempt to ease pressure on its health service and reduce fatalities.

    The measure is immediately effective and will run until June 15.

    Italy has registered more than 138,000 coronavirus deaths since its outbreak emerged in February 2020, the second highest toll in Europe after Britain.

    Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government had already made vaccination mandatory for teachers and health workers, and since October last year all employees have had to be vaccinated or show a negative test before entering the workplace.

    Refusal results in suspension from work without pay, but not dismissal.

    Wednesday’s decree toughens this up for workers over the age of 50 by removing the option of taking a test rather than vaccination. It was not immediately clear what the sanction would be for those flouting the rule, effective from Feb 15.

    Snip.

    Ministers from the right-wing League issued a statement distancing themselves from the over-50 vaccine rule, calling it “without scientific foundation, considering that the absolute majority of those hospitalised with Covid are well over 60.”

    The League succeeded in softening a previous draft of the decree which proposed that only people with proof of vaccination or recent infection could enter public offices, non-essential shops, banks, post-offices and hairdressers.

    The final decree ruled that these venues will remain open to the unvaccinated so long as they can show a negative test.

    With Omicron markedly less deadly than previous not-terribly-deadly variants, all this Draconian Covid Theater is destroying lives an livelihoods to accomplish nothing in particular. All should be dispensed with, but here’s once case where the actual rules aren’t quite as bad as rumor would leave you to believe.