Crime Is Rising In America Because George Soros Wants It To Rise

December 6th, 2021

We’ve covered George Soros’ baleful effect on American law and order many times before, and will no doubt again. But the Daily Mail has published this handy piece about how Soros-backed DAs have led to spiraling crime rates in deep blue cities:

Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros has bankrolled District Attorneys in America’s most crime ravaged cities, where criminals are being allowed to walk out of jail on low cash bonds or aren’t even being charged.

Soros, the most prolific Democratic donor, is most known for giving to Presidents Clinton and Obama but he has also been pumping money into a far-left effort to overhaul the criminal justice system by giving millions to a network of woke prosecutors in Democratic races.

Among them is Kim Foxx, the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is at its highest in nearly 30 years.

In 2020, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Foxx in her re-election campaign. She won the race and has since offered deferred prosecutions and softball deals to criminals.

In 2021, there were more murders in Chicago than in any other year since 1994.

There have been more than 1,000 murders in Cook County, Foxx’s district, this year.

Soros bolstered her re-election campaign by donating to the Illinois Justice and Public Safety PAC.

Attorney Buta Biberaj is refusing to recuse herself from the case to remove School Board Chair Brenda Sheridan, despite what district parents say is an apparent conflict of interest.

Fight for Schools, the parent organization that filed to remove Sheridan, has now also filed a petition to remove Biberaj – who received a $861,039 contribution from the George Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC during her 2019 election – from the case.

Ian Prior, executive director of the group, claimed Biberaj was ‘very involved in two of the very serious incidents’ that were catalysts for the push for Sheridan’s recall.

He said Loudoun County residents need to know the case will be handled fairly and that Biberaj’s involvement makes that nearly impossible.

‘It is necessary to have faith that the prosecutor in this removal proceeding has no actual or perceived conflicts, that she will go where the evidence takes her, and litigate this case with appropriate prosecutorial zeal,’ Prior told Fox News.

‘In this case, Commonwealth Attorney Biberaj was very involved in two of the very serious incidents that gave rise to the recall. There is simply no way that the people of Loudoun County can be confident in a fair process for the removal of Brenda Sheridan unless Ms. Biberaj either recuses herself, or is disqualified based on her conflicts of interest, and an independent prosecutor is appointed by the Court.’

The PAC spent over $500,000 on materials to damage one of her challengers. It’s a pattern that can be seen in other parts of the country.

He has also donated to PACs that support Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who is being widely condemned for not cracking down on shoplifters and violent criminals.

Soros has also donated to the campaign of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

He donated $1.7 million to Krasner’s campaign, according to The New York Post.

Soros also donated to Super PACS that prop up Democratic prosecutors and politicians across Republican states.

Republican pundits say he has blood on his hands now for the deaths of innocent people like those killed at the Waukesha Christmas Parade by Darrell Brooks, a career criminal who had been bonded out of jail days earlier for other crimes.

In 2016, Soros pumped $3million into seven local district-attorney campaigns including races in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas.

That includes Austin’s Jose Garza.

Larry Krasner, a 60-year-old longtime civil rights and defense attorney who sued the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times, won election in 2017 against a crowded field by billing himself as the outsider candidate capable of making radical change.

Krasner’s campaign benefitted from the largesse of controversial Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who poured an eye-popping $1,7million into the race to support the Democratic candidate’s criminal justice reform agenda.

Under Krasner, the future years of incarceration have been cut by half, and the length of parole in probation supervision have been slashed by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA.

Krasner, who previously defended Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia protesters as a lawyer, has clashed with the city’s top cops over his reluctance to prosecute non-violent gun and drug possession crimes, despite a surge in gun violence and rising homicide rates in the City of Brotherly Love.

As of November 21, 2021, there have been 491 homicide victims, a 14 per cent increase from last year’s number of 436, and 283 in 2019.

The Philadelphia Police Department and Krasner have been at loggerheads over a steep drop in convictions related to gun offenses.

This year, police in Philadelphia have made a record number of arrests for illegal gun possession, but the suspects’ chances of getting convicted have dropped from 63 per cent in 2017 down to 49 per cent in 2021, according to an analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer published in March.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw was previously quoted as saying that Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a ‘revolving door’ for repeat gun offenders since Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.

Krasner has blamed the decrease on police submitting weaker evidence in cases, or on witnesses failing to show up in court to testify.

The progressive Democrat DA has contended that his main focus is on convicting people who use guns to kill or hurt others, not those who are caught being in possession of the weapons.

Krasner’s office has argued that there is little evidence that suspects accused of being in possession of guns are responsible for the uptick in gun violence.

Compared to the previous DA term, Krasner’s has imposed 24,000 fewer years of incarceration and 102,000 fewer years of supervised probation or parole since 2018.

We covered some of Krasner’s follies here.

Other Soros-backed DAs include:

  • Kim Ogg (Harris County)
  • Joe Gonzalez (Bexar County)
  • Chesa Boudin (San Francisco)
  • Kim Gardner (St. Louis County)
  • Mike Schmidt (Multnomah County (Portland))
  • Rachael Rollins (Suffolk County, MA)

    • There are probably several I’ve missed. (Feel free to add them in the comments below.)

    The question remains: How does Soros benefit from raising crime rates in Democratic Party-controlled cities? What is the endgame?

    I’ve seen various theories, but I want to throw it open to readers as well. Feel free to share your thoughts and theories in the comments below.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 12 Comments »

    Bob Dole, RIP

    December 5th, 2021

    Longtime Republican fixture and 1996 Presidential nominee Bob Dole has died at age 98:

    Dole was around so long that it many ways he came to represent both the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican Party establishment.

    He served honorably in the grueling Italian campaign of World War II where he was seriously wounded.

    In 1942, Dole joined the United States Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps to fight in World War II, becoming a second lieutenant in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. In April 1945, while engaged in combat near Castel d’Aiano in the Apennine mountains southwest of Bologna, Italy, Dole was seriously wounded by a German shell, being struck in his upper back and right arm, shattering his collarbone and part of his spine. “I lay face down in the dirt,” Dole said. “I could not see or move my arms. I thought they were missing.” As Lee Sandlin describes, when fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries, all they thought they could do was to “give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an ‘M’ for ‘morphine’ on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose.”

    Dole was paralyzed from the neck down and transported to a military hospital near Kansas, expected to die. Suffering blood clots, a life-threatening infection and a fever of almost 109 degrees…

    Holy crap! I didn’t know you could even survive a fever of 109°! 22-year-old Bob Dole must have been tough as nails.

    …after large doses of penicillin were not successful, he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin, which at the time was still an experimental drug. He remained despondent, “not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever”. He was encouraged to see Hampar Kelikian, an orthopedist in Chicago who had been working with veterans returning from war. Although during their first meeting Kelikian told Dole that he would never be able to recover fully, the encounter changed Dole’s outlook on life, who years later wrote of Kelikian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, “Kelikian inspired me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it, rather than complaining what had been lost.” Dr. K, as Dole later came to affectionately call him, operated on him seven times, free of charge, and had, in Dole’s words, “an impact on my life second only to my family”.

    Dole recovered from his wounds at the Percy Jones Army Hospital. This complex of federal buildings, no longer a hospital, is now named Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in honor of three patients who became United States Senators: Dole, Philip Hart and Daniel Inouye. Dole was decorated three times, receiving two Purple Hearts for his injuries, and the Bronze Star with “V” Device for valor for his attempt to assist a downed radioman. The injuries left him with limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left arm. He minimizes the effect in public by keeping a pen in his right hand, and learned to write with his left hand. In 1947, he was medically discharged from the Army as a captain.

    Dole started his political career as a solid conservative with a great dry wit who gradually got squishier over the years. He was a fixture as Kansas Senator from 1969-1996. He was Gerald R. Ford’s running mate in 1976, and served as Republican Majority leader from 1985-87.

    He launched multiple unsuccessful Presidential campaigns, finishing way back of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and a host of others in 1980, then losing to Bush again in 1988.

    He finally won the nomination in 1996, with Jack Kemp as his running mate, when the American electorate opted to reelect draft-dodging Bill Clinton over wounded World War II hero Dole (thanks again, in no small measure, to H. Ross Perot’s third-party run). It goes without saying that he would have made a much better President than Clinton, though I wonder if the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 becomes law without a Democratic President pushing for it.

    Dole was a good Republican who simply stayed in Washington too long, where he and second wife Elizabeth Dole became one of the earliest “power couples” that have become the normal way of doing business there. Dole was widely liked and seemed to be a good sport, as this clip with Saturday Night Live‘s Norm Macdonald (who we also lost this year) shows:

    He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2017, one of only eight senators to receive it.

    Whatever you think of both Dole and Bush, the moment when the wheelchair-bound Dole is lifted to standing to properly salute the casket of his fellow veteran and former rival is deeply moving:

    Dole was important figure for a long time in American politics, and another stark reminder that World War II is passing out of living memory.

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    Posted in Republicans | 2 Comments »

    .50 BMG Bullpup vs. Walmart Safety Glasses

    December 4th, 2021

    It’s been a while since I posted a silly Demolition Ranch video, so this video features the GM6 Lynx Bullpup .50 BMG (with the cool reciprocating barrel), and features how well two brands of safety glasses ($300 Gators and $10 Walmart) handle shrapnel.

    Spoiler: The Walmart glasses do better…

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    Posted in Guns, video | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for December 3, 2021

    December 3rd, 2021

    Last week on Thanksgiving vacation, I had to put my Mac through a reboot cycle and lost the zillions of open Firefox Windows. So you may find this week’s LinkSwarm relatively (some might say “mercifully”) brief.

  • Hunter Biden was pulling down a hefty $10 million a year to spread Chinese influence:

    A damning new report claims that Hunter Biden helped expand Chinese influence in America in a $10 million a year agreement and an $80,000 diamond.

    In her new book, Laptop from Hell, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, describes Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese-linked energy consortium, called CEFC.

    Based on hundreds of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop which he left in a Delaware repair shop in April 2019, and transcripts of messages from WhatsApp, she claims that the Biden family offered their services to CEFC to help expand its business around the world.

    In exchange, Devine writes, Hunter Biden received $10 million a year for three years, and a diamond worth at least $80,000.

  • And, by an amazing coincidence, the Biden Administration is super soft on China.

    Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.

    “To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”

    In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.

    “It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”

    Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office. Through most of 2020, Biden insisted that he was the tough one on China and that the Trump administration only offered “a colossal gap between tough talk and weak action.”

    Biden, at a Democratic debate on February 25, 2020, said: “I had spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader by the time we left office. This is a guy who doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug who in fact, has a million Uyghurs in reconstruction camps, meaning concentration camps.”

    Biden, writing in Foreign Affairs last spring, said: “Companies must act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere. . . . The United States does need to get tough with China.”

    Biden, speaking at the U.S. State Department on February 4, said: “We’ll also take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”

    And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.

    Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.

    Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

    Snip.

    Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”

    As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.

    It’s not that the Biden administration is doing nothing — an upcoming “democracy summit” invited Taiwan but not China, there have been prohibitions on U.S. investment in particular Chinese companies, and a dozen Chinese companies have been blacklisted for helping the Chinese army with quantum computing.

    But these are small-ball gestures while the Chinese government sends 18 fighter jets plus five nuclear-capable H-6 bombers into Taiwanese air-defense zone at one time, Beijing wipes out the last of Hong Kong’s opposition, and the Genocide Games go on with full U.S. corporate sponsorship. We’re attempting minor and symbolic moves while Xi Jinping is attempting big and consequential ones to maximize his leverage over the rest of the world.

  • “Biden’s Approval Rating Below That of Least Popular Governor, GOP Has Nine Out of 10 Most Popular Governors.”
  • More on that subject. “Biden Approval Rating Remains an Abysmal 36 Percent.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Michael Shellenberger talks about how leftwing policies enable homeless camps:

    In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

    Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

    But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

    More:

    The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.

    But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

    The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

    How did progressives, who claim to be evidence-based, ever get so committed to Housing First? “Malcolm Gladwell’s [2006 New Yorker article] “Million Dollar Murray,” really helped popularize this idea,” the person said. “But it was based on an anecdote of one person. It works for who it works for but is not scalable. [Governor] Gavin [Newsom] made a mistake [as San Francisco’s Mayor 2004-2011] which was that we stopped investing in shelter. But that’s because all the best minds were saying, ‘This is what’s going to work.’”

    One of the claims made by defenders of the open drug scenes is that people who live in them are mostly locals who were priced out of their homes and apartments and decided to pitch a tent on the street. In San Fransicko, I cite a significant body of evidence to show that this is false, and that many people come to San Francisco from around the U.S. for the city’s unusually high cash welfare benefits, free housing, and tolerance of open drug scenes.

    The insider agreed. “People come here because they think they can. It’s bullshit that ‘Only 30 percent [of homeless] are from out of town.’ At least 20,000 homeless people come through town every year. Talk to the people on the street. There’s no way 70 percent of the homeless are from here. I would guess it’s fewer than 50 percent. Ask them the name of their high school and they guess, ‘Washington? The one around the corner?’ But you can’t even talk about that without being called a fascist.”

  • Change? “Biden Administration to Restart Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy.” Or else they’ll they’re restarting it and not do it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.”)
  • “Insiders Are Dumping Stocks At The Fastest Pace In History.”
  • More rats swarm off the D.N.C. Kamala.

    A top adviser and chief spokeswoman for Harris, Symone Sanders, is set to resign from her position by the end of the year, a White House official said Wednesday. It’s one of several high-level departures in the vice president’s office since she was sworn in earlier this year.

    Peter Velz, the vice president’s director of press operations, is leaving the office in the coming weeks, along with Vincent Evans, deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, according to reports. Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director, is also stepping down. Advance staffers departed over the summer, soon after a trip to Guatemala where Harris drew criticism for a biting response to a question over when she intended to visit the southern U.S. border.

    A source familiar with Harris’s office woes quipped that the defections must be “completely unrelated to reading stories where they are blamed for everything.”

    “This is the same story that gets played out again and again — it’s always the vague ‘staffing,’” this person said. “I don’t think there are a ton of staff, present and former, that would rush to defend the way the office is run.”

  • What percentage of requested water are California farms getting next year? Try 0%.
  • Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw brings the wood to Ron Klain:

  • Let’s follow up that kudo for Crenshaw with some serious criticism: He was one of 80 Republicans (along with Rep. John Carter, my own representative) to vote in favor of a federal vaccine database. He can swear up and down it’s not going to be used for vaccine passports, but we’ve seen worldwide governments use coercive tools with even less legal justification.
  • When it comes to arguments on the new Supreme Court abortion case, you can smell the panic.
  • Virginia’s Lt. Governor elect Winsome Sears tells the truth about Critical Race Theory in Virginia.
  • The FTC is suing to stop the Nvidia Arm acquisition. Between the China subsidiary going rogue and additional regulatory hurdles in the UK and EU, the deal may be in serious jeopardy.
  • Real life frequently has symbolism more heavy-handed than fiction. “Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary will close at the end of the 2022-2023.” (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • Disney censors episode dealing with China censorship for China.

  • Gutfeld is beating Kimmel and Fallon.
  • “Joe Rogan Had the No. 1 Podcast in 2021 on Spotify.”
  • “The Jussie Smollett Trial Isn’t About A ‘Hoax.’ It’s About The Entire Social Justice Movement Being A Scam.”

    Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called “social justice.” (Or, in the Biden administration’s parlance, “equity.”)

    It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it. According to a very solid case built by an exhaustive Chicago police investigation, Smollett pretended to be the victim of a violent racist and anti-gay assault because he wanted more fame and thus more money.

    What better way to achieve that goal than to feed into the enduring myth that minorities in America are suppressed at every turn, even targeted for violence by whites? White men in particular, and, as of 2016, even better if they’re Trump supporters.

    Police charged that Smollett offered to pay two brothers he was acquainted with about $2,000 each to act out an attack on the actor in the dead of a Chicago winter night. The siblings, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, told investigators that Smollett had given them $100 to buy masks, a red hat, and a rope that would be fashioned into a kind of noose for the staged attack. The Osundairos were instructed to confront Smollett on a sidewalk, slightly rough him up, and then disappear.

    The setup preceeded a previous stunt, wherein Smollett mailed himself a threatening letter that said, “You will d[ie] black fag,” accompanied by an illustration of a hangman. Police said Smollett’s failure to garner any significant national attention from the letter is what led him to fake the assault.

    “…This announcement today recognizes that ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” then-police superintendent Eddie Johnson said in late February, after his department probed the events from the night of the incident. He said Smollett was mostly motivated by seeking a salary increase for his role on “Empire.”

    That was the conclusion of law enforcement after spending more than $100,000 taxpayer dollars on an investigation to piece together surveillance video, eye-witness testimony, and data gathering that led them to believe Smollett had lied about everything.

    But in all fairness, who could blame him? This is what our entire culture is teaching now— that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.

    Lucrative opportunities present themselves quickly for those who sell themselves as oppressed and aggrieved. And for Smollett, it worked! Nobody knew who he was before he claimed to have been physically confronted and called the n-word and the f-word by white male Trump supporters. Thereafter, everyone knew who he was.

    He was written about in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. A-list celebrities, TV hosts and political leaders expressed their solidarity.

  • Boom!

  • “White Smoke Emanates From Wuhan Lab Chimney Signaling A New Variant Has Been Named.”
  • The Cute, it burns!

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Uncategorized, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »

    Foreign Follies: A Roundup Of Things We Might Want To Pay Attention To

    December 2nd, 2021

    Smaller than a LinkSwarm, here’s a list of foreign hot spots that we might want to pay more attention to than we are right now. And by “we,” I mean “The U.S. Department of State,” which seems to be run by feckless, corrupt Obama Administration retreads. So I doubt they’re up to the task.

    Here goes nothing:

  • Cartel gunmen stormed as prison in Tula, Hidalgo, central Mexico and broke out Pueblos Unidos cartel leader Jose Artemio “El Michoacano” and “La Rabia” Maldonado Mejia, plus his brother and a whole bunch of gunmen. Cartel violence in Mexico is nothing new, but the brazenness of the jailbreak suggests continued weakness on the part of the criminal justice system.
  • Remember how our chattering classes got their knickers in a knot over Marine La Pen? Well, Eric Zemmour, reportedly a self-styled Gaullist and (get this) Bonapartist just declared he’s running for President of France.

    PARIS — Éric Zemmour, a polarizing far-right writer and television star, announced on Tuesday that he was running for French president in elections next year, ending months of speculation over a bid that upended the race before he had even made it official.

    Mr. Zemmour, 63, is a longtime conservative journalist who rose to prominence over the past decade, using prime-time television and best-selling books to expound on his view that France was in steep decline because of Islam, immigration and leftist identity politics, themes he returned to in his announcement.

    “It is no longer time to reform France but to save it,” Mr. Zemmour said in a video with dramatic overtones that was published on social media, conjuring images of an idealized France and then warning about outside forces that threatened to destroy it.

    He has fashioned himself as a Donald J. Trump-style provocateur lobbing politically incorrect bombs at the French elite establishment — saying, for instance, that the law should require parents to give their children “traditional” French names — and rewriting some of the worst episodes from France’s past. He has been charged with inciting racial or religious hatred several times over his comments, and twice convicted and fined.

    Mr. Zemmour spoke over 1950s footage full of men in hats and vintage Citroën cars, contrasted with recent clips of crowded subways, crumbling churches, burning cars and violent clashes with the police.

    “You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” Mr. Zemmour said, reading from notes at a desk in front of old bookshelves in a way that seemed intent on replicating Charles de Gaulle’s posture when he issued a call to arms against Nazi Germany from London in June 1940.

    Mr. Zemmour said he was running “to prevent our children and our grandchildren from experiencing barbarity, to prevent our daughters from being veiled and our sons from being subdued.”

    He accused elites — journalists, politicians, judges, European technocrats — of failing France, which he said was represented by a long list of illustrious men and women, including Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Napoleon.

    “We will not be replaced,” added Mr. Zemmour, who has espoused the theory of a “great replacement” of white people in France by Muslim immigrants.

    Oh, he’s also bigger on Russians than Americans. Which seems strange for a Bonapartist, given that whole “invasion of Russia” thing.

    Given the notorious unreliability of our media in reporting on any figure considered even mildly right of center, it’s hard to tell whether Zemmour is indeed a radical extremist, a conservative populist, or something in-between. We’ll find out if he’s a real Bonapartist if he invades Germany and crowns himself Emperor. As a pre-TDS National Review once said about Jean Le Pen, “we have no frog in this fight.”

  • Turkey appears to be sliding into hyperinflation and is doing all the wrong things to avoid it:

    Minutes before President Tayyip Erdogan delivered a speech renouncing high interest rates once again, the Turkish central bank said it was selling dollars to support the lira. The bank has $25 billion of net reserves as of November, down from $28 billion the month before. But that includes another $48 billion of swaps from local banks, without which reserves are firmly in negative territory.

    It’s a flawed bid to support Erdogan’s ultra-loose monetary policy, which has caused the lira to fall more than 40% versus the dollar this year. Propping up the currency might slow Turkey’s descent into hyperinflation, but the country’s pot of dollars risks running out. The bank sold some $128 billion to steady the lira in 2019-2020 and still had to hike rates. When net reserves were at $28 billion in August 2020, it took just five months to run them down to $11 billion – the lowest since at least 2003. The lower reserves fall, the more likely another depreciation becomes.

    I’m not an international economic expert, but usually you raise interest rates to stem inflation. The timeless meme protocols call for posting this:

    Erdogan even sacked the finance minister who disagreed with this strategy. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this doesn’t end well for the Turkish people.

  • Uganda may be losing control of its only international airport to China as part of a loan default. Of course, both nations are now denying this.
  • Now that the Taliban control Afghanistan, they’re getting frisky with Iran:

    Iranian border guards clashed with Taliban forces along the Iran-Afghanistan border on Wednesday after the Taliban opened fire on Iranian farmers, according to reports.

    Local journalist Reza Khaasteh shared unverified video of the scene on Twitter, which appeared to show Iranian soldiers using heavy artillery to push back against the Taliban militants.

    Khaasteh tweeted that the Taliban managed to capture several Iranian border posts; however, other reports citing unnamed sources claimed that was false.

    OK, the Mullahs and the Taliban is maybe less of a “worry” story and more of a “sit back and watch the fireworks” one…

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 6 Comments »

    World War II Tanks and Planes Still in Military Service

    December 1st, 2021

    My friends and I watch a movie every week, and World War II films (Bridge on the River Kwai, The Dam Busters, Fury, Twelve O’Clock High, etc.) are a regular staple. One recurring topic of discussion is “I wonder how many of [particular model of tank/plane/etc.] are still running/flying?”

    The two videos below cover not only World War II tanks and planes that are still running, but which are still in active military service.

    First tanks and armored cars, of which there’s considerable variety still in service:

    It’s not a big surprise that T-34s ended up serving a long time in various Soviet satellite states, and North Korea is still using not only T-34s, but also ISU-152 self-propelled artillery, SU-100 tank destroyers and BA-64 armored cars. But M-3 Stuart light tanks are still serving in Paraguay, and Senegal and Peru are still using U.S. M3 Half-Tracks. And watch for the new lanyard-fired T-34 variant. (Paraguay was also using M-4 Sherman tanks for training as late as 2016.)

    As for World War II aircraft, only one type is evidently in common military service: The Douglas C-47 Skytrain, the military versions of the DC-3, still being used around the world in a variety of roles, including as an aerial gunship (“Puff the Magic Dragon”).

    Did you know that there’s an Internet Movie Plane database? And also an Internet Movie Firearms Database and an Internet Movie Cars Database.

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    Posted in Military, video | 4 Comments »

    Texas Governor’s Race Update for November 30, 2021

    November 30th, 2021

    A few quick updates in the Texas Governor’s Race:

  • Actor Matthew McConnaughey is not running for governor:

    Celebrities (especially those as famous as McConnaughey) tend to be formidable candidates, but there was no guarantee he would even win a primary. His hetrodox views might prevent him from winning the Democratic primary over Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, and a run against incumbent Greg Abbott (and his giant warchest) in the increasingly crowded Republican primary was no sure thing either.

  • Abbott officially filed for reelection.
  • Allen West also officially filed for the governor’s race.
  • I recently received my first flyer in the race, from the Don Huffines campaign. As you can see from the scans below, the issues he’s emphasizing are controlling the border, ending property taxes and election integrity. Good as far as it goes, but he may have missed a bet by not supporting a special session for outlawing vaccine mandates.

    Is it a bit early to be dropping direct mail flyers? A bit, but: A.) As a longshot challenger, Huffines has to raise his profile to have any chance at all, and direct mail probably offers a much bigger bag for the buck than broadcast media advertising. (There may be lots of online advertising as well, but I have so many online ads blocked that I almost never see them on my Mac.) And: B.) It’s not that early, as we’re roughly six months out from the May 1st primary date.

  • I haven’t received any campaign mailers from Team Abbott, but lord, have I received a lot of fundraising emails. Over 60 in November alone, some of which go out of their way to insult my intelligence. Like the one that claims to be from “Greg Abbott (iPhone).” Is there anyone stupid enough to believe that Abbott is personally emailing fundraising solicitations from his personal iPhone? Also annoying: “Your Order Confirmation” and “YOUR EXCLUSIVE OFFER.” Just stop…
  • Fundraising tidbits: O’Rourke raised $2 million in the 24 hours after launching his campaign. However, that’s down 2/3rds from the first 24 hours of his unsuccessful presidential campaign. Also, Abbott has $55 million in the bank…
  • Allahpundit wonders what the hell O’Rourke is trying to accomplish:

    It’s always intriguing when a well-known figure whom everyone understands has no chance of winning decides to run for office.

    I doubt even Beto’s under illusions about his chances. He’ll be running in a red state facing a massive red midterm wave against a Republican who’s more popular than the one he ran against in 2018 and who’s raised more money than any governor in U.S. history. Why bother?

    Some blather about the “hardness” of Abbott’s stand on vaccine mandates snipped, as Texas conservative activists have been all over Abbott for refusing to call a fourth special session to outlaw vaccine mandates by statute, not just decree.

    A poll published last week found him rocking a 27/57 approval rating among independents in Texas. If the 2022 midterm environment was as favorable to Democrats as 2018 was, I’d give them an outside chance of pulling an upset.

    More erroneous analysis snipped.

    But 2022 isn’t 2018. And a candidate as far left as Beto O’Rourke isn’t the man to dethrone a longtime governor.

    Team Abbott posted this ad featuring some of Beto’s greatest hits a few weeks ago. They’re going to attack him as too liberal for Texas, which he is:

    O’Rourke’s defining issues when he ran for president two years ago were liberalizing America’s border and grabbing guns. Given the crush of migrants seeking asylum that the U.S. has seen this year, though, open borders is an especially toxic position to hold in Texas of all places. And gun-control is a perennial loser in a state with as robust a gun culture as Texas had. You would think today’s announcement would be an occasion for O’Rourke to say he’s rethought his previous positions on firearms. Instead, incredibly, he’s doubling down:

    Abbott has already been campaigning against O’Rourke as too liberal for Texas, branding him “Wrong Way O’Rourke” and seizing on multiple positions he has taken since last running statewide. At the top of the list is O’Rourke’s proposal to require buybacks of assault weapons during his presidential campaign. That led to a memorable moment on the debate stage in which O’Rourke proclaimed that, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

    O’Rourke said he was not backing away from that proposal in his latest campaign.

    “I think most Texans can agree — maybe all Texans can agree — that we should not see our friends, our family members, our neighbors, shot up with weapons that were originally designed for use on a battlefield,” said O’Rourke, whose hometown of El Paso was the site of an anti-Latino mass shooting in 2019 by a gunman who killed 23 people.

    His progressive views during his 2020 presidential run appear to have stuck to him in Texas as he’s polled poorly there over the past few months. Last month a UT survey found his favorable rating at 35/50, including 22/48 among indies. O’Rourke trailed Abbott 46/37 in that same poll, a pitiful showing against a governor whose popularity had waned lately. Another poll taken a month earlier also put O’Rourke at 37 percent against Abbott. A third recent survey from Quinnipiac had a mere 33 percent willing to say they thought Beto would make a good governor.

    I’ll give you a few possibilities. One, simply, is time. If O’Rourke had waited to challenge Ted Cruz for Senate again in 2024, he would have risked being perceived as old news, especially having failed in his two previous statewide runs. The 2024 Senate primary could be a competitive one for Democrats, with no guarantee of Beto winning. This year’s primary is easier for him since no one else wants to to face Abbott in a Republican-friendly cycle. Simply put, his political capital was depreciating. He could either use what was left of it for one more campaign or go bankrupt.

    Two is fundraising. I’m skeptical that we’ll see the return of the “Betomania” money juggernaut in full force in Texas but it probably remains true that O’Rourke can raise cash more easily than the average Dem, if only by dint of name recognition. He’ll be at less of a money disadvantage against Abbott than any other prospective nominee would be. Of course, if Betomania does run wild among Democratic donors nationally, that’ll backfire on the party by drawing cash into Texas in a likely losing effort that could have gone to more competitive races elsewhere. Double-edged sword for Dems.

    Three is enthusiasm. Between Biden’s troubles and the likelihood of a red wave, Democrats will have a hard time getting Texas liberals excited to vote in 2022. Having a charismatic well-known liberal at the top of the ticket who captivated them once before might boost turnout at the margins. And while that won’t be enough to make Beto governor, it might help Dems win a few state races downballot that they otherwise would have lost. His candidacy is a favor to the state party, in other words. He might even be able to steer some Latino voters who defected to Trump and the GOP last year back into the Democratic column.

    Realistically, the best-case scenario for O’Rourke is that he raises a ton of money again, loses by a respectable margin, and is then targeted by Biden for some sort of national job either in the cabinet or at the DNC. Beto’s long-term challenge is staying politically relevant and another run for office advances the ball — albeit at the risk that he’s well and truly done politically if he gets blown out.

  • Actually, O’Rourke is already starting to tack right on border security, saying that Biden hasn’t done enough to secure the border.
  • O’Rourke has some Democratic Primary competitors (Larry Baggett, Michael Cooper, and Deirdre Dickson-Gilbert), but I can’t even find working websites for the first two.
  • Likewise, Chad Prather‘s campaign has been essentially invisible, and Allen West‘s all but invisible.
  • There’s also someone named Danny Harrison, who seems to be running on a “legalized gambling and weed” platform, an interesting choice for the Republican primary. Harrison actually has a bit of polish, so the guy is punching above his weight class (Gadfly). Like Prather, I get the impression he could actually make some noise in a lower-level race (State Rep., County Commissioner, etc.).

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas, video | 3 Comments »

    “Bail Reform Project” Antifa Scumbag Also A Crook

    November 29th, 2021

    Dwight was kind enough to send over this story. If you remember last week’s story on just who GoFundMe allows to raise money, you might have noticed The Bail Project among the screenshotted examples. Well, Holly Zoller, one of four major figures in The Bail Project, turns out not to be just a leftwing antifa scumbag, but also apparently a serial scam-artist scumbag:

    Something didn’t sit right with me about Holly after hearing about how she ordered a UPS truck full of weapons to give to antifa rioters in a riot that caused several injuries, many requiring hospitalization. Just a weird feeling, so I looked into it.

    Holly Zoller started off as Holly McGlawn. She met her husband David Zoller around 03-05 and they started a buisness together. This one was called “START” and the purpose was I think to “Eliminate Discrimination and Prejudice and erect public works.”

    However, as far as I can tell, this buisness never had any projects, locations, other employees. They started it, got tax exemption status as a non profit, took donations for a year, and when the yearly reporting was due they never filed it and ran.

    The state sent out documents for requests but they all came back as “unserved” (this will become a theme) and the state closed their tax exempt status. When inspectors showed up to notify them of the closing, the address they used was a 1 cubicle rented office space that –
    -The owners of the building said “Had never been occupied, they came in, picked up mail and donations, and left” (This will become a theme)

    They got married soon after. And for 8 years, just started buying/renting land and racking up huge credit card/auto loan debts as well. No idea what buisness they were into or what they did for work though. I’m not even sure if they were in the state. They resurfaced in 2014.

    Snip.

    Snip.

    Snip. In conclusion:

    When it comes to Antifa, it’s scumbags all the way down…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 3 Comments »

    Joe Rogan on the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict

    November 28th, 2021

    This interview with Jocko Willink was recorded last week, but put up this week, and here’s them talking about the Rittenhouse verdict.

    Note the “two different movies on the same screen” analogy Scott Adams has used before.

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    Posted in Crime, video | No Comments »

    Omicronapalooza

    November 27th, 2021

    “There’s a new Flu Manchu variant called _____ you have to be very scared about and do what we tell you!”

    The new variant is called (I kid you not) “Omicron.”

    “Bow, puny humans!”

    Yeah, we’re over it. There’s always going to be another variant. Americans refuse to put up with this lockdown and school closure BS any more, and the political party that pushes it (Democrats) will be punished electorally.

    Enjoy some memes:

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation | 3 Comments »

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